The Francophone Files

Des mots intellegents...

2008-06-03T21:29:00.003-04:00

"Moi je trouve que c'est une chance d'avoir deux visions du monde, même si des fois c'est insupportable, parce qu'on a pas une place. Je suis sur deux chaises tout le temps, je suis en flottement tout le temps. "
- Marjane Satrapi

2008-05-22T20:00:00.000-04:00

Dear France,

First let me just start this off by saying that I hope that we'll always be friends. And that what we've shared together... it's been really great. You'll always have a special place in my heart.

That being said, I think we both know that it's time for us to go our separate ways.

It's not you. It's me.

Sincerely,

Carolyn

2008-05-21T17:34:00.002-04:00

So after nine months of living, working, breathing, eating, laughing, yelling, crying, running, sleeping, thinking, complaining, admiring, eating, writing, reading, walking, traveling, and eating in a different country, I should probably have some profound end-of-the-experience kind of things to say.

But I don't.

It's been great. I'm ready to come home. And by Jove if some baggage handler at the Clermont-Ferrand airport tries to stop me there will be some pretty pictoresque French coming their way. I've been practicing angry phrases all day. I hope I won't need to use them.

I will fight to the end! Even if that end is just a seat about an Irish discount flight across the Atlantic ocean! And I pity the imbecile that tries to get between me and the polyester butt-holder that is properly mine!

And all the old people on this flight better be in tip-top shape. There will be no emergency landing in Newfoundland.

See you all on the other side.

2008-05-21T04:58:00.002-04:00

There is a transportation workers strike currently scheduled for tomorrow.

If a couple of baggage handlers decide that their right to a cushy retirement is more important than my ability to fly out of this country...

...someone is going to get hurt.

(Don't they know that their reforms are only delaying the workers' revolution and prolonging their own exploitation? Jeeez. They need to read Marx again.)

2008-05-19T19:06:00.002-04:00

It's taken me 9 months but I can finally know French well enough to be able to argue with our program director when he makes outrageously false statements. It's a nice feeling.

The wine helps too.

Travel = priceless.

2008-05-17T14:55:00.003-04:00

My time here in France can be easily split in to two portions: my stay in France, and my travels to exotic exciting places. Here's a brief summery of the travel portion:

6 and a half weeks of vacation (not counting long weekends).

12 countries visited - (The Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, The Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Bulgaria, Turkey, Croatia, Montenegro).

7 discount airlines flown - (Smart Wings, Wizz Air, Click Air, Comet Air, Germanwings, Veuling, Easy Jet).

15 churches or cathedrals visited. At least. Probably more.

3 time zones spanned.

2 cable cars and 3 funiculars ridden.

1 mountain snowboarded on.

45 minutes spent in Bulgaria.

11 and a half languages not understood.

1 ride up a hill to look at Bosnia.

13 hours spent in the Cologne/Bonn airport.

1 Pick pocket foiled.

2 Iranians and 1 Turk named Cha Cha met.

1 pair of sneakers almost destroyed.

Countless pretzels, ice cream cones, and falafel sandwiches consumed.

Countless miles walked.

Tons of totally weird, excellent stories.

And a partridge in a pear tree.

2008-05-15T17:23:00.002-04:00

In one week's time I will be back in 'Merica.

I'm going to have to remember ...
...to put the month before the day when I write the date.
...look both ways before crossing the street.
...not make blatant remarks about people in the street because they don't speak English.
...to not put my elbows on the table during meals.
...to actually get places on time.
...how to drive.
...how to spell English words. Like "apartment".
...all of your names. Just kidding. Mostly.

Don't tread on my hair...

2008-05-11T16:56:00.003-04:00

France is a country where the luxary tax applies to shampoo and conditioner
but not brie or foie gras.

I know I have acheived full cultural integration when...

2008-05-10T19:19:00.001-04:00

I was accused of being a snob by a French person the other day. I'm not even joking. It went kinda like this.

Tessa and I were walking downtown having a discussion. It was a rather animated discussion about some minor drama. We were speaking rather loud indignant English partly because we were both feeling disgruntled (and for once I was not complaining about the French!) and partly because we've found that speaking conspicuous English keeps all the annoying people who try to ask us to take polls away. Nonetheless one of these pollster people (they are in all the public spaces always trying to ask about silly things) tried to approach us and our conversation went something like this (translated version bellow)...

Lui: Bonjour mademoiselles ! Est-ce que je peux vous demander…
Moi: Non! Je suis désolée, on n’a pas le temps !
Lui: C’est vrai ?
Moi: Oui ! C’est vrai !
Lui: Oh la tête

Him: Hello ladies! Can I ask you...
Me: No! I am sorry, but we do not have time!
Him: It's true?
Me: Yes! It's true!
Him: Oh the head! [Oh doesn't she think she's special!]

So yeah. That's what he gets for trying to interrupt me with his silly questions.

I don't even feel bad.

I feel French.

I love Skype.

2008-05-09T05:12:00.000-04:00

Less than two weeks!

2008-05-08T00:09:00.002-04:00

Joyeux anniversaire Maman!

Un petit cadeau pour ton anniversaire, chère maman. Bonne lecture...

Ici en France on fait la fête pour ton anniversaire. Mais c n’est pas à cause de toi. C’est à cause de la fin de la seconde guerre mondiale et la victoire qui était nous apportée par nos chers amis les américains. Mais aujourd’hui nous faisons semblances que la fête est à toi !

Alors, profites-en ! Vive la France ! Vive les vacances ! Vive la fête !

Look! Winston Churchills is also wishing you a happy... birthday!

Some news

2008-05-05T16:26:00.002-04:00

So I had my last Italian class tonight. I was actually kinda sad because that's been one of my favorite classes. The teacher is always really nice to me and remembers my name even when she forgets all the other kids' names. She was nice to me without making me feel like an idiot when I had no idea what was going on. She yelled at the other kids for not studying but then added something about how much harder it is for people who don't speak Romance languages.

I also had my next to last guitar lesson. That is actually going really well lately. I'm a lot better at sight-reading and I can understand 80% of the directions he gives me. It would probably be more like 95% if he didn't mumble so bad.

So things are winding down. My host parents are going to Germany and then Italy this week so meet their son's fiance's parents. They are excited to meet them. I'm excited to have the house to myself. I get to eat all my meals in my pajamas and watch bad TV without feeling guilty. And play my music late in to the night and eat cereal for dinner if I want to. All those little things.

Hey, remember that weird dance that I described back in September, Tecktonik? Well some genius figured out where it came from...

Happy belated May Day

2008-05-04T17:53:00.002-04:00

Back from Strasbourg which was of course beautiful. It was sunny and hot all weekend and I almost got a sun burn. Here's the abbreviated summery:

Sat on a train for a really long time. Admired the countryside. And the vineyards.
Ate lots of Kebabs because they had falafel and the kebab stands in Clermont do not.
Admired the ... Germen-ness of it all.
Visited the city of Colmar which looks kind of like the German section of the Epcot Center. Except it's really from the Middle Ages. And there's no Mickey. Visited the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar and saw a very famous painting by Grundewald and a bunch of ... German looking stuff.
Climbed the cathedral in Strasbourg.
Ate pretzels and ice cream and flammenkucken (flaming German pizza).
Watched a parade of bagpipers.
Admired the European Parliament.
Was surprised to hear French in the streets. It all just looked so German.

Ok. That's about all.

Hope you all had a wonderful day celebrating the joys of labor (by not laboring) and the coming People's Revolution!

RATStrasbourg.

2008-04-30T17:31:00.002-04:00

Whew. Well despite the feeling of just having returned to Clermont-Ferrand, I am actually going to Strasbourg this weekend. We have a long weekend and it seemed a shame not to see this city before I left. We have another long weekend next week too but I am staying home because I couldn't force myself to plan another trip. The is too much vacation in this country.

Anyway. Life in Clermont is back to the same old same old. I saw a rat walking down the street the other day. Strolling was really more of what it was doing. So I (over course) started staring at it and the little beast had the nerve to stare back at me like I was the one who looked strange walking down the street in broad daylight on a Tuesday. Weirdo French rats. It wasn't even cute like Remy from Ratatouille. It was mangy and gross. So far no diseases though. I also have seen a ton of lizards. They all hang out in the sun by the track and then run away when I run past. There is also a family of pigeons living in our roof. They wake up early in the morning and make strange noises that sound kind of like someone dying a slow, painful death. It freaks me out.

Wildlife. Geeez.

H'ok. I gotta go unpack and then repack my backpack. Or maybe I'll just leave it... Hmmm...

... and the slide show.

2008-04-29T17:26:00.004-04:00

So for those of you are too lazy to click on my photos link (...Sara...) here's the slide show from Barcelona...

And here's the one from Dubrovnik. It's really long. Just warning you.

SpRiNg BrEaK 2008 WoOoO HoOoO! Part 3-

2008-04-29T15:32:00.004-04:00

Thursday April 17th -

So the morning after our trekking excursion on the island of Lopud we decided to hop on a bus and go to Montenegro. It was kinda rainy that day so we figured it wouldn't be a waste to spend 2 hours on a bus on the way there and 2 hours on the way back. So after breakfast we walked down to the bus station and bought our tickets and promptly realized that we had left our picnic lunch at home. Ooops. So we ran to a near-by grocery store and bought some more. Then we sat around the bus station, nervously awaiting the bus that would take us to the city of Kotor which is in Montenegro.

When the bus arrived and looked fairly sturdy we boarded and proceeded to drive at high speeds along the cliffs. This provided a terrifying but beautiful view and I was glad when we turned in-land because at that point it had started to rain and I was having visions of us flying off the road and falling hundreds of feet in to the blue sea bellow (not a bad way to go). After about 40 minutes we reached the border with Montenegro where we got a spiffy new stamp in our passports. Then we drove around some in Montenegro which looked a lot like Croatia except maybe a little less touristy. Just as the rain was starting to pour and the clouds were getting thick we got to the really interesting part of the trip: the fjords of Kotor. Kotor is basically a giant bay that consists of mountains that drop in to the sea. It's supposed to be beautiful. It probably would have been if it hadn't been so cloudy. But as it, it was still pretty nice. So after an hour of driving around the edge of this fjord we got to Kotor which turned out to be wetter and dirtier than any of the guide books made it look.

So we walked to the rain to the Old Town of Kotor which was very... old. It's probably quite nice in summer when the sun is shining and all the tourist shops are open. As it was, it was wet and all of the people just sort of stared at us. So we decided to follow the signs for a fort (... it worked the day before.) These signs led us through a dilapidated neighborhood and up some ancient stairs. Lots and lots of ancient stairs. After about 40 minutes of climbing and getting rainy and taking photos of the clouds and fjord we decided to head back down. We wandered around Old Kotor some more and got stared at and realized that there were a strangely high number of shoe stores. Eventually we decided to head back to the dryness of the bus station so we went back and ate our picnic lunch. Then we got back on the bus and started at the clouds and the fjord some more. After a successful re-entry in to Croatia (and another stamp) we got back to Dubrovnik. That night we tried to make Mexican again and we tasted some Croatia beer. It was pretty good. We also watched Croatia game shows.

Friday April 18th -

This morning was also dark and rainy but we decided to take a chance and we hopped on the boat to the Island of Mjlet where there is a National Park. We spent two hours on a high speed boat going through some choppy waters before reaching the island when, miraculously, the rain stopped. We got off at the tiny town of Polace and found the entrance to the park where we bought our tickets. Then a ranger-type guy drove us from the entrance to the center where another ranger dude explained to us that normally they give visitors a boat ride to island in the middle of one of the lakes but since it had been raining and we were pretty much the only visitors they suggested that they take us for a van tour around the lakes instead. We agreed and got a personal tour of the park, complete with an explanation of the growth of wild asparagus. Then the rangers dropped us off a the park center and we did some exploring on our own and ate our picnic lunch. The sun came out and it got nice and warm. We walked around and wondered, "What exactly does one do when one has a Croatian National Park pretty much to themselves?". Finally we walked back to Polace and waited for the boat which took us back across the (even choppier) seas and back to Dubrovnik. Dinner that night soup and a bad Jackie Chan movie.

Saturday April 19th -

Saturday we headed back to the Old Town to watch all the tourists, of which there were many. We also visited the Sponza Palace which had a cool archive in it. We also ate more gelato and sat in the sun and did comparative price studies of every single souvenir shop in the entire Old City. After making our purchases we had a delightful dinner of pizza and pasta. There isn't much night life when the age of the average Dubrovnikian tourist is 60 so we headed back home and watched a James Bond movie instead.

Sunday April 20th -

We took advantage of the gorgeous weather to sit on our balcony and read before Ante drove us to the airport. We flew back to Barcelona where we took a train to the train station and grabbed some Spanish tortilla sandwiches before catching the night train to Paris. The night train was ... long. I managed to get some sleep thanks to the complimentary earplugs that you receive when you travel first class. But a second class bed would have worked a lot better. Oh well.

Monday April 21st -
We got to Paris and hopped on the Metro to head to the National Assembly where we met M Faure, his wife, and Coco and enjoyed a visit to the National Assembly (= House of Representatives), a delicious lunch at the restaurant at the Senat (=Senate), and a guided tour of the Senate. I learned a lot of interesting but generally useless information (who wants to play Trivial Pursuit?). After the visit we went back to the hotel and crashed because we were exhausted.

Tuesday April 22nd -
I took a long walk around Paris.
I took the train back to Clermont.

I am tired of summarizing.

Good night.

SpRiNg BrEaK 2008 WoOoO HoOoO! Part 2-

2008-04-28T08:40:00.001-04:00

Monday April 14th

I woke up naturally at 6:30 and decided to use my new-found adult freedoms to sit in front of the TV and eat coco puffs. Finally! Vengeance is sweet. Much like coco puffs. Eventually Tessa got up and also had some coco puffs and we explored that satellite TV is really over rated. The Croatia channels were better (no wonder even the homeless people speak English- all the shows are in English with subtitles). With the exception of Al Jazeera English which is even better than CNN.

Anyway, after wasting enough of our time in front of the tube we got our stuff together and started to walk to the Old City. On our way it quickly became clear that we were going to need some sun screen to get through the day so we made a stop at Tommy to try and find some. Then we remembered that we were in Europe and even sunscreen is sold only in pharmacies. So once we got to the Old Town we bought some (hooray for Croatia pharmacists who speak English!).
Then we decided to act like real tourists and walk around the city walls. All the guide books say that this takes about an hour and a half but we took two and a half hours because we kept taking photos. There were gorgeous views on all 360 degrees. On one side there was the coast with the Elephiti Islands and the city of modern Dubrovnik. Inland there are large gray mountains (behind which lies Bosnia!). On the next side there was a large bay with big nice hotels and the island of Lokrum. And on the fourth side, or course, there was the open Adriatic. And in the middle there was Old Dubrovnik with all the clay roofs and Venetian buildings.

So after two and a half hours of climbing up and down stairs in the sun (but no burn!) and taking photos we came down from the walls and decided to check out one of the pizzerias that Ante had recommended to us. Mmmm. Fresh lemonade and vegetarian pizza. Then we walked around the Old City and visited the Palace of the Rector which had a little historical museum in it. We got in for free. Not really sure why, the guy just waved us in. [Note: Finally, traveling as two young woman pays off- multiple free museum entries- whooo hooo!!] Then we got some gelato (kiwi! even better than mango!) and ate it on the pier outside the Old Port. Then we visited the cloister of the Dominican monastery which was quite and shady and quite pleasant. Then we walked back home and eat Chinese ramen noodles and watched "Murder at 1600" with Croatia subtitles and went to bed.

[Recap: Coco puffs. Pizza. Gelato. Ramen noodles. Gastronomical freedom is so sweet.]

Tuesday April 15th

The next morning Ante offered to drive us up Mount Srd (the big grey mountain overlooking Dubrovnik). It was really interesting because Ante is a really friendly guy who has lived in Dubrovnik his whole life and so he had a lot of interesting facts, including about how Dubrovnik was sieged and bombarded in the "Homeland War" in the early 1990’s. As he drove us in the mountain he told us about how the Serbians mined the village and there were still mines around so you had to stay on the road and paths (he didn’t have to tell me that twice!). Once at the top he took us inside a fort that was destroyed during war and showed us the view of Dubrovnik. He also pointed to a village on a mountain a little bit farther inland and said that it was actually in Bosnia. On our way driving down the mountain he showed us the greater area and the village where he was born and the second house that he owns. He was even nice enough to drop us off at the bus station because we wanted to check the bus times.

We check the bus times and the boat times at the new port and then headed back to the Old City where we had some delicious pasta for lunch. Then we visited the cloister of the Franciscan monastery and a museum (got in for free again) that included Europe’s oldest continually functioning pharmacy and a bunch of cool religious relics. I mean, who doesn’t want to see St. Ursula’s head? Then we took a gelato break. Then we walked around trying to visit a war exhibit and an old fort but we couldn’t find the entrance to either. We left the Old City and explored an old fort that overlooks the city. Then a bunch of clouds rolled in so we walked home in the rain, made some lentils and veggies for dinner, watched some Beverly Hills 90210 and a French documentary about the Amish, and went to bed.

Wednesday April 16th

The next morning we took a very boat to Lopud which is one of the Elephiti Islands. It was a beautiful day but the village on Lopud was a little deserted since the real tourist season doesn’t start until May. We visited a tiny little church which was very pretty. Then we followed some signs for the old Fort of Saint Ivan. We followed the path for about an hour and twenty minutes through first a little neighborhood, then some people’s backyards, then a field, then a forest, and finally up a very large rocky hill. When we arrived at the top we found the fort in ruins (it wasn’t in any of the guide books so I have no idea when it was built) and we walked around and took some more photos.

We finally decided to come down and tried to get some lunch but were just stared at when we sat down at a restaurant so we bought some gelato instead and sat on a bench in the sun and watched a stray cat and played "6 Degrees of Separation" and waited for the ferry back to the Dubrovnik. Once back in Dubrovnik we were pretty tired from our hike and from sitting in the sun for an hour and a half and sitting on a boat for 2 hours so we bought some dinner and lunch supplies from Tommy and went back the apartment, ate some pasta, watched some American crime shows (oh how I miss those) and went to bed.

SpRiNg BrEaK 2008 WoOoO HoOoO! Part 1-

2008-04-27T09:32:00.003-04:00

Friday April 11^th

I awoke at the break of dawn and took the bus to the train station where I found Tessa already in the middle of a conversation with a woman she had never met. The woman was quite nice and she shared with us her anger about the fact that to get to Toulouse from Clermont you have to take 3 trains and 6 hours. Once we got on the train, our ride was uneventful. We got to Lyon and caught the TGV (really fast train) to Montpellier where we ran from one platform to another only to find that our next train was late. The train from Montpellier to Port Bou, Spain went through some beautiful country-side and along the coast of the Mediterranean which was very pretty despite the fact that it was cloudy and raining. We spent two hours in Port Bou sitting in the station and listening to other tourists complain. Then we finally got on the train to Barcelona. This two-hour ride was made more interesting by the fact that we sat next to a group of three American girls also on study abroad. I immensely enjoyed eavesdropping on their conversation. It was kind of like watching MTV. I had forgotten that people say “like” so much.

We finally arrived in Barcelona and got on the Metro (side note: both Madrid and Barcelona have had fantastically nice Metros) and found our hostel which was actually a bunch of apartments in a very nice residential neighborhood. We then decided to go for a walk in the rain and we found the Sagrada Familia cathedral which was beautifully illuminated. Then we bought some food and some juice at a convenience store and ate at the hostel and went to bed. We were tired.

Saturday April 12^th

We got up early and went back to the Sagrada Familia so that we could see it in the day light. It is a cathedral that was designed by Antonio Gaudi and was not finished before his death and is still under construction. Gaudi’s style is pretty much impossible to describe. It’s weird and beautiful and thought-provoking. The inside of the cathedral was a little disappointing because it was extremely crowded and full of construction stuff. But there was a cool little museum that had some of Gaudi’s drawing and explained how he made a model of the cathedral upside down with weights so that he could design the lightest structure. (Or something like that. The explanation was a little technical. I’m not sure I understood entirely.)

Then we walked around and looked at Gaudi’s other buildings and they were also very interesting/strange/cool. Barcelona, in general, is a really nice city to walk around in. There are big trees everywhere and all the buildings are interesting and there are bike paths. The fact that it was gorgeously sunny out probably helped. We finally wandered down to the Gothic Quarter where there were lots of cool narrow streets and shops. We got kicked out of the cathedral (with all of the other tourists) for reasons that I don’t really understand because the security guards said it in Catalan. But there were nuns and priests scurrying around so there was probably going to be a Mass or something.

Then we got some lunch. Delicious ham and cheese sandwich. Then we walked down to the port and sat in the sun and watched the other tourists. We bought some ice cream (mango = dangerous!). We wanted to go to the aquarium but it cost 14 euros, even with the student discount, so we decided it wasn’t worth it. So we sat some more in the sun and watched a band. Then we took the funicular up the mountain/hill thing on the edge of the city. There was a really nice park at the top that was built in 1992 when Barcelona hosted the Olympics. There was pretty plants and fun structures to play on and a great view of Barcelona. Then we walked down the mountain thing and sat and watched some skateboarders get chased around by the police. Finally we walked back towards the hostel along La Rambla (big famous street) and watched street performers and people selling goldfish and tourists. We got some tapas for dinner and they were delicious and we finally walked all the way back to the hostel. In case you missed it, we did a lot of walking. Probably about 10 miles. But we slept really well.

Sunday April 13^th

We got up and to the Metro to the train station where we almost got on the wrong train but eventually made our way to the airport and got on our plane which we soon discovered was full of Spanish retirees. I was the youngest person on the plane. And, in case you forgot, it was my 21^st birthday. But happily they were all in good health and we arrived in Dubrovnik without incidence. Ante (the guy who we rented the apartment from) was supposed to meet us at the airport but when we got to the airport he wasn’t there. I tried to call him but my phone wasn’t working with his number. We decided to take a taxi to the apartment.

[Lengthy side note: It is important to note that we almost did not go to Croatia because of safety concerns. We heard a (false!) rumor that NATO was going to bomb Serbia which we decided to ignore. Also, right before we left, we heard (from a credible source- a person who works for the State Department) that Croatia is a wonderful country but that it has a bit of a problem with female tourists being kidnapped and sold in to sex slavery. Keep this in mind as I continue the story. Spoiler: We were not kidnapped. Nor were we sold in to sex slavery. I continue…]

So we picked a taxi that looked like it was unlikely to be a kidnap vehicle and gave the driver the address. He turned out to be very nice and friendly and called Ante to tell him that we were coming and he found out that Ante was in fact at the airport waiting for us. Upon arriving at the apartment we found Ante (who somehow managed to beat us back) and realized that we had just missed him at the airport. But he turned out to be a really nice guy and it all worked out. He showed us the apartment, including a balcony with a stunning view and a kitchen and he pulled out a map and proceeded to give us a 20 minute lecture on where we were, what buses we should take, where to find out about boats, where were the grocery stores, what restaurants we should go to so that we wouldn’t get ripped off, and all sorts of other helpful things. It was very helpful. Then he gave us a thing of juice as a gift and went off to go on a walk with his two young daughters. So we sat in our room for a while, staring at the view and pinching ourselves. Then we walked down to the Old City, which was about a 30 minute walk, and explored a little. On our way home we stopped at Tommy (the local grocery store) and bought some food and more juice (juice was a theme for this trip). Then we made dinner in our nice little kitchen. We attempted to make tacos but there was no appropriate cheese so they just turned out to be mashed beans with “Mexican spices” and some salsa wrapped in a tortilla. They were delicious.

An odd thing happened while we were eating dinner. We were discovering that our neighborhood (lots of cement steps) had very good acoustics and that we could heard everyone who walked down the street as if they were just outside our door. We heard a noise that sounded kind of like someone entering our apartment hallway but we figured that it was just an outside noise. Nonetheless I decided to go lock our door so that I wouldn’t forget to do it later. When I got out in to the hallway I was extremely surprised to see a man standing there. “Hello? I am looking for the jdjfasdlfjcroatiankjflsdkfj” he said to me. I was so surprised that all I could say was, “Nnnnoo!”. Then Tessa came out in to the hall and said, “It’s downstairs.” “Downstairs?” “Yeah, downstairs.” “Ok, Thank you. Good night.” And he walked out and left. And we promptly locked the door. The best we can figure out, he was a homeless guy who wandered in and… spoke English? Very well? It was very strange. But it turned out to be harmless. So after watching some satellite TV we went to bed. Not a bad birthday.

whew.

2008-04-23T05:13:00.004-04:00

Just a quick post to say that I am back in Clermont-Ferrand safe and sound. Croatia was fantastic but unfortunately I will have to wait to write about it until next week because I have a giant presentation that I need to work on for my Modern Art class. Ick.
But just to be a tease I will leave you with this...

Alltraversiamo l’Adriatico e andiamo alla Croazia!

2008-04-10T10:31:00.001-04:00

Well, believe it or not (I can’t believe it), it’s time for us to go on another vacation. French people are passionate about their vacation time. It’s what helps them get through those grueling 35 hour work weeks. But I’m not complaining. It keeps them happy and it allows me to run off and explore another corner of the continent every couple of weeks. This time it’s … Croatia! Woo hooo! (Did you know that Croatia in Italian is Croazia? Now you do!) Here’s the iternerary:

Friday, April 11th – I will get up at 5 AM to catch the first bus to the train station to catch the 6:28 AM train to Lyon. Then we take the train to Montpellier. Then we take another train to Port Bou, Spain (But Carolyn, I can hear you saying, Croatia’s in the other direction!). Then we take yet another train to Barcelona. We have to change trains at the border between France and Spain because when the Spanish built their train system they were scared of another Napoleonic invasion so they made their train tracks a different width than the rest of Europe. Anyway, we get to Barcelona at around 7 in the evening and will have spent almost 13 hours on various trains and in various train stations. I am actually looking forward to it. The scenery is supposed to be beautiful as we follow the Mediterranean and go through the Pyrenees. I am planning on sitting and staring out the window and reading my book and eating my Haribo TuttiFrutti’s the whole way there.

Saturday, April 12th- Saturday will be spent visiting Barcelona. We wanted to spend a couple of days in this city but with our class schedule it didn’t work out. But there is tons of cool stuff to see like Antoni Gaudi’s architecture and the Picasso Museum. I’m sure we will also find some time to sample some delicious Spanish cuisine.

Sunday, April 13th- Sunday happens to be my 21st birthday. Yipeee. I can’t think of a better way to celebrate then by getting on a plane and flying to Dubrovnik, Croatia. Which is exactly what I’ll be doing.

April 13th to April 20th – We wanted to take the time to relax in one location for this trip so we will be spending the entire week in Dubrovnik. Dubrovnik is a small city in the southern most tip of Croatia on the coast of the Adriatic. It is, therefore, gorgeous. It is a former Roman city and was once a part of the Venetian Empire so there is a beautiful old city center with all sorts of old stuff to explore (Reliquary of St. Ursula? Why not?). We are renting a small apartment so we are looking forward to just relaxing and reading a cooking and maybe watching some satellite television. The tourist season in Croatia doesn’t really start until May so I am hoping there won’t be too many people but (knock on wood) the weather will still be nice. Dubrovnik almost certainly does not have seven days worth of things to do so hopefully we will make some day trips to nearby islands and towns. I really hope we get the chance to go see what is supposed to be a gorgeous fjord in neighboring Montenegro. Maybe we’ll even walk to Bosnia. It’s only 5 kilometers away. Do you think that I could just walk up to the border and walk in and out of Bosnia so that they’ll stamp my passport? Just kidding. Mostly.

Sunday, April 20th – We fly back to Barcelona before catching the night train to Paris. We will be traveling 1st class on the train since by the time we bought the tickets all the 2nd class ones were taken. For some reason 2nd class has beds while 1st class only has seats. But 1st class seats can’t be that bad right?

Monday, April 21st – We will arrive at Paris at 9:00 AM so that we can meet the other girls in our program and our Program Director for a visit to l’Asemblée Nationale and the Senate (French Parliaments). Spending the night in Paris thanks to Kalamazoo College and its exuberant tuition (hooray for getting my tuition dollars back as wine or lodging in fun locations!).

Tuesday, April 22nd – We’ll find something to do in Paris (not difficult to do) before catching the train back to Clermont-Ferrand.

*I should take the time to mention that my globe-trotting (ok, Europe-trotting) lifestyle would not be possible without www.skyscanner.net, www.hostelworld.com, www.wikitravel.org, and the letter S (for Socialism and lots of vacation time).*

Awwwww...

2008-04-09T10:37:00.003-04:00

So I don’t even know how Bernard and Marie-Therèse (my host parents) found out that it’s my birthday on Sunday but they did. I didn’t mention it to them because I didn’t want them to feel obligated to make a big deal of it. But somehow they found out and they threw me a really nice little surprise party. They invited Coco, Julia, and Tessa over for dinner and Marie-Therèse made a soufflé and there was even a chocolate cake with candles and everything. It was great. We all sat around talking until 11:30 at night. (Our French teacher would be proud).

It was one of the best birthdays I’ve had since I turned 11 and my (real) parents and Charlie and I all went rock-climbing.

Basically, I have super nice host parents. I couldn't think of a stronger way to say “Thank you” other than “Merci beaucoup” so I just said that repeatedly with lots of emphasis.

2008-04-08T09:59:00.001-04:00

Tibet libre, hein?

I have a sudden strong craving for a hambuger. Or even better, a Morning Star veggie burger. Food homesickness is the worst.

A word about Jardin Le Coq

2008-04-07T10:28:00.002-04:00

So everyday when I walk to school I take a short cut through a quaint little city park called Jardin LeCoq. It’s kind of like a mini Central Park and it has several features that I find amusing:

There are fantastic topiaries. My favorite is the seal balancing a ball on his nose but the peacock with a flowerbed for its tail is a close second.
There is a pond with giant carp. I love carp. Who doesn’t love overgrown goldfish?
There is a man-made lake in the middle which is currently drained because the French are scared of birds migrating from Turkey and giving all of the French birds the bird flu. This has only forced the pair of giant swans and their posse of ducks to move up the hill to the drainage pond for the winter. I walk past them almost every morning and it always reminds me of a little, crowded bird court with the swans as king and queen and all the ducks and pigeons as their feudal serfs.
The park is home to the only squirrel I have seen in France. I spotted this squirrel a couple of weeks ago and I was watching it run up and down the trunk of a tree (doing the typical spazzy squirrel thing) so intently that I almost missed the fact that there was a delusional homeless man walking around the base of the tree and talking to the squirrel.

Any way, it’s quite an interesting place and as the weather gets warmer I hope to spend more time there. There are lots of benches which are excellent for people-watching. Sundays are the best because that’s when French people walk their children.

Or maybe I’ll try to feed the carp.

Castles! (= culture)

2008-04-06T10:23:00.001-04:00

The past two weekends, since the weather has been so nice, Bernard (host father) has taken me to go see some castles in the area.

The first one was called Château de Ravel and was a medieval castle that was renovated in the 17th and 18th centuries. It had an amazing view of the surrounding area (since all castles worth mentioning are built on hills) and a very nice garden à la française with some giant topiaries which our guide explained were 300 years old. Wow. We also got to see the medieval banquet/state room that still had the original decorations- the crests of all of the surrounding nobles and kings painted on the walls. The rest of the castle was decorated as it would have been in the 17th and 18th centuries. There was all sorts of fancy stuff. That’s my overall impression of my experience visiting castles here in France: there’s quite a lot of… stuff. I am amazing that craftsmen in the 17th century could produce so many beautiful inlaid writing desks or that artists could paint so many portraits. Every castle (of which there are hundreds, maybe thousands) has at least 10 portraits and 3 inlaid writing desks and 5 four-poster beds and all the other material possessions that were necessary to own in order to be a French nobleperson. That doesn’t even include all the stuff that is in museums or the stuff that was confiscated/destroyed during the French Revolution. Anyway. It is neat to walk through and see all of this stuff in its original setting. The beautiful weather prompts one to imagine yourself living the pampered life of a French castle-dweller. I wouldn’t want to live there in winter though.

The second castle was Château LaFayette which is where General LaFayette (the French general who came and helped the American soldiers during the Revolutionary War) was born. It had a very interesting display about his life. The castle was also, of course, full of his stuff. This did include a lock of George Washington’s hair. George and Gilbert (LaFayette) were apparently pals. It was sort of weird to be at a castle in the middle of nowhere in France and see the American flag flying and see a lock of hair from America’s first president. Anyway. Apparently LaFayette went on to become a major figure during both of the French Revolutions and the abolition of slavery in France. He even has a major chain of department stores (Galleries LaFayette) named after him. Actually, I have no clue if the stores are named after him. But it seems logical.

I have to admit, I enjoy visiting these castles but part of the reason that I go on these short trips is that I get to ride in a car. I miss riding in cars. And driving though the country-side in Auvergne is particularly nice in spring because everything is green and there are baby cows and lambs in the pastures and they are cute. Driving through France is also particularly interesting because every couple of kilometers Bernard will point and say, "Oh, there’s a medieval castle." Or "Oh, there’s a church from the 12th century." French highways even have illustrated signs of all the historical/cultural sites in the towns so that you can feel extra guilty when you drive past them without visiting.

2008-04-02T10:46:00.003-04:00

I have the urge to quote a statement made by Amel's host brother earlier in the year:

"Putain! Comme il fait beau aujourd'hui!"

Literally translated as :

"Whore! How it is nice out today!"

Happy April/Avril/Aprile.

2008-03-30T09:55:00.003-04:00

The power cord for my laptop is broken.

I also have a cold.

Woe is me.

EDIT: Actually, after reading this it's really hard to feel sorry for myself.

Wal-mart is the scum of the earth.

Saddest story ever...

2008-03-28T09:15:00.008-04:00

Broken-Hearted Swan Looks for Love

The love affair was short-lived. Petra, the wild black swan who has become a minor celebrity, appears to be lonely after her mate, a white swan, has ditched her for another.

Zoo officials in Muenster, Germany, are going to reunite the animal with what appears to be the love of her life — a white paddle boat shaped like an oversized swan.

Sound strange? Not really, when you listen to the zoo director, Joerg Adler.

What's happening now may be the end of a long story that began in spring 2006, when Petra fell head over heels for a swan-shaped paddle boat out on Lake Aasee, located near the zoo in the city of Muenster.

She would not let the boat out of her sight, and over the following months became so attached to it that she refused to mingle with other swans.

Eventually, by the end of fall, the boat had to be removed from the lake, but the boat owner did not have the heart to separate the two.

Zoo director Adler decided to let Petra stay with it, taking both bird and boat into the city's zoo for the winter.

The project was financed by local residents for whom Petra has become a bit of a celebrity.

Wildlife experts had been hoping she would lose interest in the boat when she got to know other black swans living in the zoo, but Petra always kept close to it and sometimes even nestled in the hollow area underneath it.

The odd couple became a media attraction, and camera crews from all over the world came to Muenster to report on Petra and "her paddle boat lover."

It wasn't until a week ago that Petra apparently ditched the boat for a real-life white swan living at the zoo, who seemed interested in her company. Was it possible that true love was on its way?

They spent a few days together building a nest, making the zoo officials believe this was the real thing.

Eventually, the boat was returned to its owner at Lake Aasee and everything seemed just fine, until the white swan apparently lost interest in Petra.

He simply flew off and is now seen spending time with a group of other birds at the zoo.

"We thought they'd be happy together, going to live a long and happy life, but unfortunately the romance only lasted a few days," the zoo director told ABC News.

"Normally swans choose a partner for life but for some reason, that does not seem to work with Petra."

"She now appears to be lonely and seems very upset. We're going to take her back to the lake tomorrow, and we're hoping that reuniting her with the boat will make her feel good again."

Read the whole story at abcnews.com.

The world is a cruel place.

Obama-wama

2008-03-27T05:59:00.002-04:00

I’m a couple of days (or weeks) behind the American news cycle so it has only recently come to my attention that Barack Obama recently made a speech about race in America. I haven’t watched it on YouTube but I skimmed the New York Times transcript and it struck me as very thoughtful discussion of an important aspect of American culture. So I thought I would seize the opportunity to describe some observations I have made about race in France.

[Again, I make a pause. Again, I am not anti-French. But this is the aspect of French society that I have found the most shocking since I have been here.]

I suppose I should start by explaining that French people do not think of race as being part of their society. French population censuses do not collect data on race; the French are proud to say that French is French, regardless of color. This is why they also have no conception of political correctness. Actually, that’s not true. They know about political correctness. But they think of it as some quaint American construct that has nothing to do with their daily lives and everything to do with America’s obsession with all things race.

Because of this lack of political correctness French people can say things that will shock the average bleeding-heart, uber-politically correct, liberal arts undergraduates. For example, they will refer to Asian people as “yellow”… on the news. French cartoons are full of drawings that any American will immediately cringe at as an example of blackface but that French people just see as a normal caricature, same as a caricature of Sarkozy will have a huge nose. These comments or attitudes are not, for the most part, generated by racism (although it would be dishonest of me say that there are not racists in France- there definitely are) but rather by ignorance. Specifically about the situation of minorities in America. Some African-American girls on our program last semester were asked if they had ever been in a music video. My host father once asked me, “Black mayors tend to be more corrupt than white mayors, right?”. Multiple students told us in out small group English sessions that they had learned the word “wetback” as a normal term for Mexican immigrants in their high school English class. I also had to explain to a member of my Pepiniere group that it didn’t matter how many rap videos he watched- he could not use the n-word. This ignorance seems to come from a shallow understanding of how complicated race is in America.

That is not to say that France does not have its own race issues. They just don’t have the same frame of thinking about it that we do since it’s a comparatively recent issue for their society. But the fact is that there are parts of Paris that are just as diverse as New York City and that diversity leads to all sorts of cooperation and tension, much like in America. French history and society just do not include the same polarized history that America does.

That being said, I thought that Barack Obama’s speech was a brilliant discourse on the state of race in America and that he articulated a lot of things that are important for our society and our political life but that we rarely discuss in a public sphere. Honestly I think that his speech spoke to today’s issues of race just as much as Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech spoke to the Civil Rights movement. I would recommend any American to read the speech and any French person who wants to understand “political correctness” in a deeper context to read it as well.

Ehngleeesh

2008-03-26T08:05:00.002-04:00

Anyone who says that you can be bilingual is lying. The truth is that they more you learn of one language, the more you lose of the other. My English has become pretty terrible. My verbs are not properly conjugated. I can not think of words. I certainly can not spell.

The words I do use are all anglicized versions of French constructions which some times make me sound smart but mostly make me sound like a robot: “Lyon is situated east of Clermont-Ferrand”, “I do not have the habitude of making a nap”, “I was obliged to regard that film”.

I am not longer articulate in spoken conversation- I now have to stop and think about words in both languages. And most of the time I come up with the French one first. I now mostly speak a hybrid the two (Franglais!) and will say things like “Regarde that mec! His coiffure is crazy!” (“Look at that guy! His hair is crazy!”).

Here’s my theory: language is like DNA. You have words that act like genes and when you are like me and only speak those words with the same five people for an extended period of time then you don’t have enough diversity in your word gene pool and it is language incest and you end up linguistically handicapped like me.

The slightly good news is that my French is slowly but surely getting better. I now sound like an elementary school-er instead of a toddler. Baby steps, I suppose.

But for right now I am no-lingual.

2008-03-25T09:58:00.003-04:00

Well, I'm back from Bourgogne (Burgundy). My Easter weekend was mostly spent meeting my host father's siblings and cousins and their wifes, husbands, ex-husbands, children, second-cousins, girlfriends, and other assorted characters. It was quite an international affair- there was me (the token American), a German-speaking Italian, a German, a Russian, some Spaniards, and a kid adopted from Colombia. We ate several elaborate and delicious meals, of course. We visited the local museum about Gaulic civilizations which was pretty interesting. I accidentally slept too late to go to Mass. I thought someone would wake me up but by the time I got up everyone had left. Ooops. I watched them all sing karaoke. It snowed all weekend.
Bourgogne, as it turns out, is a beautiful area. It was difficult to see through the snow but we were staying at a large farmhouse-complex in the middle of nowhere so the scenery was very pretty. I didn't take any photos since I felt sort of weird taking pictures at someone else's family event but here's a photo of what it looked like minus the snow...
Ooh! I forgot to mention that my host parents bought a ton of chocolate to bring to the family reunion and share but then they forgot it in the kitchen so when we got back there was tons of chocolate for us to eat! Hooray!

Hooray for Candy! (and Jesus!)

2008-03-21T12:33:00.003-04:00

Happy Easter!

Yes, I am aware that today is not Easter but I'm going to Burgundy this weekend to a (host) family reunion so I'm going to wish it now.

I expect all of you to eat at least a pack of Peeps for me.

I hope to return with many an amusing story.

(Anyone not doing anything from the 13th to the 20th of April and want to drop everything and come to Europe? I'm searching for another roommate to fill our already reserved apartment in a secret but beautiful location for our next vacation. You know you want to. Contact me for more details.)

I am a world champion translator!

2008-03-20T12:25:00.005-04:00

So I apologize for my lack of updating lately. I have actually been somewhat busy. And since I am not at all habituated to being active all day long I have been dropping in to bed at a positively indecent hour lately. But perhaps I flatter myself. Perhaps no one noticed my virtual absence. I wouldn't blame you.

Anyway, on Saturday my host parents made a day trip to Lyon to visit their youngest daughter so they drove me and Tessa to Lyon and we visited the city. I will describe in more depth when I finally get around to uploading the photos from my camera. But we went to the Gallo-Roman museum and we ate the best ice cream I've ever had.

But what has really been taking up my time lately is that I have working as a translator/interpreter for the Masters' World Championship of Track and Field which is being held here in Clermont-Ferrand this week. I have no idea who decided that C-F was the perfect place to have a thousand athletes from the ages of 35 to 97 come to run, jump, throw, vault, and even speed walk, but I'm glad they did. It has turned out to be quite the experience. As a translator I am stationed at the registration table and am supposed to speak a myriad of languages, only three and a half of which do I have any sort of formal training. Mostly I just gesture and speak slow English. Occasionally I throw myself in front of French people so I can be the one to register a potential American. This experience has been interesting for two main reasons: 1) I have met a lot of very interesting people and 2 ) I have learned a lot about French organization style.

First, here's a brief summery of the... characters I have met:

A Finnish travel agent/athlete who was incensed that there wasn't an easier way to book a visit of the Auvergne region and who didn't speak a word of French and therefore dragged me around so that I could express her frustrations for her. Although she did manage to insult a Spanish translator all on her own when she told him to "Shut up!" in multiple languages. She did hug me when we finally got it all sorted out though. So I guess it was worth it.
An American free lance writer who chatted with me for half an hour about life and about French people. Then he gave me some of his poems. One is called "Vitamins". The other begins with "Life is a dance when Jesus Christ is your Lord and Savior". It's funny, but I thought I had traveled 4,000 miles to escape being evangelized by random strangers but I've never been so happy to talk to a chatty old guy.
A real cute little lady from California who had come to the Championship all by herself. I helped her check in on Monday and when I saw on Tuesday wearing a medal I said "Congratulations" and she gave me a huge smile.
A guy from Naples who didn't laugh at my pathetic Italian when I tried to explain that my grandfather (or the father of my father since I don't know the word for grandfather) was from Italy.
Two Italian women who asked if anyone spoke Italian and I said "un po'" and who proceeded to ask for a screwdriver. I didn't know this word of course but luckily they had an Italian-English dictionary. Unfortunately when I turned to the French person next to me I quickly realized that I had no idea what the word was in French either. Luckily gestures worked. I still am not sure what the word is in either language.
And many more people who I can't remember but many of whom were grateful to find someone who could speak English.

Secondly I learned a lot about how the French organize themselves. Namely, that they don't.

[I make a pause. I have been accused of being to hard on the French in my blog and have been told to focus on more positive aspects of French society. I refuse to do this. Not because I dislike the French. But because I have learned that the French are quite realistic about criticism and are well aware of their faults (on a societal level). Also because what fun would if be if I only wrote about that the French do well? There's only so much you can say about food. I make a joke!]

Anyway. Working at this event, on an organizational level, was kind of like being trapped in a French version of The Office meets Dilbert. There were the standard colleagues who correct everything you do. ("Don't give the athletes too much water!"... as we are surrounded but at least 200 boxes of bottled water donated by Volvic.) There was the woman who must have taken some vacation from her day job at the Prefecture to come work at this event because she couldn't have moved any slower if there was a crowd of confused and angry athletes demanding in many langages to know the results of their events. Oh wait. There was a was a crowd of confused and angry athletes demanding in many langages to know the results of their events. And this woman was the only one allowed to touch the stack of papers where all the results where recorded. All of this means that I and four other people (who only spoke French) shuttled between the crowd and the woman while I simultaneously translated for all four of them and tried to explain to everyone that the printer was also broken so they couldn't get their certificates until that afternoon. That was fun.

So yeah. Part of the issue is that (based on my limited experience) French people are not inclined to take action quickly. If they see something is poorly organized they are more likely to turn to me and explain how they would have done it better then to try to actually do anything about the situation right now. If something goes wrong, they prefer to discuss how the error occurred then what should be done to fix the problem. It's very much a different attitude toward problem-solving and it can be frustrating for non-French people. At one point I just wanted to tell the British woman who was in tears about the registration envelope that she had never been given and the French people who kept asking her where she left it; "I have lived here for 6 and 1/2 months and I have finally learned- there is nothing you can do except wait until they decide to react. Eventually they will, I promise." And eventually they did.

That being said, eventually everything did work out. The British woman got to compete. The lady from the Prefecture even got to take her exceedingly long lunch break. To their credit, many of the people we were working with were volunteers who had as little experience with this sort of event as I did with Slavic languages. Not any more. They were, for the most part, very friendly people who were glad to have me around to help them and that made me feel good. And they really were trying their best.

So over all it was definitely a positive experience. It was nice to feel useful. I got to talk so some cool people. I even got a snazzy polo shirt and an important-looking badge to wear.

Weather Report

2008-03-12T10:41:00.003-04:00

You haven't seen a rainbow until you've seen a rainbow in Clermont-Ferrand, France. They are huge and bright and usually have little mini-me rainbows right next to them.
We have also had 3 days of intense wind and occasional rain. Walking around today was walking through an angry cloud. Except if was brilliantly sunny. I almost blew away.
There is also some school-spirit-y event going on at ESC so there have been students walking around with green shirts and green hair. They are like leprechauns.
The end of the rainbow appears to be over the Michelin headquarters. Figures. That is where the pot of gold would be.
(I didn't actually take this photo. The rainbows here are brighter.)

These are a few of my favorite things...

2008-03-10T10:57:00.004-04:00

Bibendumdum.

2008-03-09T11:59:00.003-04:00

Did you know that the Michelin Man has a name? He does. It's Bibendum which is apparently some reference to an old Latin drinking phrase. The highlight of my week was when we went to go see a exhibit at the local art museum devoted entirely and unabashedly to Michelin advertising.

I can sum the entire exhibit up in a couple of pictures...

This is what dear old Bibendum looked like in the begining.

Then they made him look like this for a while.

And now he looks like this.

The only other exciting thing that happened this week was when we discovered a new place to sit and drink coffee and do nothing. We also had an amusing incident when we discovered that to the French the English word "hassle" sounds like "asshole". Oooops.

2008-03-06T04:36:00.002-05:00

Well, in case you missed it, I do still live in France. Life here in Clermont-Ferrand has been pretty quiet lately. Mind-numbingly quiet actually. Here are some of the highlights:

After a week of sunny, beautiful 60 degree weather it finally decided to be winter and got cold and it even snowed. The snow on top of the volcanoes is kind of pretty. But I hope it gets warm again soon.

I am still disturbingly well-rested. Strange dreams and the cruel situation of not being able to sleep past 9 AM have ensued.

I have been reading a lot. Juli’s left-over supply of trashy romance novels has come in handy. Sometimes I even raid my host family’s extensive library and try to read something in French. This usually lasts about 20 minutes before I switch back to the romance novel. I recently discovered that my host family owns the complete collection of Sherlock Holmes mysteries in English (jackpot!).

My guitar lessons are going great. Thanks for asking.

I have seen several movies lately. One, “Bienvenue chez chties” has actually set a record for a French movie making the most money in a week. I understand why. It was hilarious. It’s about a guy who has to move from the south to the north for his job (the equivalent of someone moving from Los Angeles, California to Fargo, North Dakota) and the hilarity that follows. I also saw “Paris” which is the French attempt at Love Actually and was therefore disappointing.

In other news, there are rumors that Carla Bruni is pregnant. French people don’t really care though, they’re all too busy following the American election and demanding [me] to know who will win. They’re so busy following the American election that I think some of them forget that there are elections here on Sunday for all of the mayors. Thing here in C-F are pretty quite since everyone knows the Socialist is going to win anyway. Apparently C-F has had a Socialist mayor since World War II.

18? Jeez we're old.

2008-03-05T08:13:00.003-05:00

Happy Birthday Charlie!

funny website

2008-03-03T11:52:00.001-05:00

Ha ha ha! So true!

Sorry, just needed to share.

That Time (After) I Went to Asia (a.k.a. Paris)…

2008-03-02T10:24:00.003-05:00

The next morning we got up and felt pretty good considering the sugar hang-over we should have had. We walked to the Eifel Tower and went up to the top, which I had never done. It was pretty cool. The view was nice but there was a dense layer of what the French call fog but any rational person calls smog over the city. I suppose that it added to the ambiance or something. Then we walked to the Arc de Triumph and showed Sarah the names of all the places in Germany that Napoleon conquered. She told us how to correctly pronounce them. Then we strolled down the Champs-Elyses and admired all the stores where we’ll never be able to afford to shop. We stopped and had some delicious crepes and were harassed by the prerequisite creepy French guy. It just wouldn’t be a trip to Paris without some random man approaching us and asking me for my bag (Ummmm… no!). So then we continued to stroll through the Park of the Tuilleries and it was a beautiful day so there were lots of Parisians out and about. Kids were sailing boats in the fountain and it reminded us of that scene in Stuart Little. Then we showed Sarah the immensity that is the Louvre. We walked to the Isle de la Cité and saw the Sainte Chapelle which was beautiful. Then we went to Notre Dame and felt like pretentious world travelers because after the Hagia Sophia it looked sort of small. We spent an hour sitting in the sun in a park behind the Notre Dame, people-watching and continuing to eat our 500 g bags of Haribo. Then we watched some in-line skaters do funny tricks with cones in the street before continuing to the Latin Quarter and finding a restaurant called “Le chat du tango” or “The cat of the tango” for dinner. We ate raclette (one of the myriad of delicious ways that the French have found to combine potatoes and cheese) and it was wonderful. Then we walked all the way back to our hostel which took a while but it was nice out and we followed the Seine. Once we got back to the hostel we pulled out our map and calculated that we had walked about 9 miles that day. Sensibly, we then decided to go to bed. The next day Tessa and I got on the train and came back to Clermont.

That Time I Went to Asia (a.k.a. Istanbul)…

2008-03-01T10:06:00.000-05:00

Day 4 (The “Do I really have this many lira left?” Day)-

The next morning we got up and looked in our wallets and realized that we had grossly overestimated our living expenses in Istanbul and withdrawn too many Lira from the ATM on our first day. As a result we decided to just spend the day shopping and haggling with the persuasive merchants. So we headed down to the Grand Bazaar and the spice bazaar and bought scarves and tea and souvenirs.

We also walked back down to the waterfront where a man selling boat tours tried to convince us to take one. After Tessa successfully haggled with him to lower his price we “decided” to do it (we were always going to do it- but it was fun pretending and making the guy nervous). So we got on the boat and spent a good 30 minutes bobbing up and down and watching the boat guys convince other people to take the tour. We got sort of tired of waiting and eventually Sarah decided to go and buy some sesame bagels for lunch. The minute she got off the boat, however, the captain came on and started the engine. Tessa and I, who were still on the boat, started gesturing at Sarah to forget the bagels and come back but she didn’t see us. It wasn’t until the boat was starting to pull out of its moorings that she came back and couldn’t get back on the boat. Tessa and I started gesturing wildly at the driver and the guys on the shore and despairing that we would never get to eat our bagels (J). Luckily the boat came back to the shore and the bagels (and Sarah) were able to come aboard. We were all very relieved. Then we spent two hours chugging up and down the Bosporus looking at assorted bridges and Ottoman palaces and very nice houses and Asia. It was nice and sunny although it gets pretty chilly out on the Bosporus. Good thing we had all just bought new scarves.

After getting back to the shore we decided to take a tea break. This was mostly uneventful except for when I went to use the café’s bathroom and discovered that it was the nicest hole in the ground that I have ever had the pleasure of … using. The door to the bathroom was also very sharp which I discovered when I accidentally hit my head on it and then went back to the table and Tessa asked me why I was bleeding. It didn’t hurt (except my pride, I suppose) and the nice waiter gave me some disinfecting wipes. I ended up with a nice little cut and the opportunity to tell people that I had been in a knife fight with a door and lost… in Istanbul. Kind of a cool story I guess. Oh well.

Oh and before I forget, Here's a video of the call to prayer at the Blue Mosque...

Then we walked back to the hostel, stopping at every single shop that we past and slowly dispensing our bundles of lira. We bought some provisions from the Turkish version of Seven Eleven and once back at the hostel I tried to get some sleep since our flight leaving Istanbul was going to depart at 3:40 AM. At midnight we caught an airport shuttle. As we left the hostel, Cha-Cha ran out in to the street after us and yelled “Always be happy!” That was hilarious. And oddly appropriate as an ending to our bizarre trip. We also soon learned that 12:00 to 3:00 AM is apparently a popular time for flights out of the Istanbul airport since when we got there it was busier then when we had arrived at 2 in the afternoon on Tuesday. Our flight was happily uneventful. I even managed to sleep for most of it!

The Day That Did Not Exist

We arrived in Cologne at 6:00 AM and proceeded to sit in the Cologne airport for 13 hours. This was remarkably painful. Especially since we couldn’t get to the part of the airport where there was a Subway because of security. I really wanted a meatball sub. We consoled ourselves and passed the time by moving from bench to bench for the change of scenery, eating Burger King, taking a Ben and Jerry’s break for our sanity, buying lots of pretzels, reading, sleeping, playing Sudoku/doing crossword puzzles, and finally congratulating ourselves for surviving the 13 hours (14 since our flight was delayed) by going Duty Free shopping and buying 500 g bags of Haribo candy (I love TropiFruiti!). Basically we spent a lot of money buying a lot of over-priced airport food and keeping ourselves in a perpetual sugar-coma. I hope to someday forget that those 13 hours every existed. Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote that “Hell is other people”. What a naïve food. Hell is fourteen hours at Cologne-Bonn airport after 3 hours of sleep and no meatball sub.

But we finally flew to Paris and after taking a train and 2 metros and getting slightly lost we finally found our hostel and were able to collapse in our beds and pass out.

Praise for Istanbul:

In conclusion, I have to say that Istanbul was probably the coolest place I’ve ever been. The sites were all beautiful and full of interesting history (and we only visited a fraction of the sites). Of course I was a bit start-struck but the fact that half of the city was in Asia, but I wasn’t at all disappointed. But what really made the experience amazing were the people. I don’t normally like making generalizations about groups of people but all of the Turkish people I met were remarkably welcoming and friendly. From the people helping us with directions on the street, to the hostel staff who made an effort to get to know us and joke with us and always offered us free tea, to the bazaar merchants who were aggressive, charismatic, and sometimes annoying but never disrespectful, the whole city seemed to be full of welcoming people. After our experiences with vulgarity in Lisbon, I was a little concerned about security. We made sure to stick to touristy neighborhoods and we didn’t go out at night. But even when we were the only tourists (and sometimes the only women) on the block, I always felt safe. Instead of attracting negative attention as a group of three girls, it only seemed to prompt people to be more courteous.

Anyway, I would highly recommend Istanbul as a vacation destination. It is a great city.

Shout outs:
City of Istanbul.
Sultan Hostel (bring your own earplugs though).
Germanwings Airline. By far the best discount airline I’ve flown. And I’ve flown quite a few. Fastest baggage delivery I’ve ever experience, discount or otherwise.

That Time I Went to Asia (a.k.a. Istanbul)…

2008-02-28T04:33:00.004-05:00

Day 3 (The “Were we really up until 3 in the morning?” Day)-

So the next morning we got up in a dazed state of exhaustion just in time to watch the afore-mentioned high-schoolers get on their charter bus on their bus and drive off as we ate our yummy included hostel breakfast. If looks could kill none of those kids would have made it to the bus. Apparently no one in the hostel slept that night.

Playing through the pain, we made our way to the Museum of Archeology which is actually a complex of four museums which house the various artifacts from the corners of the former Ottoman Empire which was quite expansive indeed. Highlights included the world’s oldest peace treaty (signed by Ramses II), the world’s oldest love poem (on a cuneiform tablet), the Alexander sarcophagus (remarkably well preserved relief depicting Alexander the Great), several mummies, lots of pottery, a pavilion entirely dedicated to decorative tiles, and lots of other cool stuff. We knew, however, that we were over-saturated when we wandered from case to case only pausing when we saw something shiny or bones. We never even made it to the fourth museum which had Islamic art because we were too tired to try and find it.

After another sesame bagel break we walked to the Grand Bazaar which was very cool and difficult to describe. There are lots of stands very close together and every merchant tries to use his limited English to lure you to buy his scarves, souvenirs, jewelry, tea, t-shirts, leather, etc. This was a little intimidating at first but was eventually hilarious. Here are some of the funniest things that were said to us...

“Angels. Angels. Angels? . . . Charlie needs you.”

“Are you from China?”

“My favorite is … she! (points at Sarah).”

“Hello. How are you? *is ignored* I am fine. Thank you.”

Merchant 1: “Hello children! Here we have children’s prices!” *ignored*

Merchant 2: “What?”

Merchant 1: “Children’s prices!”

Merchant 2: “Oh my god!”

So maybe you had to be there. But it was funny. After thoroughly browsing for a while we decided to take a refueling break. We found the Turkish version of Starbucks and I tired Turkish coffee which was in fact a lot like mud when I got to the bottom of the glass. It was surprisingly mild though.

Feeling sufficiently reinvigorated we wound our way through a maze of streets down the hill to the Egyptian Spice Market. This was actually probably my favorite part of the trip because it was a chance to see real Istanbul. You know that you have at least temporarily left the tourist zone when none of the merchants know enough English to even try to talk to you. It was amazing to see just how vibrant the city really is. Once we made it to the Egyptian Spice Bazaar we were pleased to see that it was less touristy than the Grand Bazaar and less overwhelming. We looked around at all spices and things. There were also booths selling beautiful lamps. I bought a green one.

We strolled along the shore of the Golden Horn for a little while, checking out the boat tour prices (Tessa haggled a guy down to free!) before heading back to the hotel. We had dinner at the hostel where by now some of the staff knew us. The guy who served our breakfasts named my “Nothing” because I always ordered nothing to drink with my breakfast. That night we chatted with a guy named “Cha-Cha” (he said “Don’t you dare ask if my sister is name “Tango”) who told us all about rich old English women who marry young Turkish men. After drinking our obligatory tea (how do you turn down free apple tea from a guy named Cha-Cha?) we excused ourselves to go collapse in our beds.

That Time I Went to Asia (a.k.a. Istanbul)…

2008-02-27T04:17:00.001-05:00

Day 2 (The “Did we really just visit all of that?” Day)-

The next day we got up early, eager to see the sites. We started with the Hagia Sophia with is a former basilica built by Emperor Justinian which was turned in to a mosque when Constantinople was conquered by the Turks and was finally turned in to a museum by Ataturk. The structure is dominated by a giant dome which covered what was the largest enclosed space in the world for several centuries. It is huge. There are also a wonderful mix of Islamic art and features from when it was a mosque and Byzantine Christian mosaics from when it was a church which were covered with plaster during the Ottoman Empire and therefore conserved. There is even a spot where you can see the graffiti from with some Vikings scratched their names in to the marble in the 9th century. The giant disks where added during a restoration in the 19th century and are inscribed with the names of Allah, Muhammad, the caliphs, and Muhammad’s grandchildren. They are also huge. It’s pretty cool. We spent a good hour and a half just wandering around admiring the mosaics, staring in awe at the dome, and making friendly conversation with a museum guard who was also a student who wanted to practice his English. He pointed out the Viking graffiti, which we might have missed completely.

Then we tried to go to the Blue Mosque (also know as the Sultanhamet Mosque) but were turned away because it was too close to prayer time. So we visited the Hippodrome which was the center of Ancient Constantinople and has two obelisks (one Egyptian and one copy I think) and a serpentine column which was originally in Delphi. Then we headed to the Basilica Cistern which is a large underground cistern that Justinian built to provide the city with water. There isn’t much to see but it was still very cool because it is dark with lit columns and water dripping everywhere and creepy mood music. There are also two giant Medusa-head column bases and no one knows why they are there. There are also giant fish.

Finally we headed back to the Blue Mosque and after taking off our shoes and covering our heads with our scarves we went inside. It was huge and beautiful, very similar to the Hagia Sophia except the entire interior was covered in decorative tiles in amazing designs. While we were there was also a man reading from the Qu’ran which sounded beautiful. It was very interesting.

After that we grabbed some lunch from a sesame bagel-type-thing salesman, which was delicious. Then we walked over to the Topkapi Palace which is one of several Ottoman Palaces in Istanbul. It was in the middle of a large park over looking the Bosphorus and included lots of exhibits on the Ottoman treasury (wow), the kitchen of the palace (the Ottoman’s were fans of Chinese porcelain, who knew?), and the imperial carriages. There was also an exhibit of religious relics collected by the Ottoman Empire over the centuries so we had the opportunity to see Abraham’s sauce bowl, Moses’ staff, David’s sword, Joseph’s turban, Muhammad’s footprint, Muhammad’s sword, and several of Muhammad’s beards. This was, needless to say, very interesting. Sadly the palace harem was closed since we got there too late. Guess we’ll have to see that next time.

At this point we were tired from walking around all day so we went back to the hostel to rest for an hour or so before going to a restaurant around the corner from our hostel. The owner of the restaurant was very courteous and waited on us personally. We had yummy bread with yogurt and dill sauce and I had a fantastic eggplant kebab. We also tried some traditional Turkish tea and it came in three flavors: apple, orange, and normal. It was all delicious.

We went back to the hostel, hoping to go to bed early but were disappointed to find that our hostel had been invaded by a large group of Korean high-schoolers who started running from room to room, yelling, shrieking, slamming the bathroom door, and stamping up and down the stairs (which were right outside our door) at 9 at night. They apparently were leaving the next day and therefore had no intention of going to bed. We finally opened our door and gave them dirty looks at 3 in the morning after none of us had been able to sleep for several hours. This didn’t work. It was a long night.

That Time I Went to Asia (a.k.a. Istanbul)…

2008-02-26T07:50:00.002-05:00

Day 1 (The “Did that really just happen?” Day) -

Tuesday morning Sarah and Tessa and I got up at 3:40 in the morning and took the train to the airport so that we could catch our 6:40 flight to Istanbul. After being more thoroughly processed by a German border agent as I tried to leave the country than I have ever been processed entering France (only time I have ever been asked for my residency card), we got on the plane and settled in our seats for our three and a half hour long flight. The first hour and a half were uneventful and we all fell asleep. About half way through the flight I woke up and was reading my book when I suddenly realized that all the people around me were standing and staring behind me. I turned around and realized that the elderly gentleman sitting across the aisle one row behind me was experiencing some sort of medical emergency. It was a little scary but the flight attendants and two doctors on board soon had everything under control. Our captain also quickly announced that we would be making an emergency landing in Bulgaria. So after a hasty descent over the Black Sea we found ourselves on the tarmac of the airport in Burgas, Bulgaria. The Bulgarian EMT’s evacuated the gentleman and after about 45 minutes of paperwork and refueling we took off again and were soon in Istanbul. The flight attendants gave one of the doctors who had basically saved this man’s life a giant bag of Haribo candy as a Thank You gift. We though they should have given her free flights for life.

Once we arrived in Istanbul we were surprised to find that there were about 4 inches of snow on the ground. My first thought was, “This can’t be Turkey- it’s covered in white stuff!” Alas, it was Turkey. So we bought our nifty-looking tourist visas and went through customs and caught a shuttle bus to downtown. We then spent about an hour experiencing Turkish traffic and thinking that we were going to be killed by reckless drivers in the hilliest city I’ve ever seen which had just experienced a rare snow storm. But we didn’t die. We arrived at (what we thought was) Taksim Square and proceeded to try and find the best way to take public transportation to Sultanhamet (the neighborhood of our hostel). We quickly found a Metro stop and consulted a map. After concluding that we needed to take the funicular which was supposed to start at the stop where we thought we were, we spent 20 minutes walking around the block looking for the funicular. We finally tried to ask the guy who was selling Metro tickets (a second time) but as he was in the middle of explaining to Sarah in Turkish a random lady showed up, took the directions from Metro man and told us, in English, to follow her. Assuming that it was a scam but thinking that it was still our best option, we decided to follow, provided that she didn’t lead us down any deserted streets or tell us to get in to any un-marked vehicles. We then spent 15 minutes following this short woman (who looked kind of like a leprechaun) as she ran around asking various people directions in Turkish and darted in and out of traffic and every couple of minutes turned around to gesture to us to run faster. Finally she led us to a Metro stop that was actually Taksim Square (turns out the first one was down the street from Taksim and a different stop) and even helped us find the funicular and buy tickets. But before we could thank her profusely (or even monetarily) she led us to turnstile, watched us go through, and turned around and disappeared in to the crowd. Grateful and still a little overwhelmed we took the funicular to the tram and finally reached Sutanahmet. We then spent 20 minute tramping around the Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sophia trying to find our hostel. I should add that during this whole process we couldn’t even pull out the map before random people on the street would ask us if we needed help. At first we were creeped out and assumed that people were trying sell us things or scam or harass us but after one guy pointed us to the Tourist Information Office and told us to “Enjoy Istanbul!” we realized that most people were really just trying to be helpful and friendly. So we eventually followed someone’s directions and found the Hostel and collapsed on our beds. We just stared at us each other. An emergency landing in Bulgaria? A Turkish leprechaun/fairy godmother? Really?

Being famished, we decided to check out the hostel restaurant which was delicious and cheap. Some English-speak at the table next to ours gave us his English-language newspaper so we caught up on the news before heading back to our room and relaxing for a couple of hours. That evening we ventured out but soon realized that after dark is not a time when groups of unaccompanied females walk around. Even in an area as touristy as Sutunhamet. At least in February. Feeling safe but very conspicuous we decided to go back to the room and catch up on our sleep so that we could do lots of site-seeing the next day.

That Time (Before) I Went to Asia (a.k.a. Cologne)…

2008-02-25T07:24:00.000-05:00

Our trip began last Saturday when Julia, Tessa, and I took the train to Paris and the Metro to Charles de Gaule Airport. We discovered that French airport security doesn’t care of you take liquids just so long as you drink the liquids before you leave the security area. We had uneventful flight to Cologne and after struggling with the train ticket machine Julia used her German skills to ask directions and we soon were at the train station where we had planned to meet our friend Sarah who is studying in Erlangen, Germany. While waiting for Sarah’s train to arrive we ate the first of what would be many pretzels. They were a day-old and sort of stale but very cheap and still delicious. Sarah arrived and we found our hostel and discovered that our roommate was already asleep so we decided to just to go bed.

The next day we woke up and discovered that our roommate was in fact a friendly Finnish guy who had just finished studying in Switzerland. We chatted with him for a little while before heading to the Chocolate Museum. We spent the next three hours learning more than we ever wanted to know about the cocoa bean, drooling while watching chocolate be processed, and watching German Ooompa-looompas. There were free samples. It was beautiful. The best part was watching the expressions of the German children as they watched the chocolate. I’m told I looked similar. Then Tessa and Sarah and I went on a walk while Julia visited with a family friend who lives in Cologne. We walked around and saw lots of shops and churches. Then we met Julia back at the hostel and found some dinner. I decided to be authentic had Wiener schnitzel and the local beer. It was delicious which is saying something considering how much I don’t really like either meat or beer. We then went back to the hostel and hung out until our new roommate showed up and was a middle aged man at which point we decided to go to bed.

The next morning we got up and went to the cathedral, which is called the Dom and is considered to be the best example of High Gothic architecture in Europe. The British were even asked to not bomb it during WWII so it managed to survive relatively intact. It was indeed very beautiful. We climbed the 500-some steps to the top of the tower and enjoyed the lovely view of industrial Cologne. We then descended and did some more walking. We found some more pretzels and the 4711 house which is where cologne was invented. There was a glockenspiel. It was mildly exciting. We tried to visit a former Gestapo prison but it was closed. We did end up finding a Golden Ford Fiesta that was some sort of weird German art. We also went to the Roman-Greek Museum and stared through the window at a large mosaic depicting Dionysus. After deciding that we had pretty much exhausted what Cologne had to offer we went grocery shopping and bought ice cream cones. Then we made some pasta for dinner at the hostel kitchen which was delicious. Then we went to bed since we had to get up early the next morning to go to Asia…

...not Constantinople.

2008-02-15T17:37:00.002-05:00

I am going to Turkey!

Woooo hooooo! So since I have yet another vacation next week and since Juli left and since Tessa's computer broken I had no choice but to become the unofficial Trip Planner. So I indulged myself in a long-time dream and planned a trip to Istanbul. I did some research, (both on the internet and by word of mouth) did some convincing, and now we are going! Hooray!

Here's the official itinerary:

Saturday February 16th: Flight from Paris to Cologne, Germany. Spend 3 days in Cologne checking out the sights, hanging in a backpackers' hostel, and spending time with our friend Sarah Manley who is studying in Erlangen, Germany and who therefore can act as our translator.

Tuesday February 19th: Flight from Cologne to Istanbul. Flying in to the farther away airport and therefore flying to Asia! Exciting, no? Spend 4 days looking at the Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, the Great Bazaar, and a couple of Ottoman palaces. Maybe cross the bridge to Asia. Avoid being scammed by aggressive carpet salesmen.

Saturday February 23rd: Flight from Istanbul to Cologne at 3:40 in the morning. Flight from Cologne to Paris at 7:00 at night. Get to Istanbul Airport the night before to avoid catching sketchy Turkish taxi at 2 in the morning. Break the Center for International Program's Study Abroad Handbook Rule #12: Don't spend the night in places of public transport. (Is it really spending the night if you don't sleep and you leave at 3 in the morning? I don't think so.) Spend 13 hours in Cologne taking turns sleeping on a bench before finally flying back to France and collapsing in to a hostel bed.

Spend Sunday showing Sarah around the Franzreich (France) before coming back to Clermont-Ferrand on Monday.

So I hope to have some amazing photo slide show to show after I get back. Hope everyone is doing well in their various parts of the world and that the glacier that appears to have drifted over Michigan melts soon.

2008-02-14T04:06:00.000-05:00

Dear America,

Please stop shooting people.

Thanks.

Yours,

Carolyn

The inevitable political rant...

2008-02-07T17:43:00.000-05:00

Every French person I meet likes to ask me whether or not I think Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton ( 'illary!) will become the next president of the United States. Since many of the French people stop listening after I explain that it's more complicated than they think I thought I would burden you all with my opinion. Here goes...

My favorite candidate was actually John Edwards. I'm a sucker for a good speech and Edwards is an excellent orator. He also cares about poor people and is not afraid to admit it. Which I find endearing and refreshing coming from an American politician.

When Edwards dropped out (and even before, when it was clear he was never going to win a significant number of delegates) I thought that I didn't really have a preference as to whether it would be Barack or Hillary. But as time went on and Hillary gained more ground, the sinking feeling in my stomach has begun let me know that deep down inside I really want Barack to win.

Here's why:
Hillary is so easily defeat-able. There are too many people in America who hate her with a passion and an ardor that I can't even begin to understand. One of these people would be my father. How do I know this? In the election of 2000 my father told me that if both Al Gore and Hillary Clinton won their respective elections we would move to Australia. See? I told you I didn't understand.
Hillary was once on the board of Wal-mart. Wal-mart is the source of all that is evil. I can't vote for someone who received a pay check from them.
Hillary is old. I'm tired of old people messing up the country. Move along, people. Let our generation have a turn. Maybe then someone will really do something about the environment. Or the fact that America is the only developed country in the world that doesn't provide health care for its citizens (and yes I know Hillary tried to do the health care thing. I don't care.).

So really I mostly like Barack because he's not Hillary. But that's how the system works. I don't care that Hillary is married to Bill. I don't care that she's a woman. Barack is young. He has a sense of humor and he doesn't speak like an idiot or like my patronizing elementary school principal. His kids are cute. He never supported the war in Iraq and supports diplomacy with Iran. He believes that climate change is "one of the great moral issues of our generation" and I know that most of my generation would agree. He wants to regulate CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation)'s. His candidacy has forced America to have serious conversations about race in this country. Seriously, the more I read the more I like this guy.

And now that I have publicly proclaimed my support for him I have probably doomed him to a slow, drawn-out, painful political death. I should shut up now.

Thanks for reading this far, if you made it.

Please just don't vote for McCain. I know he looks like a centrist but he's actually quite scary. He wants to solve our environmental problems by building nuclear power plants. He still thinks America is a "shining city on a hill" (way to reference the original Jonathon Edwards).
Don't you even dare vote for Huckabee. He doesn't believe in evolution.

I'm done now.

One last thing. How can you not vote for this guy?

I love Thursdays!

2008-02-07T17:04:00.000-05:00

Today was the first busy day that we've had in the last two weeks. It was a relief to be doing things again. I was starting to despair that I would never be able to function as a human being (much less a college student) again.

This morning I had my personal meeting with M. Faure where he humbled me by helping/making me correct my grammar exam. He didn't believe me when I told him that no one had ever taught me the future anterior tense so I had to explain that I've actually only studied French for 3 years before my arrival. Also, thanks to a mis-edited email from Amel, I also had the privilege of trying to explain to him what "I miss you like a motha effa" means. That was awkward.
Then Tessa and I mediated a session of "English Conversation" which is like a make-up/extra-credit class for ESC students. It was actually a lot of fun. The two girls who came asked good questions and we tried to explain the election craziness and they even laughed at some of my jokes. It was almost like having French friends except they get academic credit for showing up.
Then we had our first Philosophy class. Our teacher is a philosophical genius and there are only four of us in the class so we were all pretty nervous. It turned out to be a lot of fun, I thought. We discussed "L'existentialisme et un humainisme" by Jean-Paul Sartre.
Then we had our Arab world class which was fun. We talked about differences between the Arab world and Western civilization. It was a little repetitive since that's what we talked about last week but we got to watch a movie so whatever.

Yesterday Tessa and I went to her ICRP which basically means we sat and chatted and drank tea with a woman who runs a group for immigrant women. She was really nice and she invited us to go to a moving with the group on Monday so I think we'll go to that.

There is actually currently an international festival of short films going on right now in Clermont-Ferrand. I haven't seen any of the films yet, maybe we'll go tomorrow or Saturday. You can tell who are all of the festival-goers though because they walk around town with messenger bags with the festival logo on it. The whole atmosphere kinda of reminds me of Art Fair except it's much more spread out and instead of consisting of a crowd of yuppie Ann Arbor-ites who pretend to be European, it's a crowd of Europeans who just are what they are. (No offense, I love Ann Arbor-ites! And Art Fair!... But let's not kid ourselves.) Here's a photo of the festival's logo...

News!

2008-02-04T08:24:00.000-05:00

Good news! The Arab World professor doesn't hate America. He turned out to be very nice and even told Tessa and me that we could do our presentation in English. We of course politely declined. Then he asked us why we wanted to take the class and told us that he thought there were simply lots of misunderstandings betwwen the Arab wolrd and America. We of course politely (and enthusiastically) agreed. Tessa was even quick thinking enough to throw in a comment on how much we hate George Bush. Good thinking Tessa!

Bad news! John Edwards dropped out. Hopefully this just means that he has a secret aliance with Obama to become his VP...

Good news! Sarkozy got married! Surprisingly, French people are actually very blasé about the whole thing. I think they're tired of reading about him and his life.

Bad news! The wifi at my host parents house is still broken. And the wireless at school is unreliable. And I'm currently out of NPR podcasts.

Good news! My host family and I made donuts yesterday. They aren't actually donuts but are instead tiny pieces of dough that are lightly fried. More like sweet corn chips really. They're for mardi gras. We also made crepes Saturday night. My host parents let me try to flip one of them

Bad news! I am bad at flipping and the crepe went flying across the kitchen.

EDIT: FANTASTIC NEWS! THE WIFI AT HOME IS WORKING AGAIN! YAY!

...good times.

2008-02-01T09:30:00.001-05:00

Happy Birthday Dad!

For everyone else's amusement, here's a photo of the e card that I sent him...

yuck yuck yuck. or as they say here, huhn huhn huhn.

Post-departure Update

2008-01-31T10:13:00.000-05:00

So a in the last couple of days all of the other Kalamazoo students have left and Me, Tessa, Coco, and Julia are the only ones left. We are having our first classes tonight. As a result of having significantly less to do and significantly less people to do it with, I have developed the following things to do in my copious amounts of free time:

I walk everywhere instead of taking the bus. This takes more time and is a form of mild exercise. It is also a good excuse to listen to the "Americana" playlist that I have made on my ipod.
I go for brief runs. Brief because I am weak and it is cold.
I draw and color while listening to podcasts of Talk of the Nation and the Diane Rehm Show.
I read a lot.
I go to bed at what my mother would call "a decent hour". I am well rested which means I have strange dreams. I don't like it.
I clean my room. It's really clean.

Ok. Gotta go prepare myself for my class tonight. It's called "The Arab World:Between stereotypes and reality" and it's apparently taught by a bitter man who hates America which makes me nervous. Funny, because up on till five months ago, I had that in common with him.

I make a joke. Mostly.

The Voyage That Time Forgot: Part 7- Chamonix

2008-01-31T06:36:00.000-05:00

Going in to the last three days of my never-lasting vacation I have to admit that I was suffering from a case of travelers’ fatigue. I was tired of trains, planes, and automobiles and all I really wanted to do was fall in to a comfortable bed and sleep for all of eternity. That being sad, the weekend in Chamonix was probably my favorite part of the trip.

Friday morning I got up long before the sun (for the third morning in a row) and was picked up outside my house by my program director and his wife in their tiny green French car. We drove to the train station where we met up with Juli and Tessa and got the train to Lyon (second time in the Lyon train station in 18 hours). This train ride was mostly characterized by the fact that we all stretched out on the benches in the compartments and fell asleep. Not comfortable, fyi. Then we ran across the Lyon train station to catch our next train to St. Germain. Half-way there we had to get off the train and get back on in a different compartment because the train was going to spilt in two and go to different places and we didn’t really want to go to Geneva. Once we got to St. Germain we caught another train that took us to Chamonix. We finally got there at about one o’clock in the afternoon and walked to our hotel where we met a bunch of other Kalamazoo people and ate lunch. After lunch we took a ski lift up one of the very large mountain and enjoyed the view. We marveled at the people skiing at the top of the mountain since at the bottome of the mountain there was no snow. It was very pretty. Then we descended and went back to the hotel and took naps and ate dinner. That night we explored the tiny city of Chamonix and ended up at a bar with two guys that Jon met at a bus stop. They were friendly and American and one of them was actually from the city of Kalamazoo. They were also both Marines who were vacationing in Europe and they had some pretty intense stories about how in Prague on New Year’s Eve is celebrated with a mob armed with fireworks. Then Courtney and I came back to the hotel and went to bed while everyone else continued to take advantage of the beers being bought by the American military (through these two young men).

The next day it blizzard-ed. All day. Lots and lots of snow. I got up and decided that I wanted to try and do some snowboarding. So after breakfast I went for a walk to try and find some affordable rentals and a bunny hill (or as the French call it, le colline d’escargot, the snail here). I went to the end of the block and saw an equipment store and decided to take a chance and just walk in and ask someone. The lady behind the counter was very friendly and she told me that they did rent for half days and that there was actually a festival going on that weekend and so rentals for women were free! Needless to say, I was excited to hear this. I also asked where there might be a good bunny hill and she told me that the trails on the mountains might be closed because the snow but there was a place called the “Planards” that might be good. Overwhelmed by my fantastic good luck, I thanked her and went on my merry way. I walked around town and looked at the snow. Chamonix is a very charming little touristy place. Lots of sportswear stores, restaurants, bars, and condominiums filled with British people. Then I went back to the hotel and shared the good news and a group of us decided to try and go find the “Planards”. I consulted a map and we made our way through the blizzard and eventually found the “Planards” which turned out to be the tiny hill next to the Alps where French people take their children to learn to ski so that they don’t have to learn on the Alps. I asked the lady behind the admission counter when the half-day lift ticket started and ended and how much it cost. Realizing that we wanted to eat our free lunch at the hotel and that we weren’t dressed to go skiing, we decided to go back to the hotel, eat lunch, rent some free equipment, and come back. So we went back and recruited some more people (free skis and a 9 euro lift ticket are good incentive) and ate. When we went to the equipment store, however, we discovered that they were closed for lunch. Of course. Not wanting to lose anymore time, I quickly found another outfitter and learned that they were not offering free rentals for women but it would only cost 12 euros to rent stuff for a half day. We decided to go for it. The guy who rented the stuff to us was impressed to see so many American girls who could speak French and he was extra nice to us. He said he was tired of the British people who could only speak English. 40 minutes later everyone else had their skis and I had my snowboard and so we started our trek over to the hill. This took a while, especially since Rujuta somehow got lost. (I told you it was a blizzard). But eventually we all made it to the hill, bought our tickets, and hit the slopes. It was tons and tons of fun. I started off on the T bar and I discovered that classes of French children have no qualms trampling all over you to cut in front of the line for the T bar. After realizing navigating a T bar on a snowboard while getting stampeded by brats (I don’t say that lightly. They really were brats. They were hitting each other.) was going to get old fast, I graduated myself to the chairlift which I of course I fell off of the first time I tried to exit it. But the “big” hill turned out to be much less crowded and covered in amazing snow (Michigan never ever gets powder like this) and a lot of fun. We got several great runs in before our soaked jeans and pea coats started getting to us. That’s when I started falling. I took one good whack to the head and decided it was time to quit when they closed the lift anyway because everything was closing. So then we caught a bus back to downtown Chamonix, returned our equipment, ran back to the hotel, and all took long hot showers. Then we ate dinner, played some cards, and went to bed.

The next day we got up early and met our program director who took us to a giant chairlift called the “Aiguille de Midi”. This chairlift was actually a two-part gondola system and the “Aiguille du Midi” is actually a mountain next to the Mont Blance. We were going a loooooong way up. The gondola was packed with people who where going up to ski back down and their huge amounts of equipment (harasses, skis, boots, ice picks, etc.). Once we got to the top the view was AMAZING. Seriously, it was really cool to be up that high. Here’s a video I took from the top…

We oogled at the crazy people who were starting to ski down. We oogled at the beautiful landscape that was covered in a beautiful layer of snow but under an amazing blue sky (we got really lucky with the weather). We oogled at Switzerland and Italy. We (Jon) threw snow balls off of the platform and counted how long they would fall before we could hear them hit the rock (8 seconds). We (me) were relieved when this did not start an avalanche. We told M. Faure (our program director) that we were forever indebted to him for paying for us to be on top of this mountain. Our amazement and joy may have been enhanced by the chemical effects of the lack of oxygen at 13,000 ft, but it was cool none-the-less. When we climbed some stairs we realized just how little oxygen that is. Eventually we found a restaurant (still on top of the mountain) and got some hot chocolate and hot wine. Then we took the gondolas back down. This was when we saw the hill where we had skied in context. It was humbling. Once at the bottom we bought some postcards, ate some lunch, and headed to the train station. From there we took a bus to a train to another train to a taxi to my bed. Then I slept.

And that was the end of my three week stint at homeless. It was probably the coolest three weeks of my life.

The end.

The Voyage That Time Forgot: Part 6- Lisbon (and a little bit of Madrid again)

2008-01-29T03:27:00.000-05:00

The next morning we woke very early and ventured on the Madrid Metro (which was dirty thanks to a Metro-cleaner-people strike) to the airport. We flew on AirVueling which was pleasant but our plane was manned by a team of flight attendants who were either remarkably inexperienced or high (and I don’t mean in the air) because they couldn’t get through the safety explanation without breaking out in to giggles. This was a little disconcerting but we got there ok. Then we caught a bus downtown and found our hotel which was old and sorta creepy but comfortable. After a brief nap we decided to walk around and we found the Portuguese version of Subway which was pretty delicious. As we walked down the most touristy street, I accidentally made eye contact with a creepy old man and as we walked past he offered me a baggie full of marijuana (or rat poison-soaked oregano). I was so surprised that I almost walked in to him. Luckily Juli was there to pull me away. Then we walked up the hill to the castle (I forget the name) and visited it. This was very cool to see. Most of the plaques and things were in Portuguese but from what I could gather the castle was built by the Moors and then was used by the Portuguese royal family. It was on a hill and there was a great view of Lisbon and the river. There was also a musician playing classical guitar which gave it a very nice ambiance. Then we walked back down the hill and wandered around through a big square with a big statue. (I should add that I tried to figure out who most of these statues were but they either 1) were labeled with a name I did not recognize, 2) were not labeled, or 3) had long explanations in Portuguese). Then we walked down the touristy street and saw some POLICE ON SEGWAYS. That was exciting. So I took a picture. Then we got some dinner. Portuguese food is dominated by fish and none of us are fish enthusiasts so that was a little disappointing but we weren’t all that surprised.

The next morning we got up and took the train to Belen which at some point at history was a separate town but now is just a neighborhood of Lisbon and we found the President’s house. We American’s have a White House for our President; the Portuguese have a Hot Pink/Fuchsia House for theirs. That was an exciting discovery, as was the museum which had a collection of artifacts from Portuguese presidential history. This museum was new shiny glass cased and shiny national gifts and full of pretty ribbons and medals and it also had shiny new palm pilots that came with headphones and guided us (in English) through 90 years of the history of the Portuguese Presidency. We even took a 3D tour through the palace next door. We were also treated to the loud yelling of a Portuguese school group. It was fun. Then we left the museum and tried to find the Monastery of Saint Geronimo. We got lost and did a big circle around the monastery but we did get a nice view of a high school and a fancy neighborhood. Once we found the monastery which was very beautiful and had a beautiful church. We also watched part of an education theatrical performance that was being performed for another school group. At least I hope/assume it was educational because I didn’t understand a word of it but there were people running around in period costumes and yelling. The kids were laughing. Maybe it was a comedy. After grabbing some falafel for lunch (why are there kebabs but no falafel in France?!?!), we walked to the Tower of Belen which was a former defense tower/supply depository/prison right on the water. It was pretty and had a great view. We looked west and could almost see America. Ha ha ha. There was also a stone map of the world next to a statue celebrating “exploration-turned-exploitation” (title my own) so we ran all around it claiming continents and felt mildly homesick as we pointed to our hometowns with our toes. Then we took the train back to real Lisbon and did some shopping. We tried to buy some souvenir socks at one of the many sock/stocking stores we kept passing, but upon entering we realized that the socks were actually fairly expensive and did not come in cool patterns. Except for the kids’ ones. Which were, of course, too small. So then we found some dinner and ate and drank some Porto (because where else can you drink Porto and not feel pretentious?) and went to bed.

A note about Lisbon: something I noticed about Lisbon that I found really usual/interesting was the mix between the modern and the old. All of the tourist attractions looked as though they had been recently renovated and they were also remarkably affordable. I mean, there were even police on Segway’s. But then we would walk down streets that looked as though they hadn’t been renovated (or cleaned) since the First World War. Hmmmm. We also found that Portuguese men have no problem being vulgar to female tourists in the street. This was sort of annoying, to say the least.

The next morning we caught the bus back to the airport and flew back to Madrid. Our flight was uneventful and remarkably empty of passengers. We got back on the Metro to go to our hotel and as we entered the train I was surprised to watch a young woman shoving Tessa in the back. I was surprised because the train was crowded and people were crowding together to get on but this girl was positively ramming Tessa in the back. I was also watching her because I was confused as to why she was shoving Tessa with her hands held in front of her with her coat over them. At first, I honestly (and admittedly naively) thought that she was trying to sneak her dog on to the Metro or something. Why else would she hold her arms under her coat in such an odd position? As I continued to watch, however, (she was smirking! How could I not watch her?) it became clear that she was not hiding a dog but rather her other hand as she clumsily groped for both Tessa’s and mine bags. She was really bad at it though. We both felt her and moved our bags and two stops later we emerged from the Metro with all of our belongings. Victory! Score: Clueless American Students: 1. Snarky Bad Spanish Pickpockets: 0. So then we found our hostel and then some lunch before taking another nap (traveling is tiring!) and then meeting Nate and our friend Amel (fellow Kalamazoo student at Clermont-Ferrand and common friend of Nate) for dinner at Madrid’s best (and perhaps only) vegetarian restaurant. It was lots of fun and very delicious. Then we went to bed.

The next morning we caught a taxi to the airport, a plane to Lyon, a bus to the train station, and a train to Clermont-Ferrand where we took buses to our respective homes. Then we all collapsed in our respective beds. It was a long day.

The Voyage That Time Forgot: Part 5- Madrid

2008-01-28T06:52:00.000-05:00

So after wandering around Charles de Gaule airport searching for Air Comet and ibuprofen, I got on a plane and flew to Madrid, Spain where I met up with Juli and Tessa. We dumped my bag at the hostel and then went out and found our friend Andrew (fellow Kalamazoo College junior, studying in Cacaeres, Spain), grabbed some coffee, chatted and shared some much appreciated Kalamazoo gossip. Then we met our other friend Nate (Kalamazoo graduate working in Madrid on Fulbright grant) and he gave us a short walking tour of the city, showing us the Plaza Mayor and the bear statue (I forget the name). We went gossiped some more and then Nate took us to one of his favorite restaurants where he showed us how traditional Spanish cider is served by being poured from above your head in to a glass on the floor. The cider was delicious and so was the Spanish food. Then we were tired so we headed back to our hotel and went to bed.

The next morning we got up and met Andrew and his charming parents for a visit to the Prada where we saw lots of cool Spanish art like Valasquez and Goya. After becoming completely artistically over-saturated, we had a delicious late lunch, Spanish-style and went to visit the cathedrale at the royal palace. That night Mr. and Mrs. Armstrong (Andrew’s parents) invited us to go to a parade to celebrate Three Kings Days. The parade was similar to an American parade; it mostly consisted of floats covered in giant, colorful children’s characters. The two biggest differences were the lack of crowd control and the addition of people throwing candy off of every float. This made for an interesting combination and Andrew taught me how to say “Kids! Throw me some candy!” in Spanish. Here’s a video…

As the parade ended and the crowd was dispersing there was a fireworks display that was synchronized to Handel’s Halleluiah Chorus. After the parade Mr. and Mrs. Armstrong invited us out to dinner with them so we went to the world’s longest continually operating restaurant which was definitely amazing. After dinner we met back up with Nate who took us to his favorite Belgian bar and celebrated Barack Obama’s win in Iowa. On our way home, Nate was seduced by a local street promoter and we suddenly found ourselves inside one of Madrid’s count-less discoteca’s. I was tired and sick and not entirely thrilled to be there but the promoter did get us in for free and the time was made more amusing by Juli getting yelled at by the DJ when she tried to request “Umbrella” and Andrew singing “Umbrella” when it finally was played. I also enjoyed the people-watching. We eventually made it make to our hostel and fell into our beds.

The next morning we got up and met Andrew and his father for a stroll around the large park whose names I have forgotten. It was pretty and nice and since it was a holiday (Three King’s Day- the day Spanish kids get their Christmas presents) there were a lot of other people doing the same thing. We watched the ducks in the pond and discovered that they were larger than American ducks. We appreciated a strange art exhibit that consisted of a glass pavilion with an overgrown beaver dam inside. Then Mr. Armstrong went back to the hotel and we young people decided to rent a row boat. We had a lot of fun going in a squiggly circle around the large man-made lagoon, pretending to be pirates and making fun of other people’s rowing techniques (discreetly of course). Then we bought ice cream and snacks and tried to go to an art museum but it was closed due to the holiday. So we had some lunch (ice cream before lunch! What a rebel I am!) and went back to the hostel to watch The Italian Job in Spanish and take naps. That evening we had our own little Three Kings Party with the Armstrong’s and we offered to bring the traditional cake. This created quite an adventure when we walked in to a bakery and approached the counter and then remembered that we don’t speak Spanish. After some pointing and laughing and thoroughly amusing the two guys behind the counter we emerged victorious with an appropriately sized cake. So then we went to the Armstrong’s hotel/apartment and feasted on delivered pizza, diet coke, cake, and champagne. It was a relaxing fun evening whose highlight was probably when Andrew popped the champagne on the balcony and the cork flew across the street on to the roof of the neighboring building.

Best movie ever.

2008-01-25T19:00:00.001-05:00

If you ever have the chance to watch this movie, do it. Go out and buy the book right now. You won't regret it.

"Et soiviens-toi, la lutte continue!"

Really? Again?

2008-01-25T04:54:00.000-05:00

They're at it again.

The Voyage That Time Forgot: Part 4 - Nice and Marsielles

2008-01-22T15:24:00.001-05:00

Whew. Our weary traveler continues across Europe...

So after we left my ancestral homeland and it's bountiful plats of carbohydrates we got on a train and took a beautiful ride down the coast to Nice. We shared a train compartment with a very nice woman who spoke Italian and French and who asked us who we were (well, asked me who we were). She was very friendly and I had fun trying to eavesdrop on her conversation with some other Italian women in the compartment although I understood very little. Then we got to Nice...

I have actually been to Nice before but it is a nice little dirty city on the beach and the perfect place to spend New Year's. After getting to the hotel we decided to had for the boardwalk and take a walk. We discovered there were almost as many Italian tourists in Nice as there had been in Milan. We wandered around some more and found a Christmas festival/market thing that mostly consisted of a concert with 3 fake Disney characters, a bubble machine, and some trampolines. For dinner we decided to try a Mexican restaurant (actually, Mom politely acquiesced to my demand for Mexican) and while it was a decidedly French take on Mexican food it was nonetheless delicious. Then we we decided that we were to tired to ring in the New Year with fireworks over the Baie des Anges with all the other tourists so we went back to our hotel room, put on our pajamas, pulled out the box of chocolates and the bottle of champagne that my host family had give my real family for Christmas and watched circuses on French television. It was very relaxing.

The next day we got up late and decided to go for a bike ride. So we bought sandwiches for a picnic lunch and found a bike rental place and took off down the boardwalk. First we decided to head towards Monaco (and freedom!...just kidding) but there were big hills in the way so we turned around and went towards the airport. We stopped in the middle of the boardwalk to eat our sandwiches and do some quality people-watching (My mom and I are really quite good at people-watching. It's one of our things.) before continuing all the way to the airport, turning around, and realizing that the wind was now blowing against us and making our trip back to the rental place much harder. But we eventually made it back and decided to try to visit the Russian Orthodox Church in Nice which may be the first Russian Orthodox Church ever built outside of Russia. We found it and it was very pretty but it was closed. That was a bummer. So then we ate some dinner at some Italian place and went to bed.

The next morning we got up early and caught a train to Marseilles (which is, of course, the nice, big, dirty city on the beach)...
Once we were there we got some breakfast and then bought some tickets to visit the Chateau d'If on the Island of If (featured in The Count of Monte Cristo). 45 minutes later we were on top of a boat (appropriately named the Edmond Dantes) on our way to the island. Once we got there I have to admit that the Chateau d'If was a little bit disappointingly. I guess I was expecting it to be bigger or to have a lot of exciting history about the rogues who were imprisoned there over the centuries. But the first thing one learns upon their arrival to the island is that any real history is eclipsed by the more well-known and more dramatic fictional accounts and the how castle might as well now be simply a monument to Alexandre Dumas. But it was fun nonetheless to hang out on an island and walk around the castle. Then we took the boat back to Marseilles and grabbed some lunch before taking the bus up the big hill to the church Notre Dame de la Garde which was a beautiful church with a fantastic view of the city. Then it started to get cold and rainy and we were tired and so we went back to the hotel and I fell asleep and Mom went scavenging for dinner and some back with a croque monsieur, two servings of fries from Quick, and a piece of baklava. Random. But delicious.

The next day we got up and wandered around the Old Port Neighborhood and saw a lot of stuff but really didn't see anything. We did walk around the old port and outside another church and found all the wino's favorite spots on the rocks. Then we decided to just go to the train station early because we had nothing better to do. This turned out to be our fatal mistake (dun dun dun dun!)...

So being silly Americans who prefer to burn our own body weight in fossil fuels each time we travel, my mother and I are unaccustomed to train travel and so when we saw a train that was departing for our desired destination in the station we decided to get on it and get settled with our recently purchased lunch and trashy magazines. As we boarded the train (at the point that we thought was a good 45 minutes before its planned departure), however, the gods of SNFC decided to punish us for our foolish pride and the automatic door of the train closed immediately after I entered the car and immediately before my Mom had the chance to get on. Imagine my surprise, confusion, and horror when I turned around and realized that the door had shut behind me and seeing my mother's confused face through the little port-hole window. Incidentally there were also three French cops standing there and when I explained to them, as I franticly pushed the door button, to them that I had to be with that crazy-looking woman, either on the train or off, they looked at me and told me to go find the conductor. "That's all well and good," I thought, "but how am I supposed to find one person on this multi-car, double-decker train before it leaves in the next two minutes?" But instead of trying to express these sentiments to the cops, I just stormed off in a panic. I was relieved to find that my beloved mother had gotten on the train some cars down and we found each other and then found what we thought were our seat. Upon examining our tickets tickets, however, we realized that they were not our seats but our seats were on a train that was scheduled to leave Marseilles in approximately 40 minutes. So after Mom made an appeal for mercy to the conductor we got off the train in Avignon and waited there for 50 minutes before getting on the right train and finding out right seats.

Whew, we finally got back to Paris, caught a taxi, and got to our hotel. At this point I was feeling fever-y and sick so I crawled in to bed and drank tea and watched TV while Mom scavenged again. We did might a very friendly American woman in the lobby who was from Kansas and who talked to us about college football. It was odd to socialize with talkative Mid-westerners again... Then we watched 24 on TV and went to bed.

Happiness!

2008-01-21T10:35:00.000-05:00

All the coffee machines in ESC are dispensing free coffee and hot chocolate! I have already have two hot chocolates, a a cafe vanille, and a tea. Yay!

Also Pepiniere is over! I messed up when I presented my one slide but when I made a heart-warming and heart-felt statement at the end about how I am a stupid American and I learned a lot about... beauty schools... in France and the little old lady who wants to start the beauty school was touched. The Stupid American act worked perfectly for a whole 4 months! Now all I have to do is tell my group that I'm not going to be there next semester...

Ok, I have to go write a 10 page paper about being a esclave de la cuisine.

The Voyage That Time Forgot: Part 3- Milan

2008-01-19T12:34:00.000-05:00

So then Mom and I hopped on a train and went to Milan. We took the train so that she could enjoy the view but she fell asleep and so I enjoyed the view and read my book (Read The Omnivore's Dilemma if you get the chance). I was relieved to be back in Italy when I discovered that my train meal was a fantastic salad.

To be honest I don't remember what we did day by day in Milan so I'll just mention some of the highlights...

We were hoping to see Leonardo DaVinci's Last Supper but upon our arrival we learned that it's necessary to reserve tickets two months in advance and we hadn't done that so we were only able to stand outside the building and close our eyes and imagine what it would be like to stand in front of one of Western Art's greatest master pieces. But that was almost as good.

We realized that our hotel was next to an English-language book store owned by a dignified English gentleman-in-exile and his dog Jake. Mom embarrassed Jake by talking to him in baby-talk and the English guy was very nice and gave great advice about restaurants. His store also made me salivate since I had seen that many English books in one place in months. Merry Christmas to me!

We visited the various chuches (Il Duomo, San Ambrosio) and art galleries and museums. We got to go up on the roof of the Duomo and that was cool. As the guidebook said, "Il Duomo is stubbornly gothic despite being completed almost 400 years after it was finished". We saw a lot of really great art and stuff. My favorite was Rapheal's original sketch for The School of Athens. We saw some models that were based off of Leonardo DaVinci's sketches at the Museum of Science and Stuff.

We ate a lot of great food. I made sure to eat a balanced diet from my 3 favorite food groups: pasta, pizza, and gelato. We took daily coffee/chocolate breaks and I discovered that Italian hot chocolate is amazingly thick and rich and delicious.

Overall it was a lot of fun. I love Italy, it's so nice and laid-back and everyone was really nice about my rudimentary Italian. The food was amazing. The art was copious and beautiful. There was even a castle. And did I mention that the food was good?

The Voyage That Time Forgot: Part 2- Normandy

2008-01-18T16:25:00.000-05:00

'
When we last left our heroes they had just finished their second delicious Christmas meal and were snug in their beds. Alas, they awoke very early the next morning and found their way to Hertz Rent-a-car to pick up their shiny black chariot which luckily came equipped with a hand little navigator lady. And she only spoke French so I got/had to sit in the front and translate/navigate. After experiencing the French version of 7/11 or Tim Hortons and realizing that is just as lame as the originals, we finally peered through the sheep fields and were able to discern the distinct silhouette of Mont-St-Michel.

For anyone who might not know, the Mont-St-Michel is a abbey built on piece of land that used to be a real island but it now is more like a mountain in the middle of a marsh. So we got there and anguished about where we should park the car so that it wouldn't get flooded when the tide came it. Then we found our tiny hotel and ate delicious crepes for lunch. After finally finding a safe spot for the shiny, black chariot we visited the abbey which was beautiful and very cool. While we were there the fog rolled in and was mysterious and cryptic. Then we went souvenir shopping and watched a painful amount of The Simpsons before having dinner. Then we wandered around the island which was pleasant since most of the other tourists had left. We went out on the causeway to look at the abbey at night. Then we were lame and went to bed. There wasn't much else to do.

The next morning Charlie woke up with food poisoning. Luckily he's a stoic sort of fellow and he was ill very discreetly. So we got up early and drove around Normandy to see various D-Day sites. First we went to Arramanche where the British built a port to supply D-Day troops. Then we visited the American cemetery and the beach itself (I don't remember which one) and it was very moving.

Then we drove back to Paris and had dinner at the yummy Italian restaurant again. Then we went to bed.

Brief Interuption

2008-01-17T16:06:00.001-05:00

I am going to pause my narrative just briefly to express a pet peeve that I discovered while in Paris. At the Louvre, in fact. But there is a disturbing trend that I have experience while visiting several European museums. This trend may, in fact, may be the harbinger of the end of Western Civilization.

This trend consists of people who go to museums fill of beautiful art and walk around taking photos of everything on the walls [I should clarify: this applies to people who crowd around the really famous paintings with their camera's out].

This is just stupid. Seriously, just stop. Look at the art. Move to the next one. Rinse and repeat. Take as much time as you need, just don't stand there with your camera pointed at the piece, fiddling with your settings because you can't use your flash and preventing me from walking past you or stand anywhere in your lens' field of vision and generally forcing me to body check past you.

This especially applies to people who take the photo with their camera phone. I don't care how fancy your phone is, you don't have enough mega pixels to justify taking a photo of the Mona Lisa. It just looks like this...See how pixel-ated that is? Really. Buy a postcard at the gift shop. Look at the image on Wikipedia. That's what gets me. In this age of abundunt information, it's not like you'll never see that image again! Do what you need to do but stop blocking the flow of the gallery.

Ok. I'm done now.

The Voyage That Time Forgot: Part 1- Paris

2008-01-16T12:15:00.000-05:00

I began my travels by meeting my family in Paris for a couple of days of sight-seeing. We started by conquering the challenge of the Metro and admiring Notre Dame by night and climbing to the top of l'Arc de Triumphe to see the Paris streets lit up for Christmas. It was very pretty and at dinner our waiter was kind enough to show Charlie the French way to eat mussels which is to use the shell like tweezers.

The next day we visited the Musee d'Orsay and were completely overwhelmed by both the beauty and the sheer volume of art there. The museum itself is a converted old train station and is beautiful in addition to being filled to the seems with fantastic artwork. I was very impressed. Then Mom and Charlie and I tried to visit Saint-Chappelle but it was closed so we took a coffee/chocolate break and I found a peanut in the bottom of my hot chocolate. Random. That night we had dinner at a great Italian restaurant and some random waitress told me to finish my pasta or Santa wouldn't come. I thought this was pretty funny but no one else in my family did because they don't speak French. Dommage for them.

The next day we went to the Louvre which had even more art than the Musee d'Orsay. Quelle suprise. It was vastly overwhelming and Charlie and I just ended up wandering around trying to find the exhibit of Iranian art, getting lost amidst centuries of French sculpture, accidentally finding the Venus de Milo and eventually ending up walking around the Tuilleries before deciding that we were too cheap to go for a ride on the giant ferris wheel. Then we met back up with Mom and Dad and we ventured to Montmarre to see the Sacre Coeur and be slightly disappointed by the view from Montmarre which was dominated by singing drunk guys.

That night was Christmas Eve and we hadn't made a reservation for dinner so we found ourselves wandering streets among the closed restaurants as the real Parisians were enjoying their home-made meals and the pleasure of the company of their friends and family. I personally started envisioning not sugar plums but having to hunt rats in the Paris Metro in order to make Christmas Eve dinner over the eternal flame under the Arc de Triumphe. Luckily we did find a restaurant that was open and even more luckily it was tres chic and tres delicious. Luckiest, we realized halfway through the meal that we had made a reservation for the very same restaurant the next night. Merry Christmas to us!

Christmas morning we got up and went to Mass at Notre Dame. It was the Gregorian Mass and had a great choir. Afterwards we headed to the Museum of the Arab World because we thought it would be open. We were right. The museum was interesting but kinda old and sorta dusty and empty. After that we went to the Eiffel Tower and ended up deciding not to go up since every other tourist in Paris had also had the same idea. Charlie and I did have fun watching the bike cops chase the illegal souvenir sellers around. Then we walked down the Champs-Elyses and looked at the closed stores. Then we had another delicious dinner.

Tune in next time for the next episode of The Voyage Time Forgot when the DeChants family braves French auto routes and sheep fields to go to the beach!

Flash back: Weekend with Dad in Amsterdam

2008-01-15T11:22:00.000-05:00

So I thought that before I began the immense task of summarizing my vacation it would only be fair to go back and describe a smaller, but still note-worthy, trip that I took before I went on the Voyage-That-Time-Forgot. The weekend before, December 14th to December 16th, I went to Amsterdam to visit my dad (my real one) who was in Amsterdam for a business trip and we did some sight-seeing together.

First we went to the Vincent Van Gogh museum which was very interesting before walking around some and realizing that the whole "Amsterdam has a lot of bikers" thing is not a myth. They are everywhere and they do not stop for pedestrians (fyi). Then we ate dinner at a Irish pub that was apparently frequented by alcoholics and pickpockets since they had all the major credit card companies' phone numbers posted so that you could call and cancel your cards after your wallet was taken from where you drunkenly left it at the bar.

The next morning we went to Anne Frank's house which was very moving and then went to the Reijks Museum where I learned a lot about the Dutch Golden Age. Namely, that it existed.

When it started getting dark and cold (at about 3 PM) we decided to hop on a boat tour and we were treated to an hour and a half of slowly floating through a dizzy-ing maze of canals while our guide, Hans, told us about the horrors of rising living costs in Amsterdam and about how even after insurance companies paid to install railings along all the canals 50 cars still drive in each year.

After a dinner of yummy Thai food and a bottle of crazy Thai wine Dad went crazy and decided he wanted to go play with the slot machines at Casino Holland and I, of course ,said that this was a fantastic idea. Unfortunately, (or perhaps a sign from a Higher Power), there was a cover charge that neither of us wanted to pay so we walked around some more. Eventually we ate some delicious Dutch pastries and then went and watched "Atonement" at a Dutch movie theater (English with Dutch subtitles).

The next day we made a quick trip across town to the famous square and the palace and an old convent-type place. Then he went back to America and I came back to Clermont-Ferrand.

Whew!

2008-01-10T11:52:00.000-05:00

Well here I am back in Clermont-Ferrand after almost 3 weeks of whirl-wind travel and excitement. Aside from a nasty, but manageable, cold I am alive and well. And it's still not done- tomorrow morning I am leaving early to take a eight-hour train ride out to Chamonix, France to see Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in France.

Unfortunately that means that I don't have time right now to summarize my travel adventures but I will post some highlights here:

Spent the night on a tiny island in the middle of a bog that was pretending to be the Atlantic Ocean.
Walked. A lot.
Learned that you have to reserve tickets to see The Last Supper at least two months in advance. Dang. I'm sure that it's over-rated anyway.
Discovered that Italian hot chocolate is akin to a hot pudding cup in a mug. Yummy.
Biked almost all the way around the Baie des Anges.
Ate lots of delicious French and Italian food. Spanish food was pretty good too.
Encountered Lisbon's sketchiest marijuana/oregano dealer- twice. Escaped marijuana-less.
Ate at the oldest, continuously operating restaurant in the world.
Had a run in with Spain's worst pick-pocket. Emerged victorious with all my belongings.
Went row-boating in a big park in Madrid.

Ok. I gotta re-pack everything.

Special shout-out to Emily Minerath because she sent me my only real Christmas present and because I hope she is having an amazing time saving the world in Guatemala!

I'm going on a really long vacation...

2007-12-21T16:08:00.000-05:00

For the next three weeks I will be the closest to homeless that I will (hopefully) ever be in my life. I will literally be going in giant circles around Western Europe. Here's the plan so far (although I'm not sure about some of the dates), see if you can follow along...

December 22nd - Train to Paris. Meet family (father, mother, brother). Do Paris stuff. Museums, churches, statues, baguettes, and the like.

December 26th-28th(?)- Drive to norther France. See Mont-St-Michael. See D-day beach? Eats omelette's. Drive back to Paris. Adventures on Auto routes.

December 298th- Father and brother leave. Mother and I take train to Milan, Italy. She looks at DaVinci's Last Supper while I stuff my face with pasta. Just kidding. We'll both look at the Last Summer while stuffing our faces with pasta. I will invariably make a fool of myself trying to talk to someone with my rudimentary Italian.

December 30st- Train to Nice, France. Spend New Year's Eve licking gelato cones in France's equivalent to Las Vegas while everyone else is partying. I really like gelato. Go biking on the beach? Stare at the Mediterranean.

January 1st- Train to Marseilles. Try not to get mugged in France's most violent city. Take a boat to go see the Chateau d'If (prison from the Count of Monte Cristo). Try and understand the ridiculous Marseillaise accent.

January 3rd- Train to Paris. Spend night in City of Lights before...

January 4th- Mother flies back to America. I fly to Madrid, Spain to meet Tessa and Juli. Hang around Madrid. Go to Prado. Eat Tapas. Try to speak Spanish?

January 7th- Fly to Lisbon, Portugal. Hang around in Lisbon. Drink Porto. Try and find what there is to do in Portugal. Don't even attempt Portuguese.

January 10th- Fly to Lyon, France. Train from Lyon to Clermont-Ferrand. Try to make it back in time to go shopping in the nation-wide sales that France has in January. Going to need some clean clothes. Spend night at host family's house.

January 11th- Train from Clermont-Ferrand to Charmonix, France with Program Director and his wife (yay for Kalamazoo-sponsored trips!). Stare at beautiful Alps. Drink wine. Eat fondue. Go skiing/snowboarding? Try and find a mountain goat. Climb mountain.

January 13th- Train back to Clermont-Ferrand. Collapse in to bed. Sleep for 3 days oh wait...

January 14th- Pepiniere project due. Ha!

So yeah. I have calculated it and that is 3 weeks, 4 countries, 4 planes, 8 trains, 3,930 miles (8,648 km.) and 1 mountain goat. Almost four thousand miles if you consider that none of those trains are going to be going in a straight line.

I have never filled my memory card on my camera but I think that might happen.
Anyway. I'm going to be out of contact for a while so I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday break and that they have lots of fun and that they miss me as much as I miss them!

Shout out!

2007-12-19T16:09:00.001-05:00

So this post is dedicated to my chers amis Adnan Syed, Rachel Carpman, and Sara Skandalaras who took time out of their busy winter break (from their Olive Garden-eating and ridiculously-late-sleeping) to talk to me on Skype. They therefore have been awarded the honor of having their blurry photos posted on this blog.

If you have a webcam and we are friends then there are 3 things you should do:

Download Skype.
Add me as a contact. carolyn.m.d.
Talk to me. It helps if you schedule a time in advance. This is not because I am particularly popular but because I have shoddy internet and there is a 6 hour time difference.

You too can be featured in a embarrassingly large and pixelated photo on this blog!

Transitions.

2007-12-14T17:41:00.000-05:00

Whew. This week was extra busy. My Pepiniere group decided that it was high-time they did some work for this large project we're doing so they wanted to meet 5 times in four days. This entailed some traveling to far-reaches of Clermont-Ferrand to stand outside beauty schools and not give surveys to the students who never actually came out of the school. It was not enjoyable but they were being nice in inviting me along so I felt obligated to go. Wait until they find out I'm bailing out on this project next semester...

As for next semester I am hopefully going to be taking some cool classes. I signed up for "The Arab World: Between Stereotypes and Reality" and "Contemporary Art". I am interested in hearing the French perspective on both these topics. I will also be taking a philosophy class. [Kierkegaard in French = should be amusing.] Oh. And I will also be taking "Business English". Just for the fun of it. I can't decide whether I should kick some butt in "Public Speaking" or be a specimen for "Understanding the American Mind". Hahahaha. Anyway, it shall certainly be an interesting semester.

Right now we are all just glad that our European Culture and Civilization Class is over. It was quite the ordeal. And not in an academically-challenging-but-ultimately-intellectually-fulfilling kind of way.

My time at the restaurant has also come to an end. As cool as it was, I am mostly relieved that it's over. Feeling like an idiot was starting to get old. Now I just have to write a ten-page paper on how much Frech-ier I feel. In French.

In other news, I am going to visit my dad in Amsterdam this weekend! I am excited to see the canals and the van Gogh and Anne Frank's house and more canals and the bicycles and my father and the bicycles and wooden shoes and the canals.

Only 8 more days until Christmas (oh sorry, I'm in a secular country, Joyeux Fetes) vacation! Yay!

I am now a card-carrying French person. Literally.

2007-12-13T17:14:00.000-05:00

Look at my shiny new exclusive membership card!

Yay! I am finally an official a legal resident of France. Now that I have been here long enough to join the club I have collected some well thought out, insightful…. suggestions for things that they might consider changing in the distant future. Some people might call them criticisms, but in true French spirit I am going to thinly veil them as something more positive: suggestions.

Consider picking up after your dog once in a while. You all wear such nice shoes, it's really a shame to get them covered in crap.
Two words: customer service. Just try it.
Peanut butter is really not as bad for you as you think. Please stop acting like we Americans poison our children by sending them to school with PB+J. You're just jealous.
Please don't stand lingering in doorways. Or in clusters in the middle of the hallway. I don't like having to body-check through you to get to school.
My name in English is Carolyn. Care-oh-linn. I don't mind of you pronounce it Karoh-leen because we are speaking French but please don't try to tell me how to pronounce my own name. You're being drunk is not an excuse. It's my name; I'll pronounce it how I wish. [Special note to Pepiniere group: Kelly is not a nickname for Carolyn. I appreciate you're friendliness but you're wrong. Oh and neither is Caro. No one has called me Caro since my brother learned how to pronounce l's.]
Please watch the "Race Sensitivity Training" episode of The Office. Then you will understand why I cringe every time you talk about people who are a different color than you.

Ok. Enough of that for now. Just some things to consider.

Jogging with Qaddafi

2007-12-12T06:00:00.000-05:00

“Running is seen as a symbol of non-Frenchness,” explains Arthur Goldhammer, a translator who presides over the influential blog French Politics.

Well, someone should tell this to all of the, presumably, French people in my neighborhood. In the fall when I would go running at the stadium that is right across the street from my house there was plein du monde (lots of people. literally translated as "plenty of the world".) out and running about. There's a track in the stadium and sometimes I couldn't run on it because there was a track team practicing. So then I would run around the outside of the track building. There were usually at least 3 other people doing the same thing. And then there were 7 people running in circles around the entire park area. Some days there would be at least twenty people running around this place. On a slow day there would be at least 5 other joggers. The only time I had the track to myself was when I went at 7 in the morning once.

So take that, Goldhammer. You're wrong.

As for Sarkozy, everyone here knows he's crazy anyway. They don't need to examine hes exercise regime to figure that out. They just see who he invites over.

2007-12-07T12:05:00.000-05:00

This music video makes me laugh. So I thought I would share it so other people could laugh too.
[Warning: this video is probably about a PG-13 and not appropriate for any child who is too young to have already found much worse on Youtube].
[Warning: This video will not be funny to you unless you are old/young enough to know that "here" is actually spelled "herre"].

In other news, after having a interesting discussion with our very French and very old (but very nice) Program Director about French society and racism (always a fun topic), Amel and Tessa and I decided to pretend that we were back at Kalamazoo and celebrate diversity by eating Indian food. Although it was the blandest Indian food I've ever experienced, it was, nonetheless, delicious. And long overdue.

"Ethnic" food is hard to find in Clermont-Ferrand. There are several Vietnamese restaurants around but after the atrocious "seche" incident I can't bring myself to try again. But there is one (ridiculously over-priced) Mexican restaurant. (Although I suppose Mexican food would be expensive since they have to import pretty much every ingredient). The owner of Mexican restaurant is some French guy who saw that we were American (and therefore can handle spice) and he gave us little dishes of jalepano peppers and free deserts. I can honestly say I'm not sure which we ate faster or more ravenously; the wonderfully-searing spicy-ness or the delicious desert.

I would cut off my pinkie toe for some Pad Thai right now.

Pro's and Con's

2007-12-05T17:08:00.000-05:00

Today was an interesting French language day.

On the bright-side I went to a movie this afternoon that was dubbed in French and I could understand almost everything without even trying. (Gold Compass = good movie. Polar bears growling in French = excellent.)

On the not-so-bright-side I was at the restaurant and the sous-chef told me, "Laisse-les a la planche" [Leave them on the cutting-board.] and I heard "Laisse-les a la plonge" [Leave them in the sink]. Considering she was referring to the decorative fruit pieces that we put on the dessert plates, I was kinda confused. She finally gave up and said "Laisse-les la-bas" [Leave them over there] and gestured with a spoon full of meringue.

Overall I like the people I work with at the restaurant. But I sincerely hope that someday they are given the opportunity to go to another country and try to work with people who don't enunciate and use vague words ("it"- which it? "over there"- over where? "in there"- in what?) and words that you don't learn in any normal language course. Maybe then they won't stare at me like I'm stupid every time I don't do what they tell me immediately and flawlessly.

2007-12-03T17:27:00.000-05:00

Nicholas Sarkozy + Vladimir Putin and his Russian vodka = this video footage is not allowed on French television. Ah, the power of the internet...

Ha ha ha. What a silly man.

Too bad if you watch the rest of the press conference then you realize that he can still speak more eloquently than some other G8 leaders.

2007-11-30T17:45:00.000-05:00

Things That I Learned While Working at a French Restaurant:

You can skin anything. If it has a skin and you have a knife than what are you waiting for?
"Chaud!" means "Hot! [Move if you don't want to be smacked in the face with a pan of fish!]" not "Maybe kinda sorta warm-ish."
French people do not like strong spices. They are all about subtlety. And meat.
A "tarte" is really more like a sugary quiche with fruit in it. Skinned fruit of course.
Nothing is wasted. Chocolate didn't turn out right? Turn it in to a cake!
Real chefs cook in clogs. See my clogs bellow.
Mistakes are meant to be eaten. Especially smashed creme caramel.
The metric system is so much more convenient.
Even real restaurants use microwaves. And buy pre-sliced potatoes.
How to separate egg whites from eggs yolks. I am a real pro now.
Orange and kiwi slices make an appropriate garnish for any desert. Except for the deserts that don't get garnishes.
Don't ever let a plate leave the kitchen without a generous handful of parsley sprinkled over it.
If something falls on the ground you really can just throw it back in the pan.
Really. You can (and will) skill anything. Ever skinned a rhubarb? A pumpkin?
Cutting yourself is just a matter of time. Same with burning.
Salad always comes with pieces of lettuce that no normal person could fit in their mouth. The chef said this gave the salad more volume. I don't really understand the logic but I know it's less work for me while I'm making the salad so whatever.
Creme brullee normale, creme brullee vervine, and creme caramelle each have a distinctly different way of assembling essentially the same ingredients and no matter how many times they tell me I will always mix them up and look stupid.
Information (like directions) is much more difficult to retain when you're not sure if you entirely understood it in the first place. This might explain both my issues with the various cremes and my math grades in high school.

Ok. That's all I can think of for now. Let's just say that the book that I'm currently reading "Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany" is starting to feel a lot like deja vu. Minus the pasta. And the Dante. And Tuscany.

The Treasonous Post

2007-11-27T21:23:00.000-05:00

I have spent a lot of time recently thinking about all the things that I miss from home (the first on the list probably being chocolate peanut butter milkshakes from Tios and followed by my dog). So today I decided instead to focus on some thing more positive...

The Great Big List of Things That I Don't Miss About America

Strip malls, parking lots that could swallow humanity, and bad architecture in general. Buildings in France are just so much nicer to look at.
Bad cheese. It will be a long time before I am able to just eat handfuls of Kraft shredded sharp cheddar like I used to do.
Wal-mart. Oh how I hate Wal-mart. While I do not miss Wal-mart in the slightest, I almost miss being consumed by a fiery hatred for the evil institution and it's shady business practices.
Bad television commercials. I don't really watch television here in France. Problem solved.
Roadkill. I don't know whether wildlife is smarter here in France or what but I have yet to see any roadkill. However, it is fun to try and explain to French people that Michigan law states that if you kill a deer with your car it's yours to take home.
A certain leader of the free world and his robot cronies. 'Nuff said.
[To be fair I don't really miss Hilary or Obama or the never-ending debate about which one will really screw-up first either.]
Celebrity tabloids. It's nice to finally be free of the antics of Paris and Lindsey (are they still alive even?).
The miles and miles of corn fields. They're really just sort of creepy when you look at them up close.
KFC. Oh wait, I saw more KFC's in Prague than I've ever seen in my life. Vicious tentacle of the capitalist empire...
Hummers. (www.fuh2.com)
Side-walk preachers and door-knocking evangelists.
Fox News. I don't watch it but it's nice to know that I am safe from a tragic channel surfing accident. All television media outlets for that matter.
The fact that Southern Michigan is the cloudiest location on the planet. (Seriously, it took the Google satellites something like 4 tries before they could get clear pictures of SE MI.)
Carrot Top.
Ok. I'm starting to get desperate...

But you get the point.

The wonders of Skype.

2007-11-25T11:11:00.000-05:00

Here's what my family looks like when they finally decide they love me enough to get online and talk to me...
Think it's funny? I did. Here's what they have to say to that...
Skype is a wonderful invention.

Sanksgeeveenghg Re-cap, Music

2007-11-24T16:55:00.000-05:00

Hey everyone, check out the cool slide show thingie I added to the side of the blog! Now all you lazy folks don't even have to click on the photo link.

French Thanksgiving (Sanksgeeveenhg) turned out to be pretty yummy. I got to skin the pumpkin at the restaurant the day before and the mini-tarts weren't nearly as bad asI thought they were going to be. There was even cranberry sauce and a strange attempt at stuffing. But it wasn't really the same withough the parade and football on TV and the great DeChants-Bolz tradition of playing Cranium and SceneIt. It was also very dificult to try to explain to French people the concept of Black Friday. Apparently it's not culturally acceptable for them to trample eachother at 4 in the morning to get the last Tickle-Me Elmo off of the Walmart self.

Other than trying to celebrate American holidays in self-exposed exile, life has been pretty boring lately. But in a nice, relaxing kind of way. I have found time to listen to a lot of music and to do some pleasure reading.

I have been experiencing a Bob Dylan craving lately. I think it's because we're actually surrounded by American music all the time but it's a very narrow selection of American music. You know that you're experiencing the opposite of culture shock when you start singing alone to Hillary Duff at the grocery stop just because you know you're the only one in the whole store who will be able to correctly pronunce all the words (which you are ashamed to know). Or when you get excited when the coffee shop plays the English version of "The Way I Are".

So if anyone has any music suggestions I am open to them. In return, I would reccomend Andrew Bird to anyone who has not yet discovered his odd glory. "Scythian Empires" is my current favorite.

Do you think James Blunt is going to be sad in 15 years when someone with a half-decent voice redoes his songs and they sound a million times better?

Thanksgiving Trivia

2007-11-22T10:22:00.000-05:00

Did you know?

The French word for turkey is "dinde" which literally means "from India". This is thanks to Christopher Columbus' refusal to believe that he was not actually in India. What a cad.

Hark! A Revolution!

2007-11-21T08:45:00.000-05:00

So I found out what exactly what general strikes means. I was sitting at a computer at the school when I thought I heard yelling and I thought to myself "Hark, I believe I hear the sounds of revolution." So I went outside and discovered that there were lots of people in the street yelling things and waving brightly colored flags.

Then Amel showed up so we decided to follow the protesters. We listened to them yell things and play German 80's music (99 Luftballons makes me want to change the system too?). Then we went to Amel's house and got her camera and she took the following photos of the mayhem...

Don't they look menacing and serious?

There was also a dog with a red ribbon around his neck wandering around the crowd. Amel and I christened him "The People's Dog".

It was really just like a big party in the street. Kids got to skip school because they're teachers were striking. Students physically blocked the universities. Angery train workers burned things on the tracks.

All so that construction workers can retire at 55.

What a country.

Yay Socialism...?

2007-11-19T10:41:00.000-05:00

They're striking again. The public university students are on strike and blocking the universities too. (But at not good ol' ESC.) This time they might turn it in to a general strike or as my host father calls it, "greve a la francais". I don't know exactly what happens in the event of a general strike but I think the world might end.

And it's all really because they hate this guy...
Seriously. I have yet to speak to a French person who likes him. Or at least who will admit to liking him. I don't understand how he got elected by a significant majority. The ironic part is that he came to America and everyone loved him because who loves America and because he's fiscally conservative (for a French guy) but now everyone in France is going crazy because they think he's too conservative.

Also, can someone please do something about the dollar? Merci.

2007-11-18T11:47:00.000-05:00

Weekend lunches in France tend to be a bigger deal than those in America. This usually just means that the food portions are bigger and everyone gets more cheese. Today I sat down to lunch and my host mother placed a steaming plate of meat on the table and I immediately thought to myself, "Where did she get that elephant meat and why are we eating it for lunch?"

The elephant turned out to be a pig. I put lots of mustard on it.

I met my other host sister yesterday. Her and her "copain" (boyfriend) came over for lunch. She is a medical student in northern France. She seems very nice but she was only at the house for maybe 2 hours so I didn't really get to talk to her much. She also speaks very quickly and does not enunciate. I did find out though that I am staying in her old room. She asked me if I liked it and I said that I did.

I have to go home and work on my presentation on "Waiting for Godot" for tomorrow. I really didn't like the book so we'll see how that goes...

2007-11-14T11:02:00.000-05:00

Since coming back from vacation we've all been trying to get back in to the routine of France. So far I think we've been successful.

Tonight we are having a wine-tasting party with our Program Director to celebrate the Beaujolais. The Beaujolais is apparently a relatively new holiday in France and it's to celebrate the end of the harvest by drinking a lot of wine. My host father said that the wine industry in France so that everyone would have an excuse to drink the wine that's not going to age well anyway. So it should be great fun!

Last weekend my host parents took me to see a castle. It's the oldest surviving castle in Auvergne and it was actually destroyed durring the Revolution (death to privilege!) and reconstructed by some crazy old man in the seventies and eighties. That man's son and wife still live in the castle and the son gave us a tour. It was very interesting. I guess once the king of France once spent a couple of days there. They're still taking about it. It's sort of a big deal. The castle was small and cute and reminded me of the PlayMobile toy castle that Charlie had when we little.

A word about Pepiniere

2007-11-10T12:51:00.000-05:00

<- Here's a photo of my school. I don't know who those students are though. It's an old photo that I found on the internet and they look nothing like the students I have to shove past to get to class each day.

So the only class that I am taking here that both 1) has real French students in it and 2) I will (hopefully) receive academic credit for is a class called Pepiniere. I think I have mentioned it before but it is worth discussing again. This class is actually a very large, year-long group project. I am with a group of 5 French students and our task is to research and develop a marketing strategy for a new "Institut de Formation de Coiffure de Estetique" (which can be loosely translate as "Beauty School") in Clermont-Ferrand. The project is also a competition since there are 3 other groups working on the same marketing strategy.

I was originally nervous that this experience was going to be too intense for me. The first two sessions where long lectures in technical French about marketing and then group meetings with French students who speak incredibly quickly and use large amounts of "argeau" or slang. I was most scared when I realized that the material was the kind of thing that I wouldn't understand even it it was in English. I was worried about being a burden to my group both because of my poor language skills and because of my lack of business knowledge.

My experience so far has actually been the exact opposite. I don't know what these kids do with their lives, but it is certainly not worry about or work on Pepiniere. They also, despite taking classes in Economics and Marketing, do not understand the business aspect of this project any more than I do. They also don't have the slightest idea how to work in groups.

Don't get me wrong: my group has been very very kind to me. They also slow down and explain thingss to me (even if this means that they have to teach me colorful vocabulary) and they always include me in what they're doing. They just don't do very much.

For a while I thought that they were meeting and working and not inviting me (which I was fine with). But no. They show up to meetings having done nothing since the last time they met. They schedule extra meetings on the weekend but only a couple of them show up and then they sit there and talk about working while working very little. Seriously, they go on Facebook. I myself have wasted many an hour of my live on Facebook, but I have never done it during a meeting to work on a project. They are also mildly computer-illiterate. They type so amazingly slowly. I want to say to them "Tu tappes comme ma grand-mere. Peut-etre pire." ("You type like my grandmother. Maybe worse.") [No offense, Grandma!].

I thought things would change when the professor in charge of our project told them that they needed to work and that: (I paraphrase for the sake of translation) "It would really suck for you if you had to do this project again next year". But instead they had the audacity to tell her that they "didn't have time". I was amazed.

I still am amazed.

2007-11-09T19:07:00.000-05:00

I miss peanut butter. And candy corn. And crunchy leaves on the sidewalk. All the leaves here are wet and not at all satisfying to step on.

I miss breakfast cereal. And Law and Order: SVU. And taking a real classes where I learn things.

I miss Hollywood video and the Rave Theater at Kalamazoo with $5 student tickets.

I miss popcorn. And Borders'. And Starbucks' Mint Hot Chocolate. And Chai lattes.

I miss ramen noodles and eating pasta four times a week. I miss bagels and cream cheese.

I miss driving. And Ultimate Frisbee. I miss reading the New York Times in paper form.

I miss my really comfortable mattress and my room where the floor doesn't creak.

But watching Eddie Izzard on YouTube makes me feel better.

Ghost of Communism Past, Part 2

2007-11-07T09:29:00.000-05:00

Whew. Summarizing my vacation is almost as much work as the vacation itself.

Tuesday October 30^th was our last day in Prague. We got up early and went the Czech National Museum. After getting off the Metro on the wrong escalator and walking all the way around the museum we finally found the front door. The building itself was quite beautiful, both the outside and the interior. The exhibits themselves were honestly a bit disappointing. There was an out-dated exhibit on Archeology with artifacts from places like “Rhodesia” and most of the artifacts were in fact copies. The labels were a little bit vague; they tended to claim that chips on bones “may be evidence of cannibalism”. There were also a lot of creepy-looking dead and stuffed animals. There was a collection of every rock or mineral known to man, save one. We searched through all the cases but we couldn’t find a Petoskey stone. There were some rocks from Michigan and even a “Grand Rapids Stone” but no Petoskey Stone. So before leaving the museum we signed the guest book like this…
Where is the Petoskey stone? Don’t worry, we’ll send you one, along with a real squirrel. Michigan. They didn’t have a normal squirrel. There aren’t squirrels in Europe. I almost miss the little buggers.

We then grabbed some lunch and tried to visit the two big churches in Old Town Square but one was closed and the other cost a bunch of kronners to get in so we decided to skip it. We then wandered around and did some souvenir shopping. I was running out of Kronners so I just got a bunch of postcards. After much debate we then decided to head back to the hotel since we were all exhausted and we had an early morning the next day. So we went back to the room and played some Euchre before heading over to the real Top Hotel Praha and having some dinner at the buffet. Then we came back and went to bed. (We are such losers.)

The next morning we got up at 4:30 in the morning. By 5:00 we were waiting for the bus to the Metro and by 5:45 we were at the bus station waiting for our bus to Budapest. I think all of us were a little worried about sitting on a bus for seven hours but our bus turned out to be quite luxurious. We pulled out of the station at 6:30 and were served our first cup of hot chocolate by 7:00 which is about the same time the sun rose. Our bus even had an attendant, Eva, who was really nice and who became our friend and hot chocolate provider. She also spoke excellent English. We even got to watch movies on the Bus and we started with “The Girl With the Pearl Earring” and some episodes of Friends before concluding with “Miss Congeniality 2” (turns out to be better in Czech) and “The Whole Nine Yards”. About 4 hours in to the journey we crossed the border in to Slovakia and we stopped in the capital, Bratislava to pick up more passengers and grab some lunch. I had been very excited to see another country but truth be told Bratislava mostly reminded me of Detroit or Gary, Indiana. We then crossed the border in to Hungary and passed through Hungarian customs with no issues. The one glitch was that our 7-hour bus ride was elongated to 8 hours when we finally arrived in Budapest but sat in a traffic jam for almost an hour. It was almost worth it though when for some reason Eva gave us all free samples of Antonio Bandera’s new perfume. It was really quite random.

We did have the good fortune of meeting another young American on the bus. His name was Josh and he told us he had been visiting friends in Prague for a couple of weeks and he was now traveling to Romania to work at a bar in the Carpathians. He had traveled extensively around Europe and had some recommendations for things to do in Budapest. It was also nice to speak English with someone other than Kalamazoo people.

Once we finally go off the bus in Budapest, Danielle was waiting for us and she helped us buy some transportation passes and brought us to our hotel which was actually in the same building that she is staying for her study-abroad program. We were all really hungry so we dropped off our stuff and had dinner at a grill-type restaurant. On our way to the restaurant an interesting thing happened. We were walking on the Metro platform minding our own business when we suddenly witnessed a little old lady get clotheslined by a couple holding hands. The couple raised their arms to go over her head but didn’t raise them high enough and ended up whacking the woman in the face. They completely knocked her off her feet. They immediately helped her up but it was still quite shocking to watch. We then came back to Danielle’s room and hung out before going to bed.

Thursday was November 1^st and therefore both the actual day of All Saints’ Day and Juli’s birthday. We got up early and tried to visit the House of Terror but discovered that it was closed for Toussaint. That was when we realized that most of the things we wanted to see would probably be closed that day and maybe the next day. Nonetheless we continue to St. Steven’s Basilica which is a beautiful Baroque church. We climbed the tower and went inside but the main interior was closed because there was a Toussaints Mass going on. We still got some amazing photos and but some cool stuff at the gift shop. We then had a good idea and decided to visit the Great Synagogue, thinking that a Jewish institution would be open on a Catholic holiday. We were wrong. But we were still able to see the synagogue from the outside and the beautiful Holocaust memorial.

As we ate our delicious falafel pitas for lunch, we realized that almost everything was closed so we decided to head to the park on St. Margaret Island and take advantage of the beautiful weather. Once we reached the island we rented a 6-person bike and did a tour of the island. We were quite a scene: five American kids on a huge bike swerving around all the Hungarian people and yelling at each other in English.

Here’s a video I took…

After the island we headed back to the hotel to shower and get ready for dinner. For Juli’s birthday we decided to go to a sushi restaurant that Danielle recommended. It was one of those places where the food comes out on a conveyer belt. It was lots of fun because we all got to try lots of random things. We ended up sitting at the restaurant for three hours in order to get our money’s worth. Afterwards we were tired and sore from pedaling so we went back to the hotel.
The next morning we accidentally got up late because no one set an alarm clock. But we decided to try the House of Terror again and were delighted to find that it was open. The House of Terror is actually the building that was the former headquarters of both the Hungarian fascist party and the Hungarian Communist Party and was the place where political prisoners were jailed, interrogated, and executed. The building has been turned in to a very moving memorial and museum. It was very educational and very interesting to see how Hungarians are dealing with the more painful parts of their past. The most moving part was the very slow elevator ride to the basement where prisoners were held and executed where they showed a video of a former prisoner described the execution process. It was certainly the complete opposite of the light-hearted-ness of the Museum of Communism.

We then got some more falafel and made friends with the owners of the falafel store who were an Iranian couple who spoke excellent English and who appreciated the fact that we ate a lot of sandwiches and raved about the falafel. (French people don’t eat falafel- it’s too spicy. Silly French people.)

Then we visited the Hungarian National Museum which had a wonderful exhibit about Hungarian history. I really didn’t know much (or anything) about Hungarian history but they had all sorts of beautiful historical artifacts. Then we went to the Parliament building and looked at the outside. We even took the Metro to the other side of the Danube so that we could get a better view. For dinner we went to Danielle’s favorite local restaurant and it was delicious.

The next morning we got up early and Danielle, Juli, and Tessa went to a local bathhouse (Hungary had mineral springs) and Jon and I went to go see the Chain Bridge. The Chain Bridge is a really old suspension bridge that was the first connection between Buda (one side of the river) and Pest (the other side) and it was almost destroyed during World War II. There were some beautiful views.

Then we met back at the hotel before taking a taxi to the airport. Our taxi driver almost killed us he was driving so fast and weaving in and out of traffic, but we eventually got there safely. We bought some lunch and used the last of our Hungarian florins to buy snacks for the plane. We flew back to Paris-Beauvais and Tessa and I were quite nervous about trying to re-enter France with our expired visas. We had even planned to go to Brussels if they deported us. But all our worry was for naught. The customs agent read my passport, including my expired visa, and just let me right in. I was almost disappointed. We then caught a taxi to the train station, a train to Paris, another taxi to the other train station, and the train back to Clermont-Ferrand.

Once in Clermont-Ferrand it was raining and we got lost trying to find the closest tram stop. Our good luck had to run out somewhere.

The Ghost of Communism Past: Part 1

2007-11-04T16:14:00.000-05:00

Our journey to Central Europe began Friday October 26th when we boarded the train from Clermont-Ferrand at about 5 in the afternoon.

[Side note: Carolyn, you might be asking yourself, why Central Europe? Why the Czech Republic and Hungry? Why not Italy or the UK or even Germany? The answer, my dear reader, is quite simple: communism. I am fascinated by communism. Actually it would be more accurate to say that I am fascinated by totalitarianism, because that's what it really was. I don't really like communism or totalitarianism, but I happen to think that they make for some interesting history. And I was right. Truth be told, former communist states are also a lot cheaper to visit. Anyway...]

The train ride was uneventful (other than the fact that Juli and I lost a shameful number of games of euchre) and when we arrived in Paris we grabbed a taxi to take us to our hotel. Our driver turned out to be a very nice guy who told us we spoke good French and who dropped us off at the Holiday Inn near Charles De Gaulle Airport. We walked in to the hotel and were looking around and remarking on our good taste in hospitality when the very nice concierge informed us that we were in the wrong place and we needed to go to the Holiday Inn Express down the street. Upon arriving at the more modest (but still nice) Express version we plopped on our beds and proceeded to stay up late watching strange French television.

The next morning we got up early and took the hotel shuttle to the airport where we found the line for our flight was already quite long. Jon used his American ingenuity to stand at the desk until they opened up a new line but unfortunately waving your hand is an international signal and Juli, Tessa, and I were prevented from joining him in that line by the rushing hordes of French people who pushed past us before we could pick up our bags. After standing in line for another 30 min and then going through both passport control and security we finally boarded the plane. 2 hours later we arrived in Prague and decided to try and get to the hotel. 2 buses and 2 subways later we arrived at Top Hotel Praha and again were impressed by our fine taste in hotels. We were then, for the second time in 24 hours, informed by the concierge that we were in the wrong spot and redirected to Top Hotel Praha Garni. I can only describe the Garni version as "Top Hotel Praha's Red-headed Step-child". It was actually the former Top Hotel Praha that they decided to keep around after they build the newer (and much nicer) Top Hotel so that they could rent the old rooms to American college students and Czech construction workers. Regardless, it served our purposes perfectly and as an added bonus we were allowed to eat at the free breakfast buffet at the real Top Hotel. We were, however, in the middle of nowhere as you may be able to tell by the photos I took of the depressing looking apartment buildings that surrounded us. After some refreshing naps (excluding the interruption of the maid dropping off our towels) we took the bus to the Metro in to downtown Prague and did some exploring before finding a very nice little restaurant and eating our first real Czech meal. Then we headed back to the hotel and went to bed.

I might as well admit right now that we went to bed before 9:30 every night we were in Prague. In our defense we got up early to eat our free breakfast and then walked around all day so we were really really tired.

The next morning we got up and were delighted to discover that the breakfast buffet included hard-boiled eggs (the French only soft-boil, if that). Since it was Sunday we decided to try and avoid the crowds and visit the Jewish Quarter so we hopped on the bus and the Metro and headed back downtown. We visited several beautiful old synagogues (I think the final number was about 4) and the Old Jewish Cemetery which has several layers of graves from the city's ghetto dating all the way back to the 1400's. We learned a lot about Jewish history in the Czech Republic and my favorite site was probably the Spanish Synagogue because it had a beautifully decorated interior. We weren't allowed to take photos though, so unfortunately I don't have any.

Sunday also happened to be a national holiday for the Czech Republic, celebrating the short-lived Czechoslovak Republic so we were lucky enough to stumble upon some celebrations in the Old Town Square. We watched a military marching/jazz/performance band and a choreographed rifle-dace thing with a soldier doing some Irish dancing to musical hits like "Eye of the Tiger" and "Pump It". It was quite interesting to watch and I think we were more enthusiastic than most of the Czechs in the audience.

After taking a "beer break" (I'm told that the Czech Republic has the best beer in Europe. I don't really like beer so I got a Diet Coke) at a pub we wondered around and tried to decide whether or not we wanted to take a horse-drawn carriage ride before wandering in to a very new, very large, very shiny, and very capitalist shopping mall. I kid you not, the capitalism was overwhelming. There were stores floating above other stores. It was magical. We eventually decided that we were hungry and found a restaurant in the Old Town Square where the celebrations were still going on. I had an interesting encounter with our polite but inflexible waiter that went something like this:
Me: "I'll have a water please."
Waiter: ". . . Sprite!"
Me: "Sure. Sprite."
After enjoying our meal, and my Sprite, we headed back to the hotel and went to bed.

The next morning we got up and went to the free buffet and discovered that the mullet is apparently making a come-back among Russian youths (scariest realization ever). We then took the Metro downtown and wandered around until we found a garden which turned out to also be the fastest and the most picturesque way to climb the hill up to the castle. So we took our time and took a lot of photos and climbed the trees pick not-ripe figs and when we finally got to the top of the hill we realized that we were on the opposite side of the castle as the entrance. So we walked around and went inside. This turned out to be somewhat anti-climatic since we realized that the inside of the castle looks almost exactly like the rest of Prague. But we joined the line to get inside the Cathedral of St. Vitus and we were not at all disappointed when we got inside. This cathedral was a gorgeous Gothic church that we unanimously decided is even better than Notre Dame. This is mostly because it has huge glass windows that light up the whole church. It's difficult to describe but the photos speak for themselves. I would highly recommend this church to anyone who is visiting Prague. We also climbed the 287 steps to the top of the tower and enjoyed some amazing views of Prague.

After an unsatisfying snack of hot dogs and "cheese toast" and an attempted visit to a closed church we descended the hill and found ourselves outside the oldest pub in Prague. We took this as a sign from a higher power and took another beer break. The pub was pretty cool, it has been serving Czech pilsner since 1423 and it had swords in the middle of the tables.

We then visited the basilica of St. Nicolas which was another fantastically beautiful church, this time of the Baroque style. Again, the photos will just have to speak for themselves.

We continued to the Charles Bridge which is a very old and very famous bridge across the Vltava River. There were some more excellent views and some very interesting street performers. We then wandered through the touristy part of Prague and tried to avoid being run over by large tour groups.

We eventually found our way to the Museum of Communism which, I have to say, was just as amazing as I had thought that it would be. First of all, the museum itself is located in the same building as a McDonald's. If that's not both ironic and hilarious, I don't know what is. Secondly, this museum had the best sense of humor ever. I bought a postcard at the gift shop that has a picture of a woman marching and smiling in a Communist parade and it says "It was a time of happy, shining people. (The shiniest were in the uranium mines)". It's totally irreverent and totally hilarious. The museum itself was mostly a collection of old communist propaganda and paraphernalia. I didn't really learn that much but it was definitely interesting to see the Czech perspective on the Soviet Union.

Then we found a restaurant and some dinner. I ate Czech goulash. It was delicious. Then we went home and to bed.

This is seriously all the writing I can do for now. I'll have to continue later.

Photos Teaser

2007-11-04T11:09:00.000-05:00

Ok, so thanks to restrictions in time and internet access, I am going to delay the posting of the Toussaints re-cap until later this week but I wanted to let everyone know that I have posted my photos (all 330 of them) for everyone to see. I also switched photo-hosting websites. The old site was Shutterfly. The new one is Picassa. It helped me create the cool slide show you see above.

To see the album in more detail go to my new photo site and select the "TOUSSAINTS!" album.

I would also just like to say "I told you so" so my dear father who insisted that I download Skype so that we could communicate when I said that we should just use AIM.

Mid-Week Update!

2007-10-31T15:49:00.000-04:00

We have officially emerged from Slovakia alive (just barely though- stupid bus) and have arrived in Budapest where Danielle has been a gracious hostess so far. Prague was beautiful and we had a fantastic time. We saw lots of beautiful things and ate lots of delicious food and I have been taking notes so that I will write a long, insightful post after we get back to France. For now I will just say that we sat on a bus for eight and a half hours today and after 2 movies, 3 episodes of Friends, and 4 cups of hot chocolate we finally arrived in Budapest in time to see a little old lady get clotheslined on the Metro platform.

Right now we are in Danielle's dorm room and hanging out and feeling like college students again. We are ignoring the fact that the dorm is older than us (and therefore left over from Communism- how quaint.).

Tomorrow we are going to the House of Terror and are going to be scared by the remnants of Nazism and Communism. Should be exciting. Then we are going to eat sushi for Juli's birthday.

Happy Birthday Juli!

Pre-Voyage Post...

2007-10-26T10:58:00.000-04:00

Happy All-Saints' Day! Hooray for finally being in a country where people celebrate All-Saints' Day! For those of you who don't know, All-Saints' Day is the day after Halloween and it is a Holy Day in Catholicism (that's why in high school I always got to come to school late, ha!). Since the majority of French people are Catholic and they still haven't gotten rid of all religious vestiges of their culture, I get a week off of school!

After many hours of searching the darkest corners of the internet for cheap fares (and after buying about 40 euros worth of coffee so that we could use the wireless at the cafe), Juli, Tessa, Jon, and myself have finalized our travel plans. I have painstakingly created the color-coded map above in order to illustrate what a complex process this really was.

In black is the route that we will actually be taking. Friday afternoon (after Tessa and I go to the doctor for our exams for our residency cards and after Jon and Juli get out of class) we will be taking a train to Paris. After spending the night at a Holiday Inn in Paris (it's close to the airport, ok?) we will get on a plane and fly to Prague. We will then spend four days seeing the sights and being tourists while staying in a cheap hotel. On Wednesday (Halloween) we will get up and catch the bus at 6:30 AM for a six-hour bus ride to Budapest. I am excited because we get to go through Slovakia and this will probably be the only time in my life I will ever be in Slovakia. I hope I don't fall asleep and miss it. In Budapest we will be hanging out with our friend Danielle who is studying there and celebrating Juli's 21st birthday! Then on Saturday we will be catching a plane back to Paris and a train back to Clermont-Ferrand.

Simple enough, you might say. Wrong! Buying tickets for the trip from Budapest back to Clermont-Ferrand turned out to be a much more complicated process then we had ever anticipated. Here are some of the options that we considered...

In red is the train that we almost took. We almost took it because it was about 30 to 100 euros cheaper than any of the flights that we could find. The catch was that it went from Budapest to Munich to Paris and it would take twenty-three hours. Yeah. Twenty-three hours of our lives that would be spent on a train car watching Central Europe fly past us. I suggested that we try to achieve a new world record for the most games of euchre ever played in a 20 hour period but no one else seemed too enthused about that. After much fierce we debate and some courageous search sessions we finally found a flight that was only 20 euros more and we decided that 20 euros was a small price to pay for intact friendships and our sanity.

In blue is the route of the road trip we considered taking when we were desperately trying to avoid the 23-hour train. This was by far our favorite option until we realized that you need an international drivers' license to rent a car in Hungry and you can only get an international drivers' by applying in person in the U.S. But for a good 40 mins we were completely prepared to take the 23 hours that would have been on a train and spend them driving through 6 different countries where none of us spoke the language. Jon has his Triple A card. It would have been quite an adventure. The extra-large loop on the map represents the point where we would have inevitably gotten lost.

The gray lines represent the route that we would have taken if Jon had been left alone with skyscanner.net. To his credit he did eventually find the flight we will be taking (edit: but Juli found it for cheaper). It's on WizzAir. And our flight to Prague is on Smart Wings. Gotta love economic airlines.

So yeah. For the next week I'm going to be traipsing around Central Europe. I've got my huge new backpack and my Canadian flag patch to sew on it (just kidding!... sort of.). I'm sure I'll have quite the stories to report when I get back. Leave me a comment to tell me how many statues of Lenin/Marx/Trotsky I'll see and maybe I'll give a prize to the person who guesses the closest...

The Long Awatied Restaurant Post

2007-10-25T16:17:00.000-04:00

Because I am here in France thanks to a program run by Kalamazoo College I have to do an I.C.R.P. or, if you don’t speak fluent K, an InterCultural Research Project. This is just a fancy name that means that I have to have a small, unpaid, internship and at the end I have to write a 15 page paper on how much more French I feel. It’s a chance to experience French culture first-hand in addition to our classes and our home-stays. Before coming to France I had thought that maybe it would be cool to work for a political organization here in France but when our ICRP coordinator said that there was an opening at a restaurant I almost fell out of my seat I raised my hand so fast. I have to admit that this was partly because I saw Ratatouille this summer and I wanted to find a pet rat that would turn me in to a great chef. But mostly it just sounded like fun. The rat has yet to turn up.

The restaurant is called Le Serin which means The Canary. It is owned by Theirry Poux who is the chef and his wife Marie who is the head server. They are fantastically friendly and have been really nice to me and they have had Kalamazoo students work at the restaurant before so they know more about this ICRP process than I do. In addition to them there are only three other people who work at the restaurant. Marion is a young woman who is Chef Thierry’s assistant and who actually does most of the cooking. Valerie is another young woman who works at the other server when she’s not in school. Reda is a guy who is in high school and who is studying culinary arts and so he is doing an internship at the restaurant at the same time that he is going to school. It’s a little bit sad but Reda really could be the main character from Ratatouille: he is skinny and doesn’t talk and he always seems to be doing something wrong. Every time I see him he has more Band-Aids on his hands from all the places he’s cut himself. He is responsible for all the washing and peeling. I feel bad for him because he seems to be trying so hard, but at the same time I am jealous of him because he at least has the advantage of speaking the language.

I arrive every Wednesday morning at 9:30 and the first thing I do is change in to my authentic French chef’s outfit. The outfit, I’m not going to lie, is probably the best part of the whole experience. I get to were the blue checkered pants and the white button up shirt and the dirty apron and the spiffy hat. I will try to get a picture of myself soon but so far I’ve been too embarrassed to ask someone to take it for me.

Once I’m done changing Chef Thierry usually shows me how to make a desert. They make just one desert per day because the restaurant is quite small so one tart or one batch of crème caramel can last a couple of days. So far I’ve made rhubarb tart, tart of apple, crème caramel, crème anglaise, tart of orange, and some other stuff I can’t remember. Chef Thierry usually walks me through all the steps. I also usually get to peel or cut whatever random vegetables they have sitting around.

At 11 we all eat lunch together and it’s always something completely different from whatever is being served to the customers. But it’s still always really good. Once the serving of the real lunch gets underway I help put the tomatoes on the salads and the garnishes on the deserts. Mostly I stand there and watch and try not to get locked in the refrigerator or whacked with a hot pan.

Overall I am not sure I’m learning as much about French cuisine as I am learning how to follow directions. I am, however, developing an impressive food-related vocabulary. Epouser means to skin and fouille means whisk and I will never again mix up coutot (knife) and cuillier (spoon). I do a lot of smiling and nodding and standing and watching. But, like I said, everyone is very nice (when they don’t have scalding pans of fish in their hands) so it’s still pretty fun. So far my biggest mistakes have been getting yolk in the egg whites (it’s harder than it looks!) and smashing a crème caramel (which I then got to eat).

I have tried to write the recipes down in my field notes- perhaps when I return to the U.S. I will try to recreate them. My host father has already asked when he can expect me to make them a desert…

Provence!

2007-10-24T10:49:00.000-04:00

This past weekend we took an “excursion” with our Program Director M. Faure. M. Faure is a somewhat insane but nonetheless lovable ancient French man. It was therefore lots of fun.

We left bright and early on Friday morning and drove for hours and hours and hours. We drove through the Massifs Centrals which are the mountains that encircle Clermont-Ferrand and they were beautiful but the road was nauseatingly winding. We ate some lunch at a “Casino Cafeteria” which was kind of like eating at the French version of “Old County Buffet” except it was expensive. Then we got back on the bus and drove some more.

We finally got to Avignon where we got out and did some exploring. In Avignon there are only two things of note: a really old broken bridge that is only famous because someone wrote a children’s song about it, and the papal palaces. The legend is that if you dance on the bridge you will find a lover within a year. Here’s a video (oh I’m so hi-tech) of Tessa, Amel, and Juli dancing on the bridge to the tune of their audio-guides…

That white noise in the background is the wind. It’s a special wind though, it has its own name. It’s called the Mistral and it apparently blows through Provence at this time of year. It is quite strong and it made it pretty cold despite the beautiful sun that shone all weekend.

After prancing about on the bridge we went to the papal palace which is left-over from when the popes lived in France in the 1300’s. It’s a really really fancy castle. We saw the pope’s bed room and the dining hall and it was very old and elegant (like most of France). Then we got back on the bus and drove some more. We finally got to Nimes and got settled in to our hotel before going out to dinner. This dinner was fantastic and it included several bottles of amazing wine. M. Faure especially liked the wine.

The next day we drove to the village of Aigue-Mortes which is an extremely old walled port which was the launching place of the Crusades. I had actually already been there several years ago on my trip to France with Greenhills but it’s a cool place so I was glad to go again. We walked around on the walls and discovered that there was a bullfighting show going on. We got really excited and stayed on the walls for an hour watching the guys on horseback herd the bulls in to their pens. It was extra-exciting when two of them got away and ran away down the road. Then we got down of the wall to get some food and were disappointed to learn that the actual bullfight wouldn’t happen until that afternoon.

After lunch we got back on the bus and drove to Stes. Marie de la Marie. There we saw the Mediterranean and some flamingoes (Who knew there were flamingoes in France?). Then we went to a church that is the site of pilgrimage for many European Roma (gypsies). We went inside the church but there were too many people trying to light candles for the relic. Then we climbed to the top of church and sat on the roof and listened to the bells ring and looked at the Mediterranean.

Then we drove to the city of Arles and walked around and saw the Roman arena and went to Van Gogh’s house. It was very interesting but I have to admit that the bus-riding and sun-squinting and wind-buffeting had tired me out and given me a head ache so I was not as excited/attentive as I should have been.

That night we had another fantastic (and expensive- thanks K!) meal in Nimes. Of course, there was lots of wine again too. I learned that “Saint Jacques” means scallops and I also accidentally ate some intestine. The intestine was pretty good (it was like extra-salty bacon) and the scallops were ok. The desert of chestnut cake was fantastic though.

The next morning we explored the Roman arena in Nimes. They had some interesting exhibits about gladiators and bullfighting and the area is still used for concerts and bullfights. Then we drove to the Pont du Gard and hung out for some lunch and walking around. The Pont du Gard is an ancient Roman aqueduct and it is huge. It is also now part of some beautiful botanical gardens so we walked around and admired the view. We were watching a couple pet what we thought was their puppy when suddenly they walked off and left the dog on the sidewalk. The dog then ran off behind a building and Catie and I followed it because we thought that it was going to get lost. Once behind the building, it started eating rocks. We were somewhat shocked and we told it to stop. It didn’t listen. But it had a collar on so we made Catie, who speaks the best French, call the owner and tell him that his dog was behind a restaurant at the Pont du Gard. Two minutes later two guys started looking around the building. Basically, Catie saved a dog. It was pretty exciting.

Then we drove home. We stopped part way to have some yummy tarts because it was Rujuta’s birthday. We got back really late. I came home, ate some French cereal (which is really more like birdseed) and went to bed.

2007-10-21T16:09:00.000-04:00

I just got back from the weekend in Provence and it was a wonderful time. I will write a more detailed plot synopsis tomorrow when I have some time but I will leave some teasers here...

We danced on the Pont d'Avignon. If you've ever studied French you know the song.
We watched a bull be chased by a dozen guys on horseback while standing on the ramparts of a medieval castle.
We ate amazing food and were told to order more wine repeatedly by our Program Director... all on Kalamazoo's tab.
We sat on the roof of a church that is a pilgrimage site for European Roma (gypsies).
We saved the life of a dog at the Pont du Gard.

In other news, M. Faure is now worried that we might be deported upon our return to France. This is sort of a problem given that our vacation is next week and we have booked all of our tickets. Personally, I have already made a reservation at the Communism Museum in Prague. He is planning on taking us to the Prefecture to get some "papers" so that it won't be a problem. I fully intend to cry loudly and publicly at the Prefecture if they don't let me go on this trip.

Ok. I really need to go to bed but I have 30 more pages of L'etranger to read. Maybe I'll just do it on the bus tomorrow. I've read it in English before so I already know the ending. Mer. Getting motivated is even harder when it's all in French.

My host father finally turned on the heat. The house now makes funny drippy noises. But it's warmer so I really don't care.

Current (French) Events.

2007-10-18T17:02:00.001-04:00

Ok, I have to write this quickly because I need to go to bed but there are two important things that are currently going on here in France...

La Greve!
There is a transportation strike going on here right now. It's a little complicated but I will attempt to simplify things: Nicolas Sarkozy is trying stimulate the French economy by enacting a series of reforms called the "regimes speciaux" (which, incidentally, can also be translated as "the special diets"). Part of these reforms is that he wants to make it so that train conductors don't retire as they currently do (historically train conductors were given early retirement because the job is so strenuous). The train conductors didn't really like this so they got all of their bus-driver and tram-drivers to strike with them. In France, unlike the U.S., unions represent all workers (but not all workers are active union members) so if they decide to strike then everyone strikes because they have nothing to lose. This means there were significantly less trains/buses/trams running. They also warn their customers that "8 out of 13 buses will be running on Line 4". This doesn't help since it doesn't tell you when those 8 buses will show up at your stop of choice.
The moral of the story is that I had to walk to school today. It was annoying. There were also people walking around with flags. It was very socialist.

Also, Sarkozy got divorced! This actually was not really big news. Everyone seems pretty blasé about it. This article in the god-less, hedonist, political blog I read was the only information I could even find about it. Nonetheless, he is the first divorced French president and the first president to become divorced while in office. Given how his relationship with Cecilia has been pretty up and down for a while, we can still hope that they can have an Eminem-Kim Mathers-style remarriage and re-divorce in the next 5 years.

Ok. I need to go pack because tomorrow we are leaving to go to Provence for a weekend with our program director who is a crazy old French man who will ply us with wine and then put us to sleep with monologues on the differences between French people and American people.

Gonfler what?

2007-10-16T16:35:00.000-04:00

I just added some photos to the Shutterfly site. They're mostly of the last couple of weekends when we've been watching the French rugby team. The first bunch of when we went downtown and watched France beat New Zealand with everyone in Clermont-Ferrand. The last couple are from when France lost to England this past Saturday. This time we watched the match at Jon's house. The Dream Team (Jon and Juli) did what they do best and whipped up some delicious crepes while arguing with each other. Then we baked a loaf of delicious, and more importantly, moist, banana bread and ate Nutella crepes to console ourselves as France lost.

Today Tessa and I went to get our chest x-rays for our residency cards. The French are really scared of TB. Luckily I don't have it. I did learn four important things about the French health card system:
1) The French don't believe in hospital gowns.
2) ... or doctor-patient confidentiality.
3) "Gonfler" means inflate, not deflate.
4) "Excusez-moi mademoiselle, je suis desole mais nous devons refaire le radio parce-que vous n'avez pas gofler vos poumons." means "Excuse me miss, I'm sorry but we need to retake the x-ray because you didn't inflate your lungs."

Zut. Who doesn't love an extra dose of massive radiation directed at their vital organs? Especially at 9 in the morning. Tessa and I have discovered that the bureaucratic nightmare that France is supposedly known for can be avoided by arriving at a office as soon as it opens and being the first ones in line. At the crack of dawn most of the civil servants are still buzzing from their first cup of cafe.

I also met one of my host brothers tonight. His name is Bruno and he studies geology somewhere near Paris. He just finished an internship near Toulouse and is spending a couple of days at home before heading back to school. He sees like a nice guy although I really only listened to him talk about his job at this mine at the dinner table. I have to admit, I wasn't paying as much attention as I probably should have.

Ok. I have to go work on a paper on the extreme-right (aka racist) political party of France. It's thrilling *rolls eyes*. But I have to get up early tomorrow to get to the restaurant (which I promise I will get around to writing about at some point).

Happy Blog Action Day!

2007-10-15T09:37:00.000-04:00

Those of you who don't spend significant amounts of time surfing blogger.com are probably not aware that today is an important day. It is, in fact, Blog Action Day. This means that "bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone's mind" and this year that single important issue is... the environment!*

The idea is that if we can use the power of our technology to get enough people around the world all to spout their opinions about deforestation and endangered species all at the same time, then maybe the glaciers will actually stop melting and baby seals will stop being clubbed to death.

How wonderful!

How naive!

How French!

I have therefore decided to do my part to save a cherubic seal or two and have compiled a list of things that French people do that are environmentally-friendly...

They actually pay a fair amount of money for their water. The fact that water is not cheap also means that they do lots of things to conserve water. They take short showers. They design their showers so that you can turn them off when you are shampooing. Anyone who knows me knows that this is a most painful situation for me since the only thing I love more than a 40 minute long boiling-hot shower is money. [Note: They also, however hose down the streets with water every week to get rid of all of the leaves and trash (or in some cases dead birds and vomit). This seems to me to be somewhat illogical given how much they try to conserve water. It seems similar to if in America we cleaned our streets by hosing them down with gasoline.]
They also pay more for their electricity and gas. They only turn on the heat when it's about to snow. They turn off all lights that are not being used. They never dry their laundry unless it's raining out (I don't know how this is going to turn out in winter). They do things in what I would consider to be the dark. Bathroom stalls come with their own light switches. Hallway lights will turn off at random points and you'll have to turn them back on (kind of like the library at K...).
They don't use paper napkins. At home anyway. They do fast-food places (yay kebabs!).
They bring their own bags to the grocery store. This works because they never buy more than two or three bags of groceries at a time.
They drive small, fuel-efficient cars and they ride public transportation. My worst nightmare here in France is not that I'll be injured in a car-pedestrian accident (those Smart cars would bounce right off of Jon and that's why I follow him across the street), no, it's that I'll lose my bus pass and have to walk everywhere instead of having Bus No 4 drop me off at my doorstep.
They compost! Imagine that!
70% of France's energy comes from nuclear power plants. Depending on how you feel about nuclear waste this is either great for the environment or terrible for humanity.
They think Al Gore is a cool guy. My host father has told me at least five times that the world would be a better place if Al Gore had been elected. I'm never really motivated to explain in French that he actually was elected. But anyway, the Nobel committee apparently agrees.

Anyway. Make sure to put your paper in the recycling bin and buy a hybrid!

(Oh. If you're actually interested in green-ness you should checkout the movie "Who Killed the Electric Car". You'll be shocked.)

And really- buy hybrid.

* I am a Kalamazoo college student and therefore can not write anything with quotations that are not sufficiently cited: http://blogactionday.org/the_environment

Name Change, Rugby, Zoo Animal.

2007-10-10T15:06:00.000-04:00

It has recently come to my attention (thank you, Juli) that the word "aventure" in French often has a decidedly sexual connotation to it. According to my handy Larouse dictionary, it's synonyms include affaire, and liaison amoureuse. Although, in my defense, when you look up "adventure" in the English half of the same dictionary it tells you to use "aventure".

[Sara Skandalaris, I can hear you laughing from 7,000 miles away.]

Regardless, I have therefore decided to change the name of my blog in order to avoid implying the existance of activities that are not happening. And to be brutally honest, I always thought "The Big Adventure" was kind of a lame name anyway.

So as of today, 10 Octobre 2007, I am renaming the blog "The Francophone Files".

(In case anyone is interested this is because my favorite book as a child was The Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E Frankenworth. And because I am attempting to become a francophone.)

Anyway, this past Saturday France played New Zealand in the Rugby World Cup and by some act of the All Benevolent God they won. A bunch of us were watching the match on a huge screen in the middle of Place de Jaude in the middle of Clermont-Ferrand with probably 5,000 other people. It was amazing. The French fans went crazy. They were jumping and hugging and yelling and ... spraying beer everywhere? It was a fun match to watch (especially the haka by New Zealand in the begining) and an amazing experience.

Other than that this week has been pretty normal. Everyone just seems to be wating for next Saturday when France plays England.

One funny thing did happen to me. I am taking guitar lessons once a week at the local Conservatory and this week my teacher took me to talk to the person who's in charge of renting instruments. We found him in this room which looked sort of like a waiting room and where there were a lot of young students sitting doing their homework. My teacher and the other guy were talking and my teacher intruoduced me as a "young, American student". The minute he said the word "American" two girls who were both probably about 12, and had previously just been sitting doing work, swivelled their heads around to stare at me so quickly I thought their heads were going to fall off. You would have thought that he had introduced me as "the rare species of Afirican graffe". I've started to get used to small kids staring at us on the bus when we speak English but this was so not-subtle that I almost started laughing.

Things like that always remind me that I am an etrangere.

Je suis une mauvaise fille.

2007-10-08T10:36:00.001-04:00

Happy belated Anniversary Mom and Dad!

(Sorry I forgot to tell you when I skyped you yesterday.)

Since you asked...

2007-10-04T08:16:00.000-04:00

The rules of "My Cow!" go like this:

When you see a herd of cows you yell "My cows!" and that heard of cows belongs to you. People compete to collect the most herds of cows. Cow herds are defined as "clusters of cows belonging to the same species and grazing in the same field". You may not claim other animals, even when they come in herd such as goats or cyclists. When you pass a cemetary, you yell, "Bury your cows!" and all other players loose all their herds.
The person who is actually competitive enough to keep track of the their herds of cows and who forgets that it's just a game where the real fun parts is yelling "cow" is the loser.
"My Cow!"was invented by Amel and her brother when they were young and in cars driving through Ohio.

So I may, or may not, be deported...

2007-10-04T06:27:00.000-04:00

Storytime!

Once upon a time (6 months ago) in a faraway land (Kalamazoo, Michigan) the Center of International Programs handed me a stack of papers that was supposed to inform me about the wonderful experience that I was about to have that they like to call "Study Abroad". Because I am a good student, I read that packet of information and I learned lots of interesting and important things (for example, don't swim in rivers- you will get japanese encephelitis and die). One of the topics I learned about was "Visas". After going through a painful and confusing experience I even managed to get one of these "visas" so that I was able to enter France about a month ago.

Here's where it gets fun. The packet of information also explained that because I was going to be staying in France 9 months as opposed to 6 months I would be getting a shorter visa than other the people in the group who are staying for 6 months (illogical? yes.). As a result I was instructed to apply for a "carte de sejour" as soon as I got to France. I was also told that my program director, the illustrious Monsieur Maurice Faure, would help me in applying for this carte de sejour that would allow me to stay in France for nine months. I therefore arrived in France with all of the necessary documentaion and eager to become integrated in to French society, not the least of which legally integrated. On our first day of class M Faure explained that his assistant would be helping us with all of our documents and things and would even take all of us to the Prefecture together and help us.

M Faures's assistant, who in computer literate and will therefore remain name-less in the public post, has proven to not be helpful whatsoever. For the first two weeks of our visit she told us that she would take us to the prefecture when she had time. Then she told us she would take us individually when she had time. Then, about a week ago, she told us she didn't have time and that we just needed to go on our own. All throughout this period she would periodically tell us we needed doctor's visits or hand us sheets of paper that were supposed to explain what documents we needed to collect. So finally yesterday morning Tessa and Coco ventured to the Prefecture. They discovered that the Service des Etrangers (literally translated as Services for Strangers) is closed on Wednesdays. They were given some forms and told that they couldn't even apply for a carte de sejour until they had had both a chest x-ray and a doctors' visit.

I'm going to diverge for a moment to expain something. None of this would really be a huge problem except for one fact. Our visas (the short ones) expire on the 30th of October. I am not going to be in France on the 30th of October. I have no classes that week and therefore (according to that packet of information that the CIP gave me) I can't stay with my host family and me, Juli, Tessa, and Jon have already booked train and plane tickets and a hotel stay in Prague. Which is not in France. We also planned to visit Danielle in Budapest for a couple of days. Budapest is also not in France. The grand question therefore is this: Will I be able to get back in to France? Will I be stranded in Budapest? Or Switzerland?... Is that a bad thing?

Back to yesterday. So after Tessa told me of her dificulty at the prefecture we dicided to get a move on and go ahead and make doctor's appointments so that once we could apply for these cartes the process would go as quickly as possible. So we consulted the sheet that the surly lady at the prefecture had handed us and we got on the tram to go make doctors appointments. We got on the tram and rode for about twenty minutes and got off the tram and looked at the sheet again. That's when we discovered something funny. The building where you get the chest x-ray is different from the building where you make the appointment for the chest x-ray. And we had just ridden the tram to the wrong building. So we got back on the tram and rode back the twenty minutes to where we got on and another ten minutes to the other building. Then we got off and wandered what sort of looked like a college campus looking for the cafeteria. Yeah. The cafeteria. The sheet told us that the medical office was behind the cafeteria. So we found the cafeteria and then the office. And we made appointments. We took the first available appointments. The first available doctors apointment (which you can only do after you've had the chest x-ray and it's been developed) are literally hour hours before we are getting on a train to go to Paris so that we can fly to Prague.

At this point we realized that even if we left the doctor's office on time and ran to the tram stop and then to the prefecture we still probably still wouldn't make it in time before the Prefecture closes (because it closes at 3:30 on Friday). Therefore we would not be able to apply for catre de sejours to replace our visas that expire before we had to leave the country. This is when we realized that was a distinct possibility that we might be having an encounter with French immigration authorities in Charles De Gaulle airport.

Anyway. After talking to various sources, some of whom work for the French government (we think), we think we have everything worked out. We had applied for the cartes even though we don't have the medical approval because apparently you actually can do that. We are waiting for the Prefecture to contact us, which could take up to 3 weeks, and M Faure will hopefully tell us tomorrow about whether or not we can leave the country and safely return.

The moral of the story is that all of this angst and stress could have been avoided if we had tried to do all of this right after we got here. Or if the assistant knew what she was doing. Or if the CIP had had the foresight to not get visas that expire over vacation periods. Or a multitude of other things.

To any French immigration officials who might be reading this: I apologize if I am forced to enter your country through illegal methods. I'm not a bad person. I just want to speak your language and eat your food.

In other news: the cold I got last week is almost gone! Yay!

Horray for Auvergne!

2007-10-01T10:19:00.000-04:00

So this past Saturday we had maybe the busiest day we've had here in France but it was probably also the most fun. The Office of International Affairs at ESC organized a tour throughout the region of Auvergne and we joined all of the other international students (most of whom we hadn't met yet) for a bus ride.

We left the school at 8:45 in the morning and our first stop was the town of Orcival where there is a beautiful Roman church and a couple of quaint buildings. Our guides told us that we had half an hour to look at the church and then we needed to be back on the bus. They explained that we weren't spending a lot of time there because there wasn't that much to see. The most exciting of the church was that it had a painting of St. Claire of Assisi (my saint) and so of course I had to donate four euros for a huge candle to put in front of it. Here’s a photo of me placing my candle. St. Claire watched over us for the rest of the day and made sure we had lots of fun. I like to think so anyway.

So we left the church and after eating some delicious brioche we got on the bus and drove away. It was only the next day when I told my host parents where we had gone that I learned that this particular church happens to house the one of the most important statues in the region. Apparently as I lit my candle to St. Claire there was, not 3 feet away, a statue that is credited with saving French fighters during the Crusades (and the chains to prove it are hanging somewhere in the church) and was also hidden during the Revolution. I truly don’t know how either 1) we could have repeated walked past such a statue and not seen it and 2) someone didn’t tell us that there was some much cool history in that church. Regardless…

Our next stop was when they pulled the bus over so that we could take pictures of the volcanic rock formations and of the mountains, which were very beautiful. Then we got back on the bus and Amel and I played a rousing game of “My cow!” (the most fun road trip game ever invented by bored children) while enjoying the French countryside.

Then we reached a castle that was built in the 12th century. It was kind of like a French Greenfield village since I think during the regular tourist season there are lots of reenactments and shows. While we were there it was almost deserted which was fun because we could just wander around and play with the jousting equipment. The coolest part was probably the donkey we met. I say met because he definitely walked over to us so that we could pet him. We named him Francois and he and Jon definitely became very close very quickly.

We ate lunch at a traditional Auvergat restaurant and it was an amazing meal. Auvergne is traditionally an agricultural region so our entrée was a traditional dish, called truffade, that consisted of potatoes, mushrooms, cream, and cheese al baked together in one delicious casserole. You have not felt full until you have eaten real, Auvergnat, truffade. After a berry tart we all rolled back on the bus and continued on our way to the Saint Nectaire cheese farm. At the cheese farm, we toured the caves where zee cheezezz sit for 8 weeks and get moldy, watched a creepy, but thrilling, movie about men falling in to the caves with religious relict during the revolution, and personally met the 100 cows who are responsible for producing 100 cheeses a day. It was very interesting and I will certainly never eat cheese again without remembering creepy, smelly cave. We then got back on the bus and drove back to C-F.

That evening I went out to dinner with my host family. We ate at a restaurant as a specialy treat to celebrate the fete of my host mother. Fetes are not like birthdays, they are actually a celebration of the saint’s day of the saint that you are named after. Saint Therese’s day is on Monday October 1st but we celebrated on Saturday because my host sister was home for the weekend. I guess in the Perriaux household when it is your fete you get to choose what to eat for dinner and since Marie-Therese does all the cooking on her fete they go to a restaurant. Anyway, we had a lovely dinner, despite the fact that I was still really full from the truffade.

After dinner I met some K people at our usual rugby-watching café. As it turns out, Saturday was also the day of the National Congress of Firefighters in Clermont-Ferrand. In order to celebrate there was a free concert in the middle of the main square, the Place de Jaude and there was also a fireworks display. These fireworks were seriously the best I have ever seen in my life. They went for at least 35 minutes and included fireworks I don’t think are legal in the United States. They also decided to set them off from the roof of a mall across the square and there were several instances when I believed that the whole building would explode. It was like watching the Detroit Fireworks except from about 60 feet away. It was amazing. Then we headed over to the concert because the band was playing American music so we sang along while all the French people started.

Seriously. France exploded.

Tectonique

2007-09-30T12:49:00.000-04:00

So as exciting as it is describe my daily life, I'm going to make a short deversion just for this one post in order to spread the word about the latest new fad in France. It's called Tectonique and it is seriously the craziest dancing you'll ever see in your life. The following video was filled in a French middle school...

Yeah. So apparently the cool thing to do now in French middle schools is to have dance battles in which they dance in a manner that Lauren Lynch described best when she said, "it's so bad, it's ...good". If you look on youtube you can find 10 min videos of battles. It's insane.

I first saw techtonique when I was walking past a park to find some lunch and stopped to wonder about what everyone was looking at. There were probably about 80 adolescents in the park, milling around and being angsty while in the center of the crowd there were 2 or 3 kids dancing. It was quite the sight.

My host sister says that the only kids who do such things are the ones who wear ridiculous skinny jeans and have strange designs shaved in to their heads.

I really want to learn.

Ok Juli and Jon and Tessa and Olivier are coming to get me so that we can go find some food and play some Tarot.