Virtually Home

And after a title like that, I have to start off with some more connerie. I called Auchan the other day, and after the lady on the line looked up my work order, was simply told to "be patient" and hung up on. Aside from being offended by that awkward departure from my expectations about customer service, I didn't have any idea what I was being told to be patient for, so I made Maria call again. Maria was told that, when I told the technician to tell me how much it would cost before beginning work, he took that as a request for a formal estimate. Which means that he went back to Auchan, filled out some paperwork, and had them mail me an estimate. By the mail. As in, the kind with a postman. And then, when I receive the estimate, I have to decide whether the cost is acceptable (phone-lady said 107 euros, but refused to take the order over the phone) and then mail it back to them. And then they'll call me to schedule an appointment. Which, judging by the last time I made...

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...

I woke up pretty late today and sort of wondered what I was going to do on a Sunday. I decided to look for a movie to see -- preferably one I'd seen before, and so would understand what was going on, but definitely in French. I ended up finding a UGC theater pretty near my house and seeing Harry Potter et le Prince du Sang-Mêlée. There were only a few peculiarities where the voices of the actors were crazily different -- Dumbledore and McGonagall, mostly. I enjoyed it. The theater was built in an old part of town so it went up five stories instead of out, like American theaters do. The theater itself was very compact -- the seats were really comfortable, but there wasn't a lot of leg room between the rows. I decided to sort of wander back in the direction of my apartment and see what there was to see. I passed an Irish pub not far from the cathedral, and on the wall they had a picture of one of the guys on the Bordeaux team and a sign about when the next game was. I checked my ...