Vacances de Carnaval

Hello everyone

I'm writing my blog post a few days early, since tomorrow is the first day of a week-long vacation and I will be leaving to go to Valais, a very mountainous canton in the south of Switzerland. Béatrice and Bérnard are going to drive us to the village we're staying in, but only Nicolas, Andréanne, and I are staying. The original plan was that we'd all go skiing since the runs are pretty amazing there but since I sprained my ankle I can't ski.

My friend Margaux from school, knowing it would be pretty boring to stay in a little ski village and not ski while the others did, very nicely invited me to stay with her family for the week.. I decided to do a compromise since I really do want to go up to the mountains to hang out with Nicolas and Andréanne (not to mention enjoy the hot baths that the area is also known for) but I really want to hang out with Margaux too and I knew I would get quite bored in Valais for a week. So what I am going to do is go to the mountains with my host family tomorrow but leave on Wednesday, taking a bus and two trains to get back to my village... I love Swiss public transportation! Then Wednesday night I will go over to Margaux's and stay there until the end of the vacation. She told me that we might go to IKEA with her mom and aunt.. I am quite thrilled by this prospect.

So, anyway, I should probably tell you all a little bit about my week.. Today (not Saturday, as I think I wrote before) is my host brother's birthday. Yesterday I made him chocolate chip cookies as a present since he really liked them when I made them before and I got the feeling he would have liked to eat them all himself. Yesterday Tata and José came over with a forêt noir cake which we ate after dinner, along with a lingonberry tart that Béatrice made (it took me the longest time for me to remember the word lingonberry.. apparently an IKEA trip is overdue!)

Also, this week, my host sister Andréanne went to the doctor and found out she has mono after her lymph nodes swelled (I hope that's not supposed to be "swoll"? Is "swoll" a word?) a ridiculous amount. That certainly explains a lot since she has been pretty lethargic lately. She'll probably still do snowboarding, but not to the extent she would if she wasn't sick, so I may have a companion to accompany me to the baths on vacation.

School was pretty boring this week.. right before a vacation, it's always like that. In math we started a new unit about vectors which is something that, again, I more or less already covered (in math I usually have already learned all the concepts and ideas but they're written differently so I have to get used to that.) In history we have been learning about the reform, and now the counter-reform, which is sort of interesting but complicated too. I got two tests back this week, in chemistry and math, and got a 4.7 on both of them, so that is nice. And today I had a two hour chemistry lab where among other things, we heated solid iodine in a closed container which turned into a bright purple gas and then that deposited crystals when the gas was cold.. it was pretty cool.

Sorry I can't make this longer, but I am really really tired and ready to go to bed, since tomorrow we'll be getting all our stuff together and then leaving to go to Valais. I probably won't be on the computer much since I'll be in the mountains with no internet and then after that staying at Margaux's, so I promise to write all about my vacation after it's all said and done.

Happy Carnaval!