Made it.
I’m back at the apartment after three days in Rouen and Amiens. I had a checkup1 in Rouen, which went swimmingly. I, apparently, meet the health conditions for residence in France. They gave me a paper that will function as my health card until the actual thing arrives. it also means that I can go talk to a dentist about my wisdom teeth.
Success, rehashed.
When I left off, I had just made pasta in my electric teakettle for the first time, and discovered it to be awesome. Some handling to prevent boil-over is needed, but otherwise it worked great.
I made angel-hair spaghetti just now which took a grand total of like five minutes. Also, delicious.
Vacay
I made it there and back again, without any major hiccups. There was a great deal of waiting to get there, and the drive from Rouen to Amiens took pretty well forever. I was able to get a bit of sleep on the drive though.
The time spent in Amiens was wonderful. K— and his girlfriend, E—, showed me the town, the cathedral, and a few local eateries. Not just places to eat, places they eat frequently. Each had a slightly different atmosphere, but all were warm, inviting.
We went to see Joker on Thursday. They had a showing in VOST2, so we got to see it with the original voices. I haven’t felt quite so captivated in a while. The plot and storytelling was excellent, Joaquin Phoenix’s performance was on point in every way, and the feel of the story was (as far as I could tell) just perfectly like walking back into the old comics. If you haven’t seen it, I quite highly recommend that you do.
E— made pancakes one morning, which were on point. We all got to go up to the top of the cathedral’s front towers. the view is pretty incredible from there. the cathedral of Amiens was one of the quickest-built, and is one of the largest in Europe. It’s an impressive façade from the ground, but it’s something altogether different from above.
The drive from Amiens to Gisors (I was really lucky to find a BlaBlaCar headed the right direction) was much shorter, and that was spent mostly listening actively to the driver talk about organising town events: Hallowe’en, sports, Christmas market, &c. It was a good chance to practice listening, and to practice being an engaged listener. Asking good questions, knowing when to just not say anything.