19th March onwards.


Wednesay
I don’t think we did very much. I finished my book ‘The girls’. It was very sad. They didn’t die during the book but they only had a few days left to live. Don’t know why I’m telling you this. I’ve lent it to liz now and I’ve started ‘Atonement’. Think I’m in stall for some more crying!

Thursday
I went into the studio relatively early to do some painting. I then went into the tobacco shop and asked if they had any stamps to England and she looked at me strangely and said non. I’d heard they sold stamps in tobacco shops. Maybe I was wrong. After this Hannah and I found the post office and bought stamps from the conventional place! I needed to post Cecile all her electricity bills. Hannah was sending a map of Rouen to her mum Yeah so not really very interesting day.

Grace, Liz, Hannah, Christoph and I went to the cinema to see a film called ‘Paris’. I’d heard it was a romantic film so was surprised when the main character; a gay man, was dieing and needed a heart transplant, his neighbour; young girl had slept with her lecturer, who was now stalking her and then some models had sex with some strange men in a meat factory. It was basically about how we all cross paths with each other and you observe people who are living their own lives. There was a lot of random sex with strangers though. Lovely paris, city of love.

Friday
I went into the studio did some painting and then went for a hot chocolate with Grace. We decided to go to a little café just next to the art school, where the hot chocolate tastes like paint but for some reason we keep torturing ourselves and buying more. We’d been in the café a few minutes when Albert, the student representative came in, so Grace invited him to join us. I found out a few things from this conversation. Apparently I stare too much and it makes people feel threatened. Grace and him were talking in French and I was trying to keep up so when I’m listening intently I tend to glare a little. I guess I find it hard to know what I’m doing with my face and end up giving people evil looks when I don’t mean to. Albert was warning me that I shouldn’t do this as in France you don’t hold eye contact even when talking to people, you look for a second then you look away. He said I’ll get into a lot of trouble if I look at people on the bus like that. Whoops! I just thought it shows your listening. So now when I’m taking to people I’m a bit like ‘right should I look away now?’ How long should I look away before it seems rude? There’s so many things to remember. Being a human is hard. Albert also informed us that there’s an opportunity to enter your work in an exhibition which is also a competition. The work doesn’t come down until after we come home though so I don’t know if we’ll be able to do it.

Grace invited Hannah, Liz and I over to hers for some vegetarian sushi. It was delicious. We decided to go to O’kalloghans after this, what with it being Friday night and all.
We had bottles of a gorgeous beer called desperado where you put the lime in the bottle. We arrived at about 11 and had been in there for an hour or so when a guy came over to grace and asked us to come and join him and his friends. After some hesitation we decided why not! As I’ve said before being English here is like being a celebrity. They get so excited. Hannah decided to go home at this point. I spoke French all night. I’m getting much better at speaking it but listening and understanding is a different story. I know it’s supposed to be the other way round. When I speak the person I’m speaking to speaks French really fast back to me and then I stare blankly so in the end the French spoke English all night and we spoke French. Oh another rule… apparently when toasting you have to look the person you’re toasting with in the eye and it’s considered rude if you don’t. I can’t win!

O’kalloghans finished at 2 and our new friends invited us to a discothèque we hadn’t been to before. I was pretty tired but was persuaded around by the girls so we’d been walking a minute when one of Grace’s heels from the boots she brought that day, broke! She hobbled back to her apartment to change her shoes while we all waited outside. We eventually got to the club, were in the queue, found out it’s 12 euros to get in and decided not to go. Instead we all went back to one of the guy’s apartment for some drinks there. He and his girl friend didn’t really say much all night but he had a snake and a rat to make up for it. He took the snake out and made us all touch it. I was petrified. We spent the rest of evening, or morning talking about various things such as where phrases such as OK stem from, the music we like and then they showed us a gay calendar of a French rugby team. Lovely. We left at about 5. Liz stayed at mine.

Saturday
I didn’t wake up until 1. Had just started writing my French presentation I have to do this Tuesday, when I got a call from Grace asking if I would come with her to replace her shoes. I was great full of the distraction and said yeah. It was bitterly cold though. In the shop just as we were about to be served, Grace turned to me and said ‘Mary what’s the word for shoe?’ I didn’t know but we managed it some how. She wasn’t allowed a refund so she swapped them with a grey top and got store credit. Riveting information I know! This was pretty much all I did with my day though. Later on I went over to Graces to watch ‘The Lady Killers’ but I fell asleep half way (surprise, surprise) so decided to go home and have an early night.