La Piscine and the Weekend

            So last week ended on a good note. Classes on Thursday and Friday were as usual and nothing much exciting happened. On Thursday, there was a strike with the train system here in France, so our professor for the elective I'm in had to cancel class because he commutes from Paris every day just to teach our class. That's about an hour train ride one way. Kinda surprised he does it. I'm glad he does though because he's a really good professor. He's not afraid to state his opinions though, but doesn't let them skew his teaching. The guy is apparently a big-time lawyer in Paris that has worked on many cases in France and the European Union. So I didn't have class on Thursday because of the strike and that was nice. Fortunately the strike only lasted one day, so we were able to have class on Friday. After class on Friday, most of the people from the N.C. State group went to Amsterdam over the weekend. I opted to not go with them to Amsterdam (I would have rather seen the museums and major historical sites of the city.....), so I was in Lille on my own Friday afternoon. I went with a small group of the students on the same program in Lille to a museum called "La Piscine" in a small suburb of Lille that has apparently the reputation of being the poorest town in France. "La Piscine" in French means "pool" and the the museum is housed in a renovated pool that the town had built in the Thirties but couldn't afford to maintain. It was a surprisingly cool museum that I really enjoyed. It was humorously quaint. It had a lot of really cool art from not-so-famous artists depicting a lot of city/industrial/modern art. I approve of this museum. Once I got back to Lille and not really wanting to spend the weekend all alone, I went out with some of the people from the group that comes from the wonderful University of Memphis (I'm indirectly a U of M fan, I guess, because my sister's dating a guy that has connections with the place). We had dinner at this really nice Italian restaurant. I had a pizza. Not very French, but I like Italian culture just as much as French culture, especially when it's in France. After dinner, we walked around for a while and went to this little bakery place for dessert where I got a caramel tart. We hung out at their dorms for the rest of the night. It was really nice getting to meet some of the U of M people. They're really cool people. On Saturday, I slept in and just enjoyed the day relaxing around the town. I didn't really do much on Saturday. I met up with the Memphis people again later in the day (not all of the people I met are from Memphis, actually, one is from Nashville and another is from Cleveland, but to make it easier, they're the Memphis people because the group from Memphis is the second largest group in the program). We went to one of the local grocery stores where we bought stuff for dinner. We went to one of the dorms where we made some sort of chicken alfredo pasta dish that turned out really good. So Italian food two nights in a row. I cooked the chicken. I had a lot of fun cooking the chicken. After we ate dinner, we just hung out in the dorm kitchen for several hours talking about random stuff. Disney was a popular subject. Yesterday I didn't do anything fun or exciting. I just worked on class work and spent most of the day just walking around the town. I was going to go to the Sunday Market, but I managed to get lost and not find it..... Today, classes went fine. We talked about violence in our French class today. Quentin Tarantino was brought up quite often. I actually like his movies but would agree that they can be rather violent at times. My elective class got out early today, which was nice. Before dinner, I had to start working a video project thing for the Intercultural Communications class thing that we had at the beginning of the program. The point of the video is to share how we've dealt with other cultures. I'm working on it with four other people. In the group for this project, we have me from Raleigh, North Carolina, a Japanese-American girl from the University of Memphis, an Indian guy from Bangalore, India, a Chinese girl from Hong Kong, and a Chinese-Canadian girl from the University of Alberta in Edmonton. It's kinda fun getting to know people from different cultures. After we worked on the video for a while, the whole group had a dinner thing at the University dinning hall. We had Flemish Belgian style food. It was decent. After dinner, I went back to the dorm and that brings us up to now. That's been the past few days here in Lille. On Wednesday, we're going to Brussels. We're going to be rather busy, so it's a good thing that the Hard Rock Cafe in Brussels is right in the main city square where we're be spending enough time that I can easily run in and get a couple of shirts. But anyways, that will be Wednesday. For now, that's all.

Some Photos of the pool museum: