1) I am making Banana Bread with my recipe from home and it is baking in the oven right now. Woohoo! David and I are really excited. Of course it is kind of experimental Banana Bread because France doesn't sell baking soda or baking powder in their stores (at least not the three I checked) but according to my translation program I did find some flour with the baking powder included... so hopefully that will be good enough. In addition, France has different nut preferences than the US so I couldn't find any walnuts or pecans in the nut isle, only hazelnuts almonds and pralines which do not work very well in Banana Bread in my opinion. So it is nutless Banana Bread for which all the ingredients were measured by a legitimate cup (we used google to figure out that 24.2cl of a liquid = 1 cup. Therefore we used an empty beer can (25cl) to figure how much a cup was in one of our drinking cups. Then I used that mark to estimate the 1 3/4 cup of flour and the 2/3 of sugar and I just eye-balled the 1/3 cup of butter. But in the end it seemed to have the right consistency and it smelled delicious. I'll let you know how it turned out!
2) I made crepes about two days ago. This was another culinary adventure and it turned out brilliantly. It was cool because I made something that was traditionally French but something that I associate with being home. They were so good that we are thinking about making some dinner-style crepes this upcoming week with ham and emmental. Speaking of emmental did you know that you can seriously only buy two types of shredded cheese? (at least in your typical grocery store). You can buy emmental and gruyère, which are both swiss cheeses, and sometimes a compté. I do not know how these people live without a good sharp cheddar. *sigh of longing*
3) I heard back from Miami two days ago and the ridiculously long set of essays that I had to write to attempt to receive honors credit for being abroad last semester have officially been approved! I am very excited. Of course I will be even more excited when I receive credit for my second semester (because I can receive one credit of each type - category A and category b) meaning that I will have fulfilled 9 of the 10 necessary "experiences" required to graduate Miami with Honors. That means at this point, with my recently approved credit for my last semester at Le Havre, I am at a very proud 7 completed experiences. I am not sure if it will actually matter to my future employer that I completed the Honors program, but I just couldn't let this one thing go uncompleted, though getting all seven of those experiences has been an extremely cumbersome task so far.
Also, David and I have recovered from our big bike trip last week, and we will be heading out on a new hike tomorrow. At this point we haven't decided on which one, so I will try to give you a post tomorrow and let you know about our hiking experience. Winter is rather quickly transforming into spring here in Chambéry, and we are now having days even as high as in the 50's, and quite a bit more sunshine, in addition to birds singing. Still no flowers yet though...
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