Shadowfiend23 @ Wrocław

After waking up early and getting more baked goods from a nearby boulangerie (a different one from the second day for those of you out there who are keeping track), Deanna and I watched some French cartoons! One of the best ones was SamSam, a cartoon that recounts the adventures of a 7-year-old superhero named SamSam ( a link:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SamSam  ). Among the cartoons we watched was My Little Pony : Les Amis, C’est Magique! (Friendship is Magic in English). I had a bit of trouble understanding the specifics of the dialogue, but I got the gist of the story. After lounging around for a while, Deanna and I decided to go to Place de Jaude, the de facto mall in Clermont-Ferrand, to find a way for me to use a phone in France (either buy one, or rent one, or configure mine somehow…). We needed to do this because, as I have said, the apartment search was not going well and we had already learned that most apartment listings basically required that you call the landlord. (you can email them, but I have not gotten a single response by email as of now – and it has been weeks since the first email was sent) Another reason that we wanted to go into Place de Jaude was that I had agreed to meet up near there with other assistants who were stationed in or near Clermont-Ferrand.

So without really doing nearly enough research, we waltz into Orange, one of the phone carrier giants in France, and try to explain the situation to the workers (in French, of course). I thought that I did a pretty good job, but when it came time to give them my address, the woman couldn’t understand the name of the street. I don’t know why she couldn’t, I was saying it just fine. She even called over another worker who spoke English so he could ask me “What’s your address?” even though I clearly had understood the question. I wasn’t really irritated, but I still didn’t get why they were confused. My guess is that the street was in an unknown part of town (it’s in Montferrand, which is an old part of town) and that it was a bit too small. Anyway, we figured it out and she inserted the new European sim card into my phone. And just like that – boom – I had tweaked my phone into being a French smart phone, with a brand spankin’ new number.

After leaving Orange, I called Pierrette, the woman of the couple who was hosting us, to tell her that I had gotten a phone. She cheerfully asked if Deanna and I would like to join her and her husband to have apératifs. I accepted the invitation, even though I was only partially sure about what that meant. (I correctly had remembered that that entailed eating little snacks and drinking wine while chatting) After that, Deanna and I headed off to meet the other assistants at the looming black cathedral near the center of town. (this is the cathedral you will likely see in google image searches of Clermont-Ferrand. It is iconic.)

We made our way back to the main square and met up with other assistants from the TAPIF program. We all bought sandwiches from a little vendor nearby and ate them on the steps outside of centre Jaude. It was pretty fun to talk to other people who were roughly in the same boat as us, but we couldn’t relax very well because the apartment search was a dark, bleak cloud looming over our mental horizons. So after some prodding from Deanna, we said our goodbyes to the assistants, left the square, and went back to our little room in MontFerrand.

After making a few more apartment searches on leboncoin, we set up two apartment viewings : one was at 11:00 am the next day (Saturday) near the center of CF, and the other one was for right then and there – assuming we could find where to go. I tried to follow the directions given to me by the landlord, but I couldn’t quite understand him. I thought I heard him say “eglise Saint-Pierre”, which is in Centre Jaude, but he was actually saying the name of a church in Beaumont, a small neighboring village to CF. So basically Deanna and I wasted a train ticket and more time going to the wrong church and standing up a potential landlord. When he discovered that he had gone to the wrong place, he seemed strangely calm about the whole ordeal and ended up just saying that we could probably meet up tomorrow. After this small debacle, Deanna and I returned to our room quietly waited until our prearranged meeting with our hosts.

When the time came, our hosts greeted us outside our door and brought us up to a small sitting room. They brought out pringle-like chips, peanuts, and olives. We gabbed for a bit, snacking on the little morsels, until they offered to show us the cave beneath their house. Apparently, MontFerrand is a very old part of CF, and houses such as theirs were used to collect and store wine hundreds of years ago. They picked out a bottle of wine made by Remy’s family in the northwest of France and went back up to the little sitting room. We talked for a bit longer, and on our way out, Pierrette and Remy gave us a trove of fruit! We were so grateful because had pretty much only eaten sandwiches and bread up until that point. We went back down to our room and quickly collapsed into a deep sleep.

After sleeping from 11:00 p.m. or so until 7:00 or 8:00 in the morning, Deanna and I woke up and wandered out into the streets looking for a boulangerie (a bakery). Thankfully, we found one on a small side street after about 10 or 15 minutes. After walking in and trying out some of our slightly rusty French, we happily bought a croissant and a baguette. We were surprised by how cheap the baked goods were – the total came to about €1.80 ($2.43), which would be a steal in the U.S., especially for such tasty bread. We hiked back to our room and gobbled the bread with some of the leftover fruit from the night before.

We spent the next part of the day searching endless apartment listings, trying to find something that was going to work for us. We found an apartment that seemed pretty promising – and the address was not too far from our room – so we decided to hike over and check it out. The walk ended up taking way longer than we expected (maybe a half hour), and we ended up hating the location. So it seemed like we had wasted our time.

On our way back from the apartment, we decided that we needed to get something for lunch, so we stopped at a little sandwich place. They ended up having a pretty cool deal going on – for €7.50, we got an amazing sandwich, a drink, and a dessert. I got a kebab sandwich (which was great) and a coffee eclair. My drink was some kind of pop that tasted like carbonated Tang. So it was pretty good. Then, we walked back to our place and continued the apartment search. I got tired super early though, so I ended up going to bed at 7:00 or something crazy like that. And I slept until 5:00 a.m. the next morning, so I got a breezy 10 hours of sleep.

As a side note, I had a strange dream that I was in some kind of battle royale situation. I was locked inside a small village – where it was always twilight – and I was forced to kill every other combatant in order to escape. I won’t go into the details of the battles, but suffice it to say that it was brutal. I used my lucid dream abilities to stop bullets, to teleport, to throw spikes, to throw boulders, etc. I stood alone at the end of the competition in a square built for the winner. The commentators starting chiming in, saying how I was a monster for slaughtering the others so mercilessly. But I disagreed. I told them that I had done what I needed to, in fact, that I had beaten the system. I then raised my hands and wished for everyone to come back from the dead. And come back they did. So I had found a way to get everyone out of the arena alive – no one died in the end. The dream leapt forward one year, and I recognized one of the girls from the battle. She thanked me for saving her, telling me that she would be forever grateful.