It's Rebecca's birthday!

[rebecca_in_blue]

My sore throat is better now, but I still have a nagging cough. Around four in the morning on Friday, I woke up coughing so hard that it took me an hour to get back to sleep. Heather and I went into town together Friday afternoon, and when I told her that I needed to buy some cough syrup, she said, "Yeah, I know, I heard you last night" (she has the room right next to mine), so apparently it is even worse than I thought. French cough syrup does not taste at all like it does in America, although it is a lot better than Jamaican cough syrup. Nakeisha gave me a dose after I almost couged up a lung in her room, and it tasted exactly like a mix of salad dressing and gasoline.

On Friday evening, the school held a small party for all the foreign assistants and foreign exchange students. I lost track of how many different countries we came from between all of us. There was a boy from Scotland who played on his bagpipes for us, and there was also an assistant from an Eastern European country (I forget which one exactly, possibly Poland) who was very excited to meet Nakeisha because, she said, "I never heard a Jamaican accent in the real life." Sara taught us all a few Chinese words, and Marlena taught us some in German. Nakeisha tried to say "I love you" in German, and you can imagine what German sounds like in a Jamaican accent – or maybe you can't, but suffice to say that Marlena laughed so hard she cried. It was a lot of fun.

Today Marlena told me that she was taking a trip into a nearby town with the German teachers here at school, and she invited me to come along. We went first to Pierrefond, a nearby town with an incredible ancient castle built on a hill. It dates back to the early 1300s and was supposedly the model for the castle in Disney World. We didn't go inside it, but we walked all around it, and it was breathtaking. I would really like to go back again. Then we piled in the car again and drove to Compeigne, another nearby town, where we walked through an enormous park designed by Napoleon III full of statues and gorgeous flowers. It was a pretty amazing way to spend my birthday, and even better, the weather here was beautiful – very sunny and warm, with literally not a cloud in the sky!

After the park, Marlena and the teachers wanted to go shopping, so we headed to the botique area of town. Unfortunately Rebecca is the kind of girl who buys her clothes at Wal-Mart or Goodwill, and so she felt very out-of-place and bored in swanky expensive shops devoted entirely to perfume or shoes or lingerie. The women I was with never seemed to run out of money, because they kept going into one store after another after another, while I recited the entirety of The Wizard of Oz inside my head to amuse myself. (As I said, I was bored out of my skull.) I had just gotten to, "She's not only merely dead, she's really most sincerely dead," when thank God, they finished. I realized on the way back that I can count on one hand the number of times I've ridden in a car since I arrived here. I hope I still remember how to drive when I get back!