I wouldn’t blame you for thinking I’d abandoned you. My posts last August came to an abrupt halt when I jumped on a plane for France. I was going to tell you about it; really I was. It was supposed to be seamless. I even loaded a bunch of photos and story ideas for you on my iPad, and downloaded the WordPress app as soon as I reached civilization. But it never worked. Every time I started WordPress, my iPad would crash and I’d be staring at my last-played Sudoku game instead.

Not that I had a lot of time to spare, anyway. I spent the first week traveling around northeastern France, Belgium & Luxembourg with a grad school comrade (we did 6 cities in 7 days, now that’s the spirit!), the second week barging the Canal du Midi with Sébastien and two of our new friends from here, and the next four weeks attending a French immersion school near Nice. It was all pretty fantastic! School was intense — about 60 students, 8.5 hours a day, 5 days a week, 4 weeks. Even breakfasts and lunches were supervised so that we spoke nothing but French. One Euro penalty if we were caught speaking English. Evenings and weekends were free, except for occasional events sponsored by the school, for exploration and fantastic meals. On the Riviera, no less! The whole experience was wonderful. But, by the time I got back home and recovered from a nasty chest cold courtesy of that hacking guy sitting next to me on the plane, all the network information had (of course) changed. Things that used to work no longer did. And it took time to set up my new MacBook Air (did I mention my PC had crashed before I left?), though I am grateful for this gift from my husband and his last business trip to the States. So (and this is starting to sound familiar), I had to find other ways to busy myself. Less technology-dependent ways, like cooking, teaching, studying French. It is amazing how quickly a day goes by when you’re not sitting at an office or in heavy traffic.

So, it feels good to finally be posting something again. There’s so much to talk about… most notably Congo’s presidential elections happening right now! I will post as much as I can in the next few days. But I have to be honest… we’re about to go through another dry spell, you and I. On Friday we’re leaving for our Christmas vacation!