This week has been fairly eventful. Last Friday my roommate, Maud, had 2 friends visiting from Brest. They were really fun and outgoing, corrected my pidgin French and got really excited to try to speak to me in English. Unfortunately, Maud usually goes home to Brest for the weekends so this was one of her few Friday nights in St. Brieuc. Probably the funniest part of the night was when we decided to go home around 2 and got a ride home from one of our friends who lives outside town and always drives (sober, don't get worried). Maud and her friends were going to go to this discothèque in town but decided not to at the last minute, after we had already filled the car. They said they didn't mind walking home so we left in the car. After dropping off one assistant we headed in my direction only to see Maud and her friends faisaient le stop (hitch hiking) on our street. Of course, we picked them up and took them home but they were really surprised when they saw it was us in the car! It was pretty funny.
One Tuesday night, I met my friend Jessica in a bar called Le Piano Bleu where they often have live music. Unfortunately, the music was truely terrible that night. Really cheesy. There was one singer and one keyboard but because they were using a synthesizer it sounded like they had a whole orchestra behind them. To make matters worse, the singer heard us speaking English and announced to the whole room that there were some beautiful Americans in the room. She also tried to speak to us in English. This made it really hard to leave when we wanted to because as soon as we got up she announced that we were leaving and said how sad she was. It was pretty annoying and made us think about how inappropriate that would be at home. Imagine some Spanish people came into a bar in Plymouth Meeting and the singer started saying. "Hola! Look everyone! Spanish people!" It would be so rude! Anyway, things like that happen all the time here and we often feel like we're on display. After that though, we met Maud and some of her friends from IUFM (teacher training college you attend after getting your Bachelor's Degree) at one of our favorite bars, O'Kenny (NOT O'Kenny's, I made that mistake only once). They were really fun and we had a great time. They all have to take a music class so they can work on music with the kids and so they were singing the songs they had learned in English to me. It was really funny to hear French voices singing spirituals!
I've also been wanting to go to the movies here but ALL the American movies are dubbed here. They almost never use sub-titles. However, this nice teacher just left me a schedule of movies in the version originale in my mail box! November is Documentary Month in his film club and so I can see Murderball in the original English if I want. I ahve been wanted to see it so I think I will.
Tonight, Sophia is coming to stay so we can take the train tomorrow to Nantes to catch our plane to Ireland!! I'm getting really excited to get there!


p.s. I'm still sans Internet chez moi!