Let me first start off by apologizing for slacking on the updates. I know it's been a while and (if only this sounded humble...) I'd be curious if I were you. In reality, though, the life of a student here in France can best be represented by this video:
I've been busy. Well, let me tell you about this past weekend. On Thursday night some friends and I went to a percussion concert at my university. It was conducted by my host mom's choir leader, which is how I found out about it because she recommended it to me. They played the drums, some xylophones, some more drums, and then did a cool clapping thing and then it was over. During this whole spectacle, my friends and I played the game "Boy or Girl" because one of the band members looked like they could be either a teenage boy or a middle aged woman. Turns out it was a woman. Just so you know.
Friday afternoon was quite nice, and I didn't have anything to do durning the day so I went back to the Musée Hébert and sat in the park listening to music and reading a book. In the evening we went to see a contemporary dance. Which was... interesting. Strange. Confusing. And apparently about conception and birth? Or the conception and birth of a deer? There was a lot of milling around by the dancers, not so much dancing. It started like this: The dancers we in the audience and then got up and walked onto the stage, all the way to the back and started undressing. They stripped down to their underwear, took a blanket, wrapped it around their shoulders, and went to their places on the stage. Then some weird water buffalo or bull sounds started up. Then they started slowly walking around each other, sniffing... using their feet as tails... I don't know. They moved around some more, had dance/weird/stroke victim/mock sex, did some crazy sounds in the microphone... I just... I'm still so confused. In the words of Margaret Cho: it was just so nonconsensual for me. My program manager, Marie, told us that the dancers were from Belgium, and that usually they're pretty avant garde about their art and dance. I guess I liked it, but in another way I feel like it had so much potential... oh well.
Saturday I took a long walk with my friend Carrie. We were on a mission to climb this hill and get to a church that we've seen lit up at night sometimes. We got up there, but the street leading to the church was blocked off so we went around the other side still with no luck. It was a nice walk, anyway. Next, we went to her house for lunch and to prepare for a wine tasting that her host parents were having that evening. We then went into town for pastries and to window shop with our friend Rachel. I then realized that the wine tasting that evening (to which I had been invited) was for Beaujolais. I'll tell you what that is! Beaujolais is wine (and the celebration of it) that's the first of the harvest. It's not good. Kinda gross. In the past years people go absolutely nuts in town, everyone's drunk, there's broken glass and shop windows and not long ago Sarkozy came to Grenoble after the destruction that Beaujolais caused to reprimand and to make an example of the Grenoblois. So I stayed home and kept warm.
Sunday I went to my host mom's concert which was quite nice. Afterwards my host dad asked me how I liked it and I said it was fantastic to which he replied "Really? Hmm..." like it had never occurred to him that the concert was good. They love not supporting each other.
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