Hello!

It's been a while since I last wrote. Not many exciting things have happened, but I've been having a great time still.

It's finally been really nice out - spring seems like it's officially here. It's been in the mid 60s, it's been sunny, and there are tons of flowers and flowering trees starting to show up. It's pretty.

I've also been playing in rugby games. We've had 3 so far - we won the first one and lost the second two. We have another match tomorrow. French rugby matches are a lot different from US ones. My team actually cares about winning and are a lot more serious when they play - no one will randomly start "drink blood, smoke crack, worship satan, go Mac" during the game, and no one except the fly-half and the scrum-half talk during the game. At home, everyone was yelling during the match - calling for the ball, cheering, and generally just announcing what was happening. Here, no one does that, and you get yelled at by the captains if you do, so that's definitely new for me. Still, it's been lots of fun. I've played for the whole time in all of the matches and have gotten to play a lot of positions (outside center, wing, and when people got injured and poor Rudy was completely desperate, he put me in as fly-half). I'm starting out playing wing tomorrow.

Other than rugby, this week has been exciting since my friends John and Kacie (I went on study abroad with them in Morocco) came to visit. I rented a car and Andrew and I picked them up from the airport late on Tuesday night. We had a great picnic on the hill behind the train station on Wednesday and played frisbee, and then we had raclette for dinner. On Thursday, they went to Lyon for the day since I had work, and then that evening we all just hung out and talked, which was really nice. On Friday, it was pretty rainy, but we wandered around Bourgoin a bit and then had lunch at this French restaurant in the center of town. It was the first time I'd had French food at a restaurant in Bourgoin and it was delicious. I had a Lyonnais salad to start out, and John and Kacie had this seafood gratin thing, which were both delicious. Then John had some kind of steak (we didn't ever figure out what it was, but it was tasty), Kacie had a Croute Savoyard (bread, eggs, ham, and lots and lots of cheese), and I had a Gratin Dauphinois (potatoes, ham, and lots and lots of cheese). It was all super good, but we ate a ton of cheese. After lunch we walked around for a little bit, but then we had to come home and nap for a while. Friday night, Andrew and I went to the Bourgoin-Toulon rugby match, which was awesome, and then we all hung out some more at my house. Today, we all went shopping this morning (I bought a pretty polka-dot dress - it has pockets), had kebabs for lunch, then came home for tea and cranberry-orange scones. John and Kacie left about an hour ago, so now I am relaxing and am going to knit and watch a movie as soon as I finish writing.