Bienvenue!

Bonjour!

Long time no see, eh, comrades?  Sorry about that.  Life got in the way of the internet for a while there.  I'm sure you understand the experience.

Obviously, I've had a very full plate the past couple weeks; I had a term paper due, my boyfriend came to visit me, I had another term paper due, and, most excitingly, Easter Break began!  The English take three weeks off at Christmas and three weeks off at Easter (which explains so much about why students actually went home for the Easter holidays at Hogwarts...) so, starting after classes let out on April 8th, we all got three weeks entirely to ourselves.

Last week, my mom and brother came and we toured Scotland a bit.  I had a blast, and I can't believe how fast the week went.  In summation, the Scottish Highlands are by far the most beautiful and natural place I've ever seen, (all the wonders of the Rockies without the altitude and dry weather) and I definitely want to go back, while Glasgow leaves something to be desired, and Edinburgh is a wallet-sucker, albeit a lovely one.  I loved having people visit me, and it was great to show my family around to all the places I've been before, as well as experiencing new places alongside them.

Mom and Patrick left Sunday morning from Manchester, and I immediately returned to York to pack and prepare for the next leg of my Easter adventure: a ten-day excursion with my friend Lea (from Calvin) to France and Germany, followed by a four-day stint in London with the Calvin group.

We left York this morning at 10:29, and, after a bit of tubing and training and planing, we arrived in Tours, France, at 5:15 (all local times, of course).  We hadn't realized that the airport in Tours was so small that it didn't even have an ATM...but luckily, we managed to get a taxi driver who sympathized with our plight and took us to our Hostel by way of a "commercial center" (mall) with a cash machine inside.  (I'm sure he had a healthy dose of personal gain in this bit of assistance, but without his help, we'd probably still be at that airport, penniless and tired, so I'm going to pretend I don't care that he might  have been stealing money from us).

By the time we had checked into our Hostel and walked back to the mall (the closest edible civilization, as our hostel is in Chambray-les-Tours, a sort of suburb far to the south of Tours) and found cold pasta in a supermarket there.  Yum.

Since then, we've been planning our trip to some Chateau tomorrow and watching French period dramas and dubbed British and American television, including Jurassic Park 2, The Closer, and the BBC Merlin.

As my journal is running low on pages, I might update this blog more often for these next couple of weeks, just so I can get everything down that I want to.

I had so much more to write, but I am les tired.

<3 spadeALLcross