Do you have any bread?

&&&&&& Sooooooooooooo (in the style of Jack Todd for all of you Montrealers out there)...
This week has been quite the rollercoaster ride. I mean how can the Habs look so awful against Toronto, and then so good vs. Ottawa, only to drop a shootout to Pittsburgh?!

Of course, that was a poor joke, and is not actually what I'm talking about. I was pretty devastated when I got the news of Ryan's passing on Monday morning, and it felt awful that I had to learn about it through Facebook. I don't think him being gone has phased me at all yet, and it likely won't for a while. He was just such a good guy, always a smile and kind word... I'll miss him, and I know I'm far from alone in that sentiment.

And that was the beginning of a busy week, as that same Monday was also Pedro's birthday, though celebrations were limited to some dinner in his room and a looking-through of some of the photo albums on his computer. It was a Monday night, him and I had class till 8:15, and most of the others had just gotten back from Amsterdam.

Tuesday evening, a larger group of us went to the St Sever mall in town to go see a movie. They were having a special so entry to movies was only 3 euro (about $4.50 canadian), and we opted to go see Bobby, the Emilio Estevez film featuring a star-studded cast and detailing the context of the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. But before talking about the movie, we must discuss the popcorn, whether you wanted to or not. Back home, the default for popcorn is butter and salt. It is also a given that cinemas have their own popcorn popping machine. I thought these were unconditional international truths, but apparently I was mistakin'. Not so, indeed. Not only did their popcorn supplies come from large pre-popped bags, but unless you specifically asked for salted popcorn, the popcorn they gave you was covered in sugar instead! No, I'm not talking about caramel popcorn, or candycorn, or anything like that. Just imagine popcorn, and instead of having salt sprinkled on it, sugar was used instead. It's like someone picked up the wrong shaker. But that's normal here. And while on the subject of the popcorn, one of the guys serving it was pretty funny. Noticing that we were english, he decided to list all the english words he knew. His list went like this: "Umm... Cat, Dog, I don't know, Chicken..." It was pretty funny. So I then spoke to him in French, and he asked me if the stereotype of a Frenchman is still a berret-wearing smoker with a baguette under his arm, and I pretty much said yep.

The movie itself was quite good. An interesting and ever-evolving storyline, drama mixed with touches of comedy... All in all. very well done. My favourite line is definitely Sharon Stone's character's insult... "Your suit may be from 1968, but your attitude is from 1920!" Feel free to use that one as if it were your own. I give you permission.

From there, most of us simply bused it back to residence and I was asleep by 2 am. The next morning, I had law at 9, and fortunately, it was the last class of the semester for my veryyyyyyy boring teacher. Starting next week, someone is replacing her, and I don't see how he/she could be less interesting, so it almost HAS to be a good thing. After that, I went into town with a couple of Ontario boys and acted as translator as one of them had to bring his laptop into a repair shop. At night, there was a gathering in the residence building foyer for Gianni from Italy's birthday. I was pretty exhausted, so not really in the mood to be there, and didn't plan on staying long, but in the end, the party was haulted by security anyway, so it was off to bed. Yes, security. You see, even though the building has a foyer, it is against the rules to congregate there. It's almost as bad as the rule that says you are not allowed to stand in the entranceway hall of the building either.

Et puis hier, I again had 9:00 class, and I followed it up with an afternoon of groceries and chilling. And finally, last night I got quite wasted, or as some back home might say, shittered. I began by pre-drinking at rez, opting to finally break open the bottle of vanilla vodka i had bought a little while back. I finished about half of it, mixing with Coke and then orange juice (if you ever have vanilla vodka, I would recommend the OJ over the Coca). So I was already pretty drunk when we got to the techno lounge called BarFlower. While the music was good, and there was a decent number of people, there was no dance floor, so after 2 more drinks of vodka, it was off to try somewhere else, namely Big Ben's. Unfortunately, Big Ben's didn't have a dance floor going either, but we managed to improvise one for at least a short while and enough time for me to cap my drinking off with a beer. When Big Ben's was getting ready to close around 2 am, we were going to go find another place that was open till later, but we then found out from some french guys and also saw that the police were making rounds of downtown and not too friendly. I don't really know why we were afraid of the police to be honest, but, ummm, they were French, so we simply split a cab back home.

And that's it for now. This Sunday, I'll be going on a school trip to Mont Saint Michel for the day, and that's supposed to be one of the most beautiful parts of France, so it should be nice. And then the plan is to have a Super Bowl party at a local's place, though we'll see how well that goes after being out all day and with the pre-game show starting at midnight here.

Before I leave you all for now and you are forced to use your imagination to figure out what I'm doing out here in France while simultaneously missing me like crazy, I do have 2 bits of exciting news. First, we're looking into going to Italy during our first school break that begins February 23rd. So if you'll randomly happen to be in Italy Feb. 23 - March 3, or dates close to that, let me know! But the even more exciting news is that 2 weeks from tomorrow, meaning on Saturday, February 17th, I'M GOING TO SEE A HOCKEY GAME! Yes, I did just say that this was more exciting than Italy, and I meant it. HOCKEYYYYYYY! Rouen has a pretty decent team in the pro French league, and the 17th is their last home game of the regular season. I'll be certain to let you all know how that goes, but of course I can't expect it to compare to taking a game in at le centre bell, which is probably the thing I miss most from back home right now.

I leave you with our quote of the week out here which comes from the cab ride home last night, and was probably a lot funnier if you were there...
"Can I ask you a personal question? Do you have any bread?"