Mange, Mange, Mange: Using sports as a pretense to go to awesome places

One of my better ideas.

But before I get into that, I want to take a brief moment to return to the original intention of this blog and talk about food. I started feeling pretty creepy taking a camera into the kitchen every night when they called me in for dinner, but I promise I'm still being fed. I wish I could sum my dinners up neatly, but the meals are far too random to do so. The themes range from Asian to Algerian to Spanish to American (read: piece of hamburger meat and fries with a possible side of pizza) to regional dishes. It's always very very good, and they continue to think a reasonable portion for me is the equivalent to a reasonable portion for my host dad (not complaining at all because that's like, you know, not totally untrue). For lunch I'm always on my own, and I've become a regular at a soup place where you choose your vegetables, put them in a bag, and then ask for it to be pureed or.. souped? I generally go for the soup option. These guys have gotten so used to seeing me and Stephanie that they gave Steph a bunch of free dessert coupons.

Shout out to Katie's ridiculous pastry in the background

This weekend me and the three guys on the program went to the gorgeous port city that is Marseille. We used covoiturage to get there and back (which I'm pretty sure they have in America and is a great way to get around) and stayed in a hostel. Due to complete dumb luck, they messed up our reservation so we ended up paying for a normal, four person room and ended up in the hostel equivalent of a penthouse.

Never found out where the random castle door in the back led to

Anyway, we felt pretty ritzy. Before settling in to the hostel, we got some really good Japanese food. When we arrived at the restaurant, the woman said that she only had three dishes left. None of us are picky, so we sat down. Turns out, she literally only had enough food for three more dishes, but she also had an endless amount of Japanese omelettes. Naturally, we just agreed to eat it all. We ended up with a bento box, some curried soup, a ball of rice, and three omelettes that were sprinkled with some rather disconcerting flakes of what seemed to be some type of living, breathing organism. We honestly just stared at it in awe for a period of time because it was so confusing.

Sean and the magic omelette (<--new idea for children's book)

That evening, we went to a football match. I was more into it than I expected to be, probably due to the fact that the french are VERY passionate/aggressive about their soccer teams. Example: Marseille ended up winning, and at the end they chanted vehemently "PARIS PARIS ON T'ENCUL", which I don't want to translate here due to the audience of this blog, but if you're curious just put it into google translate. Basically, it wouldn't fly in America. Moreover, they were playing Yves st Laurent, (EDIT: the team name is actually Lorient. Couldn't have proven my not-knowing-anything-about-sports point more effectively) which is not Paris at all, so I found that kind of hilarious.

Looking rather unnatural in sporting attire

After the game, we went to a fantastic dinner at a place that the Canadian guy at the front desk of the hostel suggested. We got a whole array of seafood, french fries, pizza, etc.

Of course, because Sterling is Sterling, he had to get the seafood boat

That night we hung out in our room and went out to a couple clubs, which was absolutely hilarious for almost every reason.

On Sunday we did some sightseeing, which consisted of walking up the steepest hills I've ever known and seeing some truly incredible views/old things. We visited a fort first and then Notre Dame de la Gare (a gorgeous cathedral that is more or less placed on top of a mountain). We also just hung out at the port and took advantage of the awesome weather. In short, bro weekend surpassed my already very high expectations.

When I returned home last night, a student from UNC who stayed with my host family a year ago and now lives in France came to visit with her partner. It was interesting, because her partner didn't speak french at all and my host dad doesn't speak much English, so I was switching back and forth throughout the night. Also, after 30 minutes of trying to figure out why this girl looked so unbelievably familiar, we realized that we took a class together last year, so that was pretty cool too.

This coming weekend we go off on our two week spring break, so hopefully I'll be able to fit another update in before then. Oh, and since I finally took pictures, here are some of Marseille: