Virtually Home

These two are not really related, it's just that I remain sick while all around me, people are falling victim to the plague. Erin and Andria were feeling bad when they moved out on Monday, and Maria and Alex are both sick. I've relapsed. However, Amber arrived on a train yesterday afternoon. She got stuck in the middle of Auvergne due to snow, and they all had to sit tight while people got out and poked at the wheels to dislodge ice from them. She finally did make it on time, since they held her connecting train, and I picked her up at St. Jean. We went out to an Italian restaurant, where I had a pizza with apples and olives and honey and onion jam. It was pretty fantabulous. Afterward we took a kind of epic walk, down to Place de la Bourse and along the river, then across Pont de Pierre and farther than I've ever walked on that side of the river, to a church that turns out to be called Eglise St. Marie. We walked in a circle around it, and found that while the front wa...

Maybe the second day after Alex got here, we went to the university and, on wandering home, got really hungry. We stopped into a kebab shop near St. Nicolas where they were very friendly, and we talked to the two shopkeepers, who were cousins, while we ate. I meant to go back, but as it's not in a place I'm usually walking around looking for something to eat, I hadn't. Until a few days ago, when Vianney and Benjamin wanted to get kebab and said they knew the best place in town. Well, mostly when people tell you their product is the best one there is, they're just trying to sell it to you. And the first time I wandered into that shop, having never had a kebab, I was pretty unaware of what I was eating. But, having sampled a wide variety of kebabs in Bordeaux, since it's the only thing you can buy to eat after about 9 p.m., I think I'm inclined to agree now. Most of it is that they make their own bread and that their vegetables are fresh. A big part of it is...

I didn't feel great yesterday, and when today decided to wake me up to go to the university and choose classes at the last possible minute, I felt a lot worse. I dragged myself out of bed despite the soft rain noises from the courtyard trying to lull me back to sleep and went to the school. I chose a bunch of classes in history, literature, music history,  and film and set about trying to figure out when and where they met. This is a complicated process of finding each department's tiny, hidden hallway with a bunch of posted paper timetables and locating your class, which may or may not have the same course number as the one you initially chose, or any posted title at all. As I expected (feared), many of the courses I selected were not on the schedules, even though they'd been posted for us foreign dupes to believe we could take them. I came up with about 16 hours worth of things, but I think I'll probably only take twelve. One of the ones I'm interested in is a...