Poetry, the cold, and some tasty dinner!

Today was a lovely sunny day, if not rather chilly. We were up bright and early for our history class, where we learned even more about the ever-famous Charles DeGaulle. Today, our teacher described his relationship with the French people as that of an amorous relationship... filled with a honeymoon (lune de miel!) stage, a divorce, and a permanent rupture. It was an interesting analogy. He was a true nationalist, that is for sure!
After class, we booked it back to the campus for a part of our literature class. We had an hour taken off of the class this evening so that we could go to a poetry reading by one of the poets we are going to study. Well, I have never been to a poetry reading before... and you all know how I feel about "weird" expressions of art (the play in November)... so let's just say it was interesting. The woman was 55 years old and looked awesome for her age, except that her hair was unreal... it was like a nest. More on that later. Well, first she told a story and literally none of us were able to follow her. She was explaining something she had done with her book, a kind of key code with colours and numbers... we were lost. Then she read an excerpt from a poem and once again we were completely lost. Even in English, when reading poetry often I have to analyse a text for quite a while before I can understand it. Today, I had no text to regard and it was in French. And since we had no text, the author did weird movements to represent different punctuation... for example, she tapped her hair stick on the table for a period, raised her eyebrow for a comma, and did a wiggle for a question mark. At the end, she played some Spanish song and threw uncooked spaghetti noodles on the ground. Some stuck in her hair nest. We were confused.
The one positive thing I can say about the experience is that she was very much passionate about her poetry, that was evident. And you could tell that there was deeper meaning behind the poems. I would love to figure them out sometime...
Anyways. not much to say about the afternoon... so I'll skip on to dinner.

I know that this might look gross, but it was actually delicious! I have recently fallen in love with brussels sprouts... like seriously, they are delicious. So I tried out a recipe for warm winter chickpeas from my favourite food blog. (link http://www.howsweeteats.com/2011/12/warm-winter-chickpeas/) I modified the recipe slightly; I used olive oil instead of butter, and not as much. I also cooked the bacon, blotted the pan of the grease, but used the same pan for the brussels sprouts, mushrooms, and chickpeas to keep the bacon flavour. I also didn't have nutmeg, so I used cinnamon and it was surprisingly delicious. I also didn't have the nuts, but it was fine without. Finally, I cooked some quinoa to go with it, to get more protein! It turned out delicious.
Have a great evening!