Weekend in Laval

Saturday night I went to dinner with 3 of the guys from the foyer. Most people go home on the weekends but 2 of them had stayed here to revise for their exams. The 3rd guy was a new guy who had shown interest in being part of our little group here at the foyer, so we invited him along. The guy seemed nice enough at first, but then there were little things he would say that would just annoy me. At dinner he decided he wanted to practice his English with me. I had no choice but to agree, so the following (painful) exchange occurred -please read the boy's lines with the heaviest French accent you can conjure up:

Boy: euuuuh where euhhhh have euuuuuhhhh you euuuuuuh travel?
Me: umm, I went to Prague, Belgium..
Boy (interrupts): euuh I euhhhh travel euhhh with euhhh my euuuuh school euhh to Majorque euhh in euhhh 20-02
Me: two thousand two
Boy: euhh yes euhh it was beautiful euhhh there were comment dit-on des chemins qui descendent vers la plage?
Me: paths leading down to the beach...oh wow sounds beautiful. (switching back to French) So, what's everyone ordering?

If that was painful for you to read, please imagine how much fun it was for me to live. His volume when speaking in English was at least a few decibels higher than in French and people were staring at us and I am not at all exaggerating with the "euhhhs" between every word. Every. single. word.

After dinner we hiked up to a beautiful park that overlooks most of Laval and we went to Laval's museum. It was Museum Night throughout France I think so it was free to go in. At the park we played on the little kids' toys and had a blast. There were a few little kids there and they were not happy that we were there. One kid who couldn't have been more than 5 years old said to us "mais arrêtez! vous allez le casser!!" (stop, you're going to break it!) Here are some pictures from the park (these were taken at nearly 10 at night)













Today after a 12 mile bike ride Tessa and I stopped for our mid-afternoon post-bikeriding snack. I settled on a chocolate chip cookie. It went down like this:
Me: un cookie pepites au chocolat (one chocolate chip cookie)
Girl: d'accord (ok) at least 30 seconds passed and as I started to wonder out loud how it could take that long to put a cookie in a bag and I turned to see the girl confusedly coming towards me holding up a cookie
Girl: euhhh is 2 for 1
Me: pourquoi pas? je prends deux (why not? I'll take 2 then)

The poor girl was embarassed because she hadn't realized that I spoke French- to be fair when I ordered a "cookie pepites au chocolat" there were about 1.5 English words and 1.5 French words in that sentence and the rest of the time she just heard me speaking in English to Tessa. As she was ringing up the cookies she said "vous parlez bien le francais, alors!" ("you guys speak French well"). Poor thing! As we left the store we commented on how this was one of those rare times where the French were being sweet about us being Anglophones and just genuinely wanted to practice their English with us. We were also quite proud of her knowing the phrase "2 for 1." The warm sentiment quickly passed and as we walked home we (rather immaturely) imitated the French in our funniest French accents:

euhh, you....want....cookie? I share cookie with you!