An American, A Frenchman, and a Belgian Were Having Dinner...

^I feel like that would be the opening line to some sort of nationally insensitive joke. Instead, it's the premise of my dinner on Tuesday evening. Diane and her 5th grade class have been pen pals with a school in Belgium since the beginning of the school year. There was an uneven amount of students, so Diane got two pen pals named Marie-Esther and Chaima. The Belgian class came to Paris for a couple of days and spent the whole time seeing sites with Diane's class. On their last night in town, the two girls came over for an authentic French dinner.

Crêpe Griddle!

Madame made mini-crêpes on this fancy griddle I'd never seen before. It would be perfect for pancakes! We pretty much just made small talk with the Belgian girls all evening, talking about their everyday life. Marie-Esther was very serious... the girls mentioned that they had watched a movie  the night before about a zebra that wants to become a racing horse. When we asked them if they enjoyed it, Marie-Esther said "No. A zebra that wants to be a horse? That's ridiculous." Jeesh. Tough crowd. They were a tad bit shy and socially awkward, but then again, what ten year olds aren't? We used up the rest of the crêpe batter and brought out the nutella and sugar for dessert. My host family was joking that Geoffroy and I are in a competition for who can eat the most. First they force feed me seconds and thirds, then they make fun of how much I eat! French people are so weird sometimes...

It always interests me how different cultures have totally different mindsets about the same situation. I tried explaining to my host family that something like the Belgian dinner would never fly with Americans, but they had no clue what I meant. I mean, think about what a huge liability that is... sending your 10 year old child to a foreign country where they spend 3 nights on the floor of a gymnasium, then get picked up at school by a stranger who takes them to their house to have dinner all alone with no other adult supervision. That just sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen. My host family didn't understand when I explained that Americans would be paranoid about something bad potentially happening at a stranger's house, then they proceeded to ask me why it was okay for me to go abroad to live in a stranger's house. I'll tell you why- because I'm not ten years old.

Today was jam-packed with the most boring stuff on earth. First of all, it's a national holiday so we weren't supposed to have class. Due to a scheduling conflict, my professor for Paris by Site moved class to this morning, but she apologized with a peace offering of homemade banana bread and apple cake.They were both good, but the apple cake was infinitely better. Here's the recipe! We went to Sacre Coeur, then walked all around a cemetery for a couple of hours. What on earth is there to see in a cemetery!? Nothing, that's what. After that, I had a forty minute presentation in the Louvre. It was painstaking because my professor was relentlessly firing philosophical questions at me and I had to pull answers out of thin air. The Louvre seriously lacks climate control, so I was sweating my butt off the entire time. My professor for that class is just a tad bit overzealous about art history so we ended up staying an hour longer than our scheduled class time (which is normally three hours, so it's bad enough as it is). The only reason we left when we did is because the museum was closing and the guards literally had to force my teacher out of the building because when they told her to leave, she would ignore them and just keep rambling on and on to us.

Friday morning, I leave for Luxembourg with my friend Missy. We are running the half marathon on Saturday. I pulled a muscle in my leg a few weeks ago and got a blister on my foot on Sunday, but I'm really hoping those two things don't get in the way of me completing the race. I'm not shooting for any specific time- I just want to cross the finish line, however long it may take. The run is at night, starting at 7pm. I've been training for the past few months, so I'm really looking forward to all of that work paying off! I'll be sure to bring a course map along with me this time to avoid any incidents like my Detroit Free Press "5K".

Affectueusement,

Katie