Jill ne sais quoi

Yesterday we went downtown for lunch and met Monica and Anna. The Italian restaurant we were hoping to go to looked like it wasn't open so we walked around before finally finding a relatively inexpensive Indian place. I was very excited, because I'd been waiting to try the Indian food here. It was pretty good! Definitely different though. And the waiter told me I was eating the food wrong. He said, "Use your fingers! You don't need a fork!"

Sam and I then rushed off to a meeting with our academic advisor, Patrice, to discuss our ethnographic project topics. I'm going to be researching how the French perceive an American accent, and what words and sounds anglophones typically have difficulty pronouncing. I think it should be really interesting. I mean, it probably sounds really dull to all of you (well, mainly my parents), but it'll be lots of fun for me.

We then participated in a scavenger hunt around the city that was being hosted by the International Center. Sam and I were in a group with a Russian student named Xenia and a Chinese student whose name I can pronounce but have no idea how to spell. We had fun walking around the city because it was a gorgeous day, but the scavenger hunt itself was awful. The directions were confusing and the answers to some of the questions were nowhere to be found. At the end of the three hours, we were exhausted, and so cheated a bit and took the tram to our final destination. When we got there, our guide, Olivier, greeted us and asked us how everything went. When we told him that we had gotten turned around a few times, he drew us the route we should have taken¹ on our map. When he came to the end, he smirked a bit and said, "You should have come from that direction, but instead you came from the other way. How did that happen?"

We all kind of looked at each other, and then Xenia said, "It's a little secret."

"Like this?" he asked, and then he tapped his heels together three times and pretended to open a Mary Poppins umbrella and float away.

Anyway, apparently a bunch of the other groups just gave up anyway, so we're hoping that we will win. There are prizes! Unfortunately, we will not know until 2 weeks from now. And also Olivier would not tell us what the prizes are. Sam thinks that they will be pens or something equally lame. I personally would be SOUPED if we won pens. But seeing as we made up like half of the answers on the questionnaire because we were so fed up, I seriously doubt that we will gagner anything.

After this, we were pretty exhausted, and so came back here to rest for a bit. Around 18h30, Claude came up and said that we wanted to show us a movie. So we went down and drank some wine and ate some more of that fancy trail mix and Claude showed us Et Dieu...créa les femmes², a Bridgitte Bardot film made in '56. Claude told us that this movie changed French cinema, and I guess I can kind of see why. Unforunately we didn't get to watch the whole thing, as Claude enjoys fast fowarding through movies to show us the parts he wants us to see (usually the parts with really good shots of the Riviera) and then talking to us during these parts. So we didn't actually watch this movie, but we did get a synopsis. At first it seemed like just an excuse for the director to show his then-wife off naked, but after discussing the actual plot with Claude (we missed big chunks due to his fast-fowarding, apparently) and remembering the few scenes we did see, it seems like a really good film, and I would definitely like to watch the whole thing.

One thing we thought was particularly strange was when Claude said, "At the time, Bridgitte Bardot was considered really pretty." Sam and I just kind of looked at each other. Later, we were like, "At the time?!" We'd never seen her in a film, but she was gorgeous.

Anyway, after doing some film analysis, Sam and I went to Centre Ville to have dinner with Anna and Monica. We ate outside (but under heat lamps, which was super sweet!) in Place Grenette, and had delicious pasta. Then we walked around for a really long time, trying to find a bar or a club that had people in it. We finally ended up a block away from where Monica lives, and there was a bar called Subway (once again, that is not the English translation, that is the name painted on the side of the building) with a huge crowd of young French people sitting outside.


Here is the deal with most "bars" in Grenoble, as far as I can tell: they are like cafes, only with alcohol. So, inside there is an actual little bar, where you go up and order a drink, and then you can sit inside on one of the 3 chairs, or you can go sit at one of the tables outside on the sidewalk. We chose the sidewalk, and sat there, sipping our drinks (which all had suggestive English names) for an hour or so, when we decided to go home. It was pretty fun, but the whole "cafe" style isn't exactly conducive to meeting French people, which is sad.


¹ Let me just tell you, the expected route was horrific. There is no WAY anyone could have covered all of that in 3 hours, unless they were a native French speaker and also Clark Kent.
² The English title is: "And God created Woman"