8/22/2015

2 weeks down, 50 to go. That feels weird. I am having tons of fun here! I am really truly enjoying France. Right now I’m staying in a huge mansion because it is family vacation so all the cousins are here!

The cousins are great! They’re really fun to play with, but when one starts crying, they all start crying and so sometimes there have been 7 crying children in the same house and that can get loud. Like on Tuesday after we all went swimming, A, who is just barely 3, fell while he was on the trampoline and hurt his nose. So he was crying, and since there were absolutely no parents around, I was working on calming him down and then Little M started crying because nobody would swing on the swingset with her. I asked A if he wanted to swing with Little M in both French and English because he speaks both and he said yes, so that is how I got two three year olds to stop crying. It was an adventure.

Yesterday, we went to this really cool museum/castle in Le Grand Pressigny. It’s 1/3 medieval castle, 1/3 renaissance castle, and 1/3 modern museum and the coolest part is that they’re all connected. The medieval castle was destroyed (mostly, except for the keep and the front guard tower) in the renaissance because everyone thought it was ugly, and then during the French revolution, the entire thing was destroyed again by villagers who wanted to use the stone to build their own houses. Then in 1999, a modern museum space was built on the old castle, and it showcases the flint in the region because there happens to be a HUGE flint deposit in the same city. There was also an exhibit about Neanderthals that was interesting but also not really my thing. I especially liked the medieval castle. We were able to go up into the guard tower at the front and it was really cool to be like walking through history. There’s even carvings in the stone from soldiers who would get bored while in the tower. They mostly played a game that consisted of three squares drawn in the stone, so now when I go to other old castles in France, I’ll look for the same game because how cool is that?

Overall, it’s been a pretty nice week, not too crazy. I’m excited to keep au pairing!!!