Catch-up

Okay, so in the last, oh month or so, here's some things that I've been up to:

Last weekend, Julien and I road-tripped it with another couple to a theme park about 5 hours away, near a town called Poitiers, and that was fun. The theme park is called "Futuroscope", and it's a kind of technology-based theme park. (Doesn't that sentence just make you want to go?) Anyway, they used all kinds of sight and touch stuff to simulate different things. Example: car racing: we were in seats that moved and jerked around while the video from the point of view of the driver was projected on the screen in front of us. A lot of the park were different variations of this type of thing. However, they did have a planetarium where they showed a lot of "cosmic collisions" instead of just the night sky. One of the collisions they showed was how the earth and moon were made. Apparently, the moon and the earth collided into each other, and the moon was all in fragments which kept rotating around the earth because of the earth's gravitational pull. And all of these fragments kept colliding into each other and melding together and pretty soon all of these fragments got stuck together, and voilà, moon.

Um, what else...they had a big IMAX screen which not only projected the image in front of your face, but also below your feet (the chairs were on a plexiglass floor), so you had the feeling that you were flying over all of these nature scenes they showed. So that was cool. We saw a 40-minute 3D movie, which I fell asleep in (might I add that we left for Futuroscope at 5 a.m. on Saturday and got there at about 11 a.m.). Um, I didn't know about this movie before I came to France, and it's an American movie, but everybody seems to know about it here, it's called "Arthur and the Minimoys", and it's about this family who has a community of tiny people living in their backyard, and the grandson learns how to shrink himself to save them. So, they fly around in ladybug cars....sooooo, they had this attraction, and we got in "ladybug" cars which moved and everything, and we got 3D glasses, and then the image of the race was projected on the screen in 3D, and then we got blasted with water and air, and got "stung" by bees from the back of our seats. So, that kind of thing. And then there were also huge IMAX dome screens that we saw a movie about the ocean in 3D and then there was another about New Orleans and before and after Katrina and how fragile the bayou ecosystems are there. SO, it was kind of an ecological/technological park. So, it was cool, but it was quite cold and almost all of the waiting lines were out in the cold and were about 30 minutes each.

Then, for St. Patty's Day, a guy that works in the school's library is in an Irish band and they were playing at a local music gig place/restaurant, so a bunch of us assistants went and did some Irish dancing, and it turned out to be a nice night.