Ah, the weekend…

Well, I finally gathered up the fifteen or so (you think I’m joking?) documents that I needed to apply for my carte de sejour, and went into the prefecture first thing this morning, handed them all over to the woùman behind the desk, and after waiting for an hour, received the little card that officially states that I have applied for the carte.  Yee ha.

Otherwise, the last few days have been pretty uneventful - I’ve sat in on a few more classes, gotten the same sorts of questions asked… Oh yeah, I almost forgot that I got to go on a French field trip.  We went to visit the Chemin des Dames, which is a 15-ish mile stretch of countryside a bit south of Laon that saw some of the most horrific slaughter of WWI in France.  Very cheering, let me tell you.  It was actually quite fascinating - we visted a museum at the Caverne du Dragon, an extremely long cave/quarry that was used by the Germans, the French and sometimes both at once as bunkers.  I didn’t understand most of the tour, surrounded as I was by chattering French middle schoolers, but there were a number of signs translated into English.  Besides, the most important impression - that I never, ever, ever want to have anything to do with war and especially do not want to live underground - transcended the language barrier.  The countryside was absolutely beautiful, which made it all the more strange and sobering to realize that not all that long ago the ground was strewn with dead bodies, mines and the other accoutrements of war.  Strange.

This weekend is going to be nice and relaxed for me.  While there is a good chance that I will decide to go visit Reims tomorrow with Lauren, the English-as-in-from-England assistant, it’s going to be a laid-back trip for fun, rather than a business trip.  She wants to go champagne tasting - might not be bad, if only for the rather silly-snobbish feeling of joy that I get when I think about doing somthing like champagne tasting.  It sounds so grown-up and… un-Julia-esque.  ::grin::  What do you think?  Regardless of what I do tomorrow, I am sleeping in and doing n-o-t-h-i-n-g on Sunday.  And what a wonderful day that will be.  (Okay, so I might explore Laon and the surrounding area on foot, but that’s not really doing anything difficult, which is what I meant by doing nothing.)