Today I Touched Patrick Dempsey

The original title of this post was going to be "My Afternoon As an MBA Student" but then something more more exciting happened to me.

But this afternoon, I was a French MBA student. It was the second day of our stage and so Ben and I sat in on a negotiations class. I had no idea that there was so much to learn about negotiations - in the 3 hour class I attended today, we only covered Plan B and bluffing. Incredible. But the professor was awesome because he taught the class in half-English and half-French. Before they can graduate, the French students need to pass an English language exam so they said it was helpful to have the class half-and-half but I don't think they meant it - I think they were just accommodating Ben and me but I wasn't going to complain.

After an adventure on the bus and tram, we returned to centre ville where we watched the Parade des Pilotes (the parade of drivers!!!). French parades don't throw out candy (except for Porsche), they throw out papers and lanyards and keychains. But mostly papers with the drivers faces on them.

Porsche Gummies

The 24 Heures du Mans is a car race that lasts for twenty-four hours. It starts at 3pm tomorrow here and will continue until 3pm Sunday. There are three drivers per team, and they switch driving shifts about every 40 minutes. I'm leaving my dorm around 10am tomorrow to get there super early to buy tickets but also to get seats because it will be packed around the start line. So this parade today was to officially commence the race, even though there have been festivities all week long. In this parade, there were all of the drivers of the teams and all sorts of super cool cars. This Maserati was one of my favorites.

At dinner this evening, we were sitting next to some friendly Brits so we asked them about the race. One of the men told us that it was his fifth time coming and its the absolute best. There's such camaraderie between all the competitors that there's just no other sporting event like it.

Which brings me to Patrick Dempsey. He is one of the drivers on a team so he was in the parade today, which everyone (specifically me) was so excited about. He was definitely one of the most popular, if not the most popular drivers in the parade. He got out of his car to take pictures some people, but when he passed us, he was back in his car. We had our hands out and he was waving so he reached out and for a full half second, WE WERE HOLDING HANDS WITH PATRICK DEMPSEY. I like to think that it helped that he knew we were American because 1) we were loud and 2) I was yelling "Patrick" without an accent. Today was magical and Patrick Dempsey is a very nice person.