Coffee and Halloween

Well, so much for 35 hours a week! As I mentioned, this week was budget review week which involved lots of meetings and, for my part, lots of confusion. The meetings were done by Wednesday which left the rest of the week to do other work. Part of my work, when not attempting to write minutes, involves communicating information about the various IS projects currently being done. I have to write status reports and newsletters and things, so obviously I have to ask people for information. This means that at times I have very little to do because I'm waiting for information from people, waiting for reports to be validated, waiting for answers to questions.....
And this brings us to Friday. I had arranged to meet with the guy training me (who has pretty much finished I think) so I asked him a few questions but otherwise he, the other stagiare and I drank coffee and chatted most of the morning. At about 11:40 we went for lunch. If you go before 12:00 you get a free coffee so we had lunch, got our free coffee and then went for a walk. The afternoon was spent doing some work (to be honest there wasn't much I could do as I'm waiting for things, I'm not just lazy or Parisian) but I left at about 4:00 as there was nothing left to do and I'd arrived early and left late for the rest of the week.
Friday night I went to the guy down the corridor's flat where he had a few English people round. We had a few beers (we've all been to Auchan (the supermarket) where they've got an offer on Kronenbourg 1664: 24 bottles for under €€9!) and chatted.

Last night was Halloween. Ok, it's a bit early but Friday night I was talking to the other intern from work online (I'll call her M for brevity's sake as I don't want to use people's real names here) and she invited me to a kidsHalloweenn party. She used to babysit for some kids and their current au pair, another friend (ex au pair I think) and M were having an earlyHalloweenn party. It seemed like it might be fun and I thought I'd better get to know some French people my own age rather than just hang out with English people all the time. M's 2 friends are both German (so I'll call them G1 and G2) and the kids speak French and German. This made it a little confusing as it sometimes took a moment to work out whether they were speaking German or whether I had just forgotten all theFrenchh I know. Anyhow, we played hide and seek in the dark, musical chairs and chatted a bit. At about 11 M, G1 and I left (G2 is the au pair) to go to a bar. G1 had arranged to meet some people near the Arc de Triomphe.
M knew a place called the Sir Winston (just off from the Champs Elysee) which looked quite good but was very full. It's an option for next time I go out though. We went on to another bar though on the Champs Elysee about 150-200 metres from the Arc de Triomphe. It was a nice bar, quite trendy and nowhere near as expensive as I thought it would be. We had a few drinks and in the end only one of G1's friends joined us.
It was a pretty good night, if a little out of the ordinary. I'm going to try and do more with the French people I know because they're helpful when it comes to learning the language and I get a lot more practice than at work.

Ok, time to finish now. It's Sunday which means washing day...