Je suis retardataire

That word serves a double-purpose in this post. Its actual meaning is “latecomer,” but it also looks like the American word “retard,” which is kind of how I felt.

The story is that I was late for dinner the second Tuesday in a row (I have dinner with my host family Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday), which my professor was sure to remind me is a HUGE faux pas. In other words, don’t do it. And to have done it twice in a row, the second time being completely late for dinner, making my host mom make up a plate for me made me feel pretty bad.

What happened is that we missed our stop on the way home from Versailles (it was just me and two other girls because most of the group had already left and the rest were still at the Château), and we missed the next one that would tell us where we were. I’m pretty sure that I saw all of the station names before those two and EVERY single one afterwards, but because I was looking at our map wrong, I thought we were still okay. Finally after being on the metro for almost an hour and having already gone through Paris and were now in a sketch part of town, we realized that something was terribly wrong. We left the chateau at 5:30 and should have been back in Paris by 6:00, meaning I should have been home by 6:45. I didn’t get home until 9:00.

I felt bad mostly because it was such a stupid mistake. We were just doing homework, so why didn’t I just glance up? Why did it takes us SO long to realize that we had gone much too far? Why was I so adamant that we were going the right direction (probably because I knew we were on the right train and I hadn’t seen our stop yet—once again, retardataire)?

In other news, I was seriously craving some OneRepublic, so I looked up one of their songs and SURPRISE! It was filmed in Paris, and I was able to recognize some of the places that were filmed (including the opening scene building, which I have already showed you—Sacré Cœur).