bonjour from France!

Alas, it is my fourth day in France. I spent the first two days in Paris, we couchsurfed with a couple named Fredric and Ariane. They were incredibly generous and kind, they had a really funny dog named Alpha, a bulldog that waddled and made funny noises. They made us lunch and dinner on the first day, it was great but both Amelia and I broke our vegetarianism! I was surprised that I didn't get sick. They showed us around Paris and helped us get to where we wanted to go. We went to this street that is famous for its food, a bakery where we had a very buttery pastry from Brittanie (sp?) they then took us to a radical bookstore that Amelia wanted to check out, it was cool, yet I understood nothing because it was in French. Then we went back to their place and to a creperie where they made food special to Brittanie.

It was hard (and still is hard) for me because my French is incredibly minimal and supposedly my English is hard to understand, so I had to enunciate and talk more slowly than i'm used to. I had a really hard time with that and it is also frustrating for me to not be able to speak the language and to understand it well. Amelia has been doing most of the talking and i've been the shy, awkward American without a clue of what is going on with anything.

Yesterday we went to Lyon via rideshare -- there were 5 of us packed in a tiny ford focus. It was kind of hilarious because the guy driving listened to lots of R and B and bad rap. But it went fine and we arrived in Lyon last night. We are currently staying with Claire, a lady in her 30s we met through couchsurfing. She is really nice. She spent a year at UNC Chapel Hill which is cool, our mom went there back in the 70's. We had dinner with her and I had been feeling slightly ill all day. After dinner I felt like I was going to pass out and did just that. We ended up sleeping until 3PM the next day, which was kind of annoying but probably needed. We found another radical bookstore and they told us about a squat we could stay at and showed us this sweet coffeeshop where they have shows (lightning bolt played there last week) the feel of the coffeeshop made me feel at home. They had a bunch of screen printed posters hung up and people were just hanging out and were quite friendly. The feel of it reminded me of the Trumbullplex in Detroit meets Hardtimes in Minneapolis with a French twist into it. We had some tea and went to the center and up the fenicular to the old center of Lyon, and then we wandered back down the hill. It was so steep, the whole time I was thinking about what it would be like to ride my bike down the hill. Especially on cobblestone streets-- eeek. Last night after dinner we met some other fellow couch surfers who were pretty cool. The pub we went to closed at 11 because the basement was flooding and the guy zorking at the bar had to figure out how to fix it. The night didn't go on much longer from there and we ended up heading back.

I stopped writing in the middle of this last night, so now i'm writing from the point of view of day 5. I would write more but this keyboard is frustrating and I only have so much patience. I think today we are going to check out a squat and meet some new people. It should be good.