Dun dun dun DUNNNNNNN

Lets start out with Dad's visit. Pictures here! Along with probably the best sign in the history of the universe. (p.s. now that I've learned how to make hyperlinks, really not a big deal, but very exciting in my book, they will appear all over my blog. Fun for me, possibly annoying for you) Ok!

Wednesday, I went to work with Christophe in the morning, we left at 5:45am so I was pretty freaking tired. I went to Boulangerie Poulain and worked in the chocolate/patisserie department all morning. It was pretty sweet, both figuratively and literally. Mmmm chocolate. I now know how to temper chocolate, but only in C°, and the secret recipe for their tasty tasty coffee cakes, but I could never reproduce it without an industrial kitchen. There are not many pictures, but I took a few. When I get home from school (in like 7-8 hours) I'll post them on the picture site. I think we're in dire need of a picture update. At noon Christophe came and got me. We ate free paninis that were my form of payment and I said goodbye until Saturday and got on the bus. I took the bus for an hour and then switched to a train for about 3.5 hours. In my car there was an english couple with their daughter who had down syndrome. The dad pours his coffee all over himself, and I save the day with my french skillz and feel all good about myself. The daughter stares at me for the entirety of the trip after hearing me speak two languages. When I arrived in Nice, my heart was pounding SO HARD and I was super nervous to see my dad. I looked all around and couldn't find him -- turns out there was a 'right' way to leave the station and a 'wrong' way, or what I would like to call a 'less-right' way. Me being me of course, I took the 'less-right' way and was on the other side of the station. Fun. We ended up finding each other and took off down the ridiculously crowded street filled with tourists and construction. Dad had already been there, so the lady behind the counter kinda knew who we were. We put our stuff in the TEENY TINY room, sat for a bit, and then headed out to find something to eat. Even with a map, we managed to get royally lost and the "short 10 minute walk to old nice" that the nice lady behind the counter promised us turned into a "hellish hour and a half struggle to find nourishment, including walking past a soup van for homeless people and being kinda jealous that they were eating" (<-- this very well may be just my reactions to my stomach an may not be exactly accurate) We finally found our way back and got Kebabs, which aren't really kebabs, but more like gyros but bigger. They're pretty durn tasty, but these ones were not as good as the ones they have in Aix. Ooooh, I'm hungry right now. Ok! Finished eating, back to hotel, I slept, dad tried to sleep and didn't really succeed, but it's all good. Thursday: Wow, I wrote a lot for Wednesday. The next 9 ish days will be a lot shorter. Sorry, I'm lazy. We got up, got dressed, and went back to old nice to wander. Had pain au chocolats and coffees. <-- best breakfast ever when it's done right. Wandered, looked at stuff, ate lunch, napped, looked around some more, tried to decide what to do but instead wandered a whole lot more. I actually really like wandering. Christophe called and said we couldn't get the condo for that weekend, but that we'd come back for the end of the week and he asked if we could get train tickets back home instead of them driving crazy time there and back to come get us. It was no problem. OK SIDE NOTE! This protest just walked by the library... They were like 20 people, tops, but they had a lot of sirens to help them. They were yelling "Lute contre le repression sexuel!" Don't know where these kind of things start... but they end up near me. Almost always. Another side note, the library cat is sleeping on the copy machine and will NOT let anyone make photocopies. It is really cute, but I imagine that if I needed to make copies it would piss me off. Back on track -- We went out for dinner and were ignored for like 3 hours, but what we ate was really tasty. Back to the hotel near midnight, and I slept, and again dad didn't really.

Friday: Kinda sucky breakfast at the hotel. Sadface. Walking and looking at stuff again. for lunch... ummmm.... i have no clue if we ate. I don't think we did. And for dinner we had tasty pizza. It made me miss real pizza a lot. At this point the cat has been pried off of the photocopier. Pauvre Minou! We tried to get into a casino earlier, but we didn't have our passports. Oh yeah! We totally went to Monaco and stuck out like sore thumbs. It was kinda awesome. Some guy asked us questions in Italian, but seeing as how the extent of my Italian goes all the way to introducing characters in a story and saying that the mafia is good or bad, I couldn't really help him. Then he starts going caSIno, caSIIIno! And we got it and pointed. I'd imagine that in a country like Monaco, if you have French and English skillz, you can at least get yourself understood by pretty much everyone but the Japanese tour buses, but apparently there are italians with zero knowledge of any other language who come to lose large sums of money. Who knew?everyone except me I guess. At night, Dad went out again to gamble, but my legs hurt from walking non stop for a couple of days and I had some reading to do, so I stayed in the hotel and read a horrible book -- yes indeed another autobiography about men and their relationships with their mothers. Bleck.

Saturday: Quick breakfast in the morning, quick style packing, and then we caught our train back to Marseille. Train train train, bus bus, and tah dah! we're in Aix. So there is the Bellon's car, but where are the Bellons?!?! They're having lunch. So I call, we wait, they show up, and head on back to the house. I show dad around, he starts fixing things like computers and ipods. He is kind of magical like that. At night, we, did, something. I don't remember what.

Sunday: Dad and I woke up and went to the Mass in the old church in mallemort. The pastor... um... totally not what he's called since he is catholic, but I don't know the word right now... preacher? father? Whatevs, let it go, anyways, him, he tried to be funny during his sermon, but somehow jokes about hamburgers don't fly with the older crowd. He then made a parallel between faith and a fire in a high rise. It was logic at least. We got back home and did... something.

Ok, at this point I don't know what we did each day, so I'm just gonna list things that we did and you can put them in whatever order you fancy. Or maybe Dad can comment and fix my errors. noice.

Lunch with Christophe's parents and ben and camille's cousins
Dinner with Geneviève's parents -- we all had quite a bit to drink and the evening turned very very silly.
Aigues-Mortes -- an almost completely preserved fortified town that we walked all the way around
Aix -- Shopping, sight seeing, and beer. There was a lot of consumption of coffee and beer on dad's visit...
Avignon -- Christophe decided to give blood, we walked around, and finally went to H and M, because what is a trip to Avignon without that. Geneviève asked our server at the café what his accent was, he got kinda miffed and asked her to guess, she guessed belgian and he was even more miffed... She got really embarrassed.

OK! Back on schedule

Thursday: We got in the car in the afternoon and drove to Antibes to stay in Christophe's Aunt's condo place. Arrived in the afternoon, decided to go out to dinner that night. We went back to the same restaurant that Dad and I had eaten at the last time when we were ignored, but there was no one there this time. Everything was pretty much delicious and we left happy. We walked all the way down the harbor to the Negresco, the most expensive hotel in nice; These are totally per-night prices people. We saw hookers and really rich russian people with tiny dogs who spoke no French but a little English, so we got by. Drove back home around 12:30 midnight. I fell asleep in the car.

Friday: We went to Eze, and a beach covered in rocks, and at night we tried to watch Lost in Translation, but halfway through the dvd randomly switched to another lame movie. It was kind of the most disappointing thing ever. We went to the grocery store too, which is always fun.

Saturday: Christophe, Dad, and I woke up super early, got dad to the airport at 6, and he left. It was all very quick and early. I went back to the condo and fell back asleep until 10:30. Christophe didn't fall asleep and instead went out and bought a loto ticket.

I know this is ending kind of abruptly, but the librarian is closing down the CDI, so I gotta go soon.

I tried to get together with someone on the last day of break, but everyone was busy, so instead I did homework and watched illegally downloaded arrested development on my computer. I also succeeded at getting the internet on my computer, but the signal isn't strong enough in my room and it only works in the living room. Still... very exciting.

That's all folks! (<-- try explaining that to someone who doesn't speak English... very hard.)

love kendra