February 5, 2005

I am in the kitchen right now, waiting for Natalia. We are going to watch a movie on my laptop. Of course, she had to call her boyfriend, so now I am waiting. She said it would only take a half hour, but I figure it will take way longer than that—especially as she sounds like she is pissed off right now. Oh well. Anyway, it is one of her movies that she borrowed from a student. She thinks the movies are too scary to watch alone, so she has enlisted the help of all the other assistants (including the laptop of one of the assistants—me) to watch this movie with her. But I don’t want to be up to late tonight. There is an Argentinian festival that I want to go to tomorrow with the other assistants, and I want to wake up early enough that I can exercise and if I am up too late… blagh.

Oh well.

Anyway, January is the big sale month in France. Okay, so it is not January anymore, but the sales are only now starting to wind down. Dagmar and I went to the shops today and I found a nice tank-top that was only 7 Euros. I also bought a necklace for 3,50 Euros (that is three and a half, but they don’t use decimal points here—they use commas. So a number like US 3,000,000.00 would look like this in France: 3.000.000,00 How crazy is that?) Anyway, while we were downtown we saw a protest march. It was—surpprise, surprise!—another strike. In the past month there have been at least eight major stikes. The one today was quite interesting. It was a parade down the main street of Valence with people shouting and waving banners. I think it was another hospital worker strike. Vive la grève!

Anyway, nothing really interesting is going on now. I am excited about the upcoming trip to Strasbourg. Oh, and maybe I didn’t write about that. If I have, just skip this next part. If I haven’t, here it is: I am going up to Strasbourg with Dagmar on the 14th of February. We are going to stay there for four nights. After that, I am going to go to Basel in Switzerland and stay there for two nights. Then I fly out to Berlin and stay there for… actually, I don’t know how many nights I am there. But I do have it written down somewhere so don’t worry. After that I fly down to Nice, where I may or may not stay a few days, depending on how tired I am after all that traveling. Do you know that the French word for work is travaille. I think that may mean something.

Speaking of work, the job search front is still the same. I made a bunch of phone calls yesterday and I have a meeting with a French company next Friday. The woman doesn’t know if she even needs to hire anyone and if she did, it would only be for part time, but it would be a start. Actually, the main reason I am going tomorrow is because Natalia told me that there was an English speaker who works in Grenoble who was going to be there. I figure I can introduce myself and see if she knows of anything. I hope she is there. If she is not, I am going to be worlds annoyed.

Oh! And I was talking to Dad the other night and he mentioned that I was starting to pick up some British-isms. I’m indifferent about that, but I found it interesting. But of course I would pick up British-isms… I am around more Brits than Americans here. There are other Americans here, but I don’t have a cell phone so I never call them and they never call me, and I see Jo all the time.