Day 212: What's CousCous?

Kev, Marie-Vaunn, and Cheryl

Lamb Tangine

31 mars 2010 (Day 212)
Today I talked to my French lit teacher and found out that he just wants us to write 2 papers in 2 hours the last day of class…woot! And that it can count for the TD (work that gets presided over by a teacher) grade as well, wahoo! We read a really shocking article about New York City and the drug dealing that goes on there. I totally survived a double séance (two classes…aka 3 hours) of French Lit TD. The first half we spent talking about this crazy love theory triangle which implies that we have to have some sort of drama and mediator to be able to like a person/object. It was mind blowingly insane. The second half we spent reading and analyzing passages and it actually went pretty quickly.
Tonight we went out as an institute group to get dinner. I walked off the tram and saw Elder Knapp and Elder Lazarev…again! How insane is that. They were with Jo and Jan, two Chinese girls that they were going to teach. They both seemed really nice and I talked to Jo a little bit. Elder Knapp said he’d invite me to come help teach, but that it would all be in Chinese and that even he wouldn’t understand. When I got to the church I was the only one there besides my teacher. Kevin then showed up. I didn’t want to be on like this awkward sort of date thing with Kevin so I invited Fabienne to come. Fabienne has awesomely red dyed hair and is a man hater. She is older and single and likes expressing her opinion. She actually got into a steamy conversation with the others about FHE and church leaders right by the room where the Elders (by Elders I mean Lazarev…Knapp doesn’t speak Chinese) were teaching. Marie-Vaunn, our institute teacher said that we could invite the two Chinese girls and so I went in and asked. They had something after that but we thankful for the invite. Elder Knapp told me to get them away from the door as well. It took some work, but I did and the argument ended. Cheryl came late and we were discussing where we should go. We found out that Cheryl didn’t’ even know what couscous is so we decided that we needed to get Indian food and have her try cous cous. We packed up in cars (Kevin didn’t want to go alone so Cheryl and I had to go with him, even though he was parking his car back at his house so we’d have to take a bus to get where we were going after that). We met up and ended up going to the first Indian restaurant we saw.
It was an awesome restaurant! We got to sit on Pouffs! It was super cool. I got a deliciously incredibly soft lamb and vegetable tangine. Cheryl got chicken couscous and we shared our plates. They were both incredibly good. While we ate Cheryl and I were kind of awkwardly listening as the others discussed allergies, the middle ages, and their hatred (okay, Fabienne’s) of the British accent. I felt really bad for Cheryl. We got dessert. I was going to get vanilla ice cream with caramel but our nice and attractive waiter recommended this delicious sounding mandarin orange ice cream so I went for it. It was pretty good although I was disappointed that my seven euro dessert only came with one scoop of ice cream. On the plate were orange slices, some berries and kiwi sprinkled in cinnamon with the orange sherbert with some chocolate drizzled on top of it. It was good. Cheryl got some ice cream called Amaretto that was really good. It reminded me of a cherry rainbow float from Pace’s…mm.
Fabienne offered to take me home so I went with her. She parked about a twenty minute walk away from where we ate and so we had to walk there. We actually walked a tram stop past it. I did eventually get home, although it wasn’t until 11:30! Marie-Vaunn was a sweetheart and paid for all of our dinners! It was very nice of her because that would have been a 21 euro meal!