Living Room Infiltration-Day 111-May 1st, 2018

The best part of spending the Fall in the United States and then the spring in France, is that you get off for labor day twice. Today, May 1st, was the French version of labor day. Everything was closed today, including the trams and buses. Having this in mind, I slept in until 11 today. I had nothing planned.

I got up and headed downstairs for breakfast. Jessica must have slept in too because she walked downstairs at the same time as me. Anne Marie was in the kitchen as well, causing my usual breakfast to be a bit more exciting than usual. I had some conversations with both of them about the strikes and protests. I told them about how I talked to the protesters yesterday and what they told me.

We also talked randomly about Picasso because AM and Andre had been watching a series on him. She invited Jessica and I to watch with them later, which I agreed to. I had nothing planned for today and this could be my in to finally infiltrate their living room.

After breakfast, I listened to The Shining for about an hour. Listening during the day honestly isn’t as good. I only have three hours left of the audio book and think I will only listen to the rest at night time.

Getting a little bored of The Shining, I decided to watch a movie called The Disaster Artist. It is a movie directed by and starring James Franco that is about the creation of this infamously bad movie from 2003, The Room. I watched this on the plane the other day to prepare for The Disaster Artist. I enjoyed the movie a lot and it made me appreciate The Room more.

It was around two, so I went to make myself lunch. Today’s lunch was very reminiscent of elementary school: pb&j, an apple, and potato chips. All that was missing was my juice box.

I probably did something after eating, but I don’t really remember. It was close to 6 PM somehow and they day seemed to slip by.

On days like this where I do nothing, sometimes I wonder, “Shouldn’t I be exploring Europe or something?”. The longer I have been in France, I’ve begun to realize that one of my favorite things is how much down time I have. Sure I spend a good amount of time travelling, but some days I don’t even leave my house, let alone the country. Sometimes a day of nothing is the greatest thing in the world. I have had a lot more of these this semester and it has honestly done wonders for making my life less stressful. Plus I don’t mind doing nothing today since I’m going to Italy next week and England the week after that. Today is meant for lying around and watching TV.

On that note, I watched some more TV before dinner, John Mulaney’s new stand up special in particular. It was really funny. The dinner bell rang about thirty minutes early tonight, cutting off my show a bit earlier.

Dinner tonight was pleasant and pretty good. We had some thing called tourte as an appetizer. It has a really flake shell that has cheese and ham inside it.

Here’s a picture. It looked and probably tasted much better than this one.

The main course was beef and some potatoes in a tomato based sauce. This was decent too. After the bread and cheese, AM brought us THREE DESSERTS! The first was strawberries with sugar on top, the second was some peach cake thing, then some packaged cookies. Jessica and I gave each other a look of shock, then I saw her slip the cookies into her pocket. I did the same.

After stuffing ourselves even more, we decided to watch the Picasso show. We all headed to the living room and I took a seat on the couch for the first time in my four months here. The Picasso show was done by National Geographic and had really good production value. I’m pretty sure it was a series in English, but we watched the version dubbed in French. There was no subtitles, so I did my best to follow along.

Despite not understanding about 75% of the dialogue, it was still pretty good. After the episode, I saw Andre scrolling through some history documentaries and figured this was good opportunity to leave. I told them I liked it a lot, but needed to study. I headed upstairs and finished the comedy special.

I took a shower after then wrote this blog post. I only have one class tomorrow, but I’m ready to leave the house again. Plus the gym will be open again tomorrow. Now it’s time to go back to the Overlook Hotel to see Jack Torrance before bed.