it ain't over yet

Noemi found this quote in a cute little store when we were wandering around Rue Alsace Loraine last night*:

"La vie, c'est comme une bicyclette, il faut avancer pour ne pas perdre l'équilibre."

-Albert Einstein

(Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.)

I actually like the French version better than the English. You have to advance to not lose your equilibrium.

Advance...ahh, that is a scary thing indeed.

*This is actually one of my favorite things to do in Toulouse-wander around le centre ville. Noemi bought a walking tour guide book of Toulouse the second week we were here, so with its help we've been exploring the city one little neighborhood at a time. I love it-the streets, the "hotels", the little shops-ah, it's all so French, so beautiful!

Photo of Jeff across the street from Sainte-Mere eglise in Normandy (once again, pardon my lack of accents).

encounters with the word of wisdom

Noemi and I have had a couple of kind of funny experiences accidentally ingesting alcohol:

Last week we had rum raisin ice cream at Madame M's...and after our throats started burning we realized that it actually had rum in it...when she left the room to grab some more water, we had a very tense conversation,
"Oh my gosh, this has alcohol in it!"
"What are we going to do?"
"Quick, open the door, throw it in that plant's pot!"
"Crap, she's coming back!"
"Just let it melt!"
So that's exactly what we did. We let three scoops worth of Carte d'Or ice cream (read: not cheap) melt on our little plates. Oops.

Then today, when we were visiting Madame B in a retirement home, she offered us some chocolate. Little did we know but they were all liqueur-filled. I took one bite and had alcohol something gushing all over the place, so I just held the rest of the chocolate in the wrapper in my hand for the rest of the conversation. Noemi quietly slipped hers into her purse. The problem was, there was still a ton of liqueur in that thing, so when I adjusted my hand all of a sudden there was all of this liquid running between my fingers and all over my pant leg. I couldn't do anything about it but let sticky mess get everywhere. Noemi noticed and then we both started laughing. Rather vocally. Right in the middle of a conversation about the maladies of the elderly. Oh dear.

What can we say? We're easily entertained.

international cuisine with international people

Last Friday, Noemi and I were invited to a goodbye party for Rodolfo whom we met that one time we went and watched the world cup with Pierre and Laura. It was held at an Argentine restaurant that had a.mazing. food. It was also another one of those really cool hey-everyone's-from-somewhere-different! nights. We had someone from China, two from Peru, three from France, one from England, one from America, one from Spain, and one from Brazil. Cool, cool, cool. I am just so impressed with people's abilities here to speak a million different languages. Laura, for one, speaks English, French, German, and Spanish. Noemi, both of the Peruvians, and one of the French guys speak Spanish, English, and French. The Brazilian girl speaks Portuguese, English, French, and Spanish. The girl from China speaks Mandarin, French, and English. How do they do it?!

Anyway, here's a funny story from that night. We came into the restaurant and air kissed everybody and one of the girls introduced herself and said, "Je suis Françoise," which sounds a lot like "Je suis française" (I'm French). Noemi then said, "Je suis espanole" (I'm Spanish), to which the girl responded, "And what was your name?"

Oops.

Sort of similar to the time I responded to "How are you doing?" with "My name is Katie."

hehehe

yum.

Sometimes the ladies we visit say the funniest things.

Yesterday we were visiting with Madame Perisse (really annoyed about my inability to type accents right now, that e on the end is supposed to have an accent aigu which completely changes the pronunciation), and she wanted to look through fashion magazines. So we did, and when we came to a photo of a hot guy in a swimsuit she goes, "Quelle tablette de chocolat!" as in, "what hot abs!" We couldn't stop laughing.
Then today, Madame Sciacco was giving us advice about morality and she was gestured from her neck to her waist and said, "This is okay." And then she gestured from her waist down and was like, "This is not!" Noemi and I were like...oh dear...if only you knew how stringent the Honor Code is...

Maybe she could come talk to our acquaintances here at the residence...

we get ourselves into the strangest situations

A couple of weeks ago at church we met this lady who used to teach English. She was really excited to meet Noemi and I since we both speak English. She promptly invited us to come over to her house after church, and we were really quite excited about this (free dinner, right?). As we're sitting next to her in gospel doctrine though, we realized that all (4) of the young adults had left the room. We asked her if there was a young adult sunday school class or something, and she was like, "Oh, I don't know, I'm Catholic."

Hmmm. Okay, cool. She wasn't sitting with the missionaries or anything, so we asked, "So have you been to an LDS church meeting before?"

"Oh yeah, I've been maybe 10 times. I stayed with an LDS family in San Diego a few years ago."

Cool, cool. Still finding it amusing that the first person from the ward to invite us over isn't actually from the ward.

After church we went out in the parking lot with her to get into her car.

"Hold on one second, I'm going to ask that strong looking man over there if he could maybe help me with something. I hurt my arm and can't lift things."
Hmmm. Okay, cool.
Turned out he's a security guard, works late, can't help her, much to her disappointment. We got in the car.

We started driving to her house. "Are there any rules about going back to the residence? Do you have a curfew? Would it be okay for you to get back around 10? (it's now 5:30)"
"Umm...no, we have keys, we're fine to come back whenever." (stupid, stupid)

We got to her house, she fed us really yummy fruit (it's fast Sunday however, we had 2:00 church, and we were STARVING), and we talked French for a while. She answered cultural questions, and it was sort of fun, except she kept correcting our grammar and pronunciation so much that 20 minutes into this conversation we were scared to say anything (I thought she invited us over because she wanted to speak English with us?). She was lonely and lives in this huge house by herself, couldn't afford a maid, kept apologizing for the mess. I felt sorry for her. I noticed cobwebs. Huge, huge cobwebs. On every ceiling, in every corner, on every light fixture.
Someone should clean those, I thought. Little did I know...

We started to get uncomfortable, and there was no freaking way we were staying in the cobweb lonely house until 10 PM. So I told her I had completely forgotten that we had to talk with our families on Skype at 7:30, so we needed to leave at 7:00 (30 minutes away).

"Oh, no. Okay, well...we've got a little bit of time...I hurt my arm and can't lift it very high...but I've got all of these cobwebs that need to be cleaned...do you think? I mean, I don't want to impose or anything, but could you maybe help me clean them?"

Uh.
Okay, cool.
Charity. It's a good Sunday activity.

Broom in hand, Noemi and I start tackling cobwebs. Surprise. These cobwebs aren't vacant. There are live spiders everywhere. Huge, live spiders, crawling around on the ceilings. She kept telling us how nice we were for helping her out. Pretty sure my smile started to get a little not so genuine at this point.

But on we went, and we cleaned all the cobwebs out of the kitchen, living room, dining room, library, study, entry way, hallway, bathroom, extra storage room. And then as we were leaving,

"Could you grab these [nasty, old paint filled, potentially bug infested] glass bottles out of the yard and put them in this bag for me?"

I was desperate to leave at this point.
Sure! Whatever it takes for us to get the heck out of here!

She drove us back to our residence, gave Noemi her number, and said to call her tomorrow and "we can have dinner!" So we can scrub your kitchen floor? Or polish your wood furniture? Sorry, but no no no no no thanks.

We did not call.

Oh, but it's okay because she came to the residence yesterday and left a message at the front desk (she doesn't know our names, "the blonde American girl and the Spanish girl?") telling us to call her.

AHHhhhhhHHHhhhhh

le temps des cerises

Last night Noemi discovered this French website that lets you download movies and watch about 30 minutes at a time of them (in French). We saw that "The Proposal" was an option so we watched a third of it, and let it be known that we understood it! Of course, we've already seen it in English and it doesn't have a particularly complicated plot, but still. We felt victorious. Maybe we'll even feel brave enough to go see "Inception" version français tomorrow (its release date in France).

Also, I just have to say that I love papetries/librairies. Papetries are little paper shops that sell notebooks and planners and maps and well, paper, and sometimes art supplies. Librairies are bookstores. Noemi and I found this really, really cute one on Rue St. Rome yesterday and I couldn't help myself, I had to spend 16 euro on an agenda and a bunch of cards. There's this one brand La Marelle, that I love love love. So cute!

Now I'm going to go play games with the elderly. Fingers crossed we don't play Scrabble, because I will lose big time in French...

last show, best show

Wow, I can't believe that tomorrow tour's over. We had a show in York on Saturday night, and Becky and I had the opportunity to stay with this adorable Scottish couple (they're with me in the picture). It was such a fun weekend! They taught us some Scottish phrases including:

head banger: someone who's stupid and annoying and doesn't know it

hen: term of endearment for a female

jimmy: generic name for a guy. If you were trying to get a stranger's attention on the street, you could yell, "Hey Jimmy!"

so...I have no idea how to spell this one so I'll just do it like it sounds...geysa wee swally: give me a drink!

The other photos are from downtown York-the minster or cathedral (which is beautiful! I just love cathedrals here), and down a snickleway or alley (there are hundreds of them in York). On Sunday night the bishop of one of the two York wards took us on a "mystery tour" of the city and showed us Clifford's Tower where a bunch of Jews were massacred (and the rocks bleed because of their iron content), snickleways where people were murdered, the devil statue across from one of the pubs, half destroyed abbeys, and other creepy things. It was sweet. Just as we came out of one of the snickleways, there was a group of maybe 20 year old guys drinking and smoking outside a pub. They saw our BYU jackets and said, "BYU? You're from Utah?" We couldn't believe they'd heard of the university. We told them we were a ballroom dance team which prompted the request that we dance for them. So Chelsie and Brent started doing some lindy. They thought it was really cool and as we were leaving they held up their glasses and drank to BYU. How ironic.

Today and last night we've been in Liverpool. Liverpudlians have a crazy thick, sing-song English accent, so we had a lot of fun trying to decipher what everyone was saying to us. Alissa and I stayed with a family who'd be terrified by a demon in the house they lived in up the street from their current house. "It used to chase the missionaries down the street, but don't worry, it can't get us here!" Um...yeah...

Tonight's the last show! We have the first decent stage to dance on since Blackpool, and we're all on a high with the thought of being free to do whatever we want with our days again. I'll be in Paris with my mom, brother, and sister by this time tomorrow! Woo!!!

And thus episode two of this summer of Europe shall commence. :)

blackpool competition, day two

Today I danced, shopped, and hand washed clothing.

Here is a photo of all of my purchases so far:

note the stamps (postcards to be sent soon to a few of you!) and the delicious Fingers cookies (sort of like a Twix bar only minus the carmel and way more addicting as they're covered in Cadbury chocolate)

Washing clothes in the tiny English sink was quite the adventure. I've been wearing my Nike Blackpool warm ups since we left Salt Lake so they smell like sweat and fake tan (sick). My practice clothing has not fared any better. I finally decided to get down to it and wash them. Sinks in England have two taps, one is scalding, the other is freezing. Even though I washed my clothes in freezing water (so the dye wouldn't come out), they turned the water deep brownish/black. Yum. That's what's been on my body the past four days. Fingers crossed they dry adequately tonight, because I've got to wear them in support of the standard team tomorrow as they face off the Chinese in the standard formation team championships!!! Woo!!! Go BYU!!!

Dear future husband,

Two more qualifications for you: I can wash clothing in a sink, and I'm really good at spending money on stamps (5 pounds spent today). 

Here's a photo to prove the sink part:

Not knowing when to use the flash when taking a photo is one of my disqualifications.

Yours truly,

Your future wife

On a...neutral? note, we did not make another round in amateur latin. I don't feel too bad though, because no one else from the team did either. Tomorrow we dance amateur standard and secretly I'm hoping we don't make it past the first round...two days of full standard hair and makeup is not so fun and very time consuming.

We've got rehearsal at 6:40 tomorrow morning, so I think it's about time I headed off to bed! Cheers!