Photos In Cahors

Hello there. I leave Cahors Sunday; I don't take very many pictures here, but here are the ones I do have.

Also, at the bottom of this post is my story of the day. Or, more accurately, it's my excited rambling of the day.

Photos in Cahors:

In the pink is one of my super host sisters and in the shades in a particularly astoundingly lovely friend.

They prefer this second picture enormously.

Here's my other host sister.

Who hates taking pictures with me.

Here's the scenic road between house and club.

So so scenic

Here's the view of the park and some courts from in front of the club.

Here's the view of the club from the same spot.

This morning we took another "walk" (hike). It was great.

Again we saw the bridge they keep telling me was constructed with the same construction techniques as the Eiffel Tower.

The view from that bridge.

La campagne

Le fleuve

A good way into the walk we went through the closest city. It's named "Vers".

One of the guys in our group was looking for a house to buy apparently, so we (our group of 6 people) went on a somewhat spontaneous house tour. It's "in its juice" (need a lot of work). There were so many rooms and it was really so cool:

This house is very interesting looking also-

We walked at least 7 miles and the weather was nice.

I'm a lot tanner; thank you, France/the sun.

Story of the day:

Today a lot of things happened. 

I drank a blueberry drink. I loved it.

I sang some songs.

I taught my host kid (younger sister) some English.

I did Latino Dance. Partners Latino Dance...

I talked to actual youth. Real young people.

People keep telling me that I'm the club celebrity because they all know who I am ("the American"). This is really cool.

But most exciting of all?

I met a British man here with his family.

**This is about to turn into an excited mess of typing, please bare with me.**

I didn't know he spoke English, but he came up to the table I was sitting at with three guys I'm friends with. He just kind of held out his cig for a light, said "merci", and walked away. I though nothing of it. 

30 seconds later all the guys looked at each other and said "English" nonchalantly. They could tell by his accent that he was an English speaker.

I then asked (following a lot of explicitives) "YOU'RE SURE, WAIT YOU'RE SURE?!" And they all responded "yeah of course" AS IF THIS WAS NOT A BIG DEAL.

So, I yelled "I'M GOIN FOR IT" and ran over and sat next to the man. I asked "YOU SPEAK ENGLISH TOO!?!" and we then had the most excited English moment.

Neither of us are fluent in English (he's actually tremendously less fluent than me) and living somewhere where you don't speak the language fluently is so frustration and confusing, so we were overjoyed to speak with eachother.

So I had an English conversation.

AND WE LAUGHED

AND JOKED

AND LAUGHED

AND TALKED

AND I KNEW EVERY WORD THAT I WANTED TO USE

EVERY LAST VOCAB WORD THAT MY HEART DESIRED WAS ALREADY IN MY MIND

I MISSED ENGLISH

I MET HIS WIFE

AND KID

WE ARE ALL FRIENDS NOW

His name is Otis and he is British. Her name is Celine and she is French but bilingual. Their kid speaks the both.

I was freaking out.

I'm still freaking out, to be honest.

(I WAS SO EXCITED. I AM STILL SMILING ABOUT THIS CURRENTLY. I honestly couldn't even handle myself. I was smiling all willy nilly- you cannot just do that in France. 

You can't just smile in France because smiling at a stranger is flirting, plain and simple. Therefore, I have had to fight hard against smiling all day. It had been rough.)

I'm still so so so happy. I know it's absolutely obsurd that I'm this excited about this, but I think it's just because I really did want to prove to my people here that I'm not just a thoughtless nub- I'm someone who both thinks and talks... a lot, habitually. I love to make jokes and small talk.

I can't understand everything here and I usually can't make jokes or jump into conversations, so it's hard for me to be anything but quiet. 

But, today I got to talk. And talk a lot. And joke a lot. And have a personality. I'm so glad. So, so glad.