How are you? I hope your week has been good.
Mine hasn't been bad. I got to talk to my family a few times and that made me quite happy.
Also, I did some laundry, bought cooking utensils, and finally used the kitchen! Basically, I just did stuff that really should have been done by now, but I just didn't want/know how to do until now.
I can't believe I've been here for three weeks. Some days it feels like it's been so much longer than that, and then other days I feel like I just got here. Monday marked 100 days until Christmas-- that doesn't even seem like that long! That means I'll be here for 258 more days (give or take a few).
Today, I thought I'd share with y'all a few discoveries I've made while here.
Our first week here, the school hosted a really fancy dinner at a nice restaurant for the international students. It was a really good time. Before they brought us our food, they set out these little bowls of what looked like packing peanuts. So, obviously, we tried them and they tasted like peanut butter! They were so good, Lizette ate almost the whole bowl in front of us and then asked the people down the table to pass their bowl down (because they weren't enjoying the peanut buttery goodness). Needless to say, we searched for these the next time we went to the supermarket. It took us a few trips, but we finally found them. They're called Croustillantes Gout Cacahuetes, which I think means peanut flavored crisps. Anyway, they're amazing. The ones that I like to get are more like crunchy cheetos instead of puffy. (Because crunchy beats puffy everyday.) We call them peanut butter cheetos and I don't ever regret eating an entire bag in one day. They are just that good.
This second discovery came by way of a delicious muffin at our favorite cafe. Lizette and I will usually split a panini and a dessert, so one day we chose a muffin that kind of looked like it might be similar to coffee cake with this brownish glaze on the top. We bit into this muffin and it had a real subtle flavor. It took several bites to really pinpoint what it tasted like, but we finally settled on graham crackers. It sounds really odd, but it's good. We went back into the cafe to look at the name of it and it's "Speculoos." I googled it and it has cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and a few other spices in it. Turns out, they sell this stuff in jars next to the Nutella, and it's even better in creamy form. I found these little "toasts" (hard crackers) and I pile that speculoos on. I could eat this with a spoon straight from the jar.
Thirdly, I've discovered that Paula and Tessa (my advisors at SUU) were right about the peanut butter situation in Europe. Somehow, it's just not a thing. As someone who could live off of PBJ sandwiches and Reeses, I don't understand how they don't eat peanut butter. I was able to find this itty-bitty jar of it, but it was nearly 5 Euros for 340 grams. (That's $6.50 for 12 oz.) At first I convinced myself that I could live without it, but later caved and bought it anyway. Nutella and Speculoos are good, but they're no substitute for peanut butter.
Fourthly, I'd like to know why the coffee comes in such small doses. There are coffee vending machines in both buildings at the school, so I commend them for that, but the serving size is minuscule! I already mentioned that it's very different from American coffee in taste, but size is a whole different thing. It's not just the serving size from the vending machines that are small. I bought a double macchiato at a coffee shop and it was smaller than a tall at Starbucks.
Cappuccino from the vending machine
What is this madness?!
I'm sure there are more discoveries I could tell you about, but this is all I can think of at the moment!
This past week has been kind of dragging. We had planned to go somewhere in the region on Friday and Saturday, but Lizette was sick, so we stayed around Poitiers (which is never a bad thing). And since we didn't get to leave, I did a little more exploring on my own. I found another old church, and I swear, every time I go into another Cathedral I have a new favorite. I just love everything about them. Inside and out, I am just in awe of it all. I would love to attend church services in them every week. I suppose I could but 1) I'm not Catholic and 2) I wouldn't understand a word of what was going on. Eh, I might go anyway.
On Saturday, our friends from South Carolina hosted an American Cookout for all of the international students. They served hot dogs, potato chips, and s'mores. (They used mini-baguettes for the hot dog buns because I guess that's also not a thing here.) It was fun to eat pseudo-American food though.
On Tuesday evening we had another French class. From here on out, we'll have them regularly once a week. I'm looking forward to these, although I wish we could meet more often. I'm not learning the language nearly as quickly as I hoped I would. But that's fine, I am slowly getting better!
Today was the first day of my Services Marketing class. For some reason, our original teacher couldn't teach last minute, and the school had to find someone else to take over. The new teacher won't be here until next week, so until then, we have this huge assignment to turn in by Monday (groups of 5 writing a 20 pg paper with a presentation to go along with it). I'm having the hardest time taking my school work seriously. It just doesn't feel like school to me! Hopefully, my future classes will get off to a better start than this one has.
I really should start writing my portion of this assignment, but I think I'll sit here with my spoonful of speculoos and watch Youtube videos for a while.
I love you all :)
Je t'embrasse,
Sarah
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