yay for the weekend!

This weekend was AWESOME. Friday night we went to a wine and cheese party at our friends house and it was SO much fun. Probably the most fun I’ve had since I’ve been here. I thought it was gonna be like mellow, with a bunch of people sitting around chatting with wine and cheese, but apparently Pamela (the girl who invited us) has a housemate that is studying as part of a different program. So Pamela invited all her friends from IAU and her housemate invited all her friends from her program, and it ended up being huge. Met lots of people and became better friends with people I was sort of acquaintances with so it was pretty cool. Most of the people from the other program left on the early side and us IAU kids played drunk musical chairs which was probably the funniest thing ever. I won the second round! Haha it was great. So by the time we got home it was like 2:15 and we had to get up at 7:30 the next morning. Apparently I’m really bad at evaluating whether I’m sober enough to go to bed and actually get sleep, cuz if I’m still tipsy enough I’ll wake up a million times throughout the night and not get any sleep. I thought I could do it, but I didn’t sleep at alllll. So with about 2 hours total (not continuous) of sleep, I got up and got ready to go to Avignon, hangover and all.
We had a fantastic trip. We did some shopping (found an H&M in France!) and found an indoor market that was pretty cool and very French. Next we saw the “Palais des Papes” (the Popes’ palace) and even did the corny tourist thing with the audio tour haha cuz it was free, but it was pretty interesting. Elyse almost got kicked out a million times for taking pictures inside. That’s an exaggeration cuz no one actually yelled at her but she was making us nervous! Anyway, after that we found a place to eat lunch and had a really good ham & cheese pizza. We then went to the famous “Pont d’Avignon,” the big stone bridge in Avignon that extends across the Rhone river, except part of it was destroyed so it doesn’t actually go all the way across. Theres a famous song that got stuck in our heads allll day, that goes “sur le pont d’avignon, l’on y danse, l’on y danse; sur le pont d’avignon, l’on y danse tout en rond” which means “on the bridge of avignon, there we dance, there we dance, on the bridge of avignon, there we dance all in a circle.” It sounds cuter in french. So of course we had to “danser” on the pont d’avignon. Elyse took pictures. We were def the obnoxious tourists on that bridge, taking pics of us dipping each other and waltzing all over the place. We made up for it though by just sitting on the banks of the Rhone for about 2 hours, just talking and laughing and taking pictures and being French. Elyse gave us a photography lesson too. Her camera is way cooler than mine. So we definitely enjoyed “just being” for a little while.

At that point we had seen all the major touristy things of Avignon, so we decided to just walk around a little bit, looking in cute shops and stuff. I had read somewhere that it’s typical of southern France to have small shrines to Mary above store windows or carved into the walls of buildings up high, and I definitely noticed it in Avignon. Anyone who knows about my Mary obsession knows I found that pretty cool haha. We walked around til we just got exhausted and decided to save some money on dinner by hitting up the French McDonalds. Kind of disappointing cuz my nuggets were on the gross side, but now I can say I ate at McDonalds in France. Anyways, after McDonalds it was time to go catch the shuttle to the TGV station and take the train home. We were really early and it was a good thing cuz we got totally lost trying to find our train, but we eventually found it and we must have been practically the only ones going back in that direction cuz there was no one else on the platform but us, it was kind of creepy. We were sitting against a glass wall and elyse made a comment about how she kept feeling like someone was going to sneak up behind her on the glass or something, and just as she said it this loud noise came on the loudspeaker and scared the CRAP out of all 3 of us. At that time we were at the point that we were cracking up laughing at EVERYTHING, so we were just laying on the cement laughing so hard that we were crying. I guess you had to be there but it was sooo funny. We were exhausted by the time we got home and all 3 of us climbed into bed and went right to sleep. We were going to climb Mt. St. Victoire the next day but we discovered that the buses don’t run on Sundays, and we don’t even know if any buses go there anyway. So we’ll have to plan that one out a little better and do it another day. Well right now I’m going to go meet Elyse at a café and write some postcards. KIT everyone!
<3Cristin