girls weekend

Okay, be warned. This is probably going to be a long entry. This weekend was possibly the best weekend yet. Bruges (or Brugge in Flemish) is an amazing place.

We'll start with Thursday, because it comes into play for the weekend. Katie and I ate with two different guys from the surveillant office - G. and S. They were both super nice, but S. barely said anything. We figured he was just shy, and that's probably true.

Friday, I ended up only having one of my five classes, and I just stayed with the teacher and we talked about music. Why did I have no classes? Because the annual Telethon was happening. It's a nationwide thing, but my school is highly active in it. There were events all day, including a delicious bake sale. Most of my students were participating. Seriously, it was like a big party in my school.

In the evening, Viany made us hot dogs. Sounds simple enough. Not in Viany's world. It was a whole production with multiple homemade sauces. Delicious! Ellie, an assistant from Noyon, also joined us, because she was coming with us to Bruges and also is the only one who could drive stick. She's also an amazing person, and we love her dearly. We've already decided to adopt her into our Chauny group. She's Chaunoise now, and I think that after this weekend, she will be coming to Chauny a lot (thanks to the Cuban cafe). We also have decided that we need to make these road trips a regular occurrence.

All of us girls went out to the Cuban Cafe. We had a wonderful time! We even got free hats! We ran into S. there, and he challenged Katie and I to a game of pool and was actually really talkative to us. It was fun. And these French guys really suck at pool. I beat them, and I really suck. That's saying something. We ran into a bunch of my students. The one who works there is really great to us. He even danced with us. We also met some pompiers (firemen). We have a habit of calling them pompiers even when we talk in English. That became a whole big production. Some food and beers were stolen from the other assistants' place a few weeks ago, and it turns out that it was these pompiers. Let's just say the evening ended with Hart yelling at them in the town square until they promised to bring food and beer. My student is also a friend of theirs, so all of us hung out until late in the middle of the night.

Saturday, we managed to pull ourselves out of bed for our road trip to Belgium. We stopped for a nice French breakfast at McDonald's. Haha. No, actually, I hate McDonald's breakfast, but there were things on the French menu I would eat. We had a very nice drive to Bruges. It was a nice trip listening to music and talking. And I loved the border control... it was nonexistent. It was great. We made it to Bruges by the afternoon.

Bruges was wonderful. It's such a cute city... even if it did rain all weekend. There are canals everywhere and lots of horse drawn carriages! I loved it! I even got to pet a horse! Made my day. Saturday, we did some shopping and went to a few bars... one that was called Coolcat. We loved it there. Katie, Hart, and Ellie all forced me to try beer. I hate beer, but I did find the flavored ones not to be too horrible. We had a wonderful three course dinner at a restaurant where we were seated next to a rowdy British group. They were great! We explored some more bars and found a decent one a little from the center of town where we could actually move around.

Sunday, we went to the Christmas market. We tasted a lot of the foods... waffles, bratwurst, tartiflette... hot chocolate with amaretto... mulled wine. The mulled wine was fantastic. It was my first time trying it! And can I just say that you could not walk around any street in the US sipping wine. It was completely normal there. Everyone was doing it! We did some more shopping, including shopping for Belgium chocolate. The others went ice skating for awhile, but I'm too terrified and klutzy for that, so I was the photographer.

We definitely did not want to leave Bruges, but we had to. Everyone we met was extremely nice to us. It was also weird, because we had no idea what language to speak. They would speak Flemish to us, sometimes we'd get confused and answer in French out of habit, but English was the language we could use to get by... well, same with French technically. It was just funny. I would be like "Oui... yes... wait, I don't know".

We drove back to France to Noyon to drop off Ellie. She gave Hart a quick lesson on how to drive and then we slowly made it back to Chauny. Hart did great though.

Once back in Chauny, the pompiers showed up (with the promised food and beer) and soon after, so did my student. We all had a good time and made potential plans for next weekend. We might well be on our way to some French friends!

I took a bunch of pictures this weekend, and I will hopefully be putting them on my computer in the next few days.

Also, why is it still raining? It's been a week now with pretty much nonstop rain. No fun at all.

I feel like there was so much more to say, but I am just so exhausted to even think straight. I may be posting more soon about this weekend if anything great comes to mind. Oh boy. Class is going to be fun today.