Shopping with French People!

Thursday, August 7

So today at UBP, we had a short discussion about our insurance.  We had to subscribe to this insurance company in order to come here, but it's pretty good. OSDE offers 100% coverage for us, so we're covered. Then we chose the classes we could take.  We could take up to six. I'm probably going to do four. The other two I want have an additional cost, so I probably won't take them.

After all of that, Yasmin, Elsa, Valentin, Audrey, Hiem, and I decided to meet up a little later at the mall. The Dinosaurio is of walking distance from my house, so I told them to let me know when they were planning on coming. When they told me they were on their way, I left home and started walking towards it.  It seems I got there first, because I got to the mall, and since we didn't set a meeting spot, I looked around the entire mall and didn't find them. So I got a Sprite at Subway (cheapest deal) and sat in the food court to wait.

While the malls in Birmingham tend to have department stores as the mall's anchor, like Belk or Macy's, this mall's central store was a supermarket... like Publix.

Anyway, I finally saw them at some cell phone kiosks near the food court, so I joined them.  Some of them were looking for a phone, so Valentin and I sat down and chatted until they were done.  When they finished, we went to a photo shop that took our photos for our visas. We had to wait an hour 20 minutes for the photos to be ready, so we walked around the mall and window shopped. Some of the girls were really attracted to the candy store. They also noticed the shoes and commented on how high the heels were. Valentin was also into shoes, and then we went into the grocery store.  They were looking for agendas, but there weren't any. So then we all went into the SONY store to look at the newest technological innovations. We ended up back in the food court, and when it was time, we went back to the photo place.  We picked up our photos and parted ways.  Elsa walked home, I walked home (in the other direction), and the others walked to the bus stop on Rafael Nuñez (so we walked together for a little bit). It was fun.  I hope we go out again soon. (Sorry no pictures this time.)