Sunday, June 13, 2010

Last Weekend at Tour de Buis

The Rhone River

Ok, I lied. No photos of cute kids this week. Why not? Because they were monsters!

These were the smallest kids we've had so far. They were between 7 and 8 years old, which means they've only had about one year of English. Surprisingly, they all had a better level of English than most of my kids back in Orleans! I guess it's because they go to an international school in Lyon and have an American as a teacher. Anyway, I *thought* they were adorable, and a lot of them were, but they were uncontrollable! They went crazy during every activity, every class, every meal. It was like living in a zoo for a week. And I never before realized the needs small kids have until this week. Every five minutes someone needs to go to the bathroom, someone needs a tissue, someone is crying because of something someone else said. It made teaching a class almost impossible. Also, I'm not sure if this is normal but they seemed really rude to me. At meals, they would all shove their plates in my face and ask for food, even though I told them every single time that they had to wait their turns and I would come around to everyone in good time. I never got to start my meal until a good half hour after them because they were so needy and always needed an extra napkin, more bread, another bathroom break, etc. But again, maybe all little kids are like this at this age???

It also didn't help that I was really sick this week, with a nasty flu that thankfully only lasted a couple of days but made me want to shrivel up and die anyway.

This weekend was a really chill weekend. On Friday night, after the kids left, we walked 3km in the pouring rain to the closest bar/restaurant to have some pizza and then walked back again in the rain. That's how much the food here sucks. Andrew also walked across hot coals at the campfire and burned his feet pretty bad.

On Saturday Andrew and I got up early (everyone else was once again too hungover to come with us) and walked 4km to catch the only bus into Vienne. We only had three hours til the return trip back to our camp, so we headed to the Gallo-Roman museum which had some pretty cool ruins. I especially loved the mosaics. It really made me miss classics! We then stopped by the farmer's market for some rotisserie chicken, cherries, nectarines, and watermelon. We started our picnic lunch before getting back on the bus to the nearest town to us. We finished our picnic and then hiked back into camp, returning exhausted and hot but happy to have spent a couple of hours away from the camp.
Andrew trying out the ancient latrines
I love Roman pools
Dining room with reclining couches
Cool mosaic of Hylas and the nymphs

Today we've been organizing things for our trip next week, cleaning our room, and sunbathing naked in the nearby field. The plan is to leave next Saturday for Aix-en-Provence and spend the night there, then continue to Nice the next morning and spend two days on the French Riviera and in Monaco. Tuesday is the big day when we take four different trains with all our luggage to get to Venice. After that, we don't have any clear plans. We really want to meet up with our friend Meagan who is living near Bologna, but our itineraries aren't exactly overlapping, but we're determined to make it work somehow. We hope to rent a boat with her and visit the island of Elba and get in some quality beach time. We also want to meet up with Alfredo, a buddy of ours we met in Denmark so long ago, but he's a bit unresponsive at the moment and he lives really far south so we're not sure it's going to happen.

We fly from Rome to Beijing on July 8th, and we've already hit a snafu. I assumed that like all other airlines, we'd be charged $50-100 to check an extra bag. It turns out we'll be charged 47 euros. Per kilo. This bag is probably 30 kilos. That means that our bag would cost about 1400 euros to check. I don't understand how that makes any sense. Our tickets didn't even cost that much!!! So we're looking into possibly shipping it through a company or just throwing everything in it away, even though we spent quite a bit of money on the bag just recently. Anyone have any ideas?
Cute ducks and geese on the walk to camp
Sweet and slimy snail love!

3 comments:

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  2. Yes, all kids are like that at that age. Seriously. And we have some French kids at my school, and if their behavior is indicative of French kids in general, they are WAY better behaved than American kids. This is one of the reasons that I am waiting a long, long time before having children.

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  3. Oh, you can definitely ship things waaaay more cheaply than that! Go to the post office in Rome and check prices for bulk shipping. Then do a speedy google search for shipping companies in Rome. A friend sent her second bag from Berlin to Athens for not more than 50 euros - I'll try to remember to ask her about companies!

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