Lodgings, check!

It feels good to have all our accommodations in place for France. Well almost all our accommodations. We booked our apartment in Paris last month, and reserved our hotel in Cannes tonight! We'll be staying at a hotel right near the train station for easy access to traveling and just north of the beach. Now all that's left hotel-wise is our last night in Paris before we head back to Seattle! How exciting, right? Now awaits the big planning...itinerary, train/metro tickets, packing and more! I must say I'm a tad daunted to learn the metro system. More to come :)

Recipe #2: Chicken Cordon Bleu

I decided to try two recipes this weekend. This simple worded recipe way understates the difficulty of this dish. I started off by making my own bread crumbs which was fun and that part actually turned out! It was then easy enough to dip, bread and wrap the chicken. But once I put the chicken on the skillet, the bread part burns so quickly, but the chicken cooks so slowly. I'm not really sure how the pros do this, but they must have really skinny chicken breasts and like magic breading. In the end I decided to "brown" the breading and take it out before it burned to photograph. So if you look closely at the photo you will find that the chicken is in fact not even slightly cooked. I'm going to go back and photoshop it a bit to make it look more white. After photographing we (me and my helpful roommate Kristen) put it back on the skillet and made just normal chicken breasts to eat along with our "comfort college food" of quesadillas, apples and toast. Maybe the next recipe will be better.... :)

Diesel

This is Diesel our neighbor boy's pitbull. Diesel is quite a sweety compared with the bad reputation pitbulls have. He's become my new walking buddy :) This morning my friend Katie and I took him to Starbucks to get lattes. He's a pretty good walker, and gives off the impression that he means business. Needless to say we feel quite protected walking with him in Parkland!  (Also please take notice to the teeny tiny baby pink leash....were not sure what his owner was thinking....haha)

Recipe #1: Macaroni Pie

I started my "Recipes from Around the World" project today. I'll be making all of the recipes I gather from international students so I can photograph them for the web.  Today I started off easy with Macaroni Pie, which is basically just homemade macaroni. It has you add three eggs to the mixture...that part turned out slightly weird. It was like we were eating a macaroni quiche, with chunks of egg. It was a good first start though! 

purrffect :)

Just some photos of my kitty Mylee, now (at top) and when she was so little in the summer (bottom 2). It's amazing how much enjoyment an animal can bring to your life. I'm pretty much never "alone" since I always have her following me around, greeting me at the door and snuggling with me during bedtime.  Mylee sleeps in her little bed on my bed at night and then comes to cuddle around 6:30am or whenever my 5 minute snooze goes off. She's come to realize that wake up alarm=me awake as she bounces up to my pillow ready to snuggle in.  As you can imagine this makes getting out of bed even harder! 

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Oh also! I have changed my comment settings. If you can't figure out the whole follower thing you can comment as "anonymous." If you do, be sure to end the comment with your name or you truly will be anonymous. Thanks :)

Life as of lately...

In case you hadn't heard Kristen and I have officially booked our plane ticket abroad AND have reservations for an apartment in Paris. It seems to be coming together quite smoothly so far, thanks to various guide books and online forum posts. We have chose what sounds to be a nice old neighborhood in Le Marais section of Paris. Reviewers say it is well located (being 15 mins east of the Louvre) and is old town Paris. Our other option was staying in Rue Cler as Rick Steves (the guide book author) highly recommends. It is near the Eiffel Tower and a tad bit ritzier. After talking with people who have previously been to Paris we were told it has become over-populated with Rick Steve tourists and is a tad bit more expensive. Seeing as we'd like to feel less like tourists and more like Parisians we have chosen Le Marais. Our apartment is small, but comfortable looking. It's not like we'll be spending much time there anyways! It's made up of a big area with a bed, cute little 2 seater breakfast table and a small kitchen. The only "room" in the studio is the bathroom. I think it will work well for us to be able to bring food home and keep it in the refrigerator to cut down on cost.

Other than that we're still trucking through on our plans, finding hotels for the South of France and getting our International Student cards among many things. If you have any pre-departure tips, do tell before we leave at the end of May :)

In other news, Spring semester is off in full swing. I'm taking four classes: Graphic Design 396, Beginning Ceramics, Sustainable Marketing and Philosophy: Business Ethics. Of course my favorite classes are always my art classes but I try to find my other classes interesting as well.

Sustainable Marketing is all about marketing with the new trendy idea of being "green." It's a very new class, and thus means no textbook yet. We each are to chose our own popular sustainability book and present it to the class. I got very excited to read Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollon to be beat out by another girl in my class. I have decided to read "To buy or not to buy Organic." This is a topic I am very interested in reading as my roommates know me as sort of a food freak. If I could afford it I would buy everything organic.

My philosophy class has been interesting, it's definitely like learning another language when you read Plato and Aristotle but I'm learning to appreciate it.

For my Graphic Design class I am currently working on a cumulative semester project. I have chosen to create a flash (a fancy interactive program) website on Recipes from Around the World. I am collecting recipes from international students at PLU and students who have studied abroad for a good amount of time. In order to have photographs for each recipe, I will have to actually make the food. Therefore, I am focusing on quality and not quantity of recipes. I am hoping to split it up between making some at home with Heather (who is a much better cook than me, I prefer the photographing part) and making it for my roommates or Dustin. Hopefully the food turns out picture worthy or I may just be taking detail shots! I'll keep you all updated on how it turns out!

Lastly my ceramics class is a blast! I LOVE hands on projects so I've really enjoyed this class so far. For our first project I made a cookie jar, a spoon holder for by the stove, a fruit bowl, a vase and my favorite...an elephant teapot! I have an in progress photo I've posted at the top. We're learning how to glaze next and I'll post more pictures in a couple weeks that process is completed. Our next project is to make 8 functional cups and 1 artistic cup. It'll be fun to have cups/mugs in my house that I've made!

That's a wrap...I apologize for writing a novel. If you got this far then you deserve an A :) Hope everyone is doing well!

-Holly