Lazy Sundays seem to be the practice.

I've spent two Sundays here now and it has rained on both of them. The statistics say that there are about 300 days of sunshine every year in Aix, and that leaves 52 Sundays for it to rain. This would honestly suit me just fine. I believe it could be perceived as a sign to slow down and take it easy without worrying about making too much progress. If I travel, I won't be in Aix, and their weather patterns will be less "the rain may never fall till after sundown"-y. 

But future travel plans aside, today was lazy. I slept in, which was good since I woke up feeling better and wasn't sleeping to feel better. Around two, Chris and I walked down to meet Michelle by a kebab place in town to get food "à emporter" (to take away). We stopped by the "Petit Casino" one of the few stores open on Sundays - it's kind of supermarket-esque, although it feels more like a convenience store to me - to pick up some necessaries (including nutella) and walked on back home. 

We ate lunch after two, maybe as late as three, and it was delicious. I had chwarma, which is a mediterranean dish made with grilled meat, lettuce, tomato, (usually onion, but I had mine without), ziki sauce, and french fries wrapped up into a tortilla (although I think most places it would be pita bread, this seemed like a pretty thick flour tortilla - but then, what's the difference in that and pita? Beats me!) and grilled on a panini press. I wish I had taken pictures of the man making them, because it seems complicated for an "à emporter" meal. We then cut up one of two bananas I had and made a banana-nutella dessert. It was rather incredible. 

While we were eating lunch, the three of us watched Eddie Izzard's "Unrepeatable" standup show, which Chris said must have come out before 1997 due to some English reference he made. It was enjoyable. After that, we got into doing quizzes on www.sporcle.com - starting with a race between Chris and me to determine who knew more of the original 150 (or 151-152 if you know the ones that aren't TECHNICALLY on the list) pokémon (that quiz: http://www.sporcle.com/games/pokemon.php if you want to give it a try. I know Jason can get all of them, but I was pretty proud of my 62 that I got today.) 

It was fun and lazy, though.

I've been meaning to write a bit about my friends here. They're all quite interesting people, and I've begun in a way to think of them in two, maybe three groups: my immediate family of assistants, my extended family of assistants (and everybody else, but they're not really a group, since I don't associate with them closely enough to really call them "friends"). My immediate family is made up of the three people I live with. There's Lucy, the Italian, Joanna, the Argentine, and Chris, the Englishman. My extended family consists of Michelle from Kalamazoo, Florence from Canada, Rougina from Egypt, Madeline from Chicago, Liz from Chicago, and Hannah from Virginia. We have a few others that are on the fringe of that group, too, like one of the girls who lives with Michelle and Rougina, Cecilia from Chilé, I think, often comes out with us. Then there are the other assistants in the region, but I don't see them much, so I don't really know much about them.

The three that I live with and see every day make an infinitely entertaining set. Lucy is petite (in the sense of thin, not short) and adorable. Her English is more or less perfect, which makes her very easy to communicate with. She dances and has been cleaning our place since she got here. It perterbs her greatly that it won't stay that way, although she has said that she doesn't actually LIKE to clean. Joanna is the goofball of the group. Her command of English is negligible, and when she does put a sentence or two together, it usually is just wrong enough to be hilarious. She regularly breaks into song, is always smiling, and seems very eager to improve her French. Her French is good enough, by the way, that with some wild gestures we are able to communicate quite effectively with her (since none of us speak more than ten words of Spanish). Chris is not only our token guy, he's English as well. So, if we're out around town it tends to be Chris, a mass of American girls, and a handful of girls from other cultures. We have had quite extended discussion about "chips" (which are not, in fact French Fries, but are, after all, potato chips. He doesn't like this notion), as well as about several other English/American misfires. Chris has also had the misfortune of letting someone know that he knows the first thing about computers. The school has had him setting up the rest of our computers to run through the proxy servers that we have to use in order to get any internet at all in here.

In my extended family, I am far closest to Michelle. She is sort of our ringleader, as we all suspected she would be. We chatted online for more than a month before we came, so I felt like I knew her pretty well before I got here. She, however - like Lucy, Joanna, and I - doesn't have that great of a sense of direction, and therefore we all spend a fair amount of time lost. If she makes the decision and Chris navigates, we get where we're trying to go in the shortest amount of time. If any of the rest of us try to do that it doesn't turn out so well.

Rougina is Egyptian, and she speaks near-perfect French and Arab. She claims to understand English but not to speak it, so she's able to help us with one-word translation errors, but not much more. The others are mostly American. Liz was a theatre major, and we get along pretty well. The truth is, all of us get along pretty well. I hope we continue to get along this well by the end of our stay here! I'm really rather fond of all of these people.

If I just had a deck of cards we could get together and play. Surely that's something I can buy, though; I just keep forgetting to.

Tomorrow I go to Marseille for a likely-to-be-miserable "formation pedagogic." (And, to those of you like my mother who tell me to "Be Positive!" I've already been to one of these. They're miserable.) I hope that at some point during the day I can go and make up the medical exam I missed last Thursday by being in bed sick. We'll see.