Easter break, and back to school again

Hello everyone!  Today I've got good news and bad news.  Let's start with the bad news, because the good news is far more interesting and this way you can all be looking forward to that while I tell you about my bad luck.  For me it seems like a very big difference into home (meaning my little town of 300 people) and my host town (being a city of 50,000 plus suburbs).  At home, I don't own a bike lock and I've never locked my bike to anything, ever.  Here, I do have a bike lock, and I never leave my bike anywhere without being attached.  However, this is not enough.  Can you guess where I'm going with this?  Yes, my (or should I say my host brother's) bike was stolen yesterday.  I left it by a community building, the same as nearly every morning for the last 8 months, but when I came back all I found was a broken lock on the ground next to the bike rack.  It's rather upsetting.
 
And now for the good news:  I once again had a two week vacation from school!  The Easter break was the last one, until I get out of French high school for good June 10th.  The first week, I went out with friends and generally took it easy.  With some of my friends, we had an American party.  It was supposed to be a superbowl party, but since we missed the superbowl by a few months, we watched the Longest Yard instead.  We also ate hamburgers with little toothpick flags in them and had macaroni casserole and American desserts.  Note: Macaroni casserole doesn't work all that well without corn casserole.  It's edible, but the noodles don't really get cooked..  I also celebrated Easter!  I went to church, and a family invited me over to eat with them so I wouldn't be alone all afternoon (my host family had tennis).  It turned into a really good day. 

For the second week of vacation, I went to the French Riviera with my host family.  We drove down, and it took about 5 hours through the beautiful French countryside.  I was so tired that I didn't get to enjoy it very much though!  We were in a resort called Belambra, which had activities during the day and at night for my host sister and I.  They were pretty fun usually, and we had a good time with the other teenagers that we met.  One of the morning activities was kapoeira, a Brazilian martial art, and it was really fun.  Another morning there was volleyball, and at the end, we played a game:  A boy and I against everyone else (7 or 8 including the adult leader) and my team won!  One night there was karaoke, and we sung a little.  I learned some new French songs!  There was a group of German students there and some of them sang with us.  It was cool.  Vacation wasn't just about staying in the resort:  we also went visiting!  We went to Cannes (a week before the Film Festival!), Menton, Nice, Grasse (world capital of perfume), Biot (glass workshops), and St. Paul de Vence.  I'm having trouble getting my pictures online, but don't worry, you'll see them at some point!
 
This weekend, I had my last YFU weekend.  It was awesome, as usual!  Saturday we did a 'via ferrata', which means 'railroad' in Italian.  It's kind of like rock climbing, except we're always attached to iron cables that are strung along the cliffs.  It was pretty scary at times, but I really liked the challenge of it.  That night we ate spaghetti, which I haven't had in a very long time, so it was delicious!  The next morning we had sessions of talking about what we'll miss, how to say good bye to our new lives in France, and how to go about going back.  Once again we all brought desserts from our country.  It's funny: at the first reunion, EVERYONE had a nice traditional dessert; at the second one, a few people forgot; and at this one only about half of us had a dessert.  I brought peanut butter cookies.  I had to go to two different stores to find the peanut butter!  The cookies turned out great though and they were well-received by all the hungry étrangers! 
 
That's all for now, talk to you soon!