Around the world around the wirr-uld...

It has been a very multicultural past few days.

For those of you who don't know, my host sister Julia is in school for theater production. She doesn't act and never has, but she's part of a theater group and goes to a special school just for people who want to work in theater. She essentially does all the public relations and organizational background work for various productions that her theater group puts on. WELL, Julia's group had been working with a theater group from Burkina Faso, Africa on producing a play together for a while and this week they came here to do it! Wednesday evening, my whole family went to see it. It was a very interesting experience. I couldn't understand most of what was going on because everyone (French and Africans alike) spoke incredibly fast, and the Africans had an accent that was hard for me to comprehend. But it seemed to be mostly about French politics as related to genocide. And there was a lot of cool African dancing included. I enjoyed it.

Thursday night, Molly, Amanda and I met up with my friend Zé from my translation class. Zé is one of the most interesting people I have ever met. He is British, (here on exchange from England) but he was born in Cameroon as a result of his white mother being bored of her life in England, packing up her shit and moving to Africa, and falling in love with a polygamous African man. Here, in Lyon, he drums for two samba groups, is part of the kayaking club, and takes salsa dance lessons.
Zé proposed that we go to a salsa club, and we did. It was a lot of fun! Zé taught me some salsa moves. Then we met these two French girls named Laurie and Clemente. They are AWESOME. After hanging out at the salsa club for a while, they took us to a club called 'Road 66.' It was a cool place; there were people dancing, but also lots of places to just sit and drink and relax, which La Marquise (the boat) lacks. They also had pool tables! After dancing the night away (they played generic American hip hop and rap, as well as some electronic stuff), we played a game of pool: Me and Zé vs. Laurie and her boyfriend. Zé and I lost, but it was a lot of fun.

Last night (Friday), we all went to Rachel (a girl in our program)'s apartment to celebrate Clair (another girl in the program)'s birthday. I was actually incredibly exhausted for some reason, but went anyway. I'm very glad I did. We played charades. Then we played a game that involved picking up a cardboard cereal box off the floor without using any part of your arms and allowing ONLY your feet to touch the floor. You get three tries, and if you fail on all three, you're eliminated. After everyone takes their turn, the box gets cut in half, until eventually (if you make it that far) there's just a flat piece of cardboard on the ground. It is A LOT harder than it sounds. There ended up being three of us left at the very end (including yours truly) and we all succeeded in picking up the flat piece of cardboard so then we were all timed to determine the winner. I am happy to say that I won! I picked it up in 4.6 seconds. After that, we danced to 80s techno and Justin Timberlake. For some reason there was a really cool and really attractive girl from Greece there named Demitra, and after bringing sexy back, Demitra taught us all some traditional Greek dances. It felt really great to be be hanging out with friends, low key, playing games and dancing around, which is something I really miss from the States. It felt like home.

Tonight is the France/England semi-final Rugby World Cup game! This time it's being shown on the big screen in Place Bellecour. If France wins, it is about to be the fucking craziest night ever. It will mean that France will be in championship game. And if England wins, we'll just go party with all the Brits here that we know and love. It's a win win. I'm excited. I'll let you know how it goes.

Gros bisous à tous!

Meg