Finally an update!

Hello all,

Sorry for the extreme lack of updates in the past 6 weeks. There was a combination of reasons why no posts went up during this time. First of all, there was actually a lot going on for once! Between February 6 and now, March 20^th my parents have visited, I visited Lydia (another assistant) in Carentan and we spent the night in Cherbourg, I went back to the States to Austin for a week, came back to France and visited Orrin in St. Etienne and just this past week Anthony has been here visiting and just a little while ago I said goodbye to him as he got on the bus to the airport. Besides everything going on, February was a pretty rough month for me. I've meet some fantastic people in France (like Lydia and Michelle, both American assistants in other towns) but their distance means we don't get to hang out very often. Solitary life has been a really large change for me, especially coming from college life where I had a huge network of friends and support systems. While I still keep in touch with people from Kzoo, emails and skype are not the same as getting to swing by each others' houses and make attaya, or sit outside the library in the sunshine, chatting with everyone who walks by.

The grey skies of Normandy and chilly weather don't really improve feelings of loneliness. It's fun to have people visiting here on vacation, and I'm SO grateful that I've gotten the chance to share Coutances/ Normandy/ France with others, but it's also not my regular life. Anthony might have seen it best, as he stayed with me in my dorm, but I don't usually visit Mont Saint Michel every other week, or get to go sightseeing. (That being said all those things are fun to do and lift my mood so I'm cramming as much of that kind of stuff as I can into the next few weeks).

Meike (the German assistant in Coutances) left on Saturday. That was always here departure date, but it seemed so far away before. While we weren't super close, we got along well and we had movie nights almost every week. It was nice to have someone in town to meet up with for coffee, or to talk about students. Her departure has marked the beginning of the countdown towards the end. There's only five more weeks until I leave (!) which alternates between seeming like it's sooooooooooooo far away and “omg, I'm leaving and need to start packing.”

The weather is slowly improving in Coutances, at the very least with the sun coming up before my classes, and lasting past the end of the day as well. It's still a bit chilly, but it's Normandy so I don't expect much. I'm doing a better job of reaching out to other assistants to hang out, especially so I'm not stuck in my dorm on the weekends with nothing to do (not that I've been to swim team in about 6 weeks, but I've decided to stop going on Saturdays so that way I can do more weekend visits).

Things are looking up here, and I don't know if it's because I'm reaching out more, or just because I see the light at the end of the tunnel. In any case, things are improving here.

If you've made it through that messy mass of text below are the updates for my visit to Carentan/ Cherbourg, my trip back to the USA, seeing Orrin in St. Etienne and Anthony's visit to France.