Ahhhh.... La Rochelle

Finally, I'm in La Rochelle! I think the last thing I wrote about in the blog was arriving at the Mt. St. Michel on on Friday evening, so I'll try to pick up from there and continue to where I am now. I got up early and ran again, planning to do my long run but i brought my camera that I ended up stopping so many times and taking so many pictures that I ran out of time to finish 85-90 before breakfast, haha. But I'm glad I did it! I got some good photos, like this one:



We then went up into the Abbey of Mt. St. Michel, which I've done before, but it was great to do again. It's simply so old, so it's really hard to believe that i'm standing on a place that was built around a thousand years ago and yet is still in existence. Here is a picture of the prayer courtyard neart the very top of the abbey:



While waiting around, Aayla and I took some pretty "hard" pictures. We're so B.A. ....



This photo may or may not be on the cover of our first joint rap CD. After the Mt. St. Michel, we took the bus about five hours to La Rochelle where Victor and I met Sylvie! We were pretty anxious about it all, but Sylvie is so nice and makes great food! We've shared meals with her, some of her friends, and even a few of her children, including Thomas and Charlotte, who both live in the area. Charlotte is 19 and lives in Bordeaux where she studies Science Po (like me) although she may take the extra room here for the summer because she has a pretty good job offer.

Sylvie's house is in a great location-- really close to the Vieux Port and the Old City shopping district. It's only an 8 minute walk to the harbor, and there are tons of shops, patisseries, boulangeries and PEOPLE on the way. I didn't know this until yesterday, but La Rochelle is the third most visited city in France after Paris and the Mt. Saint Michel. There are a ton of people here already, and there are sure to be more when the Francofolies music festival commences. The atmosphere downtown is great-- tons of restaurants and cafés which overlook the old port, and a ton of glaceries, aka ice cream shops, that are amazing. We've definitely hit those up more than once already. Here's a look at one of the towers in the Vieux Port at sunset:



Classes started yesterday and they are going well. Our prof, Frédérique is great, and really helpful with learning vocabulary and specifically slang vocabulary that the French youth use. So far, so good as far as class is concerned.

All right, I'm tired and going to bed... Bonne nuit!

PS-- the temperatures here are between 60 at night and 75 in the day with a nice ocean breeze. I'm so glad I'm not on the east coast of the US right now! 102 just doesn't suit me...