How to make a bed sandwhich

I just found out I have been sleeping in my bed the wrong way: the American way. In the States, we arrange our beds with a bed skirt, a fitted sheet hugging the mattress, a tired student, a flat sheet, maybe a woolly blanket, and then a comforter. In France, the beds have all the same sheets, but the tired student is supposed to sleep sandwiched between the flat sheet and the comforter. C'est bizarre if you ask me (in general, a sandwich is a sandwich no matter what side of the bread the peanut butter is on versus the jelly, but the bed is a particular sandwich that needs to be aware of it's order). Apparently all of the other students that my family has hosted continued sleeping the American way during their stay, and when my host brother went to Colorado this summer, he could not understand why someone would sleep under the flat sheet. It is another interesting aspect of our two separate cultures. For both countries, it is just normal to sleep a certain way and we do not analyze it too much until someone thinks the opposite is normal. I am still deciding whether I will sleep like an American or like the French tonight.

One reason to sleep like an American is to enjoy the extra warmth from being under the flat sheet (oh those silly Americans). It is finally getting cold (froid) here and I am un peu triste to say that the days of shorts and t-shirts are gone. I have been trying to milk the days that I can get away with wearing shorts, but when I speak of the weather now I say "Il fait froid" because "Il fait chaud" (it is hot) and "Il fait beau" (it is beautiful) are only memories. However, I love cold weather clothing and definitely appear more French when I sport my winter wardrobe. I wear a scarf every day (bien sur) and I love stripes so I can pass off as french fairly well.

There is an H&M close to IES in le centre-ville and I am praying that I win a shopping spree while I am here. It is one of those stores where I would literally buy almost every winter outfit there if I had plus d'argent (more $$$). Since my birthday is this weekend, I was thinking about setting up a gift registry that I can post in the IES building. I could mark the clothes that I want from all the tres a la mode stores here and the other students could cross off each item after they buy it for me. That would be about 80 gifts as long as no one buys duplicates, and I would be tres content!

To update my travels, add Mont St Michel and Saint Malo to the list. They are in northwestern France and are tres jolie. Mont St Michel is a massive abbaye surrounded on all sides by a bog of shallow, gritty water. We toured the inside (after climbing halfway up the little island) and saw giant cathedral-like rooms and dozens of small rooms with petits shrines. Below the abbaye sits the town which thrives from the tourism. The stone streets are narrow and overflowing with visitors viewing medieval-looking gift shops and creperies on top of more creperies and sandwich stalls. There is a wall that wraps around the entire ville with a view of the surrounding miles of bog and squawking seagulls overhead. The view approaching Mont St Michel almost makes the whole trip worthwhile because in just minutes the tiny abbaye grows to become a towering stone mountain.

 

Saint Malo is about an hour away along the coast. It is a beautiful little ville with giant golden sandy beaches. The water has four colors of blue that stripe and blend away from the shore and tempt visitors to swim even in the chilly weather. The outer wall holds in a typical french town with cafes, music in le centre-ville, cobble stone streets, and stalls for all sorts of treats covered with nutella. We arrived during low tide and the beach was very large (and probably very crowded during the summer).

Get ready for me to spit some slang. There is a type of slang here called Verlan that is popular with the younger French crowd. It involves reversing the syllables of common words. If speaking french with les jeunes is not hard enough already, reversing the syllables is just crazy! Some examples would be saying "reum" for "mere" (mother) or "reup" for "pere" (father). My host brother and his friends tried to explain it to me and I did not really understand, but when it came up again with my family at dinner, it finally clicked in my french mind. When I can communicate with my friends with Verlan, ouem, je serai un keum cool!