Coastal France

This past weekend I visited the coastal city of St. Malo as well as Mont Saint Michel (a spit-like land mass with a kajillion stairs that eventually take you to a monastery).

Mont Saint Michel was nothing special- I had been there before and there's really not much to do or see other than visit the monastery. So that portion of the trip was only slightly insignificient and repetative. Thankfully, St. Malo lent me a different experience.

I had been to St. Malo once before and I don't remember being very impressed by it at all. In fact, I remember finding it a sort of insignificient and placid town. But after being there a second time, I feel much differently. It's a very romantic, Scottish quarter with your usual French, narrow cobblestone streets and small shops but it's also unlike any other French city I've visited. It's more quiet, slow, and familiar. It is somewhat of a 'sleepy' town but I think that it's calm pace is what shapes it's lovely nature. There was a certain charm about the place that made it absolutely impossible to be in any sort of ill disposition. Perhaps the beautiful weather or the town's seaside location is to be at thanks, but I quite literally felt more at ease and happy while I was there.

Maya and Ellen

Ellen and Kim

Kim and Ellen

My Male Models (not really, they just let me pose them):


the Russian

From Oregon

Bitter? Me? Never!

Bonjour tout le monde! I'm having the time of my life here in the hip city of Angers. Between , beautiful French men, pain au chocolat, and beautiful French men I hardly have time to think! And if you thought I was excited about that, just wait until I express my full appreciation for the legal drinking age!!

Kidding. Kidding. Wipe that grimace off your face.

According to Ellen's (my roomate) French boyfriend from Oregon, Angers is the least happening place in the country.

Obviously, he's never been to Les Ponts de Ces.

Les Ponts de Ces is about 20-30 minutes outside of Anger and is considered the "country side". Everything (meaning all 15 of it's shops) closes before 8 o'clock and it's distance is easily walked in less than ten minutes. Now you ask yourself- why is this significient and why is Kim ranting about it. Well, simple answer. Three words.
I live there.

You know, it's incredible the amount of irony in my short lived life. I decide to hold out until the next pit stop, which is supposedly right around the corner, to take a leak but what ends up happening is that the the leak turns into the Hoover Dam and the right-around-the-corner stop turns into a corner twenty miles away. Or, because it hadn't rained all spring, I decide to take the rainjacket out of my back pack and on my walk home we have record breaking rain fall.
It's just my luck to flee small-town Eagle River only to end up in an even smaller town in France.

To get to school I have two options: I can either walk 3/4's of a mile to a bus that has regular stops or I can wake up before the roosters crow to make the bus next to my house. There aren't really any roosters...yet.

In order to do my laundry, I have to throw it into a suitcase and lug it with me to school in order to do it afterwards OR on a weekend I can walk two miles (with the suitcase) to get to a bus that will take me a 1/4 mile shy of the laundrymat.

The latest I can stay out on a weekend is 12:30 because I have to catch the night bus to get home and even then I have to walk two miles in the dark to get home. If I miss that bus, I have to take a cab and that costs me a finger and then some, so you can imagine the problem I have with taking cabs.

I shower in a carpeted bathroom which is complete with a 2x3x2 tub that has a handi cap hose whose mantle is broken.

Have I forgotten anything?

Oh.

Yes...

The food's great.

Your eight-fingered friend

-Kimberly