Dinner with a French Family, a Donkey in ESDES, and Barhopping in Vieux Lyon!

After my amazing weekend in London, I spent most of Sunday recovering from the all-nighter we pulled and pretty much just feeling depressed that we had to leave England so soon!

After classes on Monday, the IBP had an international dinner! Everyone was supposed to bring a food from their home country to share with everyone else. Since there aren't very many good American dishes, I brought cheeseburgers! I didn't really have time to cook since I had three classes that day, so I bought frozen burgers from Carrefour and made them in my microwave before heading to the dinner! It seemed like they were a hit though because they all got eaten! There was so much other good food too! There was a noodle dish from Malaysia, apple dessert from the Netherlands, sangria from Spain, poutine from Canada, and so much more. It was delicious! Then after the dinner, everyone headed to Cosmo like we do every Monday! Of course it was fun as always!

some of the delicious food at the International Dinner!

at Cosmo!

at Cosmo with Ciela and Virginia

at Cosmo with Jasmin and Anna

On Tuesday, I didn't have any classes, so I got sleep late and then I met up with some friends. We planned to go ice skating and went to get some hot chocolate and coffee from Starbucks before skating since it was so cold. (It's really been cold the last couple weeks and is really starting to feel like Winter!) We also bought some Bailey's to put in our hot chocolate and it was delicious! We sat on the stairs near the Rhone River for a while and then headed over to the ice skating rink. By then, it was getting kind of late and we wouldn't have much time to skate, so we headed home. Then later that night, I met up with some people at a pub in Vieux Lyon near my dorm. The Vieux Lyon pubs are pretty mellow during the week, so we sat and talked and listened to a band that was playing. It was a fun night!

On Wednesday night, I had dinner with a French family that had been organised by ESDES. I went with Juliette and a girl from Taiwan named Carol. The woman that hosted us was so nice and she had two teenage sons that were nice and spoke English pretty well. We had soo much good food! We had tortellini, paté and bread (which was actually pretty good!), homemade pizza where the crust tasted kind of like a pastry, lots of bread and cheese, salad, apple pie with ice cream, and I even tried some octopus which was pretty good! We also had some wine that is made by the woman's family which was cool. It was a really fun night and it was cool to experience a homemade French dinner and what it is like to be in a French family!

Thursday was a pretty busy day! I had class and group meetings pretty much all day. For some reason, we had almost no work the first 2 months of the semester, but the teachers are really piling on the assignments now. I have so many presentations, papers, projects, and tests over the next few weeks. But to break up all the work a little there was so much craziness in the school! There are elections coming up for something called the BDE, which is basically like a student council that organises parties, Integration Weekend, and other fun things like that. There are two groups going up against each other to get elected called The Wanted and Donkey Shot. In order to win votes, they were giving out so much free food, doing flash mobs, and so much other crazy stuff. My favourite part was that Donkey Shot brought a donkey to the school! It was so funny and everyone loved it! I wish they did crazy things like that at Elon around student council election time!

donkey in the school!

On Thursday night, there was a big España-themed Erasmus party and a big pregame at someone's apartment. So many people were there and the pregame was so much fun! But when we got to the party, so many people in our group couldn't get in for various reasons. I couldn't get in because someone I was with was carrying a bottle of tequila so they wouldn't let any of us in. We tried to get in anyway and the security guards starting shoving one of the guys in my group. So then another IBP guy started yelling at the security and then the security chased him through the streets of Lyon for ten minutes! My night wasn't quite that interesting. I somehow got separated from Ben and Juni who I  had been with outside the party and ended up hanging out with a totally random group of French students who also go to ESDES. After a little while, I went and tried to go back to the party. I couldn't find it, so I just decided to head home and then ran into Antonio in Bellecour! So we walked back to the dorm together. I was really annoyed that I couldn't get into the party, especially because everyone that got in said it was really fun, but at least I had fun at the pregame before the party! And everyone promised we would have even more fun next week to make up for it that so many people couldn't get in.

Sorority totem pic?

all the Americans who were at the pregame!

On Friday, there was even more craziness in the school! There was more free food and different activities like sumo wrestling and a surfing thing. They also started giving out free hamburgers and threw them into the crowd. Unfortunately, I couldn't get one, but was really craving a burger after that, so I went to the nearby McDonald's with Virginia, Anna, and Ben! (I have seriously had more McDonald's in France than I have ever had in my entire life in the US!) I got a cheeseburger from the 1€ "petit faim" menu, but when I took it out of the wrapping, I saw that it was just a bun with ketchup and cheese, but no burger!! We thought that was hilarious and when I went downstairs to ask for a new one, the people at the counter thought it was so funny too!

That night, it was Ben's birthday, so about 30 people from IBP went to dinner at Pizza Pino to celebrate. I shared a pizza, salad, and wine with Virginia. We sang "Happy Birthday" and were there for a couple of hours! Afterwards, some people went home and some of us headed over to Vieux Lyon to go to a bar and continue the celebration. The bars in Vieux Lyon were so full, so instead we headed over to a bar near Cosmo called Boston. (It felt like home!) We had a lot of fun dancing and getting crazy, and a ton of other IBPs ended up going there too! We left at 3AM and then tried going to another bar, but everything was starting to close so instead we headed home. I didn't get home until 4:30 which was probably the latest I've been out on a Friday night! (A lot of the biggest parties are during the week and the weekends are usually more mellow — the opposite of how it is in the US)

The next morning, I had to have class :( One of the teachers had cancelled class two weeks in a row because he was sick and the school meanly scheduled a make-up class for Saturday morning at 9:45. And to make it worse, I had to give a presentation! I was exhausted form the night before, but the presentation went well! Later on that night, I met up with Anna, Virginia, Julie, and Meera to go see the new Twilight movie! Luckily they had a showing in English so we went to that and the theatre was surprisingly packed with French people who chose to go to that one instead of the version dubbed in French. It was really good and definitely my favourite of all the Twilight movies! Afterwards, I went with Anna and Virginia to Vieux Lyon where we met up with some others to go to a pub. We hung out for a while and had lots of fun! There was a couple near us that was just making out and ignoring everything else so Josh stole their food and we enjoyed eating their uneaten fries haha! They saw us and laughed and then continued to go at it! After being there for a while, we decided to find another bar. The other ones in Vieux Lyon were either packed or already closing, so we headed over to Cosmo. It was so packed and we couldn't find anyone we knew so we went next door to Ayers Rock instead. It was fun and had really good music so we stayed there for a little while and danced before heading home for the night.

I can't believe I only have a month left in Lyon. The time has really flown by and I'm not ready to leave yet. There are some things I am starting to miss from home, but I have met so many good friends here that I don't want to leave. We are definitely going to have to live it up over the next month and really take advantage of every opportunity to have fun together!

one of my friends posted this on Facebook and tagged all the IBPs in it. It is actually pretty accurate haha!