Wednesday 2nd April

Started the day by visiting the hotel mum is staying in tomorrow to tell them she will be arriving later than 7pm. I took a little while because the man could’t speak english very well and thought I wanted to book a room, not check a reservation. Anyway, once done, I went to the mall to find out how you pay for 4 days of parking. Ha, there was no info desk so couldn’t find out. A good start to the day. While I was there I was bad and got tempted by FNAC and bought 3 more dvds. Well I’d better use the vouchers while they’re still valid! Then I visited a childrens book store which had been recommended to me. I was Ok. Very large with a stone floor but not many books. It was quite empty actually. I wanted to find a book by Gabriella Vincent, but couldn’t find it anywhere. So instead, I bought two Little Miss books in french (only €2.50 each) and spent the afternoon attempting to translate them. I think I did ok! At 5 I wandered over to the art school. Patricia was meant to be taking us to an exhibition at the big university on the edge of town, but we didn’t really know what time. While we waited we spent the time singing childhood songs. At 6 we went and waited outside on the road and Liz received a phone call from Patricia. She was going to be another 20 minutes. Liz and I were getting hungry so we took a wander to the big supermarket and bought some nuts and some coke for Grace and Mary. The queue was so long that as soon as we arrived back, Patricia arrived. The exhibition was in a gallery in a student village which didn’t look to nice. All concrete blocks and tarmac. The exhibition itself was quite interesting, and we spotted some work we had seen in the crits such as Sophies work (pictured). However it was very small, and the students are not very friendly towards us. Only 2 people said hi, so we took and beer each (as they were free) and decided to walk back to Rouen. There was one bit ont he walk where we were on top of a hill and all of Rouen was down below us - it was very beautiful. About 3/4 of the way home, a car pulled up along side us and it was Patricia. She had been worrried about us, and had come to find us (oops) and said it was too far to walk. Thats another difference, the french don’t like walking. Like, Rouen has a metro system with several stops, but it isn’t very far to walk anywhere. Maybe if you’re going from the very north side to the very south side but 5 minutes down the road - no. They find it strange that we walk the distances we do. We would have been quite happy to keep walking but were also happy to receive a lift to. It had started raining. Back in Rouen we met up with Mika (by now it was about 8.30pm) and he took us to a brand new bar, which was all white with purple beams, had a toilet light which stayed on for about 20 seconds, and it was only a minute from my flat. Also there was Charlie, the other friend, and a girl who’s name I also can’t remember - I am very bad a names! After a glass of wine we went to a restaurant in the Vieux Marche, which was very french with lots of fondue. Me and liz had salads thinking it wouldn’t be too heavy - ha, it was like a mountain and full of bread, cheese, meat. Neither of us could finish. Mary had a vegetarian dish which was potato, cheese and veg, and looked a bit like lasagne when first bought out. Grace had a salad of potatoes, sweetcorn and salad and topped it off with some of Mika and Charlies fondue, which had apples and cider in it. After dinner, where we were given some wine by the neighbouring table because we were ‘enggglllishh, girls’ we all went back to Grace’s flat. By now iti was pouring and literally the streets were awash with water. Mika had his car, so we all squashed in (by now we had said bye to the too nameless ones). All 4 of us girls in the back. Luckily, it was a very short ride. At Graces we had another guitar session, drank tea and Mika also bought along his ukulele, which was different. Finally went home at about 2.30am, very tired.