Le Premier Jour à Aix!

Well, today was my first real day in Aix-en-Provence. I think I did an excellent job of beating jet lag. Despite napping for 4+ hours yesterday afternoon, I was able to fall asleep around 12:30 last night, and slept until 10. After waking up today, I arranged through Facebook to meet up with some people to go explore Aix.

After my 25 minute walk to town (I really need to look into a bus pass), we met at the tourist office in the place de general De Gaulle. The place De Gaulle (also called the rotund) has a really magnificent fountain in it, with a traffic round-about around it (called a rond point) (PICTURE TO COME). We needed to be at an open house at the IAU building at 4, so we walked around Aix for a few hours. It's such a small town that you can go from one end to the other without even noticing in a 15 minute walk. It didn't help that nothing was opened (it being a Sunday), so there was nothing to interrupt our stroll. We met up with Lauren, who I'd "met" on Facebook. Lauren just came from Paris, so she told us all about that. I'm convinced that Lauren is the luckiest person on the program. She has her own apartment in downtown Aix. I guess her host mom owns 2 apartments on top of each other, so she's staying in the second one. Unfair. I have a little room in an apartment 30 minutes away, and she's a 5 minute walk from school. Some people. After searching fruitlessly for an open-air market the girls said they'd seen (I'm not convinced of its existence), we finally got lunch at Pizza Capri, which is apparently one of the best/cheapest pizza stands in Aix. Only 2 euros for a pretty big piece of pizza (and really good).

At the IAU open house we got to meet all the other students, which was nice. After meeting a bunch of fellow students, a bunch of us decided to go out for a drink. Went to a pub nearby (O'Sullivans. Yes, O'Sullivans). Then Christopher (my housemate) and I went back to Dominique's (my host mom) for dinner. I'd always heard French don't have big dinners, but both nights she's prepared rather large dinners for us. Pasta, cooked eggplant, bread and cheese; very satisfying meals. Christopher and I are going out soon to meet up with people, but unfortunately none of us have cell phones yet. Should be interesting.

À demain!

(really upset that I went back to see my post from yesterday, and saw that half of my original post was gone! Lost forever! If anyone has any questions about anything that's not clear, comment and lemme know!)