I can hardly believe it's already been a month here!

This weekend, Alix, Augustin's twin sister, flew in from the US, where she had spent 3 months. Right from the beginning, her dad jokingly pestered her to speak English to me. So now the entire family is here. This makes for quite the ambiance at the dinner table, with multiple conversations flying back and fourth. Needless to say, I don't always know what's going on.

The youngest boy, Paul, does the French equivalent of boy scouts, which the French call les scouts (pronounced "scoot"). Here's a picture of him in his uniform before he left to go camping this weekend:


The weather was pretty nice on Saturday, so I took a walk to check out le marché aux fleurs, which is an open-air flower market in the middle of one of the main streets. It stretches on for a respectable distance, and changes over to clothing and other vendors at some point. Regrettably, I didn't have my camera.

The family also showed me their country house this weekend, which is about a half an hour away by car. (As a side note, it's really interesting that once you leave the city, the French avoid traffic lights by using les rond-points (traffic circles). They have them everywhere, so that you can't really drive in a straight line for very long - to stay on the same road, you have to drive around half a circle every so often!) The family and many relatives live on the same plot of land. Apparently the beef I had for lunch was from an uncle who raises cattle there.

Seeing as it was one of those rare occasions on which the whole family was around, I was designated photographer. Here's a picture of the de Baudreuil family:

(in the back: Paul, Arnaud, Alix, Augustin; in the front: Marine, Camille)

And me with all the kids:


Today I went to my first engineering class at the Polytech'. It went well... The class is starting off with things that are review for me (binary, hexadecimal...) so that's kind of nice. But I was able to understand the professor. The thing that's going to mess with my head, now that I'm actually working with numbers, is that the French use commas instead of decimal points. Afterward, I had lunch with a couple French students I met in the class.

Now for a random fact that I find quite amusing: there's this one local radio station with the jingle "Nostalgieeeee." I guess that's the French version of "oldies" but it cracks me up every time I hear it.

À plus tard!