Halfway?!



Coming up is the end of January, which marks about the half way point of my exchange. Insane, I know. Time goes by incredibly fast, but I still have a whole five months left (thankfully)! Unfortunately, it's also the end of the exchange for the semester kids, which means Madeleine, one of my good exchange student friends is leaving this Saturday :(. So Madeleine, Kenny (another exchange student friend), and I had a nice "last day in Paris for Madeleine" two weekends ago (because last weekend we had an AFS thingy) and tried to finish up some things that she wanted to do before she left. We went to the Catacombs first thng in the morning, which was really awesome in my opinion. They're like these underground passageways and caverns that's basically a huge underground cemetery with dead people from centuries ago. The bones are stacked up all nice and decorative, it's kinda gross and morbid but at the same time it's really amazing, espically to think that it's all there under the streets of Paris. There are an estimated six million people down there, six million! It was definitely a little creepy, but I had a fun time with Maddy and it was certainly cooler than seeing the Mona Lisa :).

It was just so weird, bones and bones and bones.



Rough translation: If you've seen a man die a few times, always consider that the same fate is waiting for you.
Boo.



This stuff just goes on and on, it's crazy.

We then went to the Jewish quarter to get Falafel, apparently the best in the world or something. I wouldn't know because I had no idea what the heck it was in the first place. So here's a picture.  



Those aren't meatballs, it's fried green stuff but I honestly don't know what it is.



It was pretty good, and Maddy was set on getting her Falafel, so mission accomplished. We finished up by hitting La Defense (northwest of paris) to do some shopping. France has this month long thing called "Les Soldes", or the sales, where everything magicially becomes a lot more affordable. I was actually really impressed, there's plenty of decent stuff that's pretty cheap. I'm also going again this weekend with some friends. I told myself that I wouldn't spend too much money in January to make up for everything in December, but then these darn sales came along :). So that finished off our nice day in Paris.

We had our AFS weekend a couple of days ago, at the same place as last time, a really cool house/hotel thing right on the Seine river. As always it was fun the see all the students I hadn't talked with for a while. It was also cool to sit down for dinner and hear everybody conversing in French, something we couldn't really do last time.

Though I've improved a lot, I still have a long ways to go before I'm fluent. Sometimes I feel like I'm just not picking it up very quickly, and it can be a little discouraging sometimes, but I'll keep working at it. Other than that, life is humming along. I mostly enjoy school and can pretty much follow my classes (except Spanish and some stuff in French class). A couple more weeks until another holiday (how I love their break schedule here) when we get to go skiing again, so I'm difinitely looking forward to that.

Oh, and I just googled what Falafel actually is. The round things (which I guess are the actual falafels) are fried crushed chickpeas. Well, I'm glad we all know that now.

Hope everyone has a great week,

Lauren