Bahh, jschepa.

This weekend was pretty sweet. We left yesterday for Rouen, a city about an hour outside of Paris, and came back tonight. By "we" I mean a guy from my class and I. We stayed with some family friends of his, who were kind enough to feed me and give me a place to sleep (with a gorgeous view, I might add), despite never having met them before.

Yet another spectacular bedroom window view

Weird as it may sound, it was really nice to get out of Paris. Not because I was getting tired of Paris (my goodness, I'm pretty sure that's impossible), but because I almost got too used to how great it was. Plus, it's nice to be out in the countryside a little bit, in an actual house with an actual backyard. They fed us so well (hmm... are we sensing a theme here?) and were extremely accommodating.

Rouen is a nice little gem. Where Joan of Arc was burned at the stake, you know, just casual. Typical France. But in all seriousness it has a slower pace and more manageable size than Paris does. It looks German? The architecture, I mean. Which is kind of odd. I'm sure there's a reason for that, but as it is late on a Sunday night, I have homework to do after this and really can't muster up the energy to Wikipedia the genealogy of the village. Although, I do know that during the German occupation in WWII, much of the city was bombed. Parts of the Notre-Dame cathedral (the one in Rouen, not Paris) actually crumbled and had to be rebuilt. This Cathedral is the very same one that Monet was obsessed with. Okay, "obsessed" is maybe an exaggeration - he did a series of paintings of the Notre-Dame using different lighting, from different angles, etc. Below is the cathedral (top) and those paintings in the d'Orsay (bottom).

The best part about the whole weekend was that we used a lot of French with the family's son and his girlfriend and their friends. Aka: I learned a lot of slang. They blur a lot of words together so it's kind of hard to understand at times. For example, Je ne sais pas ("I don't know") becomes "jschepa." Classy. It was great practice, though. I had been craving some interaction with real French people, which, other than with my host family and randos on the street, doesn't happen that often.

Oh, but I should mention that on Friday we attended a private concert in a beautiful apartment. Other than my stomach audibly growing the whole time because I had eaten some bits of cheese and cucumber for lunch and then had to wait until horderves were served at about 11:00pm (whhyyy do the French people eat so late?!?), it was lovely. That same day I went to see a French movie in theater. I couldn't understand half of it, but it'll be a nice litmus test to watch it at the end of the summer and see how much I pick up.

Anyways, last night we all went to a bar in Rouen (truthfully, it was an Irish pub named something like O'Kallagan's -- not super French) and just had a great time joking around in French. I felt so great about how much more I could understand, how much more I could say, following their less-than-textbook conversations. [Sorry I talk so much about language but, well, that's what I'm doing here.] Today we went to an old, beautiful abbey nearby and also hiked up a hill overlooking Rouen. Again, visual pleasure for your enjoyment:

I'm excited to meet up with some good friends from school this week who will be here in Paris for a while, as well. Good times yet to be had. Still haven't done my homework due tomorrow... or rather, today (12:30am here). Priorities, man.