LOL

So after arriving back to the ship after spending the day in Paris, I
decided to spend the next day in LeHavre, the small town where our ship was ported. I didn't have very many plans; I just needed to find a post office for stamps, find wifi to Skype my boyfriend, and find a library for a class assignment. However, these few and seemingly boring plans caused the most "LOL's" of my entire voyage so far. Here's the stories:

Since I can't read a map to save my life, I decided I would have to ask someone (in French) for verbal directions to the post office. After analyzing my prey, I pounced upon two old ladies who looked kind enough to help me and kind enough not to make fun of my horrible French. I said hello, introduced myself, apologized for bothering them, and then proceeded to ask them where I could find the post office. The only problem was, I couldn't remember the French word for post office. If you know any French, you're probably dying of laughter right now because post office is an extremely easy word to remember in French (Bureau de Poste). But nevertheless, I couldn't remember it, and therefore had to pull out my postcards and point to the place where the stamp would go,
hoping they would understand. Thank goodness one of the ladies knew exactly what I meant, so she fired off directions in rapid French with a few arm gestures towards the streets. I acted like I understood everything she had said and walked off with my friend in the direction of my best guess. We were only walking for about 2 minutes when I hear yelling and someone running behind me. It turned out it was one of old ladies, running after me in her head covering, long skirt, and heels, shouting in French the whole way. When we were reunited she grabbed my arm and proceeded to lead me to the post office...or so I thought. She actually led me to a little souvenir shop that was selling postcards, because that's what she thought I needed, not stamps. Neither myself or my friend Sarah had the heart to break it to her that we weren't looking for anymore postcards. Lol.

After eventually finding the post office, I decided to go find the
"best" wifi. I had heard that this amazing wifi was in...the
McDonald's. So, not only did I walk all the way across the town for
McDonald's, I walked all this way just for wifi and a hot chocolate. It didn't take me very long to realize that no one in McDonald's spoke very much English, and after about 5 minutes of miming and pointing to what I thought was the hot chocolate on the menu, I walked away with a cup of hot milk, 2 sugar packets, and a packet that said "Banana." I was quite disappointed until I opened the banana packet and realized it was chocolate mix! Turns out that hot chocolate is called "Banana" in France and each customer has to mix their own!

But the McDonald's stories don't end there. Halfway during my Skype conversation, I needed to use the bathroom. Public bathrooms in France are very different than the ones back home. Most public bathrooms require a code to get into, including this one. So, I had to ask the cashier for the bathroom code to unlock the door. However, when I tried to get out of the bathroom, the door wouldn't open! I tried almost everything and had to resort to just panicking and banging on the door hoping someone would hear me. I'm a little embarrassed to say this lasted about 5 minutes longer than it should have, since there was a button right next to the door that when pressed, would allow the door to swing back open. Oops.

And finally, in the smallest and least busiest town I've been to while on Semester at Sea, I almost became road kill. It was raining pretty heavily, so my friend Sarah decided we should just cross the road without a crosswalk so we could get out of the rain and the wind quickly. Neither of us noticed that the road we were crossing looped around behind a tree, so when the car came around the curve, we were already in the middle of the road. But don't worry, I'm clearly still alive since I'm writing this blog. But I don't think I will be crossing roads without crosswalks for a long, long time.

So, I hope my LeHavre stories made you "LOL" as much as I did! Stay tuned for all the upcoming stories about my time in Ireland!

P.S. I'm sorry there are no pictures for this post. For some reason, I
barely took any pictures while in LeHavre, and none are relevant to this post.