odds and ends

Going away from Rennes for a week and then coming back made me realize what a great city it is. Rennes is overflowing with places I like to wander around in and its architecture is awesome. Right now the air is clogged with the smells of gardinias, siringas, mimosas and forsythias. There is light in the evening for a long time and the combination of mysterious violent purple blooms, heavy smells, and the golden rays of the setting sun makes for an intoxicating 6: 30pm walk around my neighborhood.  Truely suburban paradise: everyone riding their bikes home from work, people talking to each other through open, screenless second story windows, ladies with their babies on the front stoop, older ladies gathered at convenient street corners, middle school boys yelling through letter slots and eating entire sleeves of cookies before dinner, old men out for very dignified walks with the prerequisit wooden stick and wool hat duo. I like it so I go out in it.  Rennes is a bike city so sometimes I go out in the bike lane and pretend I know French traffic laws and am accustomed to abiding them on a bike. It's fun and I can cover a ton more ground than on foot. Last Thursday I took Lucie's bike along the canal path where the mules of the pre-desiel-engine houseboats used to walk. After a while it goes into the country and is green green green and covered with sheep and cows pumping out Breton dairy products. I rode really fast out and then turned around and the wind hit me. Ohh! The way back I went through downtown and had my first cobble stones with bicycle experience. Bump bump bump bump.
I am also making great strides with my host mom's little boys who have been rather distant with me. This week they are not at all obsessed with their top collection which was previously a near constant occupation and thus they are now available for other fun activities such as throwing cereal with me around the kitchen when their mom isn't home, playing the piano with their toes ( I told them that is how Americans do it), playing violent games of croquet around tree roots and contesting my awesome* chess skills ( I won for the first time ever last night). When they are not beating me at chess, the pauvres suffer under their mother's current mania for spinach and zuchinni themed dinners and make up for their lack of nourishment by eating entire loaves of brioche bread before dinner.
Nourishment leads me to the next event of note: the North American invasion of Rennes. Last weekend Lucie was gone mountineering with ice picks and crampons and ropes so she told me to invite people over to her house which was possibly the nicest gesture ever. However, little known by me, Erin, Zoe and Bjorn had planned a birthday surprise for me. Thursday, one day before I thought everyone was coming, Erin, the mistress of stealth, had me positioned at the metro stop waiting for one of our Rennes friends who I had invited to dinner. Apparently I had a really spectacular slack jaw when Zoe and Bjorn surfaced on the escalator instead--their faces pressed against the plexiglass at my knee level. I just about died and then they mobbed me and took me out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant. Afterwards I was led to a secret location which turned out to be the anglophone bar the Funky Monkey. There someone else had miraculously arranged all of my fellow American study abroaders to swing by and wish me happy birthday. The bartender was even in on it; he brought me some sort of Roman candle bedecked cream covered shot that he made me take without my hands which I executed flawlessly AND avoided being captured on camera. Fun. The rest of the weekend we spent wandering around Rennes, staying up too late laughing and eating. Eating a lot. My favorite was a pancake meal we had after a long walk by the canal. We used Lucie's party crepe maker and were able to fry lardons ( French bacon chunks), cook pancakes and make impromptu toasted cheese out of Camembert all while sitting at the table. To make up for our lack of syrup I made a carmelized butter, apple, sugar, cinnamon dish on the stove. YUM! I thought I would never eat again, but the first 2 days after they left were marked by massive hunger on my part. Come back friends! I really enjoyed how my stomach ached from laughter.