Little bits from the past week.

Le 15 décembre 2004.

So much! The thing I love about journals is that you can come and go from them as needed. But so much as happened in the last week, and I’m going to either bore you or forget loads of details, or rather, just both!

Starting with today and yesterday and then going backwards, my last two days have been really productive. I learned loads about handling money in the last two days and credit cards. Two loads of laundry went through the washer at Carrefour yesterday and ended up drying in my tiny studio. Melissa and I ‘attacked’ the CAF this morning to try and complete our dossiers and find out how much money we’ll be receiving. That turned out to be quite jolly, as I finished up the paperwork for my folder, and Melissa found out that about two-thirds of her rent was being paid for, meaning that I should receive about the same amount! Hooray for rent not taking over half of my monthly salary starting next month! In addition, I received my CAF payments for October and November today, so I am no longer completely as broke as I thought I was. I still can not afford a gourmet meal, but I might splurge and go get a foie gras sandwich at the marché de Noël in St. Louis this weekend. On the discouraging side, the Sécurité Sociale seems to have lost my dossier; but Melissa and I seem to have lucked out though as a higher-up was filling in for a colleague to go to lunch and he promised to find my folder and let me know what was going on and fix it- though I didn’t get the promised phone call this afternoon. But he gave me his name and told me to call if I had any more problems- he said we were nice so he didn’t mind helping us out. Yay for connections!

This weekend I had a fabulous time in Paris visiting Kim and Thanh Ly with Kristen! I went in on Thursday night to see Amelia, Liz, and Anna before they left this week; together we got to overwhelm their Lake Forest friends as Team Cornell. On Friday night, we became Super Team Cornell when Kristen joined us. We had all sorts of lovely, expensive Parisian foods and wine. Thanh Ly, Kristen, and I went walking and metro-ing around Paris on Saturday playing tourist a bit, as Kim had a class in the morning and work at the American Library in Paris in the afternoon. So we went to the Eiffel Tower, Sainte-Chapelle, chez Angelina, the American bookstore on rue de l’Opera, then to meet Kim at Galeries Lafayette at Place de l’Opera and Printemps, next to Starbucks, and finally out for dinner in the Marais. It was just such a fun and relaxing weekend of spending time with friends and seeing Paris in the winter… and I have the wind burnt cheeks to prove it!

Before I left for Paris, I went out for huitres with Victoria! They were so super yummy! I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed enjoying them til I got to munch on them again. It’s so nice to have someone here in Metz with me who appreciates the finer things in life! :) The market at night is just so beautiful and it was great fun to stand out of doors enjoying the huitres and chatting with the patron of the booth, who was so amused by two young Americans eating his huitres in Metz. Afterwards, we all had dinner together for Christmas as people were already starting to leave for the holidays. We then had a Christmas swap of little gifts. It was a fun if almost impromptu Christmas party.