Fifth Day

Mélody invited me to her end-of-the-year luncheon with her friends.  Her friend, Mélanie, the hostess, lived in a house rather than apartment, which is actually pretty rare for the city-French.  The weather was superb as it's been for the entirety of my stay thus far (75-83F with a light breeze), so we had a nice meal in the courtyard.

The first thing that catches my eye as I walk out is a fuzzy animal coming out of the shed.  Much to my cousin's friends' amusement, I mistake the overly furry rabbit as a dog.  Mélanie explains that almost everyone makes the same mistake--though usually, the rabbit has a comb-over that makes it look like Justin Beiber (whom the French also enjoy joking about).

The gossip at lunch stretched my French to its limit.  Usually I only have to follow a one-to-one conversation about rather ordinary things using relatively standard language.  The parlance at the table was not only idiomatic and sometimes laden with medical vernacular (they were all nursing students), the talk was shooting all around the table.  We take understanding a language for granted, but really, it's quite a feat to be able to filter through an entire conversation for several meanings at once.  Really knowing a language goes so much farther than being able to understand classroom dialogues and dubbed movies.

The rest of the day was just spent with family.

The furry rabbit

 

Here's my little cousin Emilie.  She's crazy but adorable.  She was running around the house with this piece of fabric covering people with "magic dust."  We scoured her "diary" in which she writes nonsensical things about her friends and cousins.  It was fraught with some really funny misspellings and ramblings of a Gleek.

Turns out Mélody is a Allod-addict.  Allod is a French free-to-play WoW-esque game.