J'aime faire du vélo -- I like to ride bikes

Bonjour!

This post is coming to you from my friend Aline's house in a small town in Brittany (France). I arrived on the morning 17th after taking 3 different buses (total of just over 25 hours, broken up by a night in Madrid with the lovely Becca Niles.)

(For those thinking about the amount of hours that could have been saved flying: there were various reasons for choosing endless hours in a bus over a plane. And it really wasn't as painful to be on a bus for 17 hours as you might expect. :) Maybe I'll blog about it sometime. Now is not that time.)

Random house along a river in Rennes

After the rush of packing up my apartment in Estepa, traveling with my brother, saying good-byes, and tying up loose ends during my last week or two in Andalucia, my stay with Aline and her family has been nice and relaxing. Emilie, my Belgian roommate from this past year in Estepa, was visiting also and just left yesterday. I will be here until the 29th when I take a train down to La Roche Sur Yon to begin my summer camp job.

Brittany is a Celtic region in NW France and the birthplace of crepes. Generally sweet ones are referred to as crepes while salty/savory varieties are called gallettes. * After spending a day in Rennes, a large city about an hour from Aline's house, we went to Aline's parents' house. That evening we went out to this creperie (girl in the picture is Aline) with a few of Aline's friends in a town nearby. I thought of taking a picture of my food, but it didn't look nearly as impressive as it tasted, and in town of probably under 300 residents, I felt weird about taking it. I had one gallete with cheese, smoked ham, mushrooms, and egg and a crepe with chocolate, banana, and whipped cream with cidre to drink. Delicious.

Since then, my days have been filled with lots of biking, baguette sandwich picnics, lazy afternoons reading books, wandering along the coast, and listening to This American Life, Joni Mitchell, and Learn French by Podcast between nodding off on the beach. Also lots of time enjoying meals with Aline and her family at home (while mumbling out all the broken French / Frespanol / Spanish with an attempted French r / English with an attempted French r that I can muster up after eight 10-minute sessions of Learn French by Podcast and the 2 or 3 informal lessons I've had with Aline and Audrey, my other roommate from this past year, also French, over the course of this year. They're patient with me, and we all laugh after a successful - or failed - use of wild hand gestures, animal sounds, etc. to tell a story. Aline helps translating too from Spanish to French, but it's sometimes fun to bumble around in a language that you don't actually speak, right? Maybe? Sometimes I like to think that making a fool out of yourself builds character. In any case, it definitely has built up my French vocabulary a bit.)

À la prochaine! Until next time!

One of many beautiful views from the Quiberon Peninsula , where Aline, Emilie, and I spent the afternoon biking this past Saturday. This part of the peninsula is a protected coast. Several kilometers down the road, the protected area ends, the beaches are sandier, and there are homes, a few spas, one or two resorts, and lots of restaurants, cafes, clothing stores, and candy shops.

* http://www.alimentation-france.com/france/specialites/les-crepes-et-galettes-bretonnes.html

These are my friends

And this is possibly the best idea for a costume party theme that I've ever experienced. ( A dress like a scientist party my sophomore at college is the only one that has come close.) I spent this past weekend in Tarifa (a beach town in Southern Spain with crazy amounts of wind) with my a big group of my friends from Estepa celebrating Suzy's 21st birthday and starting a week full of good byes. The theme: anything beginning with the letter S. S for Suzy. (She's the star in the front row).

When in Rome ...

Post to come about my trip to Rome with my brother. Until then, here's a picture of us with the Colloseum.

In Italy with Dan