Bibliothèque

A truly gorgeous day today!! Sunny all day and about 60 degrees by this afternoon. I love it! If this is February, I'll take it! We had a very nice day today - everyone started out well with some homemade French toast made from big, thick slices of brioche from our local bakery. After taking the boys to school, I then hit the trails around the port with a group of women who run every Friday. I know two of them and they invited me to join their group. It was such a beautiful 60 minute run filled with sunshine, good French conversation and beautiful scenery (I'm including a few pictures)! Rejuvenating! This morning was a bit cold with a temperature of only 2 degrees Celsius when I drove the kids to school - cold enough that I had to scrape my windows before driving. It struck me while driving and running, that I saw people everywhere opening the windows of their houses to bring in some fresh air! How often do you see that in the US when the temperature is only 35? While running, I began speaking with one woman in the group whom I did not know. She spoke no English but we managed to get to know each other a bit. She told me that she is very anxious to learn English because "you must know English to be able to travel" and asked if I could get together with her next week and see if we can help each other out with our respective languages. I agreed so we'll see what we can manage! After spending the afternoon with my American friend and indulging a bit in slang and euphemisms, none of which I can ever use with my French friends - I picked up the kids from school and we headed to the library (bibliotheque). We completely overwhelmed their 3 meager shelves of English books but we all managed to find something that we were interested in. All of the kids also picked up a few French books that they thought they could manage - perhaps with the help of their tutor. Everyone is now reading quite contentedly. I am blogging early tonight because we have big plans for the evening.... we plan to rent a video for the kids on our new pay-per-view television service (all American movies are available in English), order a pizza from Domino's around the corner and then Josh and I are going to walk to the theater by the port and watch the American version of "No Country for Old Men". Quite exciting!!!!