Escargot

I fully meant to have a nice long post explaining how fun my weekend was. I went to a hockey game with my French friend, saw my first movie in a theater with my host parents ("L'Enquete Corse"), went to a boring Rotary thing in Grenoble, and went on an unplanned excursion up to the mountains with one of the Mexican girls in my class to have her touch the snow for the first time. But I didn't have time. So, there you go, a mini-synopsis of le dernier week-end.

Today I met up with exchange students, as I do many Wednesdays, sometimes its a little group of Annecy kids and we just meet for lunch and head home, and sometimes, like today, its a bigger group. Today there were three Americans, three Canadians, one Australian, and one Argentinian. Two of the Canadians come in from other towns. We went and sat in a cafe for a while then went to the little theater in the old village to watch the one movie playing in English in the city- "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind", but alas, someone screwed their times up and the movie actually started five and a half hours later. The other options were all in French, and none looked promising- one was "L'Histoire du Chameau Qui Pleure" (The Story of the Camel Who Cried). We ended up going to another cafe and sitting and talking for several more hours until our buses/trains home. It was great to get to gossip about Rotary, host parents, friends, etc. Unfortunately, one of the Canadian girls is going to go home in about two weeks. Her sister has gotten very sick and is in the hospital, and she needs to be with her family. We're hoping the insurance can cover the so she can come back when her sister gets better.

Last night I went to a little Rotary meeting where a French girl who was in India last year gave a talk and showed pictures from her stay. Each family she stayed in spoke a different langauge, the school was in English, and on the street everyone spoke Hindi. She primarily spoke Hindi- which I find really impressive. While we were listening people were passing around trays of apertifs, I was reaching for a mini-pizza when the woman next to me pointed at one thing and said it was escargot. "REALLY???" was my response. I thought it over a minute and decided to take that instead- I'm in France, I have to have eaten escargot once. It was in a little round pastery bowl with a glop of greenish stuff (a sauce), you couldn't actually see the snail. It didn't taste bad, but it didn't taste good. It was too chewy. You had to keep chewing it and thinking "I am eating a snail."