After returning that night, an wonderful thing happened, and a tradition was born. Nicole made a general announcement that whoever wanted to was free to come to her room, where we would be making tea and watching Planet Earth. Four of us answered the call: Sophie, Sophie, Sterling, and me. We micro-waved water and made some tea, and then all squeezed onto Nicole's bed and watched the "Deep Seas" episode, and we have since repeated this several times, making our way through almost all the episodes. We only have one or two left at present. I have learned the names of many sea creatures such as Vampirus Toothus or the Wonderpus Octopus, I have seen elephants swim, and I have realized that the mating practices of Birds of Paradise are about the funniest things ever. Everyone should see this show. It really makes you think more about all the effects we as human beings have been making on the environment, besides being a beautifully filmed tribute to our natural world.
At any rate, this was the beginning of a legend, but we had our true birth as a group when we received our name: g². I'll be talking about g² often in this blog because we do nearly everything together, so for future reference it consists of, from left to right: Nicole, Sterling, Me (in case you don't know me (unlikely, as you're reading my blog)), Sophie long hair, Sophie short hair. This is from our first ever gathering:
Other notably noteworthy adventures of note include our expedition onto L'île de Nantes to see les Machines de L'île, the most famous of which and definitely the most awesomest is the giant, fully operational mechanical elephant. We got there just in time to see it take it's trek through the hangar, which was lucky as I guess it only runs every once in a while. Needless to say, we took many thousands of pictures and also several videos of it "walking" at a speedy .25 km/hr and blowing mist out of it's trunk. Here is a photo of all of us with the magnificent creature:
There was also a merry-go-round with, not horses, no, that would be too normal, but sea creatures and this bizarre man-thing coming out of what looks like a sewer drain:
It was definitely worth the trip. Later that night we went out to Potato Love (l'Amour de Pomme de Terre), a restaurant in Bouffay which serves... wait for it... potatoes! It was delicious, and there was sooo much food. Also sometime around this, I'm not sure if it was the same night or not, we discovered the other Irish pub in the area, Buck Mulligan's (I'm not sure why, but Irish pubs are always the most crowded places downtown), which has become another of our regular hangouts. We ran into a few others from our group, and also met Paul, an Irish guy who had literally just arrived that day and will be living in Nantes for a year, working for a cheese manufacturer.
On Sunday I ventured by my lonesome out to the Japanese garden on l'île de Versailles, which is in the middle of the other river that runs through Nantes, the Erdre. I took several pictures, and discovered more of the blue stick men that are part of a memorial to the 50 hostages that the Nazis took and executed in Nantes at the end of WWII:
The next day, Monday, g² decided quite spontaneously to go to a FC Nantes match. We took, apparently, the very long way to the stadium, taking the tram all the way downtown, and then another line out to Beaujoire, when it turns out that there is a bus that can get us there in around 15-20 minutes instead of the hour it took us. Oh well. We got to the game just fine, got out tickets and finally got into the stadium after being patted down twice and in the process missing the first goal. It was a pretty good game; Nantes won 2-1 against Strasbourg (yay!!), and there was a guy sitting in front of us that had some really good victory dances.
Well, as it appears that I am kind of organizing these posts by weekend (since it seems like that's when everything happens), I will end this here and be back later with stories from the following weekend.
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