Return to the Interwebs

Well, Jenny and I finally got internet at our house! It is really nice to have after spending a month with no way to get online except to ride the metro out to Lille 3 and use the wireless there. What we got is called a Neufbox, which is this box you pay for through the phone company, and with the package we've got we pay 30 euros a month for internet, phone and TV. And we can use the phone to call landlines in the U.S. for FREE!! We might also be able to call cell phones in the U.S. but I'm not sure yet because we've been told different things by different people. So it's a pretty great deal, and I think it will make life a lot easier.

Now that I have internet again, I'm hoping to be posting a lot more often. In the meantime, here's some of what's happened over the past month:

-Last week was Jenny's mid-semester break, which we mostly spent relaxing and lazing about our house, in addition to taking care of things like laundry, shopping etc. We played a lot of rummy, watched a lot of movies, and slept a lot.

-Last Sunday, Sarah (who is a lecturer at Lille 3 with Jenny, and is also from UT) had Jenny and Kathleen (who is also recently finished at UT and is doing an assistantship in Lille) and I over for lunch. First we went to the Wazemmes market, which is a massive open-air market held every Sunday. There was a ridiculous amount of people there! After that, we went back to Sarah's, where she cooked us a delicious lunch. After lunch, we watched Muppets Take Manhattan, which is always good.

-Halloween was last weekend, but it doesn't seem to be as big of a deal here as in the U.S. Jenny and I went to the Citadel, which is a big park area in Lille, and walked around there, where there was a kind of kid's carnival Halloween-type thing going on. There's also a free zoo, which we hadn't been to yet, and that was pretty cool. And as we were walking through the Grand Place (which is the big square in the middle of the city) on our way home, there was a huge group of people doing the Thriller dance! We were going to go over to Sarah's to watch The Nightmare Before Christmas, but didn't end up going because we were both starving and we wouldn't have had time to eat anything. So we came home and made delicious burritos. And we even had one trick-or-treater come to our door!

Rhinos at the zoo, play-fighting with each other.

-I've been reading a lot. Lille 3 has a really good English Library, where Jenny has been checking books out for me. I read A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick, which was pretty good, and re-read The Children of Men by P.D. James, which I've decided is one of my favorite books. It's the book on which the movie is based (which is also one of my favorites), but they are really quite different. I highly recommend it. I also re-read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which Jenny had bought at the airport before we left. After finishing it, I was feeling empty and sad from leaving the world of Harry Potter behind, so I decided to re-read the whole series and am now on The Chamber of Secrets. I haven't read them in quite a while, and they're just as good as I remember (and SO MUCH better than the movies, although I think I have learned to appreciate the movies for the severely limited, flawed things that they are).

-Liliane and Francois came over last week, and of course they brought us a bunch more stuff. They have been so nice to us! Then they took us out for crepes, which were delicious. We also ate an epic six-hour lunch at their house on Friday. Their niece Alice and her boyfriend David were visiting Lille for the weekend, and they came and picked us up and drove us out there. It was pretty insane, I am certain that I have never sat at a dinner table for that long before. Then on Sunday, Alice and David picked us up again and we toured an old coal mine.

-We figured out our plans for Christmas! My family is coming to visit, and we're going to spend five nights staying in Paris together, before coming back to Lille for Christmas. I'm really looking forward to seeing them all, and I'm also quite excited to go to Paris!

I'm sure there's plenty more I could write about that's happened in the past month, but that's probably enough for right now.

Thriller dance!