Last Raclette Dinner for L'Auberge Bretonne

L’Auberge Bretonne, as my roommates and I have coined our little international community, had our last raclette dinner together on Friday night to say goodbye to the Russian assistant. We toasted with Breton cider and then ate raclette with sautéed potatoes, mushrooms, proscuitto, and French ham. I also used this as an occasion to give my roommates little scrapbooks that I’ve been working on for them the past couple of weeks. I selected and developed my favorite pictures from the last 6 months together (not an easy task if you know how many pictures I take!), and arranged them in small scrapbooks with different quotes, lyrics, brochures, local magazine cutouts, etc … personalized for each person. I think they really enjoyed them, and it was fun looking through them all, laughing about all of our random memories from the year. Unfortunately, we were soon interrupted by yet another unfriendly visit from the dorm supervisor. It was 10pm on a Friday night, and there were 8 of us sitting at our kitchen table

with a bottle of wine and few beer bottles. He yelled at us for drinking alcohol on the premises, etc. It’s just a bit hard to take him seriously when we’re a group of responsible adults (everyone well above the drinking age) enjoying our last meal together with some drinks. And puhlease we were looking at scrapbooks at the time … I don’t think it gets much less “party atmosphere” than that! Anyway, my camera was sitting at the table when he busted in, so I sneakily turned on the video mode to capture the confrontation, hehe. We’ve of course watched it several times … basically the Italian assistant is left to defend himself after the man unfairly singled him out, another assistant casually ignores him & continues to flip through a scrapbook, another actually continues to drink her glass of wine, and the rest of us each try to put in our two-cents, defending ourselves in French. It’s hilraious … I tried to upload it but couldn't due to length. Aside from this interruption, we had a great night together celebrating the bonds that we’ve made over the past 6 months. It’s hard to say goodbye to people after spending so much time together, adapting to a new environment together, and sharing so many new experiences.

Here are some pages from the little scrapbooks I made :)