Hot Weather and Hot Food

Well, the weather is pretty nice now here. It's cold in the mornings, then heats up to the point where I can wear just a t-shirt in the afternoon. Well, pants too but you know what I mean.... I've been taking care of the good weather by working on my badminton skills with my host siblings. The other part of the title refers to Saturday night, when I made chili for my host family and another family of friends. I made two batches - a normal batch and a spicy batch - because I knew that the other family (and myself) likes eating a little spicier than my host family here. So of course they all chose to eat the spicy chili, but it didn't turn out exactly as they thought. The mother changed to the regular chili after a few spoonfuls, the father and one of the kids were sweating, and the other kid was drinking milk and looked like he wanted to jump in the pool. Apparently we have different ideas of spicy, because I considered it only an alarm-2 or alarm-3 chili. So it made for an amusing meal, anyways, and not a bad one with the chili, cornbread, and blondies. And a hint for anyone who might want to make cornbread in a foreign country (not that this will apply to many people or anyone at all, so I don't know why I'm writing it) is that fine-grained polenta is the same thing as corn meal if you can find that in a grocery store.

In other news, school is going pretty easy this week. I didn't go to school at all today because none of my teachers were there for whatever reasons. My math teacher isn't there the rest of the week either, so tomorrow I finish classes at one o'clock, and i only have three hours on Friday. I might try to go to the movie theater one of the days and see the film "Into the Wild" that a number of people here have told me is really good. All in all it should be a really nice end of the week and a sort of appetizer to the two week vacation I have starting Saturday.

This past weekend I went with Philippe to hit a bucket of balls at the practice range of his golf club. He tried to give me some tips about relaxing and not trying to force too much strength and all, but I really just wanted to hit the ball. I did my best to stick in a few Caddyshack and Happy Gilmore impressions as well. That's about it for now, I need to go and watch Marseille vs. Moscow. A la prochaine!