Bonjour encore, et merci pour lire mon blog! (Hello again, and thank you for reading my blog)!

For checking in, here is a photo of the massive lobster that I told you about. If you look closely, you can see the tiny baby lobster in the front left of the tank, and above the huge lobster, compare it to more common ~2 lb lobsters.

Ce homard pèse vingt-deux livres! (This lobster weighs 22 lbs!)

 I met this impressive critter at a lobster shack in New Hampshire after working on a tv show at NASCAR last weekend. I also wanted to write briefly about that, for anyone who is interested.

You might not think that NASCAR is the best cultural immersion situation for a language teacher or student, and you would be mostly very correct. There is certainly a culture around the race tracks, (the track = la piste, if you remember our word of the day!) of locals, drivers and fans. It is an exhilarating experience, being in the center of the stadium and running around all day to keep up with the camera crew. When we broke for lunch, I was surrounded by a driver from Mexico, and a driver from France and their pit crew. It is still, after several years, exciting to me when I run into native speakers and can understand and converse with them. They were gone in a flash, but I learned that this event was not entirely homogenous if you look hard enough. This is true of your day to day lives too. Maine (/New England) is surely not the most diverse place you will ever live or travel, but you truly can find chances to practice French or Spanish, or many other languages if you are open to them, and even more if you seek them out. For any of my car fans in class (la voiture = the car), it was a great race. The driver my crew and I were filming wound up crashing in the last laps, but is entirely ok and in great spirits for the next race - you win some, you lose some!

Looking down on the track from the sky box (the highest point in the stadium!) during the aftermath of a small wreck.

I love working on film, for the creative nature of the business, and all of the great people I get to meet! Going to dinner with them after the shoot and meeting the biggest lobster I had ever heard of or seen was just the cherry on top.

Please let me know if you ever want resources for some good French music, movies, or community events and I would be happy to help you find something that interests you! Or, maybe you'll notice something multilingual in a daily errand or outing...

Until next time,

Miss G