Europe

Today I had a history quiz and a French presentation.  We hadn't practiced for our presentation before we gave it, but it went really well.  My partner is a girl named Kaia and she was really good to plan a presentation with because she's creative and practical.
In art we're painting still lives inside the studio.  While painting, our teacher John goes around the room to help us with our works.  I hear the same thing over and over again, and to me too.  "Don't paint the (name of a single object), paint the relationships.  There's no background.  Look, there's air around that scene.  Do you see it?"  These are the same repeating comments I keep hearing and they are so abstract to me that I grow incredibly frustrated.  I WOULD try and paint relationships if I know what that meant.  I try to extract that from him.  So far I understand that I'm not supposed to paint object-by-object, which is a difficult thing for me to try.  I'm used to working on one grey kettle and getting immersed in the details, painting in the objects as I see them.  But instead he pushes us to paint a little bit of the kettle and a little bit of the curtain nearby, and each stroke is supposed to make us see another stroke somewhere else on the page, so we work on the picture as a whole at all times.  I understand this part of it, and I'm aiming for that, but so far it's not very natural for me.  They want us to do it because it's supposed to be more natural.  I'm trying.  But isn't that kind of a paradox?  It doesn't make sense to TRY to be more NATURAL.   
I have no class on Fridays, so on Thursday night my friends Bradie and Becca planned a night out for me, since my birthday was the next day.  I met them in the square near school after our late art class.  We were going to go out to dinner together, but instead we went to a café and I had tea while Bradie had a beer and Becca had a crepe.  Some dinner!  The two had surprises for me I wouldn't have expected after not knowing them for very long yet.  They each gave me a thoughtful little gift with a really nice letter, and it was really touching.  And they had tried to surprise me with a cake before we met, but they had each been rushing around.  I told them it was more than okay because I hadn't expected so much at all, and it was nice of them to even plan that.
We have some French friends, or rather Becca and Bradie have French friends who I sometimes join them to hang out with if they can convince me to leave my house for a night.  And last week we celebrated their friend Clement's birthday all together, so this week we celebrated mine all together.  Since we hadn't gotten anything for Clement on his birthday, and they were having us over for mine, we decided we should bring him over a belated birthday gift of a bottle of wine.  While purchasing it at the épicerie, the man behind the counter asked if we were Americans and told us about a made-for-TV film he was making.  We humored him as he started telling us about it, but then he pulled out a flyer for casting calls.  He said he needed American accents, and he especially liked Bradie for the main part.  We kind of laughed, but he gave us a flyer, and when we left we started talking about what a little fun it would be to play in some little film while we're studying abroad.  We emailed him the next day and he sent us the script...the very long script.  The very cheesy script.  And this Thursday we're supposed to have auditions.  
So we headed to our French friends' university after that.  Just to our luck, their school was having a dance that night.  But I was up for it.  I'll try anything, especially when it seems like it can only lead to funny experiences, like spending my 22nd birthday at a school dance in a cafeteria with a bunch of grey-coated French engineering  students. Their particular school has a tradition where at any school-sponsored event, the students have to wear these heavy grey jackets.  Imagine doctors jackets made out of heavy grey canvas.  And because it's an engineering school, so almost all of the students are male.  Some of them decorate their jackets, others leave them plain.  I noticed that Nemo the fish was a popular decoration on the pockets.  I asked one student about that when we were at the dance.  He said girls find it cute...I guess one might try anything to make oneself more attract girls while wearing that jacket, right?
We stayed at the dance until really late...maybe 4 in the morning.  I know that's not late by French standards, but it is for me...