My Continued Adventures

The last few days have been pretty un-noteworthy, which I guess explains the lag in posting.

I guess I've mostly been playing guitar, watching Star Trek: TNG and X-Files, and surfing YouTube. For instance, today I finally heard about President Obama's speech for the first day of school. That's one frustrating thing about living abroad -- I keep not being apprised of presidential addresses or  major pop culture events until way after.

Most of what I have to show for yesterday involves successfully finding the laundromat, which was about a 3/4 of a mile from my apartment. I know there's one closer. In fact, I remember walking by one a few days ago and remarking aloud to my roommates that we should remember where it was, in case we needed it. As it turned out, we did have need of it -- and I didn't remember where it was. I'm sure it was closer than the one I found, but I didn't want to invest a lot of time and energy into the hunt when I still had to fetch my laundry, carry it there, and then baby sit it.

Laundry is really expensive in France. It was 3.50 to use a tiny washer, and 50 cents per 5 minutes for a dryer. I thought about carrying my laundry home to hang it to dry, but I also didn't want to deal with carrying wet laundry that far.

Everything was uneventful until I was waiting on the last few minutes of the wash cycle and a man came in who exhibited a lot of obsessive-compulsive sort of symptoms. He said hello to everyone in the room individually, then he started at the washer I was using and asked who was using it -- even though there were other machines. He took out a tissue and wiped the seat he was about to sit in for almost a full minute. He went through the list of instructions for using and paying for a washer over and over again, aloud, with hand gestures. When he sat down, he started reading a dictionary -- reading it straight through. He was near the end of the A's. It was an interesting experience, but overall made me think that we really need to have someone come look at our washing machine.

Last night I went to the pub to watch the Bordeaux-Rennes soccer game. There were not nearly as many people there as for the Bordeaux-Marseille game. The bartender tells me that Bordeaux and Marseille are the two best teams in the country and I should not expect a crowd that big again. Still, there were plenty of people there. Soccer strikes me as really strange because they play continuously for 90 minutes, which is in itself respectable. It also means fewer commercials, which I guess is why the teams have so much sponsorship with their stadiums and their jerseys. And all in all, very little happens in the way of scoring -- when there is a goal or a near-goal there is not one replay but at least five. They have two slow-motion speeds: "slowed down" and "SUPER slowed down" which I think is kind of entertaining.

Anyway, Bordeaux won 1 to 0 and I came home.

Most of the excitement for the day came when I decided to take a long walk in a direction I hadn't much traveled the last few weeks. When I was just about ready to turn back I encounted a familiar place, which turned out to be the grocery store I found on my first excursion. And man, knowing what I know now, I sure did head out in the complete wrong direction to find a grocery store. It was really far away. I was kind of impressed with my ability to miss all the stores between our apartment and that place.