Wine and Stew

Thanksgiving last Thursday was fun. I ate a whole bunch of food and drank a gratuitous amount of wine with my Assistant friends Arthur, Jon, Meg, Anne, and Francine. I made stew and we had mashed potatoes, salad, fried spinach with garlic, baguette, this Jamaican dish called Festival (which was like cornbread...) and other stuff. Insted of going to the protest, because it was raining in the way that Normandy does, I stayed inside and watched a whole bunch of the TV series 24 on DVD. It's addictive if only because of the plot.

The weekend was uneventful. I was so broke, and so was Jon, that we just sat around and drank the rest of the wine from Thanksgiving at his house on Friday night. Saturday night we went to this free concert. Well, concert is maybe being nice. See, normally, if you saw an advertisement for a concert in a paper, you'd say, "Cool, music and stuff. Sounds good." That is what we did. And we were wrong. By concert they meant three middle-aged women doing bad performance art. One played the violin furiously while another would tell a story and try, badly, to act out what they were saying. The first story was about a girl who became a singer. The second was about a girl who became a tree. Or something. I quit trying to translate after about the first ten minutes, and we waited until the intermission to leave, as opposed to these two girls sitting in front of us, who just left after about five minutes. Fortunately, though, we recieved a free glass of wine, which made it better.

Sunday I went on a bike ride in the rain/hail and got really, really dirty. But I got to talk to my mom, and the rest of my family, during the weekend, so that was a bonus. I would have called them on Thanksgiving itself, but I had 30 centimes to my name at that point, which is not enough, alas, to buy a phone card to call home. Getting paid was more exciting than it should have been because I got to actually buy food. Ah, the life of an assistant. I just tell myself that at least I'm poor in France, which is better than being poor in America. Somehow.