Bonne Année!

11:56 P.M.

Damnit, I'm really bad at this whole keeping up with the blog thing. It's been almost two months since I've last written and I've probably lost any audience I had (if I had any). How about some bullet points to sum up my life since my last post?

- Laurent came to visit Metz for a week in December. We went to the Christmas markets in Strasbourg together and froze our asses off together.
- I went to Pau for my two weeks of Christmas break to stay with Laurent's family. We went skiing for 3 days and I was soo horrible the first day. I even crashed into a wall (in front of all his friends, of course). Meanwhile, tiny kids were passing me and even fetching my poles when I ate dirt.
- We celebrated New Years at a costume party in his tiny town. It was mostly full of drunk Frenchies and bad 80's French music. Later people set off some fireworks and I unfortunately saw someone light a sparkler in their ass.
- Laurent left for New York :( But I bought a plane ticket to visit him in February. I think it'll be really weird to be back in the U.S. for two weeks. I'm going to do all the dim sum eating and root beer drinking that I can.
- I saw Twilight last week, Robert Pattinson = sex god. I was worried about watching it dubbed in French, but I understood almost everything! Exciting.
- Last week, I experienced another night of lying awake in bed until my alarm rang. It just so happened to be a half moon. Wtf.
- I'm FINALLY getting my carte de séjour, meaning I'll be getting my CAF money soon. I went to the préfecture and they said I was missing a justificatif (a gas/electricity bill or something), but I had already explained to them a month ago that it's my landlord who gets all that stuff. The lady went away for 2 minutes, came back and said, "Oh, okay, well we've decided that we'll just do the carte de séjour for you." Uh, thanks? I could've had it a friggin month ago if y'all had been doin your job.
- I ate galete de roi like 10 times, but never found the bean! Grr...

The first week back at school went okay. I can't tell if I've just gotten used to the students being talkative or if they've calmed down a bit. One CE2 class is just so bad, though. They talk through the whole class, fight, ask to go to the bathroom a million times, jump out of their seats, and are just pain in the asses all around. I've punished all the ones that cause problems, sent them back to their classes, and written notes to their parents, but there has been no changes. Sigh. The teachers at this school always seem so frowny, too. There's only one teacher who smiles and winks at me when I see her in the morning. The directeur always shakes my hand, how formal. Maybe he thinks this is the American equivalent to the bises?

Today has been a long day, I'm pretty exhausted. After work (had my favorite schools today, hooray for good kids!), I did some shopping (bad) at Morgan. Usually I avoid this store and associate it with all that is flashy and trying too hard to be sexy, but I actually found two cute sweaters on sale. Yay, love that feeling. I think the lady in the dressing room thought I was crazy/insecure since I kept asking if the dress I was trying on made me look pregnant. I got a long overdue haircut afterwards at the salon next to my apartment. I love how they offer a cup of tea or un café with some chocolate, it seems so very French to me. Erick, my hairdresser, is from Taiwan, so we talked a lot about dim sum and pearl milk tea. After cutting my hair, he gave me directions to a Chinese supermarket and invited me over to his apartment to eat Chinese food sometime! Woooh, gonna spend some quality time with my hairdresser :)
About a week ago, I put up an announcement online for doing French/English language exchanges. A middle aged couple responded to me, so we had crepes for dinner together tonight and they invited me over to their apartment afterwards for tea. They were really sweet and... parental? But in a helpful, nurturing way. Plus they have high tech couches and a gigantic flat screen TV.

I'll try to make shorter posts more frequently. I'm supposed to be a changed person this year, meaning no more procrastinating.