From Little Swan to Busy Bee

Something that people always warn you about when going abroad is that you probably won’t have much time for yourself to sleep, workout, keep in touch with people, … and, of course, update your blog. Between my classes during the week and traveling every weekend, I regret that I have not had the “me time” that I would like. Here’s what a typical week looks like for an abroad student:

Monday: Classes start up again. Thankfully for me, my first class isn’t until 3:30 pm on Mondays. This gives me some time to catch up on sleep from the weekend and grocery shop for the week. Mondays also include scrambling to complete all of the homework that I didn’t do over the weekend due to traveling. It’s also time to start thinking about travel plans for the next weekend….

Tuesday: My longest day of classes. I start at 11:00 am and go until 6:30 pm.

Wednesday: Only one class today at 12:30 pm, but it’s time to start really thinking about plans for the weekend. Transportation and lodging must be booked by now. I need to start packing and/or doing laundry. Not to mention, the majority of my homework is due on Thursdays, so I’m trying to finish that.

Thursday: Another long day of classes from 11:00 am to 5:00 pm. After classes, I’m either packing for the weekend or already off to my weekend destination.

Friday – Sunday: Traveling, site-seeing, walking, eating delicious food and… not sleeping.

Now, I’m not complaining. This little swan loves being a busy bee. However, many things fall through the cracks, namely this blog. I’m going to start working a lot harder to update this blog as quickly as I can… stay tuned for lots of posts! I dated all of them correctly, so they will appear earlier than this post on my blog 🙂

Fête de la Mirabelle

After a long day of traveling on Friday, I decided to “take it easy” on Saturday. My original plan had been to travel to Strasbourg for another day trip, but the thought of a 1.5 hour train ride and lots of walking did not seem fun. Instead, I decided to go into downtown Metz for the finale of the Fête de la Mirabelle. This is a two-week festival celebrating a small plum, called the Mirabelle. The festival votes on a queen and princes. It includes a carnival, parades, markets and performances.

Mirabelle Market

This Saturday we went to the open-air market. There were over 100 vendors selling all sorts of things! There were lots of stations selling crafts, jewelery, porcelain, pottery and embroidery. However, my personal favorite part were all of the food vendors. There was all the French food that one could ever hope for: baguettes, cheese, macaroons, sausage, crepes, waffles, chocolate, pastries, wine, liquor and beer! Needless to say, I didn’t eat very much before coming to the market. I did some cheese tasting, liquor tasting (who knew that was a thing?), Mirabelle pound cake tasting… and many more! I also ended up buying a couple of things to try with my friends. We had Mirabelle macaroons, Mirabelle pie and Mirabelle beer. It was all so delicious.

We then went next door to the market to a children’s carnival. It looked like so much fun! There were so many bouncy houses, slides, and small rides. There was even a Merry-Go-Round with Dumbo on it! We wanted to go on the rides but figured that we were too big and were too afraid to try and ask the workers in French. Yet another reason why I need to learn French ASAP. Did I mention that I accidentally ate baking soda instead of sugar the other day because I couldn’t read the label? Yeah, that happened…

L’Americain

After the market, We walked around downtown Metz for a while. It is so much more fun when there are actually people there. We did some more window shopping and went into a French chocolate store. It was very hard to resist all of the delicious looking chocolate. Then we had dinner at this Kebab place called Snack. Yep, it has no official name, just Snack. It also seems like Kebab places are everywhere in Europe! I had Kebabs when I was in Luxembourg, so I didn’t really want to eat Kebabs again. Instead, I ordered “L’Americain”, which is basically just a cheeseburger and fries. It was only 5€!! Unheard of!!

Finally, we went to the Le Grand Soir de la Mirablle (The big night!!). There was a live electo/pop/rock concert, acrobatic performance by Voála Project and fireworks!! It was all so cool. The music was also all in American, which I thought was very funny. It seems as though all of the French people like to listen to English music even though they don’t know what the words are saying. For example, One Direction was playing in the grocery store when I went the other day. I obviously wasn’t complaining.

I’m also pretty sure there are no regulations or restrictions for fireworks in France. I was scared for my life on a couple of different occasions. There were fireworks shooting off from behind the stage AND on the sides of the crowds. First of all, I could feel ash falling on my face during the performance. It also smelled like a million matches were just blown out. I have never been able to smell fireworks before because I don’t think I’ve ever been that close to the launch point before. As we were leaving a little early, the finale fireworks went off, so we stopped to watch them in the parking lot. I kid you not when I say some red fireworks dropped and hit the ground maybe 50 feet away from me. Some people were even standing about 15 feet away from where they bounced and dropped and didn’t even seem phased. It was quite confusing.

The acrobats were pretty! They were all harnessed into the cables hanging from a structure on the crane. They performed some pretty cool stunts with un-clipping and re-clipping their cables in different formations. They also threw confetti and streamers. However, after seeing the Cirque du Soleil, this all seemed pretty safe to me. I was able to take a lot of really cool pictures:

Fireworks and confetti!

Love this photo with the crowd

Right over my head 😮

All in all, it was a really awesome performance and very fun to see in my own little French backyard!