The Day in which I Volunteered to be Tortured

Salut! This post is going to start out with some knitting lingo, just as a heads-up for those of you who will have no idea what I'm talking about, not care, or both (but read it anyway because it's so cool!). Today was my first day in the knit shop "working" on my ICRP. The owner of the shop (known henceforth as 'Madame') had a sheet of English-French knitting abbreviations that she had printed for me to help with my learning and communication. I spent the following hour looking through Rowan magazines (she has them all the way back! At least, I looked through number 7 and she had quite a few older looking ones) and translating patterns. I also did some of my own studying by looking through a book of knitting techniques that had chapters on yarns and needles and stitching. We chatted a bit about knitting: projects I've done, how long I've been knitting/learning French and so on. At one point Madame was trouble-shooting a coworker's project that had too many stitches and I had to sit on my hands to keep from jumping in and trying to help with broken French-knitting. I was invited to come early on Saturday to hang out before the class that I'll sit in on starts. I'm going to learn to crochet!

The entry way in the Council
of Europe building.

This afternoon, us K kids had a field trip to the fancy building across the street from my house known as the Council of Europe. To those who do not know what the Council of Europe does, shame on you! I've known all about it since we had a class on it... last week. In truth, the CoE is a collaborative board with members from 47 countries in Europe (the 27 that are members of the European Union and 20 others) and was created to share and think up ways for strong democracies to thrive in the countries of Europe. It has more recently become, to quote the member of the CoE who spoke to us today, "the European guard-dog from human rights". During our visit, we were able to sit in on a debate and voting on the topic of child abuse in Europe and the start of a session on the Ukrainian governmental system.

Before we sat in on the council, we listened to a member of the staff explain the history of the CoE and some of the reasons for its creation. At one point, she asked for a volunteer to help her demonstrate some of the types of punishment that had been deemed illegal by the council at one point in history. Since no one was offering to go up, I volunteered and Zena took my camera and filmed a bit.
It started out with a skit where I'm Irish and was being accused of a wrongdoing. I denied having anything to do with it, and my torture ensued. ;)
Not much planned for the rest of this week. Just classes as scheduled and whatnot. Hopefully something fun and exciting will happen so I'll have an entertaining post for you all. À plus!