Maaaaiiiil!!!!!!!

My email has just been taken away from me by the evil Internet gods! All other websites work: google, blogger (clearly), Facebook. All necessary, of course. But no email? I'm afraid I might not survive another hour . . .

Unless, of course, I can fill this hour with things like this blog. So, here's my life lately:

This past week, I was in Rennes, again. It was quite wonderful. Foodwise- crepes and seafood. The crepes in Brittany are the most wonderful things, ever. They use some sort of special flour, I hear. Anyway, they're magical.

Also, when you're surrounded on three sides by ocean, you'd better have good seafood. Like this big uneven shell thing, where you have to be careful not to spill the juice inside. You take it in the palm of your hand, squirt some lemon on, eat the mussel inside, and then drink the juice. Follow with white wine. Mmm.

Oh! And we made mussels! We bought this big 2kg box of them. It's really cool, actually. These guys are all closed up in their shell, and you start with them just in the pot on their own, swimming in a bit of butter. Then, eventually, they squirt juice out, and you feed them a lot of white wine. And wait 'till they open, so you can eat them!

This actually turns into the story of the never-ending wine sauce.

After making mussels, we were left with this buttery wine sauce. The next day, we bought a bunch of chicken and potatoes, and boiled them in it, letting the wine boil off a bit. And it was delicious. Even more delicious, two days later, we took what was left of _that_ sauce, and boiled some more potatoes in. And at the bottom of the pan, we found a lone piece of potato that was left there from the chicken night. It had completely absorbed the sauce, and then been boiled in it, and it was amazingly good. But that's not all. The day after that, the now 4-day-old sauce, or the little bit that was left of it, was used for steak.

So, culinary adventure.

Also, we went to Mont St. Michel, or Saint Michael's Mount. It's really cool, actually. A castle and a city and a church, all build around a big rock, out on a mile-wide stretch of sand leading into the ocean. At high tide, the sand turns into quicksand, and on low tide you can walk in/ attack, as you wish. A really medieval sort of place, with narrow narrow streets, and battlements, and anything you could wish for in a medieval city. And plenty plenty of tourists, too, which is always funny.

Oh! And they have this thing, like a parascope, that lets you look over the island. It's part of a museum. You go into the museum courtyard, and at some point, the guide invites everyone into a small dark room off to the side, with a white table in the middle. Over the table is what looks like a stove pipe. And then the guide closes the door, and it's pitch black. Except that now, on the table, you see the outside projected. And she moves the pipe around to show you the beach and the battlements, and the garden you were just in, and everything. Not really what you expect in a medieval place like that. It's really new, too- it was just put in after World War II.

So, that was Rennes.

And I got home just in time to present the story my group wrote for French class. Which kicked ass. It was sort of like a detective story. For class, we had a character, and each group wrote a different chapter about her. Anyway, it was fun.

Ok, now let's see if mail works again . . .