Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week!

First off I just like to say that I started off this week in a very classy way. While taking a break in the middle of a two and a half hour class I fell off a table while tipping it over. I was sitting on a table and leaned over the edge, where my feet were dangling, and the table went off balance. This resulted in me half catching myself, half face planting it into the carpet and ending up all sprawled out over the floor with the tipped over table, along with the papers that were on it. There was an audience as well. But I’ve found an up side, these things no longer embarrass me. I think I’ve managed weirder accidents than this before, so I just hopped up said I was good and helped put things back in their proper place. I didn’t even get a bruise or a scar, so this is totally not even a big deal. Just funny, and quite classically me. After my normal classes were over I headed up to the place where my first rock climbing class was to take place. Unfortunately after taking a tram until it stopped and then a bus, which took about 40 minutes, I couldn’t find the gym. I was so disappointed. I found the street it’s supposed to be on, but not the actual gym. I wandered up and down the street for about 20 minutes, even went in one place and tried to go in another then gave up and took the two buses back to the house in defeat. My host mom tried to help me find it on a map, but it was just a map of the trams and the building wasn’t marked. I waited until the next day and asked one of the IES professors for more specific directions. I think I know which building it is now, at least I hope so, we’ll see next week I suppose. Also on Tuesday I went out shopping for a pair of shoes that would suffice for rock climbing at the sales, and found an awesome pair of Pumas that will do the job for 50% off. I was very proud of this purchase, and very thankful for government mandated sales. Yep, the French have a month of sales after new years, which I believe is required by the government. Something that would never happen in the States, ever. So that was fun. On Thursday a few of the IES students and I went to a discotheque (a dance club) with our IES social coordinator, a French student who gets paid to take us out and show us around town basically. Anyway, the club was pretty fun, but it’s a poor idea to go out late on a night when one has school the next day, especially when one is out past when the busses and trams run, so that one is required to walk 45 minutes back to one’s house. And I didn’t even walk all the way to my house, which would have been an extra 15 or 20 minutes, I stopped at a friend’s house. Needless to say, my knees gave out on me about half way through Friday and I wrapped one of them up in my Ace bandage so that I could make it out on Friday night for a fellow student’s birthday. It was fun, we just went around town on a pub crawl to see what there was and explore the city a little. I did leave the party early enough to catch the tram home though, I will only make that mistake once. After two nights out in a row, I slept well into Saturday morning. During the day I went to the markets with some friends and then we made lunch and riffled through some of the shops for the last day of the sales and then we had dinner. We stopped at this awesome little Thai restaurant that had some amazing food! So yummy! Sunday was pretty basic and boring. I did some work, played some computer games, explored a little bit more of Nantes. I found six post cards that I really liked at a local book store. So I got them and since they’re of different locals around Nantes I decided to wander around the city and take pictures of the same areas with my camera. So you can see those, plus a few extra areas in my Nantes album now. I revisited the Jardin des Plantes, and also went to a Garden near my house. Also, there’s this area of Nantes called the Machines de l’Iles. Basically it’s a huge metal elephant, and since I passed in on my adventure, you can see that too in my pictures. After my wanderings I went back to the house and rested some more. That pretty much wraps up my fourth week, and my first month in Nantes! I can’t believe I’ve been here for a month already! It caught me off guard this week when I realized that. I’m having an amazing time! And next Friday I’m heading off to England for my vacation! So I’ll have more travel pics to show you all soon and hopefully some fun stories!

Peace.