The last of May

And the spring birthday spree continues! Helena's birthday was on Sunday, but because I had to work that day we decided to have full-out birthday festivities on Saturday instead. It's only fair that we each get a fake birthday, after all. What began as a plan to go bowling and get a drink at our cafe turned into essentially a Rambouillet bar crawl. When scheduling issues prevented us from pursuing our bowling plan, Helena, Janelle, Aimee, and I wound up at our cafe, ordering a fondant au chocolat, complete with birthday candle, behind Helena's back. Lassie gave us the dessert on the house, and he and the boys started (/attempted) to sing "Happy Birthday" when they brought it out! It was hysterical. Funny Guy, wanting to chip in for the birthday celebration, brought Helena a little mug of whipped cream with a spoon, which she then purposely smeared across her mouth. Upon seeing this lovely new Helena, Lassie burst out laughing, brought us a huge stack of napkins, and proceeded to wipe Helena's mouth for her! As the evening wore on, the boys got more and more into our birthday celebration. Alex brought out a lei for Helena to wear, and Old Guy bought us a round of drinks. Funny Guy put on some "dance music," and we just had to request the YMCA. Yes. We got up and did the YMCA at our cafe. Yes. Everyone was watching. Haha we had a great time, and the waiters did, too.

After our extensive cafe celebration, the girls and I went over to chic Gloss for a cocktail, walked around Rambouillet, stopped at another bar, ran into Olive AND New Guy, and then finished up at Gordon's Pub where we ran into Alex from our cafe! We had quite a fun day/night. Helena got the most fun birthday celebration of us all!

As we all speak English as our first language but all come from different English-speaking countries, the girls and I often point out differences in our diction. Here are a few of our discoveries.

American versus British English:

bangs -- a fringe
urinal -- pronounced "ur-EYE-nal"
aluminum -- pronounced "al-oo-MIN-yum"
nike -- pronounced with one syllable, rhyming with "hike"
adidas -- pronounced "ADD-ee-dass"
movie theater -- cinema
movie -- film
sweater -- jumper
soda/coke -- fizzy drink
napkin -- serviette

New Zealanders and the English have many language similarities, as do the Canadians and Americans, though we've found some crossovers as well. For example, C, E, and A say "flip flops" whereas in NZ they call the shoes "thongs." In both C and NZ, they call what Americans call a "zipline" a "flying fox." Only people from Saskatchewan (cough cough, Janelle) refer to a hoodie as a "bunnyhug" from what I can tell. Ha. I'm sure there are more significant differences, but these are some of the words about which we constantly harp on each other :)

On Sunday the parents were in Paris watching the French Open, so I brought the kids to their horse jumping competition! They each rode twice, and they both did a fantastic job with no mistakes! I took a few pictures and filmed them so that their parents could watch. It was exciting and they were both really pleased with themselves - especially Emmanuelle who tied for third place while riding her favorite pony, Flamme.

Six weeks from today and I'll be flying home! Miss you all :)