la fin janvier

We're officially half way through our stay here. I don't know how I feel about it  - strange - a bit like that feeling on midsummer's eve when, even though it's still June and you have months of summer ahead of you, you know that the days are now getting shorter and you can't help feeling a bit sad.

We've had a lovely week nonetheless. French is getting harder and harder (we're at the very end of learning all the grammar now), and I've struggled a bit more than usual. As soon as I learn a new grammatical thing (e.g. the subjunctive), I feel like I've pushed out the previous thing I've learned from my head, making it impossible to recall! Patrick, being super keen on grammar, is really enjoying himself though.

We're now down to six people in the class (two Australians, one American and one Brazilian as well as us) which is the dream number of people, really. We've got the day off today because it's the end of the month; yesterday after class we had a little party for the whole school where each student could bring along something from their country to eat (or drink). I had every intention of attempting to make shortbread in our horrible little toaster oven but as I was putting flour in my shopping basket on Wednesday, I realised we don't even have measuring scales (let alone a baking sheet) so, although I probably could have worked something out using proportions, I decided that there were too many variables, and also I couldn't really be bothered. I ended up buying some very odd McVitie's digestive biscuits which were the most English things I could find (they don't exist in the UK as far as I am aware), and some imported crisps. Other people had bought various cheeses and charcuterie (an Italian went out and ordered some pizzas from around the corner) but some people made so much effort and cooked properly: there was fried rice, a rocket salad, a glass noodle dish, sticky coconut rice and mango and more. It was great!

Musée Cognacq-Jay

Our culture trip of the week was a museum I hadn't heard of before, and only knew about because we strolled past it last week - the Musée Cognacq-Jay. It's a lovely little museum - free to the public - that is essentially the private collection of the Cognacq-Jay family who collected art in the early 20th century. Worth a visit, although it's small and somewhat bizarrely arranged; they moved the collection from its original building into the Hôtel Donon in the Marais, where nothing quite fits.

Tourists 

Other activities this week: Eating (as usual). For our second "date night" of the trip, we went to Double Dragon, a relatively new (and excellent) Chinese food place that has rave reviews. We had a lovely meal. Would recommend!

Happy!