Hey. I know it’s been super boring on the blog lately, but that’s because nothing post-able is going on. Sincerest apologies. Rest assured when something happens, I’ll post it. If you like, in the meantime, I can post a few banalities:

1) I cut my hair again. It’s nice that curly hair is so forgiving because I’m pretty sure I’m awful at this.
2) I’m going to Nancy this weekend again.
3) Am trying to figure out if I have enough money to go to Greece in April.
4) I caught up some on Desperate Housewives, and like every time I get three or four episodes into it, it started to bother me.
5) Did I mention I’m brushing up on my Spanish? I can say things in Spanish again. But only in the present tense and the near future, or the preterite if it’s a totally regular verb.

See, I told you nothing is happening. Don’t blame me if this post was boring.

Not much news here. It got cold. (Well, sort of. It should be actually cold tomorrow.) And it snowed.

And Jon Stewart sums up nicely how I feel about the State of the Union speech:
“As it does every year this State of the Union matches up two bitter rivals: the president of the United States, and words.”

The Spanish book I ordered from Amazon came and I’m busily trying to remember all the Spanish I forgot, and never knew very well in the first place.

Oh my God, this Daily show bit about the new French international news is so funny it’s not fair. Especially the very last part.

(I feel bad categorizing this under Frenchness, since it’s really more about Americanness… but the category is there asking to be used.)

I’m going to play guide tomorrow, to some of these people:

Miss Zandra

Jenny

Moi and Zandra

Two really fuzzy but awesome pictures of Chelsey

These are all from last weekend in Nancy when we bought plane tickets for Spain. Yay! I sure hope it’s nicer tomorrow than it’s been the past few days (you might have heard about the wind) because I don’t really know what to do with people here if it’s rainy again. Meteofrance.com predicts a break from the rain in the afternoon. I guess we’ll see.

Well I don’t have much to say today so here are the rest of my vacation pictures.

Veronika let me make her pose in front of the castle in Karlsruhe

Looking out on the twon from the top of the tower

Looking backwards from the tower

Not the greatest lighting

So, we (4-5 of us) are going to Spain in February. We’re flying in and out of Madrid. What I’m wondering is, is it okay to arrive (besides the first night) without hostel reservations? I’ve never done this so I don’t know. But it makes me nervous. It is the off season but there might be an arts festival going on.

On a related note, does anyone know anywhere great or cheap to stay in Madrid or Barcelona?

It’s not really that cold. People keep wondering if winter is really going to arrive this year. But Lorraine cold, warm as it’s been, is a special kind of rainy, windy cold, especially tonight. So instead of carrying out plans to go to Thursday night at La Boheme, I’m staying here in avoidance of the fifteen minute walk. Tomorrow is a B week, so it’s my ridiculously easy Friday–one hour of disposition in the salle des profs and no classes. I think I will have copies to mark up.

I went to Nancy yesterday, and I’m going again tomorrow. I’m going to Spain in February, and possibly to The Decemberists in Paris.

I went to see a movie yesterday, Stranger than Fiction. Right beforehand we were telling R#2 about how the exit signs in the U.S. never say “Way Out” like they do in England. He said he thought it was more formal. We said we thought it was less. Then the movie, in its unnamed American “city,” nefariously showed the only sign I’ve ever seen to say “This Way Out” in a building. Or maybe it was underground. Does it matter? You could hold that unnamed, fictional cities don’t really count as proof of something’s existence, except that it was obviously filmed in a real place and not on a movie set. Why must the movie fates work against my trivial arguments? Don’t they have better things to do?

To give them their due, the movies have been actually very helpful to me this week, since I’m supposed to work on the American dream with some students. The trailer for The Pursuit of Happyness (which I’d really like to see and which works most easily into the lesson) conveniently showed the other night, when I went to see a (different) movie.

I’ve gotten hooked on Friday Night Lights. Woops. Curse you, curse you, Texas.

Now for the rest of the London pictures.

Buckingham Palace

Parliament and Big Ben were really hard to get a good picture of at night. So here’s sort of a bad one.

So was Trafalgar Square, and it didn’t help that the bottom of the column was engulfed in scaffolding. These are two crummy pictures of the same thing: the Christmas tree, Nelson’s column, and Big Ben peeking through.

On the other hand, Picadilly Circus was really easy to take a picture of.

Kensington Palace, on New Year’s Eve

Kensington Gardens + mini sailboats

That afternoon, in the back of the Victoria and Albert Museum. I was actually a bit obsessive about this thing. They turn off until someone walks by them, and then they start doing different things. I took many many pictures for myself, because the colors and the patterns change. But I won’t bore you with them.

Happy New Year. I won’t take credit for this picture–Alix took it. That’s the top third of the London Eye, which is about what we could see.

Like I said, my pictures from Edinburgh weren’t the greatest, due somewhat to the grey skies. So, here are not very many.

The dog cemetery at Edinburgh Castle

Speaking of, Otto had surgery over Christmas because he had a loose piece of something in his shoulder. I miss him.

Please do not climb on Mons Meg. I mean really. Actually I don’t know why I thought this sign was so funny, but I did.

Walter Scott monument

Edinburgh was really nice, actually, even though my pictures weren’t. As evidenced above, we went to Edinburgh Castle, and I do love castles. This one had graffiti from American (and other) prisoners from some century or other. It also had cheesy dialogue voiceovers going while you walked around the prison, except of course with modern accents for everyone (French, British, American). The anal retentive in me thought that surely the American accents they used were much more like British back then. I think this might be what happens when you teach your own language.

We also went to the Museum of Scotland for about an hour before it closed. We saw these guys who were pretty cool. I also found out too late that a hot toddy doesn’t necessarily include hot chocolate. How sad. Our last morning there we went shopping and I bought stuff at H&M (yes I know, so special to Scotland) and Jenners. At some point I also bought a ring.

Anyway, I think that’s about it for Edinburgh. On the 29th we took the train down to London and the ride was really, really pretty. Right now I’m trying to figure out how to afford to go to Ireland in April, and I’m not sure it’s possible. Maybe I will have to save it for future rich Eileen. (Ha.)

I’m back in Bar le Duc. It took a while. I went some other places. I’m going to start from the beginning with the pictures, and I’ll put up six today, but rest assured there will be many more. Skim them if you like.

This is Burghley House. Kate and Julia took me there on Christmas morning while we were waiting for Christmas lunch to be finished. The night before, Julia and I made mince pies, which are yummy. Burghley House was closed on Christmas Day but the grounds were open, so we walked around. It was used as Rosings Park for the newest P&P, just as Stamford (where the Ms live) was used as Meryton. Christmas was really nice, actually, and I received two guide books, one for Scotland, which proved very useful in the following days. The other was for Dublin, so now I definitely have to go there. For Christmas lunch we had goose, duck, stuffing, brussels sprouts (made by Julia with orange juice and peels), vegetables, and eventually Christmas cake. We tasted the Mirabelle liqueur, and I think we generally decided it was quite good. The next day we went to Julia’s uncle’s house, and both then and the 27th we had traditional post-Xmas English food, which includes bubble and squeak, which is basically all the veggies mashed together. It was yummy too. I feel well-versed in English Christmas traditions now.

On the 27th I left for Edinburgh. I met up with another assistant at the hostel. The hostel was dreamy. Free internet, cheap cafe, cash machine, vending machine, clean rooms, free towels, conditioner and soap… really it’s hard to sum up all its dreaminess.

Our first morning there we took a bus to Rosslyn Chapel, a stone chapel that’s carved within an inch of its life.

Many of the carvings included the Green Man, who I thought was pretty cool.

The chapel is being restored, so there’s a large canopy on it letting the stones dry out. This means you can’t get a very good view of the outside, but you can walk around the top and see some very idyllic Scotland panoramas.

And here I am, out in front of the chapel (not pictured), wearing a scarf that Mrs. M’s mom made me for Christmas.

If you’d like to see more of the pictures, or all of them at once, let me know, since they’re all on Snapfish, and I usually only put up about a fifth of them here. I’ll post more in the coming days of Edinburgh, London (Buckingham and Kensington Palaces, Picadilly Circus, etc.), and just a couple of Karlsruhe.