on a lighter note...

Through all my friends' troubles (and more have come rolling in the the past two days), I have the wonderful levity of reading my daughter's blog writings, when she gets around to it.  Here is the delightful post I found  there when I got up this morning (Warning:  nudity is involved...):

So the end of the semester is drawing to a close and if you're on the Dijon program that means one thing: even more free dinners than usual. Two days ago was our banquet with the host families and tonight was our last group dinner (Monday will be the dinner with the teachers). The restaurant that was picked for tonight was Luna-Sol, a Mexican/Spanish restaurant that some of the group members had gone to before.

Luna-Sol was quite the experience, to say the least. First of all, don't expect to find great, authentic Mexican food in France. I think that one is obvious enough, but another "Mexican" restaurant we had gone to had at let had decent, Mexican-esque food (despite the fact that it was called "Cheyenne" and had a Native American style theme, neither of which has ANYTHING to do with Mexico, but okay). This one didn't seem to know what Mexican was if a taco had come along and bit it. I ordered the "Viva Mexico" platter, six small bowls that consisted of: salad (lettuce, tomatoes, and pieces of hardboiled egg), two little eggrolls with spicy filling, 3 tiny onion rings, guacamole with four (!) chips, chicken kebob and coleslaw. That is just all over the map right there. At least they had the right idea with the guacamole.

And then, THEN came the large table next to us filled with young men and women (mainly men) in their twenties who were at the restaurant for a birthday celebration. They got wasted. WASTED. Which didn't help the fact that the guys were pretty sketch to begin with. It was cool that they kept singing drinking songs, which are cheerful chants with lots of clapping and table slapping (why don't we have drinking songs in the States? We tried to compete in the musical arena and the only thing we came up with was "Build Me Up Buttercup" [that 60's song, "Why do you build me up (build me up) Buttercup, baby/Just to let me down (let me down) and mess me around/etc"] and "O Canada" [which for some reason two people in the group knew]).

What was NOT cool was when they started to get even drunker and sketchier and started wandering over to our table and chatting up the friendliest of the girls. The flirty girls in the group talked back to them (though no one was actually interested in the guys and the girls kept the line drawn at talking), and the rest of us enjoyed our margharitas and danced in our seats to the music. Then, oh then it all just went BAD. Our group had gone into a small empty side room to dance among ourselves (because this group likes to dance) but you could still see into the main room where the birthday group was. And around midnight when some of us were thinking about leaving we looked into the main room and some of the guys were dancing on the tables STRIPPING. And this being France and them being smashed they stripped ALL the way down. This was a fairly liberal, fun-atmosphere restaurant (they never tried to quiet down the drinking songs or stop the dancing) but they had NAKED MEN ON THE TABLES DANCING!!!! And they didn't try to stop them. That was about the time I left. It was a bit of a guantlet getting out because just when the first two guys had put their pants back on and I thought the coast was clear and tried to make a run for it (along with a couple other girls) ANOTHER guy got naked. And, let me just add, these were not attractive men when their clothes were ON.

Ah, Eurotrash. How I will not miss you, even if you do give me memorable experiences.