France!

There is too much to write I should have posted earlier!

Terry and Sam and I spent a week together after looking around Paris with a French woman in a cottage on the Italian border and her three sons doing garden work. She often left us alone in the chalet for long stretches of time (like from 9 am to 3am one day) without saying where she was going so we would just play board games and drink her wine. She had water scarcity issues so alcohol was literally cheaper to drink than water, so we drank all the time.

On Friday I split up with Sam and Terry and traveled across France by myself, which went smoothly until the towns started getting smaller and smaller and then I had to take buses. The last "bus" was just someone's van with a phone number painted on it that only goes from Condom to Gondrin where I had to be picked up every three days. After 14 hours of traveling this bus was an hour late and I was freaking out. But then a nice old couple assured me in French (after recounting the horrors of Normandy to me for 20 minutes) that the bus just comes whenever it is convenient for the driver, which made sense given what the bus looked like. Then when I told the driver that I needed to get to Gondrin he looked at me like I was crazy and said that he doesn't drive there. Fortunately it turned out that I had forgotten that they mispronounce everything in south west france and that I was just saying the name of the city wrong. So I get in the sketchy bus and drive some more. When I get to the town, my host isn't there because I'm late. The only thing open in the town is a pub, and I have to convince the propreitress to let me use her telephone. I have to leave a message for my host, and wait outside the bar. so finally a woman in a Volvo pulls up and yells out the window "Get een Deeirdree we're all going to a bullfight!". (My host is German) Inside the car are already four German women and an American college football player and everyone is speaking German. (Everyone is speaking German all the time and I can't understand a thing). We drive to another small French city and get out of the car to be greeted by a riotous party. Hundreds of French people are drinking and dancing in the streets wearing white and red for the bullfight. One of them hears me speaking English to the American football player and yells to his friend: "C'est Hermoine Granger!" and then he and two of his friends start pretending to cast spells at me yelling "Expelliamoos!" At this point I am exhausted to the point of thinking that I'm hallucinating. But we watch a bullfight (not the kind were they kill the bull though thank God). It was pretty incredible- the men do backflips over the charging bulls and these strange twists in funny outfits.

Since then its been really tiring farm work. The farm is beautiful though and I can see a castle from the kitchen window. They raise lambs and donkeys. I've been brushing the donkeys, stacking wood and chopping brambles, planting veggies and whatnot. I keep doing everything a little bit wrong though and it's really frustrating not to be able to speak English to everyone working here, or even French. My hosts speak all three but there are also wwoofers here from Austria and Switzerland.

I told my host yesterday that I liked to cook bread, and so she delegated the responsibility to me today of baking. But for her "liking to cook bread" meant "I know bread recipes by heart." When I asked for a recipe she got really angry and said "You said you knew how to make bread, why would you say this if not true?" I was able to quickly find an internet recipe, but was very confused by the metric system and the bread took way too long to make and she was a little upset at me. So I tried to redeem myself by doing the dishes without being asked even though it wasn't my turn. Then I got yelled at because it wasn't my turn to do the dishes and I messed up the system. I think that Germans are very into systems.

I've gotten in the routine of naturally waking up at 6 or 7 which I haven't been in since I was like 12 and had a bed time at 9pm. But I love the French countryside and actually enjoy the work quite a bit too.

Will post pictures as soon as I figure out how (technical difficulties) , probably in Lebanon.

Guten nacht, Deidre