The French can eat anything with chocolate

At least that's what I'm discovering. They have chocolate in their cereal; not chocolate flavored cereal, but actual pieces of chocolate in their cereal. And yogurt too. What we consider pudding, they consider chocolate yogurt. And you know how people say the French wo,en are skinny because they eat in small portions? Not true. They eat a ton. Every meal (even dinner, which, as Gilles told me, is a small meal) has three or four courses. I am going to get so fat.

I've been having a lot of adventures before school starts. Friday, Sylvie, Mathilde and I went to the beach, and I cut my poor foot up on some underwater rocks, but besides that it was oodles of fun. Oh, and women don't wear bathing suit tops if they don't want to. Definitely a sign of culture differences between here and the US, because Mathilde told me that there was a nudist beach a few kilometers over, indicating that this was not one.

Saturday, Gilles took Mathilde and I to Lourdes, a place where a few hundred years ago a shepherd saw a vision of the Virgin Mary. Now the town gets millions of pilgrims each year. The cathedrals there were enormous, and really ornate. It's hard to describe except to say that it's breathtaking. Unfortunately, my camera decided to stop working once we got to Lourdes. It's better now, but that was unfortunate.

School starts tomorrow, so there'll be a lot less of me romping around the countryside, but Sylvie has arranged for me to participate in drama, yes, drama, at the lycée. Which will no doubt be insanely difficult, but good for my language skills!