Joyeux Anniversaire/Le Tour de France

To celebrate my birthday yesterday, the girls brought me a raspberry tarte, an assortment of pastries, and a box of meringues. They also provided cups and plates that said "Joyeux Anniversaire" and bought me some earrings as a gift. How sweet of them. Mostly though I liked the card they gave me. They also made me fake blow out a candle that played Happy Birthday (we didn't have a lighter-probably the only people in the country not to have a lighter). Since class wasn't until the afternoon, we did some shopping in the morning and ate lunch. I had a ham and cheese crepe that was delicious. After class, Max, Karoline and I went go-carting and to dinner. Kaitlynn wasn't feeling well and decided not to come. We were originally going to go to the planetarium, but because Kaitlynn really wanted to go, we decided it would be best to go another day. Go-carting was fun, though Max smack talked us before we started and in the end he wrecked his car and lost. haha. I guess that's what you get when you ask what pedal is gas and which one is the brake. We then ate a yummy dinner. Karoline and I both had really good chicken with fries. Later that night, Karoline and Kaitlynn, feeling much better, came over to my apartment and we watched The Office and ate nutella. It was a great birthday.

Today the Tour de France is in town. This morning I went to a cafe on the main square to have a coffee, read, and watch the excitement build for the time trials this afternoon. The entire town is looking like Canal Street at Mardi Gras. There are barricades everywhere, and you'd better not need to go across the street for anything because the police aren't letting anyone cross. As it was, I had to make this huge circle around the main square just to get to a cafe. There is a huge stage set up for the starting point and all morning they were playing music. So as I drank my cafe creme (cafe au lait) and read about Shakespeare, I listened to "Billie Jean" blaring across the city. There are an abundance of English and Americans here too. Most everyone at the cafe was speaking English. However, the highlight of my day so far is that they all thought I was French. Yay! Two French women sitting next to me asked if they could look at my French newspaper and then made a snide remark about all the tourists. This American guy who needed a chair to sit with his huge group came up and attempted sign language to ask if he could have the chair at my table. I of course spoke to him in French, keeping up my little charade. Eventually I left to buy some Tour de France souvenirs and even the woman there spoke to me in French though she spoke in English to the two people in front of me in line! Success! I am blending in.

The time trials began at 2:30 or as they are called in French, "contre la montre". It was basically just like Mardi Gras as people shoved their way thru the crowd and up to the barricades. A huge group of kids tried to sneak their way thru us, but as experienced parade goers, we were able to guard our spot. It was fun at first, but with one team going thru in 1/100 of a sec every 7 minutes, we started wondering how long it would be until Lance Armstrong came by. We asked around and found out that his team was going to go last at about 4:30. So we wandered over to a cafe, sat by the mist fan, talked for about an hour, and then went back out. Karoline got on Kaitlynn's shoulders to take pictures of Lance and video from above while I was in charge of the street-view video. The man starts out by introducing Lance and then the crowd goes wild and they are off. And if you blink, you'll miss them.