It is officially spring in France, and a great time to go hiking (faire la randonée). Often our team has formal sorties (outings) to go skiing, hiking or head to the beach. This time around we were more informal and each invited a couple friends to join us for a hike up a mountain in a nearby village. 

We explored a couple caves thanks to the flashlight app on Assad's iPhone. Next time, I will remember my headlamp!

Spring turned to "fall" for this part of our hike in the woods. Don't we look like a fun bunch?!

The beauty of this view couldn't be captured in a photo.

What? You mean we have to walk back down the mountain too? According to Michael, more people die on the way down than the way up (don't worry, we all made it back down alive).

One thing I am appreciating about living in France is actually enjoying spring. I forget sometimes how much hope spring brings. 

Toucan flying. Fish marching band. Blown-up whale spouting confetti. People wearing boxes. Steel drums. DJs. Cotton candy costume. Clown wigs. Man dancing with a broom. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle masks. 

These were some of the sights and sounds of Carnaval in Toulouse -- a tradition that has been revived here after an extended hiatus. 

Here's a slideshow of some photos and videos that I took during the parade. Enjoy!

Easter is one of my favorite holidays. Obviously, the resurrection of Jesus Christ is worth celebrating. I love singing Easter hymns. I love saying, "He is risen." "He is risen indeed," (a tradition I learned from my dad). I also love Easter eggs. 

My roommate Lucy and I both had dreams of dying Easter eggs. However, we had two major obstacles:
1. All eggs in France are brown.
2. They don't sell food coloring in France.

A Google search revealed that eggs could be colored using natural ingredients and that eggs could even be "whitened" by soaking them in vinegar. Mission possible?

It all started so hopefully as the eggs boiled. I found an article/recipe that claimed to help me make the perfect hard-boiled egg. The author claimed, "I have never overcooked an egg using this method." This should have been the first warning of imminent disaster.

Later, we prepared the dyes. We used carrots and yellow onion peels, beet juice, paprika with chile powder, black tea and red wine mixed with water and a little vinegar. The water changed colors, so that also seemed promising.

Tina and Binia went and picked some flowers, and Lucy took out some old pantyhose, so that we could use them as a net to hold the flowers on the eggs and make pretty patterns. I took out some rubber bands and scotch tape to make designs. All was well in egg dying for the moment.

Soaking an egg in vinegar did in fact take a layer of something off the shell of the egg. Egg exfoliation? (see photo on right).

After getting its shell brushed (yes, that is Lucy with a tootbrush), the eggs looked a bit better. I used rubber bands to keep part of the egg its natural color.

It turns out that all of our dyes were "exfoliating," so we took to unconventional decorating with pantyhose, flowers and markers. Dreams of colorful eggs were shattered!

Just when we thought it couldn't get any worse, Lucy dropped one of the eggs...and it wasn't even cooked. As much as I would like to blame the "perfect hard-boiled egg" article, it did have some truth in advertising -- the eggs were definitely not overcooked!

To bring everything full circle, the very heavy lid that I used to cover the boiling eggs ended up falling on Lucy's foot when she tried to put it away on a high shelf. What a catastrophic day!

Our failure took its toll, but we kept our joy throughout it all and had quite the ab workout from all the laughter. If you want a few more good laughs, check out the photo gallery of the rest of our failed attempts to amend a not-so-eggcellent experiment. Happy Easter!