Je suis Americain-Day 5-January 13th, 2018

I didn’t have class until 1 pm today, so I used the opportunity to sleep in to about 9:30. I know it’s relatively early, but I went to bed at 10 pm the night before and woke up very well rested. I’m starting to develop a morning routine here, which often includes my new acquaintance, the European shower.

I headed downstairs, and had my usual breakfast of a brioche, corn flakes, and coffee in a bowl. Anne-Marie is usually up pretty early and graciously puts my breakfast out on the table everyday.

Here’s two pictures of my typical breakfast.

There was also a new addition to the kitchen this morning. One of Anne-Marie’s sons, Fabrice, plays for the Grenoble rugby team. The team must be sponsored by some restaurant because this funny poster was on the fridge.

A-M’s son is second from the left.

Also here’s a picture of my family’s Christmas card hanging up in the kitchen. (I figured my Mom would want to see this)

After some down time in my room, I headed out for class.

Today’s lesson was pretty generic. We seem to move at a pretty fast pace and have already began to learn French verb conjugation. My ability to form sentences is slowly developing. We also spent a good amount of time on phonetics and pronunciation. I have been quickly learning how important pronunciation is in French and how bad I am at it. We were instructed to make certain shapes with out mouths and make sounds more nasally for certain pronunciations. Listening to everyone repeatedly make nasally sounds was pretty damn funny.

There is a big courtyard right outside the BU office and there is always people skateboarding outside. Multiple times during the lesson I got distracted by the skaters outside and felt stupid for not bringing my skateboard to class. I skate to class everyday in Boston, but couldn’t imagine my board being useful in Grenoble and left it at home. Boy was I wrong. I’m currently doing my best not to impulse buy a skateboard. We’ll see how that goes.

After class, I browsed some shops with a few of my classmates. There is some law in France that says stores are forbidden from having sales unless it is in a six week period in January and February. Because of this law, pretty much everything is 60% off. For this same reason, “solde” (which means sale), was one of the first French words I learned.

Upon further inspection, I discovered that a lot of stuff on sale was still pretty expensive. For example they were charging the equivalent of $120 for Adidas Stan Smith sneakers that would cost $60 in the States.

At the mall, I met up with some other friends from the “smart French class” and we made plans to cook dinner that night at Dylan and Jonathon’s house. Their host parents were at a wedding and told them they could have some people over. We all purchased different things to contribute to pasta dinner. Naturally, I bought a bunch of wine. I bought two bottles of this red wine Jonathon recommend that was 3 euros each. I also bought a more expensive sauvignon blanc wine, my favorite type, purely because it said Bordeaux on the label. For those lacking wine knowledge (aka me two days ago), wine from the Bordeaux region of France is considered to be some of the best in France along with Champagne and Burgundy.

After shopping, we headed out to Dylan and Jonathon’s house and hung out for a bit. Their house is over two hundred years old, though has some modern additions like the kitchen. It was very cool and nice to finally see some other homes in Grenoble.

Cooking dinner was a group activity for the five us, I contributed by washing dishes and drinking lots of wine.  Our food ended being pretty good thanks to Dylan’s cooking skills and of course my wine was delicious.

Here’s a picture of the white wine I drank, notice how it’s empty.

At the end of dinner, five of our other friends came over to the house to pregame before we headed to a bar. We all enjoyed a nice cheese plate and baguette we purchased earlier to go along with the wine. It was a merry time and everyone was soon ready to head out to the bar.

Here’s a silly selfie of me holding an antique gun I found in the house.

Nick doing his best Harry Potter impression by standing in the cupboard under the stairs

The students who went to Grenoble last year left a ton of recommendations for bars and restaurants to go to. We chose a pirate-themed bar, Barberousse, known for its flaming shots.

It was bit overpriced, but the bar was a ton of fun. The flaming shots lived up to their name and were perfect to take snapchat stories of instead of paying the 10 euros to actually drink them. I tried to practice my French as much as possible at the bar. I would do everything from: ask where the bathroom was, ask for menus, order drinks, socialize with locals, hit on girls, and get rejected by girls. It was a fun time all around and my BU peers found it hilarious to watch me attempt to speak French to locals. My general strategy was to say in French: “My name is Will”, “I am American” and “I did not vote for Donald Trump”. This brought me a good amount of success.

Here’s Jonathon and I with our new French Female Friends.

We all the left the bar and went our separate ways. I joined some people for a McDonalds run, only to find French McDonalds surprisingly expensive. They charge 8 euros for 6 nuggets, something that costs a dollar in America.

I took the tram home after this and did everything in my power to get to my room as quietly as possible. After some trouble with the locks, I made it inside and tiptoed up to my room. I decided to circumvent the bathroom this time in an effort to prevent Anne-Marie from scolding me for flushing the toilet again.

Having avoided any interactions with A-M in her night gown, I happily went to bed.