I'm exhausted...too much fun

Yesterday we sort of delayed going to soccer until it was time for kickoff of France vs. Romania. Alex and I made some stir fry out of some bell peppers and mushrooms and chicken beforehand. The atmosphere at the pub was a lot different than it had been for the Bordeaux-Marseille game. I was expecting an even bigger turnout because it was the French national team, but my friend Marie, who is from Bordeaux, tells me that les Girondins et l'Olympique are two of the biggest teams and so everyone is interested in seeing the game.

Anyway, Alex and I watched the game for a while and later were joined by Maria. I really much learn the rules of soccer -- again, we scored one more time than they did but our goal wasn't counted for some reason I didn't understand. The game ended at a 1-1 tie, which I guess is okay in the preliminary world cup rounds? Again, I was expecting penalty kicks or something.

Afterward we wandered over to Place de la Victoire yet again and met some oenologists (study of wine and wine-making) from the Champagne region at the table next to us. Alex went home at some point and Maria and I went dancing with them, where we ran into a few of the guys we had met and gone to the rum bar with the night before. All of this dancing and meeting people you have a significant language barrier with is pretty exhausting. It's great to meet people, but now I need to just sleep forever.

We went to sleep very very late, and we woke up early to meet with our landlady to sign the lease and pay our first month's rent. I went back to sleep for a few hours afterward, and this afternoon I met with my friend Maria, who I met when she was studying at OU last year. We took a walk around the area where I live downtown and over to the river, and stopped for a coke on the way (I drank orangina, which is better than coke because it has pulp and is made from something identifiable).

Yesterday and the day before we were having some trouble with the sinks in the apartment...the kitchen one had been draining slowly since we got here but I didn't really think anything about it until Maria asked me to look at the strange thing the bathroom sink was doing. It was retaining water instead of draining, but better than that was that putrid, half-rotten food was floating up through it. We didn't recognize any of the food so I suspect it may be the result of something one of our neighbors did. We emailed Bernadette and she recommended we buy something like liquid plumber (débouche envier in French, I think) to fix our problem. So we made a trip to Auchan and dosed the plumbing pretty hard. It seems to have worked well but she warned us to do it every month because the plumbing is apparently cranky.

My throat is sore today. I think it might be the reasult of sleeping with the window open, combined with several nights of minimal sleep and the terrible exhaustion that comes from making sounds your maternal language doesn't have for days on end. It's really mentally and physically exhausting for me to speak French. I hope that goes away soon. There's sa lot to be learned by speaking to people.