Of College Life and Belgian Chocolate.

I bought a cell phone!  It's one of the smallest ones I've ever seen.  And I love it.  The provider is Orange.  I guess they're the equivalent of AT&T in the States because they're the only service you can use with an iPhone.  Some more fascinating France info.  But anyway, they have this "pay as you go" plan that's pretty reasonable.  So it works for me.  Plus I can use this phone when I'm back in the States.  I just have to switch out the SIM cards...I think.

We went to visit the school I'm going to be teaching at yesterday.  It was cool to see where it all was.  It's not actually very far from Paris.  About 15-20 minutes by train.  But then it's about a 20 minute walk from the train station.  So that sucks a bit.  The campus was very interesting.  They have the middle school, high school and university all on the same campus.  The one side is the university, and then the other side is the other two.  That was a little weird.  I went to check what housing options they were offering at the university.  So we entered the campus and accidentally ended up surrounded by 13-16 year olds.  "This can't be right..."  So then we went to the other side of the campus and ended up right in the middle of some sort of hippie commune of (clearly unwashed) college students outside of what we assumed was the "Student Activities Center."  It looked like they had emptied their dorm rooms and were sitting on all these plush couches and chairs on the lawn just chilling in the sun smoking and drinking.  It was a little awkward.  Especially because we passed them, realized we were going the wrong direction, and then had to turn around and walk by them again two seconds later!

So anyway, long story short, I decided that even though living on campus was cheaper, I didn't really want to be surrounded by that on a daily basis.  I didn't come to France to relive college.  So I'm going today to visit an apartment (hopefully more than one actually).  It's suuuuuper small; but I can afford it...sort of.

Let me take a moment to introduce all of you to a dear friend of mine.  His name is Jeff, and he's from Bruges, Belgium.  I call him Jeff de Bruges.  Jeff makes some of the very best chocolates.  Every Friday when I was studying abroad in Avignon, my friends Kate, Leigh and I would go visit the local JdB and get a few chocolates to try.  Eventually the lady there got to know us and would give us some freebies.  Well, that didn't happen this time, lol.  But!  The few I did buy started to melt in my bag so rather than have a sticky mess I just ate them all at once and then felt a little sick afterwards.  So that's something.

Well I guess that's it for now!

Oh, and congrats to Sarah O. for the engagement.  We never thought this day would come, haha.  Jk!