Late November happenings

Last Saturday was an interesting day. In the morning I got up and went with Manqi to a careers talk at the university. There were a whole host of talks to choose from and the one she had chosen to go to was about a man who manages film festivals in Brittany, with a particular focus on British films. I thought it sounded quite interesting and would be an opportunity to hear some extra French so went along. He spoke for an hour without a powerpoint or anything, just him and a microphone, then there was a question time and it was interesting to get an insider view into festivals like that.

We then went to the market in the city centre and bought a ‘galette saucisse’ for lunch. I’m afraid I don’t have a picture of it – we gobbled them up before thinking about the camera after waiting in a queue for 20 minutes! It’s a local speciality and is basically a sausage wrapped in a pancake, but it is tasty. They can even cook cheese ham and egg into the pancake and then wrap it around the sausage if you want something more special! We also saw a fun music group all dressed in red playing some lively music outside the metro station, I could’ve stayed for quite a while to enjoy their performance.

After that we wandered through town a bit and bumped into our housemate Andrew. The three of us decided to try out a café called ‘Haricot rouge’ (‘Red bean’ or sometimes translated as ‘Baked bean’!). Manqi had already been with an American friend of ours who raves on about it, because they have many different sorts of hot chocolate and milk shakes. We enjoyed sitting down for a bit having a chat, and a mini brownie came free with my drink which was nice. The prices there are reasonable and you can borrow board games to play if you want, but it wasn’t quite as exciting as it had been made out.

A few times this week I’ve found myself in a big crowd for dinner. Last Saturday there were 9 of us at my house for dinner in the evening, then on Thursday just gone our home group had a Thanksgiving dinner (we were 15-strong) and last night, Manqi had a number of Chinese friends round making spring rolls and things so that was interesting. Tomorrow quite a few of us are going round to the pastor’s house for lunch too. It means that things are quite lively around here, but so many large gatherings in one week gets tiring!

That’ll do for now, I’ve started writing about something else but this post was going to get too long if I included it so I’ll save it for another time!

I hope you’re well.

Fiona x