Je suis tellement heureuse

I am in heaven, just had the most amazing 5 hours ever.

Too tired for real sentences, but here are pictures....
--took walk around village
--picked up Chan with Camille
--Camille took us on a tour of the countryside
--went to Camille's friend's estate, where her horse is right now, and hung out with the horses
--made amazingly delicious dinner--vegetable soup, vegetable omelette, rubharb tarte, apple and rhubarb compôte--entirely from things we picked that morning from the garden
--conversed and joked around almost entirely in French, and I didn't end up with a headache!
--all the while Chan was running around the bungalow, yelling, 'C'est quuuuuuoooiiiiiii?' It's her favorite sentence, and she sounds like an angel.

We have a new game to play during dinner: I try to say something, struggle to describe the word while the others listen attentively with their hands folded, and the first person to come up with the word I'm looking for wins. It's a lot of fun, and not lame, really.......or maybe it's the general excess of happiness and contentment in the air here....

Green is 'vert', and preservative is 'conservateur'

It's Monday afternoon here in Quemeneven, and we've finished working for the day. This morning, we worked in the vegetable garden--weeding, plowing, planting, watering. I'm completely exhausted from both the work (first time I've worked in a garden) and from struggling to understand a foreign language for the past 5 or 6 hours, but I've never been this happily exhausted.

Chez Boderiou, there are 5 adults and la petite Chan. The Boderiou adults are Olivier and Camille, and Chan is their angelic 2 years old daughter. Then there are the three woofeuses: a couple, Marie and Justine, and me. Marie and Justine are 100% French. They've been, and are, biking around the country--2000 km so far and no plans to stop anytime soon. We all get along almost surprisingly well, considering the fact that I find communicating with them completely exhausting (there have a lot of 'essaie d'expliquer!' from the others and a lot of sighs from me). It makes for a pretty hiliarious time though. While we were preparing lunch today, Camille mentioned how great it is that we know absolutely everything that goes into our food (I'm on an organic farm), and I agreed, saying that it tastes really good and there aren't preservatives or anything. Except. 'Le préseratif' means 'condom' and not 'preservative', as I thought. A mistake I will never make again.

I have to go soon. Marie came in a while ago and invited me to play tennis with her and Justine, and it's taken me almost an hour to type up this post (French keyboards are pretty darned different from American keyboards). But like most things right now, it takes a while but it happens, et ça marche bien.

La vie en rose, et verte, et rouge, et bleu, et jaune

I am blogging from chez Boderiou--the farm of my host family in a tiny tiny little 'town' in Bretagne. I'm too tired to say too much right now, but I'm pretty much in paradise. Communication is a little difficult because the grown-ups here don't speak much English, I don't speak much French, and the little bèbè doesn't speak much of anything, but this family is unbelievably sweet, everything is mind-bogglingly beautiful, and I am bursting with happiness. I really can't imagine how things can get better, but I've only been here a few hours...we'll see what happens tomorrow!