I broke the internet.

Yeah, so if it wasn't working for you about two hours ago, that was me. In my ceaseless efforts to configure the house wifi to my computer (or the other way around), I unwitting did something awful last night and the box went dead. No more blinking red lights, no more recognition of ethernet, nothing. My host father (a very jolly Frenchman) may have actually growled at me. Like, I told him what I had done (so not my fault), he proceeded to go about remedying the problem, and then this guttural sound rumbled at me from the next room. It sounded a lot like, "But what did you do Anne?!" (In not so jolly French.)

In the end, he just exchanged the box for a new one, asked dude at the store how I should configure my computer, and abracadabra! I have wifi. So, the moral of the story is, it was totally worth it break the Orange Livebox. Plus I paid so much penance yesterday by being dupped into a five-hour lunch.

Yes. Five hours. My host mom was all like, "Oh, Anne, we are going to eat lunch a friend's house on Sunday. Do you want to come?" and I was all like, "Oh yeah, sure, I love lunch, it's a delicious, short meal!" Slight dramatization. So we (host mom, dad, sis, bro) get there, and there is a young husband and wife and a small child. The kids all play and the men and women talk to each other respectively. I sit at the end of the counter (where we are eating appetizers, round one of meal) and stare dully at the food. At a certain point, the husband and wife realize I speak French and ask me complicated questions about the subprime housing crisis. Fun.

So, an hour and a half later, we start the real meal. We eat meat, rice, bread. Dude of the house asks me if Walmart is really open 24 hours. I say I think so, but I don't like them because of their sexist hiring policies and union bans. Then we have cheese/salad round. Omg, I love French cheese. Like, I might die of 400 clogged arteries in France, but I will die so happy. Anyhow, I thought we were done. I was just biding my time. And thus we rolled into hour four.

Coffee and desert was proposed and then served. Delicious banana cake. No objections. Surely we were done. No. No no no. This is the part where we go outside and admire the yard and the countryside for an hour while the kids play on the swingset! Well, not quite an hour, but we got there at 12:15 and finally left at 5:30. Sunday Lunch: my first lesson in French culture.

So we finally went home after a (thankfully brief, only 30 minute) stop at host father's sister's house. And then I broke the internet. So maybe it wasn't pennance. Maybe it was revenge.