cocorrrrrrrrico!

So had my first bus wreck this morning. It wasn’t bad, just some big truck thinking it could squeeze past the bus while it was at a stop. It could not, and took the driver’s side mirror off with a crunch. After listening in to enough conversations to realize that the bus was not going anywhere anytime soon, I got out and walked the rest of the way to school, using the 15 minutes to formulate a French translation of “so there was this truck, right…” only turns out when I finally got to school the teacher was out sick, not bothering to tell me, and I didn’t have to work today. So went back to the bus stop and waited with an elderly French matron who kept glaring at me as if I was the reason the bus was unusually late. And when it finally arrived it had a shattered mirror ducktaped to its side. Ah, la France.

Went for a walk in the countryside the other day. It was great, I had gone to Parc St. Pierre for my usual communing with nature (it’s hard in a city,) fortunately, I now have a French boyfriend with a car and similar nature-communing needs. We hiked for probably about two hours, and I learned a bunch of vocabulary relating to the forest. It’s like I’m having a second childhood, going everywhere and asking “What’s that? What’s that? What’s THAT?” Luckily he is patient. (Moss. Ivy. DIRT!)

We ended our walk in a village with beautiful old houses with huge gardens and roosters crowing in the background…apparently a lot of grandparents are selling these houses and moving to retirement communities because the grounds require so much upkeep, not to mention the roof and the windows and the heating bill and… I think that’s what he was saying, I was a bit distracted. Just large open green spaces, cold fresh air with a hint of smoke drifting across the field from some distant fireplace…mmmmm. I am not a shoe made for the city. Fortunately ‘se ballader,’ a French verb that means “to take a lesuirely ramble through the countryside” might become a Sunday afternoon tradition.

Which means maybe by May I’ll have picked out my future countryside home?