April 11th Friday

I woke up around noon to our buzzer sounding. It turned out it was Amanda S. She was back in town from the states and was in the area. She came in and we talked for a while. It was nice catching up on the past weeks. I recounted my narrow success on writing the papers. Amanda was curious to hear if Heidi made it because she had seemed worse off than me. Her mom was visiting near the end of the module and that mean that Heidi didn’t have much time to entertain and to write papers.

Amanda invited us to come out to Boulogne with her. Adrienne and I got ready and we headed out on the metro. Once in Boulogne, we walked around for a while. It was time for lunch so we found a Lina’s Sandwiches. I had a sandwich with mozzarella, tomato, and arugula. I had a Pepsi light to drink.
After lunch, the three of us went around to what we called the “cheap stores.” These stores are a little slice of heaven for me. Living in the 7th arrondissement means that it’s a really nice area but insanely expensive. In these cheap stores we were able to go on a shopping spree. This was the most excited I’d felt about shopping since I’d arrived in France. The stores were full of random practical things that once we saw, we knew we couldn’t live without. There were random kitchen items, home decorations, cleaning supplies and some entertainment options. In the first store, Adrienne bought a new non-stick frying pan for pretty cheap. The one we had was being scratched up pretty bad. I also got a wooden spatula to use with the new pan. I bought three CDs for myself that were very cheap. One was Edith Piaf’s Ma Vie en Rose. Another was a 2 disc set of Sinatra songs. The final was a CD of Luis Mariano who sang French songs. We also saw some shopping caddies there. They’re basically large tote bags on wheels that allow people who walk to the store to bring home groceries. They seemed a bit expensive here so we decided to look at some other stores.

We looked in many different stores. We had a few options on the caddies. They were 20€ and up for ones with metal frames. I didn’t want to spend that much on it. In one store, I found one that I liked. It was red and had different foreign words written on the outside as a design. It collapsed into a handy briefcase shape so that you could easily carry it with you when it was empty. This one was €10.90. I went ahead and settled on that one. Adrienne had already bought one for around €6 at another store, but hers had a strange plaid design that I wasn’t fond of and it didn’t collapse into a briefcase.

We made our way back up the street and saw some cute trash cans for sale. We decided to go get one because we didn’t have a trash can in our apartment. We just had plastic bags floating around. It was really hard to throw something away with one hand.

Laden with our little treasures, we made our way to the metro and took it home. Once home, we unpacked our items a bit and tucked them away. I heated up some frozen ham and cheese crêpes for myself as a snack.

Karuna arrived at our apartment then. She had just gotten back from her trip to the States. We made ratatouille and couscous for dinner. Afterward I just played around online. I went to bed around 12:30am.