Hard to Take a Ferret in Your Carry-On

And so we came to an end...part one

2009-07-10T15:26:00.000-07:00

I had this really brilliant plan. I was going to get my packing done early, and then go to bed early enough so that I could spend a good hour writing an entry before it became absolutely necessary to go to bed. It was a really, really good idea. Unfortunately, life got in the way, it's midnight, I'm exhausted and emotional and shaky, and about ready to go to bed. So unless there's wireless at the hostel or at LaGuardia, the report of the final week is going to have to wait until...Monday-ish. Something like that. But I promise it will come.

If this is my last post from France...it's been more than I can describe, and if the crazy little snippets and anecdotes you get through this wonderful filter known as blogging have given you half as beautiful a picture as the scene I've been living, than I've truly outdone myself as a writer. It's been an incredibly fun and experience even to write the blog; I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

So until the next, whenever and wherever that is.

What a week continued again

2009-07-01T09:50:00.000-07:00

*Edited for a couple of additions to Tuesday and Wednesday

So there was also some sake and a boat ride on Friday that seem worth mentioning; because of the tomato-bacon-rice thing that was boiling and the sudden entrance of my host family, I didn't really have time to write about it. The sake was quite wonderful; it was the first time I'd ever had it and I still can't decide whether I like it more than red wine or not. And the boat ride along the Seine was lovely, much warmer than when I did it in March with John and Sophie. Most of the time Mat and Julie were trying to convince me to jump in the water, which I refused to do until they showed me how. Since they refused to show me how, I never did. It was a fun evening, if the conversations did get a little tripped out.

But anyway, on to Saturday:

In the morning we drove out with dad and all the baggage to Roissy. John, Sophie, Mat, Julie and Elisabeth all said goodbye in the parking lot and left for the country house; I stayed with Dad and helped out with the baggage up until he went through security. I was surprised at how emotional I got saying goodbye, seeing as it was only two weeks from that point to see him again (and less than that from now). It really hit me again, watching him leave, how much I missed everyone at home, and for a second I wanted nothing more than to be going through security myself and getting on that plane with him.

But then there was Gay Pride Paris, which washed that away temporarily.

I took the RER back to Paris and wasted the morning doing nothing in particular; I went back to Montmartre and photographed some more graffiti and found a few more gifts for people, and then went back to the other side of the river to the American café and took lunch to go, walking around in an elaborate loop to find the parade. I got there about an hour before it started and watched the preparations, and managed to get a spot close to the front of the parade to listen to the speeches by various members of prominent GLBT organizations in France. Liza Minelli and the mayor of Paris were also there, though I didn't recognize them until later.

The parade itself was amazing. I walked for about fifteen minutes and then stopped to take pictures of the rest of the parade; it took nearly three hours for it to pass me by completely. There were all kinds of people there, from little toddlers to octogenarians, straight people, gay people, transgendered people, people in crazy costumes and people in modest dress...but god, how many people! Estimates afterwards put the number anywhere between 200,000-700,000. It was one of the most if not the most enthusiastically joyful public event that I've been to. For a day, everyone was allowed to be themselves, whether considered within the bounds of mainstream cultural acceptability or not. It was empowering to watch. And just about as amusing. I was photographed once for my incredible rainbow awesomeness-- I was wearing a rainbow tanktop, had a rainbow sweatshirt tied around my waist, was carrying a rainbow flag and had rainbow sandals on as well.

But after those three hours, the parade passed by and, covered in various political stickers and with a decent sunburn on my shoulders and back, I headed to the metro to get to Gare de l'Est to catch my train out to the country house.

I remember when I first came out to myself that I had a period where I thought -everyone- knew that I was a lesbian, that I had some kind of gigantic neon L painted on my chest...wearing that much rainbow on the public metro gave me about the same feeling. People (mostly men) definitely stared at me, and it didn't phase me much until this group of four burly guys starting -really- staring at me. I think they were just trying to decipher the stickers on my shoulders (from the way their lips were moving), but they still made me nervous. Luckily my stop was right after when they got on, so I was able to beat a retreat before they could do anything.

However, at Gare de L'Est, there were no trains going in or out because of a power outage. Just because I'm that lucky, my cellphone happened to be on extremely low battery, so I spent about an hour at the station, turning on my cell on the half hour to try to reach Sophie. I sat down against a wall and quickly was surrounded by a group of college-age German tourists (everyone was trying to get to a comfortable place to sit as they waited for the power to come back on so they could catch their trains), who also started staring at me. One took a picture while I was looking the other way. They were definitely talking about me-- I heard a word that suspiciously sounded like homosexual. But they seemed more curious than hostile, so I let it go and after a while they forgot about me.

In any case, I finally got a hold of Sophie and she told me another way to get at least halfway to the country house and told me John would pick me up there. No one on the metro seemed to give a damn this time around, or at the second station-- or if they did, I didn't notice because I was so frayed from spending so much time in overheated stations with too many people, waiting for something to happen. The train I took was almost empty, though, so I could read the newspaper and relax a little bit. Still, it was a relief to finally get back.

Sunday:

A much, much quieter day, mostly spent on the computer stealing music from John's incredible library. In all, very productive: Bjork, Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, David Bowie, Van Morrison, Pearl Jam, Noir Desir, Nirvana... I think my library has about doubled if not tripled since my arrival in France, with all the music people have given to me. It adds variety, so I'm quite pleased. In the same afternoon I also learned to make jam (a useful life skill, if you ask me) and picked some raspberries (one in the bucket, two in your stomach is the best rule to follow). We left the house around six, which normally would have given us ample time to get back to Paris for my eight-thirty train...

...except for the traffic jam. I changed my train for another one in the morning at the first station we came to with a minute to spare, but still had to pay an extra fifteen euros for it. Better than buying another ticket entirely, but still. It was nice, though, to spend another night with everyone; I achieved my greatest accomplishment by getting Elisabeth addicted to Lost (the virus spreads!). We threw dinner together with a little bit of whatever-was-in-the-fridge plus some takeout from the Chinese place across the street; all in all, not a bad way to end my time in Paris for the year.

Monday:

In the morning John and Sophie woke me up and I said goodbye to everyone. I walked out to Montparnasse and got breakfast from the American patisserie one last time: a banana-walnut-caramel muffin, which was so delicious that I'm plotting how to steal the recipe. The train, which appeared to be empty when I got on, filled with a group of rather noisy high school students; I tuned them out with Lost and everything was fine.

In Tours I took the train out to the station at the center of town when Camille didn't answer my calls, and when I walked out to the bus stop and noticed that the next bus wasn't for another two and a half hours, tried again and found her there. She picked me up without a problem, happily sparing me from a weird drunk guy who was at the stop and kept muttering to himself and inching closer and closer to me.

In the afternoon we went out to a friend's house and spent the afternoon in their pool. Most of the time we spent trying to push each other under the water; I'm very good at getting other people (except Louis) under, but not at resisting being pushed under myself. We stopped briefly for cookies and cake, went back in, and then finally left when we realized that we had to leave to get to dinner in time at the house of a couple that Catherine works for. It turned out that they had a pool as well, but by this time we had less enthusiasm for pushing each other under anymore (when your nose and eyes start smarting badly, it becomes less fun), so we ended up being social and spending most of the time talking with Claude and André (the couple who invited us) instead. It was a very nice evening; they're both excellent cooks and have a beautiful garden, and they also were great conversation. They've been all over the world, from Vietnam to the States to South Africa. We also talked about such fine subjects as food and wine, and after dessert they opened a '97 Vouvray that was absolutely delicious, one of the best wines I've tasted yet. We're having them over next week so that I can introduce them to NM cuisine; I hope I'm up to the task.

Tuesday:

The heat wave continues-- I think the peak was about 32 degrees (almost 90 Farenheit). Most of the day we spend inside with the shutters closed in order to keep the heat out (air conditioning is somewhat rare in France). At around two in the afternoon we decide to venture out for a bike ride around the little towns in the area; we stayed out for two hours and by the end I felt like I was going to die. Everyone made fun of me, saying I should be used to it from living in New Mexico; I had no witty response, my brain having been fried by the heat. Oh, and a butterfly flew down my shirt while we were riding through traffic; I was so ticklish that I'm surprised I didn't crash the bike. It survived until the next rest stop and flew right back out as if nothing had happened. Strange experience.

Oh, and around lunch, Catherine asked me if I was offended by the fact that Claude and André were both men. A little taken off guard, I just quietly shook my head and said that it made no difference to me at all. Camille burst out laughing and said, "Mom, I don't think you realize..." But both of us let the moment pass, so I never ended up coming out to Catherine. It was just funny, though.

Wednesday:

35 today (about ninety-five degrees Farenheit), so there were no excursions today whatsoever apart from a run at nine in the morning (when it was much cooler out) and a brief walk at noon to go feed the horses not far from us the leftover bread from lunch. A lot of time spent reading, a lot more time wasted on the internet, doing not much in particular. I've had a more or less continual headache the whole afternoon that I think is from the heat. It's supposed to snap and rain tomorrow; I dearly hope so, because another day like this without air conditioning is going to kill me. The fact that we're being green by not using air conditioning is only a very hollow condolence.

But this evening it was much cooler out, so I took a little walk just to get out of the house, and I found, to my pleasant surprise, that the tar had refrozen on the roads (yes, ladies and gents, it had begun to melt during the day), and that the fields of sunflowers, which were just putting out the first flowers on Tuesday, are now in full bloom. Unfortunately, I didn't have my camera, but I'll go back tomorrow with Lea and take pictures.

Right. So now we're caught up. Yay! I think I'll write another entry just before I go to Paris for my plane home weekend after next to recount my last adventures in France, which will include two brief trips to Normandy and Blois, an AFS reunion, shopping, and who knows what else.

Till then! Ciao!

What a week, continued

2009-06-30T10:59:00.000-07:00

So on to Tours:

We caught our train at ten, and despite the fact that it was crowded and the seats we were assigned were not technically together, or even in the same car, we managed to get two seats together and keep them up until our stop at St. Pierre des Corps. Camille picked us up at the station and we went back to the house for lunch with the rest of the family. I finally met the infamous Louis and found that his English was quite good-- he has more of a Scandinavian accent than a French one, which I suppose makes sense since he learned English in Finland, but still struck me nonetheless. He and I served as the main translators, though Dad and Catherine managed to talk a little in German and completely confuse the rest of us.

After lunch we went into town and Camille, Louis and I showed Dad some of the essential markers of Tours-- the Studio Cinema, Place Jean Jaures, the Rue Nationale, Place Plumereau, the Loire, etc. At Place Jean Jaures we unexpectedly found some of Louis's friends, so we went out to the Gangette with them for some drinks. The Gangette is a kind of bar on the banks of the Loire which only exists in the summer (literally, not even the stand is there in the winter or spring) and just opened up on the solstice, presumably. It's been coming and going for two years now and seems pretty popular; even on a Wednesday afternoon there were a good few people there. By the time we said goodbye it was about time to go to dinner, so we walked around Place Plume for a while to waste time until Catherine arrived from work. We had dinner at a little creperie just off the square, and it was delicious. I had a crepe with escargot inside, which is among one of the most sublime things I've eaten; everyone else at the table took it as a sign that I've become too French for my own good. For dessert people ordered a number of wonderful crepes that looked (almost) too wonderful to eat; mine was with two scoops of ice cream (one vanilla, two chestnut) with chocolate sauce and almonds. Also among one of the best desserts I've had. I need to find chestnut ice cream and take it home with me. As much as possible.

Thursday:

We went on an all-day expedition with Camille around the area fairly close to Tours. First of all, we stopped at the park center where Camille had her internship a while back, and sought recommendations of where to eat lunch. After that, we went to a little trogolodyte cave/museum for a specialty called 'pommes tapées,' which literally means hit apples. That's fairly descriptive of them: they're skinned apples dried at an extremely high temperature to remove all moisture, and then smashed on two sides with either a hammer or an elaborate machine for this purpose in order to fit better into jars to be preserved for the winter. They're then best served warm with cider or wine serving as a kind of sauce, which is more or less how we tasted them (except that there were cinnamon and cloves added, too).

After that we drove for a while and found the lunch spot that Camille's old supervisor had recommended. It was absolutely delicious. The entire meal was centered around the regional bread specialty, called fouées: they look kind of like hollow rolls, and are served warm with butter, rillettes, or anything else that strikes your fancy. At the restaurant they had the butter and rillettes as well as a main course of duck with white beans and salad, with crème brûlée for dessert. This is not even mentioning the cheese-stuffed mushrooms as an 'amuse-bouche' (appetizer before an appetizer, which I'm forgetting the name of in English) and the wines (côté de Lyon as an aperitif, and a regional red wine that I can't remember in specific which was also very good). So we left very full, but very, very satisfied.

After that we headed out for the last excursion of the day to the Château de Brézé, which is unique among the châteaux of the Loire for having been built halfway underground. The tour we took was exclusively through the underground section and it was really interesting. It was completely unlike any other château any of us had visited. Some of the stranger things: for all the defense systems, it had never once been attacked, and the moat, as deep as the ground-level château was high, had never been filled with water. Certainly unique, and worth the visit.

After a brief stop in Chinon for some macarons and a pie made with wine jam and pears, we headed back to the house, where we had some guests over for a little party. All in all a pleasant evening. I didn't have to translate much in the end because Dad spent most of the party talking to some friends of the family who spoke very good English, so I spoke in French with the people at my end of the table. It was a really wonderful evening, to have my two little worlds collide like that...

Friday:

In the morning we took a long walk around Mettray to see its infamous "Stonehenge," which is actually called the Dolmen or the Fairy Cave. We had lunch with the family, ratatouille à la mexicaine (which is to say, with green chile added), which was very good. Dad said goodbye to Catherine and Lea, and then we headed into town with Louis and Camille to do a little gift shopping. Louis bailed fairly early (he'd already made plans to meet up with his friends), but Camille stuck with us to the end, which is a good thing since she was our ride to the train station. We found more or less everything we were looking for and all of it more or less fit, which was good. We made it to the station with time to spare, although our goodbyes were rushed since we were trying to look for two seats together and Camille was so busy trying to help us that she nearly stayed with us to go to Paris; she made it out just before the doors shut. The rest of the ride was quiet, though; I watched Lost and Dad wrote some postcards.

Back in Paris, we picked up some cheese at the cheeseshop by John and Sophie's apartment, and then had a sushi party. Even if it wasn't as good as the restaurant back in Albuquerque that I love so much, it was definitely very fun to make.

And that was it for the stay.

I'll catch up the weekend and the past two days later; I'm halfway cooking dinner as I write and now everyone's come back, so I figure I should get off the computer and be social, as well as attend to the pot of rice-tomato-stuff that's currently boiling. And it's not a bad stopping point anyway.

Bye for now!

What a week, what a week...

2009-06-30T01:37:00.000-07:00

Or past thirteen days, really. And such a past thirteen days that I scarcely know where to start. I guess where I left off? Well, actually, I'm going to skip to Friday two weeks ago, because that was more interesting.

Friday:

I went out to Cheverny with Camille and some of her friends. Cheverny is the chateau that the chateau in the Tintin comics is based off of, which is one of its claims to fame in the modern age. It's a beautiful chateau, and the grounds are outstanding (as well as huge). The inside was stuffed with artifacts spanning half a millenium; there was even a document signed by George Washington (which I tried to take a picture of, but there's a glare right over his signature). After we visited the chateau we stayed out on the grounds for a while stealing cherries and playing JungleSpeed (which is like Uno only weird). At around four thirty we left so that I could get to my train in time and drop off Camille's friends at another friend's house.

It turned out that we got to the station an hour and a half before my train left, so I wasted time in the cafe by reading and getting myself a coffee. I happened to notice, however, that my train did not seem to be on the charts, so I checked my ticket and found that it was actually a ticket for the day before. Originally I had bought a ticket for Saturday, but it worked better for my family in Paris that I come on Friday night. I had a ticket for a train that got into Montparnasse at 9:30, but again it worked better that I come earlier, so I changed the ticket on the Thursday to get in at 8:30 instead. However, the woman at the counter had changed it to the same day that I was changing the ticket and not the day after...hence the problem. Luckily they gave me a ticket to the next train without paying any more for it, but I still had to waste another couple of hours in the station, including the twenty minutes the train was late by. By the time I got into Paris, I was thoroughly sick of the TGV and any and all train stations. But all was well that ended well; we got out to the country house without a problem, and I fell asleep sometime around two in the morning because Mat and his friends were listening to music and talking downstairs directly above my room. In response I turned up the quiet, calming music on my Ipod, which I've since found is not the best solution.

Saturday:

I spent most of the morning pacing and asking people what time it was until John and Sophie got so fed up with it that they decided to just take me to the airport already (well, that and it was about time to go, anyway). And then it turned out that Dad's flight was in about twenty minutes late, and his bag was one of the last to come off the carousel...but finally, he came out of the terminal, and I think I nearly took him down with my tackle-hug (ok, I'm exaggerating a bit, but I was really really happy to see him). After that, I just sort of stared for a second, unable to compute, and finally said, "wow. You're in France!"

You all know I'm that perceptive.

But in any case, the rest of the day was fairly quiet-- Dad delivered his packages of Poptarts and jerky and bacon bits to my cousins, I received some essential NM items (green chile, biscochitos, a cd of my uncle's band), and we took a long walk on the "ditch" by John's house, which is really a canal but it's still a ditch to me. They're just lucky I don't call it an arroyo.

In the evening we went to the village party, where we watched a bonfire and that was more or less it. There was some dancing and some more drinking but overall it was pretty tame. We went to bed around midnight, which I'm sure was good for Dad's jetlag, and that was day one of his stay.

Sunday:

We spent another quiet day out at the country house and headed back into Paris around six for the Fete de la musique. John and Sophie led us on a tour that lasted nearly three hours, and we heard everything from techno to bluegrass to metal to god-knows-what. Sometimes there were elaborate setups by huge bands, other times it was just a lady and a guitar standing on the street corner. It was absolutely amazing; I've never seen anything quite like it and I don't think I ever will outside of it. I think this is my favorite French holiday.

Monday:

We started the morning with one of my favorite walks, from the Champs-Elysees all the way to the Louvre, where we stopped for a visit. After seeing the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo at the Louvre, we spent most of the time in the quieter galleries (Oceania/Africa/the Americas, Egypt, and Mesopotamia), which also happen to be some of my favorites in any case. I will say, though, that I never appreciated how empty the Louvre was in February until I came again in June. The statement is true of Paris in general, to be honest.

We had lunch in Tuilieries, where the sparrows attacked our plates more ore less as soon as we put down our forks, and then continued on to the Picasso museum, walking all the way. For some reason or another the Picasso museum was free that day (there was just a sign saying "the museum is free for all visitors. Good day."), which was lucky, and we spent a good hour or so there. Dad described it as being like a Van Gogh museum he went to in Amsterdam, except for less Van Gogh and more Picasso, and I found this to be a very apt statement (despite the fact that I've never been to Amsterdam, much less the Van Gogh museum there).

We walked from there to Centre Pompidou, where we had banana and Nutella crepes in a little cafe, and then took the metro back to John and Sophie's apartment. We ate dinner together (and if I remember correctly, there were crepes for dessert, too), and that was it.

Tuesday:

Breakfast was at an American patisserie that I've been curious about ever since I saw it back in April. Evidently it's a Parisian chain, since I saw one at the train station when we left for Tours the next day, but in any case the cafe was without a doubt the most Americanized French-owned cafe that I've seen thus far in France. They pulled off the American pastries really well, and the coffee was excellent. I went back there another couple of times before I left Paris for the last time on Monday.

We headed out to the Musee d'Orsay, but it was fairly crowded, so we went up to Montmartre instead. After meandering up the hill and looking at the shops, we finally ended up at the Espace Dali, which I was happy to go back to. We had lunch at a lovely little cafe next to the museum and spent a little more time walking around Montmartre before heading back down the hill. We took the metro out to Orsay again, and finding that it was still crowded, walked along the Seine for a while and then took the Boulevard St. Michel down to the Sorbonne, where we looked around for a while and stopped for drinks. After that, we headed back to the apartment and went out to dinner with John, Sophie, Elisabeth and Julie to the restaurant we went to with Mom last summer. All in all, a nice ending to the Paris stay.

I'll pick up with Tours and the rest later; it seems we're going out biking soon, and I should probably get off the computer anyway.

'Cause baby, I've got-- MOTIVATION

2009-06-17T04:37:00.001-07:00

Well, it's been a week, right? This blog thing does happen, sooner or later...and evidently, it seems to usually be later.

The highlights:

Thursday:

For our final PE class, only 13 of our class of 31 showed up; we ended up playing rugby in the mud (it had rained the night before). I even have pictures-- one girl who lived close by but was "sick" showed up for solidarity and took pictures of everyone. It was my first time playing rugby, and I'm more or less as terrible at it as I am at all sports, but it was fun nonetheless.

In the early afternoon we had a little party to celebrate the end of the year, with much sugar in the form of beverages and cakes of various sorts. The teachers were all incredibly kind and gave me some books as going away presents-- two more new, recent ones (Antoine de Saint-Exupery and Marguerite Yourcenar) and a copy of de la Fontaine's Fables that is, as they put it, "almost older than your country." I was amazingly touched (I nearly started crying), and began to appreciate just how kind of a community I managed to stumble upon here in France, and how much I'm going to miss them when I'm gone.

Oh, and the potato chip cookies were a hit-- they disappeared within the first ten minutes. Thanks, Leedara!

Then there was the last math class, where we played Scattergories, and that...was it.

Friday:

The last day. There were no real classes (I don't think that anything after the last science class on Wednesday counted as an actual class)-- just several parties, one after the other. To start with, in Spanish we watched the first half of a movie that I'll now evidently have to rent in order to see the resolution. Half the class was playing Scattergories in the back and paid no attention at all and thus are spared the curiosity (it was a good movie, too, which is why I'm so anxious to see the end).

After that was Drama, where we had a picnic of sorts out on the lawn, where we all ate entirely too much sugar, in the best way. The drama teacher, who hadn't been able to make it to the party yesterday, gave me a present as well-- a copy of Celine's Voyage au bout de la nuit. I still can't believe how incredibly wonderful all these people are. In English we had a party with the Italian class (since, by five in the afternoon, most everyone had left, and only two of us showed up to English at all), where there was slightly less sugar but was no less fun for all of that. And that...was it.

Actually, no.

At home I made a cake for Camille's birthday, a real American cake from a box (I asked my parents to send me the mix). Shortly thereafter, I went back to Vaucanson for the Bal de Promo, which was not anything like an American prom but, I think, all the better for it. I only stayed for the first two hours since my ride home, my English teacher, left early since she had her six-year-old daughter with her and so couldn't stay too long. At the beginning I thought that the French students did a lot better job of pretending to dance than Americans do, but once the party really got started it was more or less indistinguishable from any other party with loud music and teenagers that I've been to, except that there was French pop as well. Oh, and they played 'Voulez-vous coucher avec moi'. Because I guess they had to. It made me smile. I've always wondered whether that song would be popular here or if they'd hate it. I get the feeling it's a bit of both, depending on who you talk to... In any case, it was alright. A better way to spend Friday evening that I could have come up with on my own, and it was nice to see the English teacher one extra time before leaving.

And then that really was it.

Saturday:

I spent the afternoon in town looking for presents for everyone back home (and I'm not telling what I bought or where I went). I took myself out to lunch at the same restaurant that I went to with Fanny back in March and had a nice risotto with a glass of Chinon-- the image was so lovely that I went so far as to photograph my little table before I started eating. It was an afternoon quite pleasantly spent except for the sunburn I got on my neck and shoulders (and even that disappeared pretty fast).

The evening was much more...interesting. Camille had her 24th birthday party with all of her friends, and I was sort of halfway invited (I wasn't ordered out of the house like Lea and Catherine), so I stayed just out of curiosity. It was definitely a party-- I think it was summed up very well by one of the neighbors the next day, after being asked by Catherine if everyone had behaved themselves: "Well, they are...young." Everybody drank far too much, but in general the atmosphere was pretty lighthearted, way too much smiling and laughing more than utter incoherence... The only mishap was when one of the guests almost spilled a bottle of...something, some fruit liqueur, I think, all over my backpack full of books and important papers. Luckily, he missed, so there was no harm done. We all got to bed around five in the morning, and everyone was pretty justly exhausted. I didn't really realize how tired I was until I actually went to bed, when I could barely keep my eyes open two minutes after the lights were off and people were quiet.

Sunday:

Sunday was very quiet. I slept until ten in the morning and only got up because it was too light out for me to sleep anymore, and then spent the day puttering around, listening to an audiobook, and taking walks in order to stay awake. Camille slept for most of the afternoon on the couch, Lea was over at a friend's, and Catherine was working, so it was very quiet and peaceful. Olivier came over later in the day and gave me over 600 songs in three different languages, increasing my music library by around 30%. All in all a good recovery day.

In the evening, however, when I was Skyping my parents, they informed me that Powder died a little over a week ago. I wasn't and still am not sure how to react. None of it seems real, as if it's happened on some other planet, not here, not anywhere I know. I know I'm going to miss him badly, though, and I feel guilty that I wasn't there to say goodbye, that I didn't see him one last time before he died. But he died like we want all of our pets to die-- old, in his sleep, and without pain-- so that's a definite consolation. If he'd gotten sick like Sibylle did, I would be having a much harder time coping.

Rest in peace, puffball.

Monday:

In the late afternoon Camille took me out with some of her friends to do a "tour of Tours" to see all the decidedly non-touristic places in and around the city (for example, the sketchy suburbs and the newly-built American-ish mall complex). It was fun, and afterwards we stayed over at the friends' apartment for dinner, which meant I could finally escape the party leftovers (we had sausage nearly four meals in a row-- I think it'll be another year before I'll want to have it anywhere near me). We also made plans to go visit a chateau together on Friday, which, if it's anything like today, should be fun in the sense of interesting.

Tuesday:

In the early afternoon Camille and I went out to Amboise to visit the chateau there. My accent was evidently good enough that the woman at the front desk thought that I was French when she sold me the tickets-- we only went back and corrected her because they take statistics on where visitors come from and use them for...some obscure purpose.

In any case, the chateau itself was beautiful, and we had a personal guided tour of about three rooms since we happened to run into one of Camille's friends who works there. On the way back home we stopped by a bakery in Tours that makes pastries double their normal size, and I found it humorous that nothing in the shop would have been considered outsized by American standards (though I saw clearly that it was outsized for the French). Despite being huge, the quality of the pastries is about the same if not better than other bakeries, and you get about twice the pastry for the same price, so I think I might be going back there at least once before I go.

And that's more or less it for the week, because absolutely nothing happened today. Well, I almost burned down the kitchen making lunch for Lea and one of her friends (I was cooking meat, and the paper package it was wrapped in got too close to the stove and caught fire. Lea and her friend helped me put it out but then they left me with the mess without another word). But other than that, nothing.

I'm not sure when I'll have time for the next update, since my dad is coming to visit next week and I'll thus be fairly occupied until next Sunday, so expect something around next Monday or Tuesday or perhaps Wednesday, if the pattern continues more or less like this. Until then!

The weekend

2009-06-10T09:22:00.000-07:00

This update thing is going to happen, I swear. Even if I have to do it writing and making potato chip cookies at the same time. Ok, quick explanation-- when Leedara read that I was introducing the French to Rice Krispies and all the terrible things in American cuisine, she sent me a recipe for potato chip cookies, which is exactly what I'm going to introduce them to next. They're actually not bad; the way I messed them up made them more scone-like in texture, and it's not bad, the mix of salty and sweet...in any case, on to the weekend:

Saturday:

I got in at one in the morning from Normandy and slept until nine, which almost never happens. (Usually, even if I'm up until one, (which isn't unusual) I still get up at seven. You could set Swiss trains by my internal clock). I spent most of the morning working on my part of a presentation about Tours, ran to the butcher's to get something for Lea's lunch, and then set out for the house of one of the AFS volunteers in the area, who took me up to the reunion.

Like most of the other AFS weekends, we did several activities about cultural tolerance and how small the world is, etc, etc, stuff that I've seen before presented not half as well. Mostly the weekend was nice because we all had the time to see each other in one place and talk about how the exchanges are going (or, in the other direction, to offer advice and answer questions from the French students preparing to leave). I spent most of the time hanging out with one of the "partants" (the French students getting ready to leave) named Benedicte. We honestly don't have that much in common but she's really sweet and fun to be around. I'm planning to go up and visit her in Blois the weekend before I leave, after she's finished up with the Bacs (she's in Terminale, so she really doesn't have the time beforehand).

Sunday was more or less similar, but with a barbecue for the parents. I had a long conversation with Benedicte's parents about the exchange process, life in France versus the States, and even the differences in the mentality towards war (I was really enjoying myself), and they said afterwards that they found it fun to talk to an American in French, since most of the time when Americans come to France, you have to speak to them in English.

At around four in the afternoon we had some tearful goodbyes, and then coming back home was sort of an anticlimax. But then again, it almost always is.

Monday:

Drama was fun-- the Friday I was in Normandy, everyone split into groups and prepared the last two scenes from Dom Juan, with varying interpretations. In the best one, the girl playing Dom Juan (we only have two boys in our class, so there was one group that was entirely girls) spoke a modern, "cité" French, and the rest still used the language of Molière in the script (which is sort of like Skakespearean English as opposed to modern English)-- a brilliant effect, and really funny. It also made me appreciate how much my French has improved-- to get the comedy achieved by the different accents/styles of speaking requires a certain comprehension of the language. I finally feel like I'm speaking real French...which is a shame, since I'm leaving just as I'm getting good.

Apart from that, not much.

Tuesday:

Since so many people decided to skip drama (8/11), class was cancelled and I got out four hours early. I went into town for lunch and then spent the afternoon doing nothing while it rained, which is why I have no excuse for not doing the blog yesterday (or the cookies, for that matter. Which, by the way, I've had approved by Camille and Lea). Oh, and I had my last French class of the year. There's a lot less emphasis placed on the last class of the year than in the US...it was just like any other class, and then, "Okay, dismissed, have a good summer and good luck on the Bac." And that's it; no one makes anything of it. We're a lot more sentimental in the US. Or, at least, we are at Bosque.

Wednesday:

I had my last History and Science classes of the year, which were more or less the same. The science class was like any other, and then we had two hours free because French was cancelled (the teacher is helping out with giving the oral exam for the Terminales, I think). I played Uno with my friends and then we went to History, where we found that half the class had ditched because they didn't want to wait around for two hours. We ended up playing a cool logic game that I adored but seemed to drive everybody else crazy. After that, I had lunch in town again and came home to mess around on the internet some more and make my cookies for the class tomorrow.

And that's...it. I think it should be more interesting next week? I hope.

So there were crazy French people. And...stuff?

2009-06-08T12:50:00.000-07:00

You'll see in a second.

Wednesday:

After school I went over to Lucas's (another AFS student from Brazil) house to work on a presentation for AFS about Tours. Three other students, Peyo, Kazuto and Nuria (from Chile, Japan, and Paraguay) were there as well. We ended up mostly listening to music and playing GuitarHero (which I think is the only video game I can say that I enjoy) for hours on end, and mostly improvising for the presentation. It was quite fun-- I completely lost track of time, which is rare for me (I'm hopelessly neurotic about knowing what time it is). At six thirty I suddenly noticed that I had about five minutes to catch the bus that would get me back downtown, where the last bus to Mettray was leaving in forty-five minutes. I ended up walking the wrong way from the house, so I missed the bus that would have gotten me there with enough time to walk the several blocks between the two stops, but luckily I found the stop just as the bus was arriving. I made it to town with five minutes to get to a stop that's normally ten minutes away walking, so I sprinted the entire way and looked ridiculous because I was trying to hold down my skirt at the same time-- the only time in my life that I voluntarily wear a skirt and of course it's the one day I shouldn't have. But, sweating and panting and coughing (because I still had the tail end of the laryngitis from London), I made it to the stop one minute before the bus was supposed to leave, and then it turned out that it left five minutes later, anyway.

So that was Wednesday.

Thursday:

I got up half an hour early and Lea's father Paul swung by to pick me up at quarter to seven. I slept on and off during the drive up to Normandy (for some reason, since being sick a couple of weeks ago I've been having less trouble sleeping during the day, even now that I'm better). We arrived around twelve and had lunch with the friends of Paul's that we were staying with-- Gaston and his wife, Beatrice. They were...interesting. Beatrice was notable to me because she was the first French person I've met that's expressed doubts about Obama's leadership capabilities (it seems like everyone I've met here adores Obama, pretty much without question), but she was quite nice and an excellent cook (even if she was very much red-meat-and-potatoes kind of style-- we had mutton twice in a row for lunch and dinner, and then sausage and steak the day after. I was in pain afterwards). It was her husband that was...um...I'll say he was a character?

He tried to tell me the second day that the US has never had a good army and that the only reason we're a world power at all is because we have strength in numbers...I politely disagreed, because I was too shocked to come up with a better comment. Oh, and he wanted to know why I'd learned French instead of Spanish, because with French "You get France, Quebec, and then nigger Africa. What's the point?" (First thought: wow. Second thought: wow. Third thought: what happened to Belgium and Switzerland? Fourth thought: wow). Even if it was a joke... what else... Ah, so the reason I was able to go to Normandy at all: for a living, Gaston buys and sells old military objects, mostly from WWII, and for the anniversary of D-Day there was a huge informal market in St. Mere-l'Eglise (the first town to be liberated by the Americans). In French, the word for this kind of market is "brocante," and I was asking how long the market lasted on Friday (since no one really gave me many details about what we were doing-- I wasn't even sure that I was going to Normandy at all until Wednesday night). But when I asked, he went on this long rant: "Brocante? Brocante? This is not a brocante! This has nothing to do with the damn things! Brocantes are for old clothes and sets of broken china-- no, this is not a brocante!"...and so on for several minutes. So at the end I asked, "what do you call it, then?" And he was quiet for a minute and finally said, "Marché militaire." For a while I thought that I had legitimately made an error, but when I called it that to my host family, they just sort of looked at me funny and said, "You mean the brocante, right?" So...I believe I've made my point on the guy-- he was weird. (Oh! And he cut his nails with a pocketknife. Now I'm done). But in the end he was actually quite nice-- I helped out a little at the stand as a gesture to thank him for letting me stay at his house and come to the market, etc-- I translated for a couple of English tourists and watched the merchandise when he needed to leave, helped loading and unloading-- and in the end he actually paid me for it (I tried to refuse, several times, but ended up taking it-- his arguments were: "I have relatives that I specifically ask to come up and help me out, and you did more today than they ever do," and "you should never refuse money at your age.").

So, the market and the town itself:

St. Mere-l'Eglise is a charming little town, I'm sure, when there aren't so many tourists that you can barely cross the streets. Once you visit the church and the Airborne Museum there isn't much to do, so I spent a lot of time sitting in a little square away from the main plaza, listening to an audiobook and watching WWII-era planes go by overhead (some sort of cargo plane, I've deduced from describing them to my dad, but once I put the pictures up I'll get confirmation on what they actually were). All in all, very pleasant, and the Norman landscape is simply gorgeous (even though Gaston and Paul don't agree. They think the wind turbines ruin it). I'm hoping to go back before I leave to see Coleville and the beaches and perhaps Cherbourg, this time with Camille and Lea as reinforcements.

And that...actually covers Friday, to be honest, so I'll skip to Saturday tomorrow. But it's late and I have class (last week of school!), but I'm getting out early tomorrow and should have time to catch up. So until then!

Look! An update! It's a miracle!

2009-06-02T12:44:00.000-07:00

Not that much happened last week...I promise I'll get with it with this whole blog thing, but seriously, there's not much to talk about. I'll just skip and note the highlights:

Thursday I didn't go to school because I was sick (I definitely had caught whatever Julie had, but it affected me worse). It turned out later to be a viral laryngitis-- I walked to the doctor's on Saturday to ensure that it wasn't strep when it didn't go away after a few days (I still have a sore throat, actually, but I feel normal enough that it's not worth it to do more than take the cough syrup I was prescribed and roll with it). I spent most of the time sleeping: I was up at six thirty long enough to have a cup of tea and decide not to go to school, and then I slept more or less until ten, wrote a few e-mails, went back to bed, had lunch, went back to bed until three, took a shower, and then messed with pictures for the rest of the afternoon. And made cherry pie. Something about being sick gives me the strongest urge to bake...anyway, I was weirdly fatigued for the next several days and took naps in the afternoons, which is strange for me because I almost never can sleep during the day. But now I'm feeling much, much better, and I think despite the soreness that the virus has more or less run its course. Or at least, I hope so.

Apart from that...on Sunday we went out to the Botanic Gardens, which was nice. There were all kinds of animals from bears to wallabies to ferrets there (all caged), and wonderful flowers and stagnant ponds. It got me out of the house and walking. I haven't run or taken a significant walk since London, which is sad. I think I will have to tomorrow if I have the time.

What else...yesterday we went out to Florian and Christelle's for the Pentecost (it's a day off in France) and had lunch with them, which was nice. Their little girl is really cute, but she doesn't like me for some reason. She's shy around people she doesn't know, so that's probably why. I don't really care; it's just kind of funny to think that I'm that scary.

Today I badly flubbed a presentation for ECJS (I got nervous and started saying just random words that came into my head, in an order that vaguely resembled grammar after it's been blown up), and had the wonderful opportunity to listen to teen drama upon teen drama, except in French...it's the second-to-last week of courses (of school, for me, but for everyone else it's still another three weeks because of the Bacs), and everyone's fed up with everything and everyone else, so it's not the most fun time to be at school. It never is even in the States, so I'm trying not to make much of it. But, yes. Life is good, though. Lots of pastries and interesting cheeses (gouda with cumin = the gift of the gods).

The rest of the week looks more interesting. Tomorrow I'm working on a presentation about Tours with some of the other AFSers. Thursday and Friday I'm headed up to Normandy, and Saturday and Sunday I'm at an AFS weekend (the last one before leaving!). Right now I'm sort of where I was in December-- thinking about leaving but still a ways off from doing so, nevertheless hitting a lot of 'lasts' (last recharge of the bus card, last full month in France, last week of school next week, etc). Things will pick up once school ends, though. Camille and I made a list of things in the region I have to see before I leave, so I should have plenty to write about. Just have to get through the tail-end of the academics. I will miss it, but at the moment I'm not appreciating that as much.

I'm rambling and I should get to sleep, so good night, sleep tight, and until Sunday or Monday or whenever I have the time/energy to update.

We'll always have...London? (Part II)

2009-05-27T08:46:00.000-07:00

Where was I? Ah, yes, Wednesday:

We got up early-ish (7:30, better than for school but still early considering how late we'd been up the night before), had breakfast and made our lunch and dinner for the day (sandwiches!) and set out straight for King's Cross to take the Tube out to Buckingham Palace (the stop was at Green Park and we walked from there). We were given about half an hour free, so after we got the iconic images we messed around for a good bit and took pictures of each other. By some fluke (which might have been planned), we managed to catch the ceremony for the changing of the guards, and I got some pretty good pictures since I sprinted out to the railing before the crowds could get there (and it turned out that most of the crowds were on the other side of the square, anyway). After the first of many group photos, we left on a long walk through Hyde Park and the Kensington Gardens, where we had lunch and fed the squirrels. The squirrels were utterly fearless-- they would eat right out of our hands. They were all also quite remarkably fat.

We spent an hour at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which was hardly sufficient time to even see just the theater gallery, but still wonderful all the same. It's a beautifully constructed museum, one of the most beautiful I've been to, and the exhibits are very artfully displayed. I'd like to go back, if I get the chance (a recurring theme, as you'll see).

At around four we went to the Lycee Charles de Gaulle to meet a group of French drama students much like ourselves, except that they lived and studied in London. We performed little pieces of our scenes from Monday evening and they did likewise (they'd had a performance on the Friday of the week before that we were supposed to have gone to, except that we had to postpone the trip a week because there weren't any openings for 37 people at the hostel). They were pleasant enough, and it was interesting to hear one of the teachers talk about the differences between the English and French systems of education-- a lot of the things he pointed out were things I had noticed myself. Certainly, there are ups and downs to both systems-- the capacity to specialize earlier in the French system, the ability to have courses like math and languages more often in the American one, for example. There are reforms going through now to make the French system more like the American one, and I think that would be a real shame if that were to pass, since the French do certain things much better than we do (although I'll say the same is true the other way around). I think there's a happy balance that could be struck.

After that, we took the Tube out to the Lyceum Theater to see the Lion King, and I finally heard the 'Mind the gap' announcement over the intercom for the first time. I was the only one that was thrilled by this-- the French students didn't get what was so interesting about it and the rest of the passengers were, of course, British, so I was basically looking like a total idiot smiling and giggling by myself. I don't think it would have been half so funny if I hadn't been so tired, but still. Anyway, the performance was absolutely magnificent-- I've been hearing half my life how amazing the musical of the Lion King is and was never really quite sure whether or not to believe the hype, but in this case it actually is true. The costumes in particular were just incredible-- my favorites were Zazu and Rafiki (Zazu was a man in a suit with a puppet bird, with his face painted fantastically in black and white; Rafiki also had her face painted magnificently and was wearing shaman's dress more or less with a large target-type thing over her rear for the baboon's butt-- one of the most amazing mixes of ridiculousness and beauty I've ever seen). You could tell that the dancers had really studied the movements of the animals and incorporated it into the choreography. The only thing that was really weird for me was that all the actors had really strong accents-- it didn't bother me in Zazu and Scar's cases since they have accents in the original, but the rest of them were just strange for me. The hyenas in particular-- Shenzi had a really, really strong Scottish accent, which was just too much of a 180 from the original for my poor language-fried brain to stand... It was a general hit with the French students, although none of the songs were repeated quite so often as 'You Can't Stop the Beat' (as I said, they're -still- singing that one).

We got back to the hostel around ten-thirty/eleven, and went to bed after conversations until about midnight.

Thursday:

We got up at more or less the same time, with the same shower/sandwich/Tube routine. We spent the morning at Covent Garden shopping. We had to stay in groups, and the first shop that I was dragged into (literally) was the Disney Store. All the French students loved the things like that, Starbucks (where I think I went at least three or four times while I was in London, though I only got coffee twice), and Build-a-Bear (where around a third of the thirty-four students made a stuffed animal), and it was strange for me-- I've been surrounded by these things all my life, so I would never think of going to them on a trip to London, but for them these were all pretty special treats. It was interesting to think about. Once we left these stores, I once again confirmed the general rule that I should not be set loose in a marketplace with a full wallet, but about half of what I spent (amount classified) was on gifts for other people, so does that improve things, slightly?

At Covent Garden we also had authentic fish and chips at an authentic London dive, which was fabulous. Whether it was actually that good or if we were just too eager for a change from sandwiches, I'm still not sure.

In the afternoon we set out for the river Thames, where we took a boat up and down to see some of the famous sights (the London Eye, Westminster Abbey, several bridges, a few monuments and museums, etc). The tour guide was quite funny, and I ended up having to translate a lot of the jokes when my classmates asked me why I was laughing so much. We got off in front of the Globe and walked the short distance to the Tate. Unfortunately, we only arrived in time to use the restrooms there and see one room before closing time. We spent the rest of the time out on the steps of the Globe, eating dinner (guess what it was!) and waiting for the gates to open so we could get good spots next to the stage. Since we were in line first, we were right up against the center of the stage-- I was literally leaning against it for about half the show, and had to take my elbows down when the actors got too close (during swordfights and such).

The play we saw was Romeo and Juliet, and it was extremely well done: the actor who played Mercutio was particularly impressive (his talent was such that even the solely French-speaking students and teachers remarked on him afterwards). The Nurse and Lord Capulet were also very well-portrayed. By contrast, Romeo and Juliet in particular I found rather weak in comparison (her soliloquy just before taking the poison was not convincing at all), but it didn't diminish my enjoyment of the play any. It was amazing to experience theater like this, in a way so similar to how Shakespeare originally envisioned it. I think it was one of my favorite parts of the whole trip-- I was so enthralled that I didn't notice how badly my feet were hurting after a day of walking all around the city and standing still for three hours straight until intermission and then when we left-- the French students were not quite as enthusiastic. About half left during intermission and spent the rest of the time talking and smoking outside, but honestly, I don't blame them-- it wouldn't be fun to watch a play you don't understand when your feet are aching and you're tired and ready to go back to the hostel and sleep. We still had to walk a good bit to get back, though we did take the Tube most of the way; I think everyone was grateful to go to bed after such a long day.

Friday:

We started out the day by going out to Trafalgar Square and the National Art Gallery. I really enjoyed the museum; I spent so much time poring over some of the paintings and reading all the little information cards with background on the artists and the specific pictures that my friends abandoned me after about half an hour and I suddenly found myself alone. I still enjoyed myself in any case-- I especially loved the portraits by Cezanne and the paintings by Van Gogh. There was also an interesting exhibition on Picasso's engravings (which I didn't even know existed). I also saw the Rokeby Venus and a few other paintings by Velasquez and got lost three times looking for the gallery with Leonardo da Vinci's paintings, only to find that half of them had been taken down for restoration. I didn't mind, though; museums are some of the better places you can get lost in.

In the afternoon we had lunch in St. James Park (three guesses what it was) and took a long walk through the City of Westminster to see the important monuments there (Downing Street, Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, etc). My camera died shortly after getting pictures of Big Ben, so I didn't get any pictures of my first impressions of Picadilly Circus (where we went after a break for ice cream in St. James Park in the late afternoon). Despite never having been to New York, the place reminded me of Times Square. During the free time we had there, I ended up going to Starbucks with my friends (though I didn't get anything), as well as several souvenir shops where, to my delight, I found a shirt that said 'Mind the Gap' on it.

At five we went to the Picadilly Theater to see 'Grease,' which unfortunately wasn't very good-- even apart from being not at all the type of thing I enjoy in terms of storyline, the actors had no talent whatsoever and the leads were exceptionally poorly chosen. And it wasn't just me who thought this-- pretty much everyone agreed at the end that it was bad. I guess you can't win them all.

We spent another couple of hours at Picadilly Circus after the show, where, after a twenty-minute discussion of what we were going to do as a group, I ended up going to Starbucks again with my friends (and this time I split a caramel hot chocolate with Laurene). Funnily enough, the people who decided that we were going to Starbucks and were the most vehement that we all do something together (and thus took twenty minutes deciding on what we were going to do) were the first to leave without any explanation and without telling us where we were going so that we could stay together.

I love teenagers. I really do.

Saturday:

We took the Tube out to Picadilly Circus and spent most of the morning there and on Oxford Street. I considered getting new earphones for my Ipod (which had broken our first day in London) at the Mac store on Oxford Street, but decided not to when I saw the price (20 pounds-- 40 dollars. No way. I waited until I got back to Tours and I found some at the Fnac for a quarter of the price). There was one clothing store on Oxford Street that was really popular with a lot of the students-- I think about a third of them had bought something and were carrying the bags with them when we met up for lunch. I wish I could remember which one it was, because it was funny, all of them with these gigantic brown bags... We met up in Leicester Square and ate at Burger King (you read that right; I wish I were kidding), and it was the first time I'd had fast food in nearly six years. Normally I'd refuse on principle, but in the context it seemed too bratty to do so, and I figured since it wasn't me buying it, it wasn't really me supporting it, so I ate and pretended that I wasn't. I felt disgusting for the next two days; you won't find me eating fast food for another six years, at least.

After that, we went back to the Tate, since it closed before we really had the chance to see anything on Thursday, and I spent most of the afternoon there perusing the galleries by myself (I started out with a group of my friends, but they mysteriously vanished after the first room and I never found them again). The exhibits were absolutely incredible, very moving and inspiring and strange, and very well-presented. The two things that stick out in my memory are a room of paintings by Ed Ruscha and a film by Ana Medieta. The Ruscha paintings stuck out to me for the way that the artist used text as a centerpiece for his art for the most part without focusing on font (although my favorite piece, "The End," worked mostly because of the font chosen for the words 'The End'), something that appealed to me as a writer; the film by Medieta was just very simple, but very raw and powerful and chilling, in a way that I have no comparisons for. There were many other beautiful and inspiring pieces, of course-- I could make a list as long as this entry so far-- but those were the two that stood out to me the most. In the gift shop I found a fascinating book on street art, which I decided to get with the intention of donating it to the art department at Bosque upon my return, and another on the place of ethics in aesthetic philosophy (everyone was curious about the cover-- a man in a prison jumpsuit, hooded by an American flag).

After that, we walked down to the National Theater and had dinner on the little square outside (and guess what we had). The performance, which was of All's Well that Ends Well, was ok-- the setting and costumes were very well done, but I think they played up the tragic aspects more than was appropriate for the play, and the acting wasn't especially spectacular, especially on the part of the actress playing Helena (she had almost no inflection in her voice; it got old listening to her speak by the second act). The French students without exception fell asleep or left; even the teachers apart from the English teacher were seen to be dozing off. We got back to the hostel rather late since it was a long performance, but since everyone slept during the show, no one wanted to sleep when we got back, so everyone was up until nearly two talking when we had to get up at six the next morning in order to prepare everything and leave. There was a brief argument between myself and the people that wanted to talk which didn't end well; things have more or less blown over now.

Sunday:

We drove. For twelve hours. And I didn't sleep at all on the bus, though everyone asked me if I had. I got coffee at a rest station once we got back to France, though, so I felt much better for the second half of the drive. I spent most of the time reading the street art book (had to make sure it was worth giving to the art department; it definitely is), and this time I remembered what I read (as opposed to on the way out). And that was more or less it.

Since I'm not feeling that well (Julie was sick in London, and I think all of us that shared a room with her caught whatever she had) and I have a test tomorrow morning, I'm going to go to bed early now and do the rest of this week on Sunday/Monday's entry. I'm not envisioning that I'll have much to recount, but in any case...

Ciao!

We'll always have...London? (Part I)

2009-05-26T09:55:00.000-07:00

Ok. On to the entry! First, the week before last, filling in the major events before my departure:

On Sunday I went out to the Abbé de Fontevraud with the other AFSers of the Tours area (although a few people from outside Tours came, it still wasn't all of the Centre students). It was a nice visit-- the abbey itself was beautiful in a sad, old-building-that-hasn't-been-restored-faithfully kind of way, and the birds were quite lovely and absolutely unafraid of people (one of them kept flying into the windows of the parked car when we were still in it, and there were swallow nests in the eaves of almost all the buildings and flitted in and out, though I seemed to be the only one that noticed them). In any case, it was nice to see everyone again and see how everyone was doing.

Monday we got out at eleven (technically, we weren't out until two, but we didn't have any classes after eleven) and went to the Salle Oesia to rehearse one last time before the performance. We spent a lot of time hanging around and running lines and trying not to stress, since there were two other theater groups that needed to rehearse on the stage as well. We also ordered pizza, since we decided that the sandwiches we'd brought were not sufficient (little did we know what was to pass in the next several days...). Finally, after nearly six hours of waiting (we got there at two and the performance wasn't until quarter to eight), the show began.

The Premiere Facultatif went before us (the other theater group that runs for fewer hours per week); they put on 'Le Nuit des rois,' which is the French title for 'Twelfth Night.' It was a fair performance; they didn't speak loudly enough for the most part, since they were used to rehearsing in smaller rooms where you don't have to shout to have the back row hear you, so I had trouble understanding what they were saying sometimes. After that was the Writers' Workshop, which was really funny and cleverly done. Each of the students had a different style in reading their pieces, and at the end they read rejection letters, which they tore up and then stormed from the stage. I think it was my favorite performance of the evening (besides our own, of course).

Finally, it was intermission and with butterflies galore, we put up the set for the first of our short plays. I wasn't in it, but I watched from backstage and it was done really well. I was really nervous up until the moment where we walked on stage-- from there it went so smoothly, we might have been in rehearsal but for the brightness of the light. Everything went perfectly, no problems, and we rushed once the lights went down to change for the next short play. I had literally less than a minute and hadn't quite finished putting on my heels when the music started-- my cue that I had about ten seconds. Luckily I made it out in time and did my little bit as the TV show host without a problem. The play (Inventaires) went well-- there was only one point when one person forgot their lines, but she covered it pretty well (people told us later that they couldn't decide if she'd really forgotten or if it was part of the scene) and there were no troubles from there. I noticed afterwards though that, in the rush to change, I'd forgotten to take a barrette in the shape of a butterfly from the previous scene out of my hair; I hope it wasn't too noticeable (it was a big butterfly). Everyone commented on my dress, though-- the French teacher went so far as to come up to me afterwards and say that she wanted one like it (I know she was kidding, though).

I missed the chance to get a seat for the Terminals' performance because I spent too much time chatting backstage with people, so I went out to the lobby and listened to a book on tape instead while I waited for the performance to end and Catherine to come and take me home. We got in at about eleven thirty-- I made Rice Krispie treats for the class and a sandwich for myself for lunch the next day, and then I went to bed for three hours.

Susan's father picked me up at ten to four and we were at school within ten minutes (the roads were completely dead so early in the morning). We were delayed slightly in leaving by one student forgetting her identity card and letter of permission to leave the country at home, but finally, we made it off fine, only about ten minutes late.

Most everyone slept most of the ride-- I woke up at around six-thirty when the sun started to rise and couldn't get back to sleep for more than a few seconds of dozing. I remember listening to my audiobook for at least an hour but I can't remember any of what I listened to. At around nine we stopped at a rest station somewhere in Basse Normandie (we never figured out exactly where) and I bought myself a cup of coffee flavored with Milka chocolate, which definitely perked me up.

At around eleven we reached the coast and took the Chunnel to jolly old England (again, I don't know exactly where we crossed). After another three hours' drive, we arrived in London feeling still quite tired but in general more perky from having eaten and from having arrived.

We were dropped off at the youth hostel, Journey's King's Cross, and given time to arrange our things a little in our rooms before we set out for the evening. To describe it, I'm going to borrow the paragraph written about the hostel from the little itinerary packet the teachers had prepared for us (this is a direct quote; no translation):

"You thought you had enlisted a four star trip to London? YOU WERE SO RIGHT!!!! Prepare to eat the best sandwiches you ever dreamt of and this for the next 6 days. You will be staingat the classiest hostel of the CITY, well known for its small rooms (8 persons per bed [this is crossed out and room is written in its place]) and its private high-tech bathrooms (6 showers for 218 tourists and endless hot water from 4.15 to 4.30 a.m). Your tour leaders have selected the best mean of transportation ever: YOUR OWN FEET... Think about it: no problem of car park, no time wasted waiting for the bus, no huge amounts of money lost in the subway fare...........and the best speed to enjoy the scenery! So what do you think? Aren't you the luckiest students at Vaucanson?"

Funny, but no joke. We nine girls in Premiere were all packed into a room together, sleeping on three-tier bunkbeds, with no room to open our suitcases fully, windows that didn't really open at all, drunkards fighting in the streets at night, glass-fronted showers for the whole floor with freezing water...it was a lucky thing that we were really only there to sleep; otherwise, I think we would have killed each other after the second day.

After choosing a bed and throwing our bags on top of it, we set out for Camden, which is exactly the kind of neighborhood I want to live in someday. It was pretty much hipster heaven (I swear, there must have been a retro clothing store on every corner). After exploring for about an hour, we had our lovely dinner of sandwiches in the square (as it was) and from there went to Shaftesbury Theater to watch Hairspray.

I wasn't at all familiar with the musical beforehand except for the hazy memory of it coming out as a movie with John Travolta in it last year. It was pleasant enough for all that-- the peppy music kept us awake, in any case. Musicals aren't generally my cup of tea, but I enjoyed it well enough despite myself. I think that the entire class was singing 'You Can't Stop the Beat' and 'Good Morning, Baltimore,' for the rest of the week. In fact, they were still singing it on Monday.

By the time it was over, it was past ten, so, duly exhausted, we trooped back to the hostel and went to bed. Which is where I'm going to leave it for right now, since it's about the same time as I'm writing this and unfortunately I have to go to school tomorrow. I'll try to get the rest of the trip up tomorrow, though-- I get out at one since it's a Wednesday, so I should have plenty of time to finish up.

'Til tomorrow!

Briefly before I go

2009-05-24T13:45:00.000-07:00

'Ello, 'ello,

I'm back from London at last! Sorry for the long pause, and that you'll have to wait another day to hear about all that's happened in that time-- it's late over here and I have school tomorrow, and after school we're going to the theater again, so I probably won't get the time to update fully until Tuesday. I'll try to write at least a bit tomorrow, though, provided I don't get home too late.

'Til then!

Rounding the two mile marker

2009-05-12T13:22:00.000-07:00

Today marks exactly two months until my return home. Hard to believe the time has gone by so fast...well, they do say that time flies when you're having fun. Other people who have done exchanges told me before I left to savor every moment, because it'll be over before you know it. When they said that, six months so far from home sounded impossibly terrifying and long. Now it seems far too short. At the end of this week I go to London for a week, and then after that I have three normal weeks of classes before I finish up for the summer. There's one week free and then my dad comes, and after that two more weeks and I'm home. When you break it up like that, it seems like no time at all. Strange to think about, hard to believe.

In any case, that only marks one of several surreal events today, but before we get to that I'll start from Wednesday last week:

The only significant event was an epic four-hour rehearsal in the evening, for which I almost missed my bus. Beforehand I was having doubts about the performance (the eighteenth), but afterwards I felt much better. It helps to have run the script more than just once. Afterwards everyone was exhausted (despite the effects of delicious revitalizing cakes brought by Susan's mother, Alice, and our teacher), but in a fulfilled kind of way.

Thursday we went to the movie theater in the morning as part of the Lycéens au cinema program (high schoolers at the theater, basically) and saw Almodóvar's All About My Mother. I managed to understand everything despite the distracting effects of half-understanding the Spanish and mostly understanding the French (I did learn a few new expressions from the film; nothing appropriate). Afterwards I was free since the afternoon classes were cancelled for a faculty meeting on the new school reforms, so I took myself out for pasta in town and then caught the bus back to Mettray. I took a run, read, and listened to music the afternoon, and Camille came home and she furthered my education in French music.

Friday morning I went to a commemoration service at the Mettray cemetery since May eighth is a national holiday in France commemorating the end of WWII in Europe. It was fairly simple: there were some former military men holding French flags, the mayor gave a short speech on remembrance and the values of freedom and human dignity that the Allied combatants died for, and the national song was sung and afterwards everyone went to the town hall for refreshments. It was interesting. I think that I was the youngest person there (though more kids mysteriously showed up for the cake served at the town hall).

For the rest of the weekend I alternated between reading and procrastinating on my homework and not much else. I also introduced my host family to green chile, which they loved, made them breakfast burritos and made tiramisu for the first time by myself (and they begged to have me make it every week, so I was pleased with the results). I'm learning all kinds of useful things to bring back to the US.

Monday was a fairly quiet, standard day. I read nearly all of Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore in my free periods. In English we listened to 'El Condor Pasa (If I Could)' as an exercise in listening comprehension, which made me smile.

Today was wonderful, if it did start somewhat strangely. I woke up fifteen minutes late because I failed to set my alarm the night before. Normally I have some twenty minutes to check my e-mail before I leave for school, but today, understandably, I only had five. I noticed a message in my inbox from my dad saying how he had gone to an awards ceremony at Bosque that evening and that the Yale Book Award, the most prestigious award given to juniors, had been awarded to one of my friends Joel and then another student who hadn't showed up for the ceremony. I was thinking, 'gee, that's inconsiderate of them not to come. what a jerk!' And then I looked at the photo he attached-- it was of my mom accepting the award in my place. I felt incredibly stupid (this is why I shouldn't read when I'm tired) and incredibly touched-- I started tearing up in front of the computer. And then Catherine called from the living room and reminded me I was going to miss my bus, so I shut off the computer and left, and from there the day was absolutely normal. All the usual Tuesday morning exhaustion and irritableness. It was so surreal.

Not much to speak of for the rest of the day-- notes on the Holocaust and a film in History, notes on the book we read over break in French, and towards the end of a lackadaisical rehearsal Julie took me aside and helped me out with my pronunciation (I had to repeat one of my lines a good six or seven times before she was satisfied).

Then I came home, found that I had three pieces of mail (a copy of All's Well That Ends Well I had ordered from Amazon, a few tins of sweetriots from my mom and a letter from my dad), started listening to John Campbell's series on world mythology, and that was more or less it. I also found many more kind messages from my friends on Facebook and a couple of e-mails from my teachers about the award-- I still can't quite believe it. But in the best possible way. It would make me homesick, I think, if things weren't going so well over here. Instead it just confirms that it won't be a disappointment to come home.

I'll update one more time on Sunday night for the last events of this week before I go (not that I'm seeing something big happening in the next couple of days). And it definitely will be Sunday, since I have the performance Monday night. So until then!

Better late than never

2009-05-05T13:08:00.000-07:00

Honestly, there's not much to write about, but in any case:

On Thursday morning I left for Golinhac (a village of about 300 inhabitants close to Rodez, which is in the vicinity of Toulouse) with John, Sophie, Julie, Elisabeth, Mathieu and a friend of theirs named Vincent. I took the train up to Orleans and they drove down from Paris to meet me at the station, and then we continued on together all the way to Golinhac. It was about a six-hour drive and I finished up my reading for French (earlier than the rest of the class, it seems: my fear of being the last to read actually ensured that I was one of the first to finish. Since most people waited to get the book during the break, whereas I got it the day it was assigned, by the time they went to the bookstore there were no copies left and they were thus unable to finish the assignment. So I'm ahead, for once). I also started Cormac McCarthy's All The Pretty Horses. We got into Golinhac around eight-ish and had dinner with John and Sophie's friends, Lionel and Rhadija, that we had come to visit, and then went to bed.

Friday was spent in reading and taking walks and cooking. In the evening, we celebrated Lionel's fortieth birthday, with much food and alcohol and bad dancing (by the end). I spent most of the time hanging out with another girl my age who also happened to be in Premiere Litteraire. Unfortunately, she was also there with her boyfriend, so she mostly wanted to talk to him since I had slightly more difficulty understanding what people were saying over the music (as a consequence, I think most people thought I didn't speak French very well). In any case, a good time was had by all; the hall was a mess by the end and I was duly made fun of for starting to clean up in the midst of the party (it's just something I do. When I see plates/cups/etc out of order, I have to arrange them. I just have to, or it bothers me). I think we went to bed around two in the morning and slept in until nearly noon, despite the fact that the churchbells across the street rang the hour quite loudly and insistently.

Saturday was another reading/walking/cooking day. We had another mini-party in the evening and Rhadija made couscous, which was delicious. We did slightly better and got to bed around one in the morning, if I remember correctly. We woke up the next day slightly earlier (I was the first up at eight-thirty, and then people sort of filed in during the next hour). I finished my book, started another one, we prepared ourselves for departure and then set out for the six hours back to Paris.

We started too late and so I missed my train for Orleans, so we stopped in Bourges (the city we arrived in just about when my train in Orleans was leaving), exchanged my ticket and spent the next hour walking around the center of town, visiting the cathedral, etc. I said goodbye and spent an uneventful train ride reading.

Monday was the first back from vacation and passed relatively painlessly. Not much else to be said than that.

Today was alright. In History we had a test that I'm not exactly sure how I did on; I feel less anxious about it than the last one, but all the same on the last question I started rushing because I spent too much time figuring out how to phrase things, and the second question I think I didn't detail enough, but we'll see in a few weeks. (It was over the Great Depression in Europe and the rise of totalitarianism directly before WWII, by the way). French was cancelled because the teacher was absent for reasons unknown to the general population, so we spent the time practicing our lines for Drama and playing Uno instead. After lunch we took the bus out to the performance center where we'll be performing on the eighteenth for a rehearsal, which went fairly smoothly. We worked out the major blocking for the longest piece and got a start on the two smaller ones. I'm honestly quite nervous for the performance: this will be my first time acting in front of an audience in a foreign language, and also the first time I'll have performed in a stage production since middle school. So we'll see how that goes.

Tomorrow is the last real day of school for the week: Thursday we have a movie canceling the morning classes and during the afternoon the faculty are discussing the proposed school reforms, so class is cancelled then, too. Friday is the anniversary of the end of WWII and is a holiday in France, so there's no school then, either. All in all, not a bad way to start back. After this, one more week and we're headed to London, which I'm looking forward to. And then three more weeks for me once we get back, and I'm done. Since I'm not taking the Bacs, I miss the last two weeks of school: classes are finished on the 12th of June, and the last two weeks are for revision and exams, respectively. Since I'm not doing the exams, revision is rather pointless, so I get out earlier than I thought. Hard to believe that my time at Vaucanson is nearly over-- it feels like I only just got here. Time flies...

I'm almost positive I should be able to update Sunday, so until then!

Pictures and a quick update

2009-04-28T12:15:00.000-07:00

Hi!

I realise it's been a couple of days since the last day of what should have been the daily updates...apologies for the delay.

Sunday was spent mostly quietly; in the morning, after waking up late after the epic party, we went to the Grand Palais to see an Andy Warhol exhibition. I enjoyed it quite a bit, and so did John, I think, Elisabeth I'm not sure and Sophie was underwhelmed. There were too many people, even though it was Sunday, so that dampened things a bit.

The rest of the day we did more or less nothing. I finished reading my American news magazines and that was more or less it. We were going to go see the new Miyazaki film, but an issue with the ticket machine made us miss the show; luckily, we made it to the one after and I had just enough time to catch my train. I loved the film; I love most everything by Miyazaki that I've seen. This one (Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea) was very much bubbles and sunshine on the surface, but I think there's a more subtle subtext to be found if you search (or if you read it in). In any case, it was cute and nice and made me smile. It was a nice way to end Paris.

So now I'm back in rainy Tours, pretending to do my homework and succeeding occasionally. Yesterday I went into town with the granddaughter of the odd couple who took me to the France-Etats-Unis meeting and that was nice, and today I payed a visit to a friend of the family who teaches philosophy at Vaucanson. She lent me a few books by Descartes and Rousseau for me to try to read; we'll see how that goes.

And I've uploaded a selection of the Paris pictures into the Photobucket gallery; the upload was interrupted but I think most of them made it in:

http://s711.photobucket.com/albums/ww120/bleumarten/?start=20

'Til Sunday!

Cold feet, pet shops, and poetry

2009-04-25T16:15:00.000-07:00

That's more or less all that can be said for today.

I spent most of the time messing with my photographs and poems from the last week, reading Newsweek and generally relaxing. In the evening I went out in search of aquarium plants with John on the row of pet shops by Pont Neuf, and then walked all the way back to the apartment through the lovely little neighborhoods in full Saturday evening swing. I even found an American bakery that I absolutely have to go back to, just to see if it tastes anything like home.

After that, we went to a party at one of their friend's apartments. Everyone drank too much and danced outrageously to things like 'Cry Baby' and the Macarena. It was a good time, even if the cigarette smoke did start to get overwhelming at around twelve-thirty. And now it's one-thirty in the morning and people are attempting to sleep in preparation for getting up early for the Andy Warhol exhibition tomorrow, so I think I'll join them before my sentences get any longer and I get anymore incoherent. Yes.

Ciao!

Writing with the ghosts in Pere Lachaise

2009-04-24T16:26:00.000-07:00

There was other stuff that happened today, too, but that was my favorite part.

I'm only going to give a brief sketch since it's one-thirty in the morning:

In the morning, I think I accidentally aided a fare-jumper on the metro on my way out to the Petit Palais (why I didn't just walk I'm not sure). There, I learned that despite the fact that the museums are free, you still have to pay for the expositions even if you're under eighteen. A little annoying, but for all I've gained in culture from the museums of Paris, I can cough up eight euros in return. The exposition was fabulous, very worth the money: it was a collection of the works of William Blake, an author who I really don't know well enough. His artwork was beautiful, though. Very, very, very Romantic. The Romantics make me smile. I adore the style about as ardently as I disagree with it. Anyway, Blake is brilliant, the exposition was very well-done, and afterwards I hung around the museum for another hour looking at artifacts from ancient Greece until I was ready for lunch.

I took the metro out to Parc Monceau and, after painstakingly choosing a place to get a panini, I sat in the park for about an hour or so and wrote poetry (I ate beforehand, if that's not clear...). Once I ran out of things to say and when the soccer game on the field to the left started launching projectiles perilously in my direction, I decided to head up to Montmartre since I'd heard there was a museum of Salvador Dali's work there, and besides, why not?

So I spent the next couple of hours wandering around Montmartre, and eventually did find the Salvador Dali museum, where I proceeded to fall in love. I knew his work vaguely beforehand, but now after having seen more than just 'The Persistence of Memory' and 'Bacchanale' I think it's safe to say that he's among my favorite artists if not my very favorite artist.

After that, since I still had some time to waste before everyone came home, I went out to Pere Lachaise, found a bench after wandering around the gravestones for a while (I found one with a copper pelican on top, but I'm still kicking myself for not going back and figuring out to whom it belonged), and wrote poetry for the rest of the afternoon. In the meantime, about three different people asked me if I knew where Edith Piaf's grave was-- strange only because she was the -only- person people asked me about. And there was also a drunk guy near the entrance who saw me photographing some birds in the trees shading the main avenue, and we had a brief but interesting conversation on what kind of bird it was I was photographing (we decided it might be a kestrel-- "Which isn't an eagle, but they're in the same family, I think"-- and then I quietly excused myself and went the next several alleys over). I was so engrossed in my writing (after the interruptions) that I stayed in a full half-hour after closing; luckily, there was a maintenance person who saw me running from entrance to entrance and kindly opened one of them for me.

So I took the metro home at rush hour and got home around sunset after getting momentarily lost on the way home. For dinner we had cheese I think in every single course, which was wonderful, and then we went bowling.

I'm terrible at bowling. My overall score was a twenty. Anything that vaguely looks like a sport is evidently too much for me.

And now it's two in the morning and I'll write more tomorrow, if life permits.

Attention, attention, c'est le train de fete de...Angela, Julie, et Elisa?

2009-04-23T14:19:00.000-07:00

So, there was Disneyland.

What can I say but that it was Disney?

I'll give more details tomorrow when I've got more time; it's about eleven-thirty here, so I think I'll be going to bed soon. But I thought I'd write something, just to let y'all know that I didn't just forget. So until then, ciao!

Mimes + sushi = just another Wednesday in Paris

2009-04-22T11:58:00.000-07:00

I sleep better in Paris, evidently-- I only woke up when Elisabeth's alarm went off at ten, and normally I can't sleep past eight. The morning was a series of failed attempts of trying to do something and finishing by doing something else: Sophie and I tried to do some grocery shopping, but the store was closed (it's Wednesday, is the explanation), so we ended up visiting a series of smaller shops instead, which was on the whole much nicer. I found a shop to get cheese to bring back home, in any case (they'll wrap it so that it keeps better and the dogs at customs can't smell it). After that, we tried to go to a little sculpture museum close to the apartment, but Sophie decided that we would take our business elsewhere when we came and found that we had to pay. Normally the city-owned museums are free (and that was what it said on the museum's website), but when the museum is hosting an exhibition, you have to pay for it. Since the museum evidently hosts exhibitions for eight months out of the year, Sophie found this policy more than a bit dishonest and is going to write the mayor to complain.

Me, I just say, vive la France.

After having leftover salmon and pasta for lunch, we met up with Julie and took the metro to see a mime show. We managed to get there fifteen minutes early despite getting slightly lost on the way there (I felt slightly better about myself on yesterday's performance). The show itself was interesting; certainly mime is an under-appreciated form of storytelling. I find it fabulous that an actor can communicate an entire world of objects into being without ever saying a single word (unless a few sound effects count). It says a lot about our interpretation of symbols, and our ability to infer... I don't think we appreciate enough the importance of non-verbal communication. But in any case, I don't think it would have been half as fun if there hadn't been a preschool group in the audience sitting ahead of us-- they were really into the show and brought a whole new life into the performance ("No, it's that way! That way!" "Pick me, pick me!"). They did get annoying at times, but for the most part I think it was better that they were there.

Afterwards, we got slightly lost again on the way back to the metro, but ended up taking a long and lovely walk through a public garden, so it wasn't all bad. Back at the ranch, we spent a quiet afternoon reading/on the internet/cleaning/etc, and for dinner we made our own sushi. Noda's is still better, but all the same, it's fun making sushi. It changes things up a bit.

Tomorrow, it appears I'm co-chaperoning a trip to Disneyland. It'll be the first time I've gone since I was three years old...we'll see how it goes.

Ciao!

So there was art, and sequoias, and occult bookshops...

2009-04-21T11:24:00.000-07:00

Hey, look, I remembered the daily update promise! Without further delay:

I got up later today, but nonetheless I still ended up walking around the Eiffel Tower for an hour to waste time before the Musee de Quai Branly opened. It's a charming neighborhood and there were crows and graffiti and stickers to photograph, so I didn't mind. Paris is quieter in the morning; you can almost feel in certain places like you have the city to yourself. Life moves around you, somewhere, and it's peaceful.

The museum itself was nice enough. Not my favorite, but not my least favorite either. There were three exhibitions that were quite good: the first on the history of jazz, the second on the halfway-lost mythology of Manreva (a grouping of islands in the Pacific), and the last on modern-day cultural blend and exchange (basically, the effect of globalization on art and culture). I loved the exhibitions. The museum itself was lovely, too, but by the time I got to it I was starting to get restless. I went through two of the galleries in full-- the Americas and Africa-- and briefly saw the Australia section of the Oceania gallery before I left. The gallery for the Americas had very little from the continental US, and from there mostly from the Sioux. There was only one artifact from the southwest-- a funerary pot from one of the Pueblos (they didn't say which). Everywhere else was pretty well represented. Kenya and many of its surrounding states were strikingly missing from the Africa gallery, but I guess I only noticed that because I was looking for it.

I have to say, the design of the building is intriguing at first, but the distribution of the light is strange and it gets to you after a while. The Louvre was more open, even if its collections of art form outside Europe are rather...limited, shall we say. But still. It was a nice museum. I enjoyed my visit.

I took the bus back to the stop near Sophie's apartment, and from there the metro to the Musee Cluny stop in order to get to the Luxembourg gardens. Once I got out of the metro, I managed to go the wrong way three times, despite the fact that there were maps of the neighborhood every so many feet. I'm just fabulously uncoordinated that way. Once I went the right way, though, I made it without a problem. I bought a vegetarian crepe from a stand near the entrance that Sophie showed me the first time I visited her here ("You have to know the crepe stands; a lot of them are second-rate, but the good ones are -really- good"). This time I had the time to visit the gardens more thoroughly: walk around, take pictures, smell the flowers, enjoy the sunshine... Let's see, what can I say about the Luxembourg gardens apart from that they're beautiful..? Well, there were some giant sequoias, which was interesting. I wouldn't have expected them there, and actually wouldn't have realised that they were giant sequoias but for the fact that there was a little sign saying so. Yes. And evidently everyone had the same idea as I did, that a nice visit to the gardens would be a good way to spend the afternoon, because it was absolutely packed (or as packed as a park can be). There was a dog that wouldn't stop barking at me while I was eating my crepe-- I guess he wanted some? His owners didn't seem to care; they would just wave a hand once in a while and say, "Oh, mais tais-toi, enfin" (Oh, shut up already), which was about as effective as it sounds.

So, yeah, that was my afternoon, rather quiet and pleasant... Once my feet started to get tired from walking around, I decided to head back.

On the way back to the bus stop, there was a little news stand that had copies of the Economist, which I've been sorely missing in France, so I bought myself a copy, which turned out to be a good idea-- no one was at the apartment when I got back and I didn't have a key, so at first I walked around and looked at the shops and restaurants in the neighborhood (including a particularly interesting new age bookshop that smelled like incense and cigarettes), but as my feet were tired I quit after half an hour and went to sit on a bench inside the gate and read until Elisabeth came home and let me in. Sophie came home a little while later, and we set out to go see an Andy Warhol exhibition...

...except that the exhibition is closed on Tuesdays, so we walked around the area for a little while, crossed the Pont Alexandre III, and walked through Invalides and eventually all the way home. It was a perfect evening, in terms of the temperature and the set of the light, and it was nice to spend time with everyone else since I've been doing things mostly solo for the past couple of days. On the way home we got a baguette with bacon bits in it to share (it was...interesting?), had dinner, and now we're just relaxing. Everyone is on their own laptop, which is amusing. And now I suppose I'll write something, if I haven't written enough already, or read. We'll see.

Tomorrow we're going to a mime show, which should be interesting, and apart from that I don't believe there's anything on the radar. But in Paris, you never know. Stay tuned!

So hey, why don't we try this new thing...

2009-04-20T09:03:00.000-07:00

Hello, my wonderful readers,

So this week I'm going to (attempt) to do daily entries, in order to save you (and me) from a gigantic post at the end of the week. And that way I can use all the fabulous post titles that have been stacking up in my head. But before I can start that, I have to pick up from last week, so let's have at it:

Wednesday:

There was school, which was the last day of normally-scheduled classes before the break. The classes themselves weren't particularly memorable, so we'll skip them. In the afternoon I went to see 'Nous Resterons Sur Terre' (We Will Remain on Earth), the French version of 'An Inconvenient Truth,' with Sophie and one of her friends, Anne. In some ways I think this was the better film; instead of a bunch of statistics, it was a series of visuals, which sometimes is much more effective. Visual creatures that we are, images will always make more immediate sense, I think, than numbers. In any case, it was certainly more striking on a visceral level, and more artistic. The point that bothered me was that it insisted that things need to change, but no suggestions were offered of how to start. In a lot of ways, I'll concede that we're still figuring that out, but there are still many, many elementary things that you can start doing that have the potential to effect enormous change, provided that enough people do them. In any case, it was worth watching, but not outstanding.

After that, through a misunderstanding I missed a panel on Jackie Kennedy through the France-Etats-Unis group, but it wasn't a grand loss since I had homework to do anyway. And that was it.

Thursday:

The morning was volleyball. I really hope we do something else after the break, because I am absolutely hopeless. English was cancelled for reasons that remain obscure, so I finished at four. I would have finished at three if the classroom for Math hadn't changed or if someone had told me that it had. In fairness, Laurene tried to tell me that it had, but when she described it I thought that it was a different room from what she was talking about. In the end, though, no harm done: on Thursdays we split into two groups for math, so I just went with the later group instead. During the afternoon time I had free, I read, pretended to do homework, actually finished some, and went to bed before midnight for the first time in a week, so all in all, a success.

Friday:

First thing in the morning we had an oral exam in Spanish, but this was actually kinder than the one in French: we had a mock trial, which is something that I've already done in my Spanish classes in the US. It went quite well; I didn't speak as much as I probably should have, but what I did say was pertinent and in mostly correct Spanish, so I count it as a victory considering how much difficulty I've been having trying to speak Spanish in France. The other classes weren't particularly remarkable; Social Studies was research for our project on how solidarity is a social duty, in French we did a group analysis of one of the poems from the Bac Blanc, and in Drama we did a short writing assignment.

The afternoon classes (which for me is just English) were cancelled for the Course contre la faim (Race Against Hunger). Unfortunately, I didn't find very many sponsors, but I did the run anyway and managed to do 10K, the maximum allowed unless you proved you were training for the Olympics, basically. I was pretty pleased with myself, especially considering I haven't really been doing any running since I left Albuquerque. To celebrate, I treated myself to a new jacket with a purple skull on the back (because life is too short to pass something like that up) and some cheap earrings. The treat was unintentional; I actually only went into town to pick up some tea for Sophie (my aunt Sophie, not my friend) as a thank you for letting me stay at her apartment in Paris, but since I spent too much time choosing and then was stopped by Armand, who happened to be passing by just as I exited, by the time I got to the stop, I'd missed my bus. The next one wasn't for another half hour, so I walked around the shops in the area for a bit, and there you have it.

And that was Friday, pretty much.

Saturday:

I took the early train to Paris. Sophie met me at the station, and then we went back to the apartment briefly in order to pack some overnight things to go out to their house in the country. Since we had some extra time before the train out left at ten-fifty, I asked if we could go to the post office on the corner to mail off a package and a couple of letters. We left at nine-thirty and didn't get out until quarter past ten. The woman at the counter had no idea how to do her job, and she was the only one with an open window. When we finally managed to leave, we booked it to the metro and from there to our train, and managed to make it with three minutes to spare (like I said, I'm getting the hang of this public transport thing...). All's well that ends well; we made it out without a problem, and we passed through fields upon beautiful fields of canola in flower in the mist and the rain.

Unfortunately, while pretty, the rain prevented us from doing much that afternoon. I read and shivered and dozed off by the fire for the most part. In the evening, I watched 'Howl's Moving Castle,' in French, which was interesting-- I didn't understand it at all since I missed the first half of the movie (I was calling my parents). After watching the first half the next day, it made much more sense and only confirmed my love for Miyazaki's work. (And Diana Wynne Jones's, I suppose it must be said, even though I actually haven't read 'Howl's Moving Castle.' I know, I know. But her Chrestomanci books were some of my favorites when I was between 10-13. And Dogsbody. I adored Dogsbody).

All in all, very quiet, very pleasant.

Sunday:

Rain again in the morning, so after breakfast I spent most of my time stealing CD's to upload into my Itunes library from my uncle's gigantic collection. I fleshed out my Santana collection, added the Doors (why they weren't there already, I'm not sure), as well as Eric Clapton (ditto), Damien Rice, Alela Diane, and Leonard Cohen. By the time I finished with that, the rain had stopped, so I took a long walk by a canal that made me think of the ditch where I walk my dog back home (only much greener). When I got home, I was enlisted to make salsa for burritos. When I protested that I'd never made salsa before, my relatives protested back that I'm from New Mexico, and I had to concede that they had a point. Evidently, even though I'm not a native New Mexican, I still managed to make something that resembled salsa quite well, given the lack of certain key ingredients (jalepenos, for example). It was good enough to dip chips in, anyway, and now I can be among the proud and the few who can say they made salsa for the first time in France. For dessert, to round out the strange internationality, we had tiramisu (which I aided in the creation of), which was delicious. I kept the recipe, in case it comes in handy later.

We packed up the show after that and headed back to Paris. We visited Sophie's parents briefly and gave them flowers from the garden. By the time we got home, it was around eleven, so we went more or less directly to bed.

Monday:

Alright, catching up!

I woke up at eight and prepared myself as quietly as I could so that I wouldn't wake up Elisabeth (my cousin). I took the bus out to the Champs-Elysees and went to the Starbucks there, partly to waste time and partly because I really do miss Starbucks. In the US, I wouldn't be caught dead there, but somehow in France it's comforting.

After that, I took the metro out to the Hotel de Ville and walked from there to the Georges Pompidou Centre, where I proceeded to waste another forty-five minutes waiting for it to open. Mostly I was looking for a place to have lunch, but there were some shops close by that I went through as well. I found an absolutely fabulous rainbow tank top that I bought with the original intention of saving for Paris Pride, but ended up wearing that day; I put on long sleeves in the morning since the last several days were so cold, but the afternoon turned out to be sweltering, so it saved me from a good amount of discomfort considering I spent most of the time outside. Among other adventures, communists tried to recruit me (they were just standing outside of the museum and handing out flyers, so I guess I'm exaggerating a bit), and I took a lot of pictures of amusing graffiti. I even got other people to take pictures after me; I happened to stop and photograph a wall that reminded me of something Banksy might have painted (yes, I know he's British, but you never know), and a group of Spanish tourists behind me noticed and stopped to photograph it as well. The reason I know I was the reason they stopped? I overheard the following exchange (in Spanish), "Why are we stopping? What the hell is that?" "I don't really know, but that girl's taking a picture of it, so I guess it's important." I bit my tongue and skipped off.

Anyway, after all that fun, the museum finally opened. There was a minor moment of frustration when I was stopped at the gate and told to go to the ticket counter; evidently, even though it's free if you're under eighteen, you still have to stand in line to get an exemption ticket. I feel like that defeats the purpose a bit, but whatever. The line moved pretty fast; I was through in less than ten minutes.

There are two exhibitions going on at the moment; one for Alexander Calder and the other one for Kadinsky. They were both striking in different ways. If you're not familiar with either of them, search their works. They're worth a look. I took a few pictures in the Calder exhibition until a guard politely stopped me and told me that photographs weren't allowed in the exhibition hall. I was embarrassed, but in any case I got pictures of all but one of my favorite pieces, and a couple with my little crane. I'll put them in the gallery later this evening or tomorrow, depending on when I have the time. I didn't take any pictures in the Kadinsky exhibition (for obvious reasons), but (I believe) photographs were allowed in the rest of the museum, so I have some of a few other pieces, a couple more with the crane, and a few of the view of Paris from the terrace.

At around one thirty I left to go eat lunch. I went to a little Indian restaurant that I'd picked out that morning, since I've been longing for Indian food for a while (yep, my cravings: Satellite (using Starbucks as a substitute), Indian food, and green chile. Still waiting on the last one). It was pretty good: not Annapurna, but not bad either. Wonderful vegetable curry, cauliflower fritters, cheese nan-- the stuff of dreams, basically. The waiter was quite nice and was surprised when I tried to pay with my American credit card that I wasn't French. He shook my hand when I left. I was basically the only one in the restaurant; I think that's why.

After that, I walked from there to the Louvre. The Louvre, unfortunately, was absolutely packed, so I only stayed for about an hour before I headed out. This time I saw the Mona Lisa, as well as the Venus De Milo, among various other paintings and sculptures from various cultures and eras. There was also a striking series of paintings called 'Les Funerailles de Mona Lisa' that particularly caught my attention. The room they were in was nearly empty, and they were gigantic canvases, so it was an impressive effect. Black-and-white, eerie realistic sketches...I'm not sure how to describe them. I don't yet have the vocabulary to be an art critic or a sommelier. Powerful. That's good enough.

Once I could take no more of the crowds I went out to the gardens of Tuileries and sat by a fountain for a while to rest and enjoy the sunshine. I walked the rest of the way to the Champs-Elysees, stopped and vaguely looked at a few of the stores but didn't buy anything, and then took the bus home. And that was pretty much it; now I'm just waiting on dinner. Homemade chevre tortellini. Mmmm.

I haven't quite made my plans for tomorrow yet, so it'll be as much of a surprise for me as for you. But I definitely will try the daily update plan; at the worst I think I can make it every two days. The evenings seem fairly free, though, so it should work out. Keep checking!

Ciao for now!

Hey, look! Pictures!

2009-04-14T12:47:00.000-07:00

Wow, I'm feeling motivated this Tuesday. I actually put up all the backlogged pictures since Fontainebleau. This includes a few from around Vaucanson and Mettray, as well as the new ones of Chenonceau and of the cookies I made with Camille. Enjoy!

http://s711.photobucket.com/albums/ww120/bleumarten/

'Til the next!

So, there was last week, and now there's this one, too

2009-04-14T08:31:00.000-07:00

Hi,

Yes, so I'm incredibly disorganized this week (and last one, too, come to think of it). You'd think with a four-day weekend I'd remember to do the blog either Sunday or Monday, since I have both of them completely free...evidently not. There's too much temptation to do nothing when you have nothing to do, is the problem. That's why NaNoWriMo is in November and not in the summer, and why I never get my blog done until Monday night. Usually.

Enough of the introduction, and more of making up for last time:

Monday:

Not a lot-- I started two hours late because French was cancelled due to the oral exams, and got out three hours early since Theater was cancelled for the same reason (the Theater teacher also teaches French). Actually, I got out exactly at three, and it was funny that the day felt so short, getting out at what would be considered the normal time in the US... A nice treat, certainly. It'll make adjusting to the schedule back home easier, or at least, I hope so.

Tuesday:

The morning wasn't especially memorable-- I think it was this day though that I got back the results of the History test that I thought I'd completely failed. 15. I was completely shocked. Happy, to be sure, but shocked. 15 is about an A on the US system-- anything above is in the above and beyond excellence category. So I was quite pleased with myself.

During my lunch hours, I went to the International Day of one of the technical schools in town with other the other AFS students studying in Tours. We all brought dishes from our home countries (I brought Rice Krispie Treats again, which were a big hit), and we had to go around and speak to the students in our native language in order to simulate the experience for them of adjusting to speaking a language other than your own. It was easiest for me since most of them spoke at least a bit of English-- it was the hardest for the students from Japan and Brazil. The thing was that most of the students didn't understand the exercise-- they just thought I didn't speak French, and tried to use one of their teachers as a translator, even after I demonstrated quite pointedly that I did understand everything that they were saying. There were several other amusing misunderstandings and anecdotes-- everyone thought I was from Mexico at first, and they complimented me on my English and asked why I didn't join the Spanish-speaking table. After that was cleared up, they asked a lot of the questions I commonly get-- what's the name of your city again? More slowly? No, I haven't heard of it; it's not your accent... So do they really have yellow school buses over there? Did you vote for Obama or McCain? Can you really drive at sixteen there? Can I see your license? (They thought my license was really cool). Do you really have the right to bear arms? Do you have a gun? You don't? Why not? (the last three are new; actually-- I'd been asked about the right to bear arms before, but not if I owned a gun). What else...There was one guy there that wanted to move to New York for the night clubs (I wished him luck on all his future endeavors)... and everyone was shocked when they noticed on my driver's license that I'm only sixteen. They all said I looked more like eighteen or nineteen. But that still doesn't explain why I've been served alcohol with no ID check (and without asking me if I wanted it, for that matter) in New Mexico.

In any case, it was a fun afternoon. And one of the students (not the AFS ones, from the technical school) brought some of the best tiramisu I've ever tasted. Definitely worth going; I had a great time.

Then there was Theater in the afternoon, I came home at five, as usual, and...that was my day, more or less.

Wednesday:

I got back my results for the Bac Blancs for science: 12 in Biology, 15,5 in Physics. I was very happy with the Physics result; Biology could have gone better, but for a first try and with absolutely no grace points for vocabulary it's not half bad (it's about a B on the American system). French was cancelled again because of the oral exams, so I went to Auchan (the supermarket just around the corner) with Armand and a few other friends (because, along with Uno, it's just what you do when you have a free period), and I received the best compliment I could possibly receive: they asked me if I was coming back to spend Terminale (senior year) with them, and were disappointed when I said no. I was really touched, and realised just how much I'm going to miss them all when I go home. I really stumbled upon the best class I possibly could have; in three months I've gone from a complete stranger to completely part of the group. Amazing how fast this is all passing; I'm already halfway through...

And that evening, I finally made it over to dinner at Amalia's house. She invited me over way back in February, but neither of us had the time until just last week. It was really nice-- we had raclette (everyone wants to be the first to introduce me to raclette, it seems, but all of them missed the mark by about four years-- I had it in Switzerland when I was twelve), and for dessert there was a lovely, rich little cake called 'nid de Paques' (Easter nest), so named for the pattern of frosting on the top. Amalia's family was really nice; they invited to take me out to one of the famous chateaux in the area on Easter, which I gladly accepted. For having been here for three months, I haven't had any time to go to any of the local chateaux, so I was happy for the offer. After dinner, I showed them all some pictures of New Mexico icons-- the Balloon Fiesta, the Sandias, the petroglyphs, roadrunners, coyotes, tumbleweeds-- and then I introduced Amalia to some of my favorite music. She liked Tori Amos's soft piano stuff, loved Iron and Wine, and was underwhelmed by the Decemberists. Two out of three-- not bad. And then I went home and went to bed, after some last-minute review for the oral exam the next day.

Thursday:

After a disastrous morning of volleyball, I showed up ten minutes early for the exam since I nearly ran there out of sheer nerves (of being late and of the exam itself). My theme was to explain the vision of Paris Paul Eluard presents in his poem 'Courage.' Luckily, I didn't blank from stress (unlike the poor kid who was taking his exam ahead of me), and I managed to get a good plan written out with time to go back and detail it before my time was up. I stuttered a little on the presentation of my analysis and repeated myself probably more than I should have, but overall it went okay. I forgot the verb for 'to overcome' and ended up saying something really stupid like, 'chase out of the city,' but he got my meaning. The interview, though, could have gone better in my opinion: I was so focused on Eluard that I completely blanked on the names of his contemporaries, as well as other surrealist poets of the era. Since I couldn't come up with any names, the examiner asked for American poets that are politically engaged. When he hadn't heard of any of the ones I managed to come up with, he asked for singers in the '60's instead. Not only did I manage to name singers that were everything -but- American, I mixed up Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez, and had to be prompted on Bob Dylan's name ("What I was really looking for was a folk singer with a guitar and a harmonic- " "DYLAN!"). My uncle, if he hasn't already, will probably disown me. But I got 7/10 for the first half and 7/10 for the second for a total of 14-- about the equivalent of an A-. Not half bad, for presenting in my second language.

And the rest of the day...must not have been terribly memorable. Last English class of the week, and last class of the week, where I sketched out an idea for a book of prose poems that's been sitting on the back burner in my mind for a while while the rest of the class did grammar and comprehension exercises (I helped with vocabulary, when people asked). And that was it for school.

The evening was quiet; we had a fabulous dessert called 'pain perdu,' a ridiculously sugary concoction made from stale bread. You mix up eggs, milk, flour and sugar in a bowl, dip pieces of stale bread in, and then toast them in a buttered frying pan and serve with powdered sugar, Nutella, or jam on top. It actually tasted quite a lot like French toast in the end; probably it's where the recipe comes from. The preparation was just a lot simpler. I've been writing down all the little recipes like this in a little notebook; by the end, I expect it'll be full...

Friday:

I had the day off since all my classes but one were cancelled because of the oral exams: Spanish, French, Theater, no ECJS because it's the off week, so there was only one hour of English, which wasn't really worth it for me to go. So I passed the day pleasantly and quietly: I slept in, watched the pirate drama unfold on TV, went into town and bought chocolate for my host family for Easter, a few books in English for myself, and helped Catherine out in the garden by pulling weeds. It's really beautiful now that it's spring and that it's rained these past couple of days-- I'll take some more recent pictures to post. Oh, and Camille came back and we had wonderful conversations like we usually do. Her internship is going pretty well so far; it seems she's still getting hang of the system of organization over there, but that it's starting promisingly and she enjoys it well enough. So I'm happy about that, even if it means she's only here on the weekends.

Saturday:

Not a whole lot. In the morning we had a Friends marathon in our pajamas; all of their voices are rather strange in French for me, but Joey's bothered me more than anyone else. I can't even explain why exactly, but I couldn't (and still can't) get over how weird it was. Later I made chocolate cake from Camille's recipe, which turned out very nicely; I now have two good ones to bring back to the US. I ended sixteen years of deprivation and watched 'The Nightmare Before Christmas,' which I adored. I like most things by Tim Burton, though, so I'm not surprised I liked this. The reason I ended up watching it was because Lea's English teacher quit unexpectedly, so she won't have any English classes until after Easter break (it wasn't worth it to find another one for the last week before the break). Camille didn't want her to lose her English in that time, so she asked me to watch the movie with Lea and her friend Chloe (who happened to be over that night, was in the same predicament, and anyway needed to be amused) in English with French subtitles. The two of them had already seen it in French and were annoyed that the meter to the songs is different in French, so they couldn't sing along. And they thought it was strange how the voices were different. Funny how these reversals happen, isn't it?

Sunday:

The morning was somewhat stressful-- everyone was in a hurry to clean everything and no one was satisfied with the way anyone else was doing it. After doing what I could, I quietly excused myself and walked down to the butcher's to get some eggs to make cake that afternoon (yes, again. Different recipe. And it turned out deliciously). Florian and Cristelle arrived around one, and we had an egg hunt with Thais. I ate my lunch as quickly as I could while everyone else lingered over the appetizers in order to finish in time to head out to Chenonceau with Amalia and her family. I felt embarrassed about leaving in the middle of the meal; when I asked Catherine on Wednesday night, we had nothing planned for Easter, so I didn't foresee that I'd be interrupting anything. It wasn't until Saturday that Florian and Cristelle confirmed they were coming. But in any case, I guess there's worse I could have done.

The chateau was beautiful-- from the front, it doesn't look like anything truly spectacular, but once you see it from the side you notice that it's actually a bridge that completely spans the Cher. During WWI it was used as a hospital for wounded soldiers. It was interesting to see the mix of history. And I fell in love with the kitchens (especially the gigantic rack of cake molds) and decided that we need to redo the one at my house in New Mexico exactly like them. Or I'll keep the idea for when I'm famous and retire to Taos. One or the other. But if we do it now, I can become a master baker and open up a French bakery in Albuquerque that will absolutely steal all the business of the one in Santa Fe...

Ahem. In any case.

After the chateau visit, we went out to Amboise, where my camera died, unfortunately, and I saw the house where Leonardo da Vinci died. We didn't go in or visit the chateau (no time), but it was lovely even from the outside. We also saw some of the famous 'maisons troglodytes'-- houses carved out of natural caves in the rock, which were really interesting. They made me think of the earthships a bit, the way they blend so well into the landscape. I'll have find my way back there, with my camera. Someday, I'm sure, I will.

We got Nutella crepes as well, since it was a special occasion (not that I wait for special occasions to have Nutella crepes, but...), and at the stand I saw a 5-kilo jar of Nutella. I'm serious. I almost regretted not having my camera for that more than for not having it for da Vinci's house. And after that, we went home. I fell asleep in the car on the way back, which I only mention for being extraordinary because I -never- sleep during the day. At home I took some pictures of myself with the gigantic dark chocolate egg that Catherine, Camille and Lea gave me for Easter, and...that was it.

Monday:

Another quiet day. In the morning we went grocery shopping because the supermarket offers 10 euros credit for 60 euros' worth of purchase on Easter Monday. Camille and I ended up getting separated from Catherine and Lea, and we searched for each other for about half an hour before we finally found each other and, in rather more irritable spirits, went home. During the afternoon I procrastinated on a History assignment and made chocolate chip cookies with Camille. We found a really good recipe on a French website that I'll have to bring back for my dad. On my suggestion, we added walnuts, which made them even better. We burnt the first batch, but the second two turned out fine, so we had plenty for the snack, dinner, and for Camille to take to her internship the next day.

To show I was really desperate to procrastinate further, I asked to be taken around to sell some more tickets, and managed to sell another five. So now I only need to buy back between 5 and 25 (depending on whether the teacher lets the second packet of tickets drop or if he wants me to pay that one, too), but still with a max of only 50 euro extra. London for 99 euros-- still a bargain in my book.

Finally, after stressing myself nearly to the point of madness, I managed to finish my assignment at around ten that evening, which was why I was in no mood to write the blog yesterday. I went to bed around one in the morning and fell asleep around two after another fascinating conversation with Camille-- it started by being about my cousins, and ended about being about racism against Hispanic and Middle-Eastern people, with some things about the politics of religion, homosexuality, and birth control in the middle. It was fun. I feel bad for keeping Camille up so late, though-- I know I wouldn't have fallen asleep until around then anyway (I haven't fallen asleep earlier than midnight for at least the past week), but Camille had work today, so I hope that things weren't too difficult today. In the future, I'll watch the clock more carefully...

Tuesday:

Like most Tuesdays, this one was very long and tiresome, since it's seven hours of classes with lunch being the only break. But I'll detail it nonetheless, since I have time and I've received complaints from at least one of my readers that I never seem to be doing anything on Tuesdays. The morning went okay-- it did turn out that the History assignment that I stressed so much over was collected, so at least it was somewhat worth the effort (we'll see how many points it's worth). We focused more on the fine points of totalitarianism and the distinguishing features of various regimes (fascism vs Nazism vs Stalinism, things like that). In French, we finished up Le Rouge et le Noir, which I'm very relieved about, and received our next reading assignment, which I listened very carefully to and made sure I wrote in giant letters in my planner to read during the break. 'W, or le souvenir d'enfance' (W, or the memory of childhood). Georges Perec. I haven't heard of it, but it looks interesting. It's half an autobiography, half a novel. Literally. It's two books in one. It'll change things up, at least. Oh, and everyone else got back their grades for the oral exam-- I had about the third-highest grade in the class, at least from what I could tell from the people I talked to. I'm pretty pleased with myself, overall.

And then there was lunch, which wasn't brilliant, and in the extra few minutes before Drama I reviewed my lines and hung out with everyone else. Drama itself went okay-- I'm excited to have an actual character in one of the scenes that we're doing. We're doing scenes from four different plays by Philippe Minyana: Voila, Inventaires, Chambres, and...the last one I forget. I'm in the first two and the one that I forgot, but in the one I forgot I don't speak (I just arrange things in the background and push a squeaky wheeled cart during the awkward pauses), in Inventaires I'm a TV host, so technically that's a character and a speaking part, but I'll give you literally all my lines right here: Bonsoir, je m'appelle Eve, nous recevons ce soir Jacqueline, Angele et Barbara. Merci, mesdames, merci, merci beaucoup. In Voila, I have more lines (still the fewest of the characters in the scene, but more than 'merci'), and my character's name is Nelly. The play is basically a collection of banal conversations, that twist unexpectedly (sometimes they go off on unexpectedly philosophical tangents, or, on the other hand, I get to announce quite loudly that I slept with another one of the characters in the scene, after proclaiming my love for another one). It's fun; I'm enjoying myself a lot. And learning a lot of new vocabulary (coughing fit, for example).

And...yes. I finished at four, took the bus into town, picked up my book to read during spring break, wrote my blog. That was my Tuesday. I guess I do more with them than I thought.

'Til next week; I'm not exactly sure when I'll update next. In Paris, most likely, the day after I get in. I'm looking forward very much to a two-week break (but then again, who doesn't?), but before I can get around to that there's still a fairly sizable assignment for Drama I need to finish, so I'll get to that right now. I've learned my lesson about procrastination this time. Really.

Oh, and Catherine just walked in the door and evidently she managed to sell some of the tickets for me this morning, which is really sweet-- I didn't even ask her to. So now I only have to buy back between 2 and 22. Cool.

Ok, so the real end, now. Ciao!

We interrupt this program...

2009-04-13T15:56:00.001-07:00

The blog is going to be late this week.

I apologize.

Explanations (and the entry) will come tomorrow. But it's not serious. I'm just an idiot and procrastinate way too much.

'Til then.

Another week, this time with extra sugar

2009-04-05T12:15:00.000-07:00

Hey, look, I'm actually updating on Sunday for once...I think it's been at least a month since the last time I actually updated the day I mean to...

Without further ado, I'll take the miracle as it comes and go straight into things:

Tuesday:

This Tuesday was, unfortunately, no more memorable than the last. Apologies.

Wednesday:

After school I met up with Fanny for lunch. I got slightly lost on the way to her school, but luckily I managed to find it okay. She showed me to this beautiful little restaurant just off of Place Plumereau which was amazingly good and amazingly cheap. We both got this delicious pasta dish made with a house-made pesto with almonds and a spice I'm forgetting on top for six euros. For comparison, I've found kebab places that sell a panini, fries, and a beverage for six euros. It was a steal. I think I might just be making that my Wednesday lunch stop from now on... We also shared a pichet of Chinon, which was lovely, and finished off with chocolate mousse and warm berry crumble (we split in half and shared). Yes. I'll definitely be going back there.

After that, we walked around town randomly for a bit, and ended up visiting a museum of craftsmanship run by some Masonic order (the emblem was everywhere). It was pretty interesting; there were shoes of all different sizes (mouse to giant), model chateaux made of everything from horseshoes to sugar, and various other pieces of artwork. It was interesting, in any case.

After that, we sat by the river for a while before going back to catch our buses. Unfortunately, I missed mine, so I wasted a half hour and bought myself a pain au chocolat aux amandes since I knew I wouldn't have time to eat at home-- we went to the opera that evening as a class, and since I missed my first bus that left me five minutes in between the arrival of the second and the departure of the one I was taking with Susan to get there. So once I got back, I sprinted up to the house, where a woman was waiting in front of the door looking for Catherine, who wasn't back from work yet. So I told her that I didn't have the time to help her but gave her Catherine's cell, which evidently was the mystery of the evening and got Camille into trouble a bit because no one realised that I had ever come home, so it was assumed that Camille had given her the number and had just forgotten about it. (She was coming by to see if Catherine would do yard work for her; Catherine already has a full schedule and isn't accepting new clients) I dropped off my backpack, grabbed a few biscuits and then sprinted back to the bus stop again, where I waited literally thirty seconds before the bus arrived. Kind of stressful. Just a bit.

The opera was nice enough; however, it got long towards the end, and the singers were exhausted from the rehearsals and so weren't singing as strongly as they could have. I think I preferred the first, but all the same, I'm glad that I had the opportunity to go.

Thursday:

There was school, which was a math and PE day. I utterly cannot play volleyball, and that's all that needs to be said for the morning. In the afternoon we threw a surprise birthday party for our English teacher, which was fun; I was designated the one who waited in the classroom and made sure she didn't leave to look for us while everyone met up and prepared everything. It was great-- we listened to Michael Jackson and Frank Sinatra and had way too much sugar. I made Rice Krispie Treats, since it's now become my personal mission to introduce the French to them, and when Mme. Juigner saw them she was thrilled-- she went so far as to tell me it was like Proust's madeleine for her. Evidently her father had a job at Stanford when she was in kindergarten, so she went to elementary school in the US. At the cafeteria there, she has happy memories of such treats as peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches, mini-hot dogs and Rice Krispie Treats, so it was a sort of blast from the past for her. I wrote down the recipe so that she can make them with her daughter. I was happy that I could do something nice for her, since she and her class have made my experience at Lycee Vaucanson that much richer and more enjoyable.

In the evening, we went to the theater. I think it's my favorite of the plays we've seen thus far. The title was 'Le 20 novembre' (I shouldn't need to translate, I think), and recounted the final hour of a teenage boy planning a school shooting. It was an amazingly intense piece: it was a monologue, and the actress was incredibly talented. She really engaged the audience, asking them questions, looking them straight in the eye (her gaze was impossible to hold. When she looked at me, I couldn't)...the set-up helped with this: the audience was seated in a semicircle on the stage (the normal seating was closed off), and so she could move around and get really close to the people present. Extremely intense, disturbing, and fascinating. Afterwards she had a Q&A session with the audience and detailed some of her reasons for deciding to play this piece, her background as an actress, etc...She's German in origin, and she mentioned that when she puts on this piece in Germany, it can last up to ten minutes longer at the end because the audience will talk with her (the last line is, 'Do any of you have anything to say? Some commentary you wish to make...?'). In France, though, no one ever says anything. It made me want to see the piece played in the US, to see how the audience would react there...I could already see vast differences in my perspective in comparison to the French students. There has never been a school shooting in France (in Germany there have been a couple, however). I had another great conversation with Susan directly after... I bought the text of the monologue, because it made me want to react, write something in response. Tear it apart. Critique it. Poeticize it. Transform it. Something. I haven't figured out what exactly yet, but it's waiting on my bedside table for when I figure it out.

Friday:

The morning didn't start out brilliantly-- I didn't get to bed until two in the morning the night before (insomnia. It happens), and then for some reason neither my alarm nor Catherine's went off, so I got up ten minutes before I had to leave. Not only did I not get a shower, I didn't even get to wash my face or brush my teeth because the water was shut off (they were doing work down the street), so I ran out the door smelling and looking terrible, running on five hours' sleep and not happy with life in general...But luckily, the grumpiness manifested itself as a drawing inwards, falling-asleep-at-the-desk kind rather than a snappish kind, so mostly people looked at me and said, "Mais Angela, tu as l'air vachement fatiguee!" My general response was along the lines of, "Yeah... I think I've been tired since I was born, basically."

See, I have a sense of humor. Twisted, but I have one.

So, yeah. There was school, where classes and a lot of I-should-be-working-but-I'm-playing-Uno-instead-because-I-can't-concentrate-for-being-tired during the free periods happened.

Last bus story of the week: since English got out early, I managed to get to the bus stop and barely make an earlier bus into town to catch the 52 to Mettray. Normally I take the 5:55 bus in town to get home, but there's also one at 5:20 that I usually miss because I take a later 8 into town that doesn't get in until about 5:30. But since I got the earlier one and there was traffic that prevented the 5:20 from leaving, I managed to catch it by sprinting off of the 8 and just got it while it was stopped at the light just before it turned green. My closest yet-- ten seconds at the most. I'm starting to get the hang of public transport, I think. It'll be a disappointment going back to cars.

In the evening, Sandrine (a friend who goes to a different school) came over for help with her English. They're studying Shakespeare (I know, I was like, what? too), and so I corrected a few pieces she'd written and then helped her with comprehension of the passage. The balcony scene. I failed to find a good translation for the word 'prorogued,' though, so I ended up just paraphrasing the whole line ("My life were better ended by their hate/ Than death prorogued, wanting of thy love"). I also recited the prologue, which I only half-remembered (up until "Whose misadventured piteous overthrows/ Do, with their death, do bury their parents' strife.") It was fun, I enjoyed myself. And then we spent until midnight with Camille looking up crazy clips on YouTube, the best of which was Remi Kart:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MytfhzcSF-Y

Enjoy.

Saturday:

Not much. I got up late, and in the afternoon Camille took me around to some of her old neighbors' houses to sell some of my mysterious raffle tickets. Nine down, thirty-one to go. If all else fails, I'll buy the rest myself. I only had to pay fifty euros for the trip, really nothing compared to what I'd have to pay in the US; marking it up another sixty wouldn't be that bad. Think about it, London for a week for only 110 euros? Definitely worth it.

Apart from that...I called my parents...and... that was it.

Sunday:

A friend of Catherine's took me to the Easter brunch meeting of Tours's France-Etats-Unis organisation. It was a pleasant morning; it was the first time in a while I've had muffins or pancakes (classic-style, with maple syrup; Laurene made chocolate ones on Thursday for the surprise party which were really good, but not quite the same thing), and whoever made them made them quite well. Along with the food there was a poetry reading, in French and English. The woman wrote quite beautifully in French, but when she tried to recite in English...oh, lord. I don't find accents funny anymore, because I know how hard it is, but even so, I was biting my tongue. She tried to recite 'Imagine' as a poem, but the accent was just...I didn't even realise it was supposed to be 'Imagine' until two verses in, it was that bad. But in return I embarrassed myself by reading 'The Trolley Song,' without knowing the tune (I was pushed to the stage and she just put the paper in my hands, so I didn't have much choice), so fair's fair.

After that, there was a photo exhibition of national parks in the western US, where again I was biting my tongue. Despite the fact that all the photos were labeled and the man giving the presentation had been on the trip with the photographer who took the photos, he kept saying the pictures were from drastically different places...for example, he tried to put Joshua Tree in Arizona (it's in California), Chaco Canyon in Colorado (Good old NM), and even had some pictures Jasper-Banff, which is in Canada. He wouldn't believe me when I tried to correct him, though, despite the fact that I live in the western US...

After that, Catherine's friends showed me their photos and videos of Florida, which mostly consisted of Cypress Park in Orlando. The thing I found most interesting: during the video, they kept smiling and making comments like, "For us, this is America," and "I think we saw the essential." Whereas I found that they had mostly pictures of the kitsch and glitz that I absolutely detest in Florida. I just sort of smiled and nodded and kept myself from saying, "Yeah, baguettes and the Eiffel Tower: for me, that's France."

I also found it interesting that for how much they proclaimed to love the US, they had absolutely no interest in talking to me about where I live.

After the videos, they took me to the movies. It wasn't my type of film but it wasn't terrible either and I could tell that their daughter really loved it, so I didn't mind going. Their daughter was really nice and I liked her quite a bit; she has Down Syndrome, but she's really quite sweet and she was the only one that was really interested in me. She asked me really cute things like if I liked chocolate or if I was planning to have kids someday. And she didn't freak out about whether or not I understood her, which was better than her mother. It was really strange: her mother would ask me if I understood something, and regardless of whether I said yes or no, she would go ahead and re-explain it anyway. I think she re-hashed the movie plot for me no less than three times, despite the fact that I said that I understood it the first time she asked. And I will always ask and did ask a few times with her when I didn't understand something, so it shouldn't be that she thought that I was trying to cover up that I didn't understand.

Oh, and later at dinner, three different people tried to tell me that you pronounce the 'l' in half. And they were still suspicious and barely conceded that I was right in the end. I kept wanting to ask, who's the native English-speaker here?

I don't know. It was an interesting day. I know that they meant well and I think they were all quite sweet and generous to have taken me around, but all the same... It's just been very busy and hectic and I'm starting to feel a bit of the mal du pays, with two weeks left before spring break and an hour-long oral exam on Thursday (yep, analysing French literature on the spot in my second language-- fun!). But I think there are ups and downs and if this is the down then I'm happy to take it. It could be much worse. And I'm optimistic that this week will be better, despite that exam-- for one thing, I have seven hours fewer of class since all the French classes have been cancelled to make room for the exam, so that's already quite the treat. And who knows, maybe something spectacular will happen. Nothing on the horizon, but we'll see. You never know.

'Til the next!

La semaine blanche, plus rice krispie treats with creme anglaise

2009-03-30T11:11:00.000-07:00

'Ello all,

Somehow I'm more tired today than I was yesterday, despite the fact that I slept an extra hour and a half today (class starts at nine on Mondays, and now that Camille's home she can take me later. Thank you, Camille). I don't make any sense, much less to myself. Yes. So last week after the exams, up until today:

Tuesday:

The longest day of the week, finishing at four. But nothing truly remarkable happened, as far as I can remember.

Wednesday:

In History we had a test over World War One which I think I utterly failed-- I spent too much time agonizing over how to answer the first question that I neglected the other two and had to rush, even though I knew the answer to those ones and could have done them better and more thoroughly. And language barriers make trying to answer a short essay in fifteen minutes eleven times more difficult. I'm not impressed with myself. But we'll see.

After school, I met up with Fanny and we went to her language school, which has an impressive video library, and watched 'Les Amants de Pont Neuf' since it was too cold to walk around town. After that, I went home and did homework, and that was it.

Thursday:

I got out at three since Math was pushed up an hour and English was put at the beginning of the day instead of PE due to the schedule changes for the Bacs blancs, which was nice. I met up with Fanny again and we went back to my house to watch 'Some Like it Hot.' She stayed for dinner (a vegetable quiche), and afterwards we played a card game called 'Nain Jaune.' It was a nice day, overall.

Friday:

There was some brief confusion in the afternoon about when Math was-- since no one in our class had an elective between one and two, they decided to move the math class up two hours so we could go home early, which was nice but kind of hard to get the message to everyone, so Theater (the class just before between 12 and 1) got interrupted several times by people coming to say, "so, you know Math's two hours early today..." Unfortunately, I had to wait around an hour for my bus since there aren't any that run to Mettray until three in the afternoon, but I managed to amuse myself reading the newspaper in the library.

In the evening, we went to a party at a friend of Catherine's celebrating the end of their home renovations, which was fun. I managed to sell a few of my mysterious tickets (four down, sixteen to go!). And one of the parents of one of Lea's friends kept trying to practice his English with me, harder and harder the more wine he'd had (and I think they went through about four bottles that night, among nine people). It was an interesting party. We got home past midnight and tried to sleep so that we could get up early the next day for Fontainebleau.

Saturday:

We left slightly later than we meant to, but managed to make it in time for a late lunch of roast chicken at Bois-le-Roi, where a lot of Catherine's family lives. I was introduced to one of her sisters, Sylvie, several cousins, her parents, and a few of her nieces and nephews. In the afternoon, we paid a brief visit to the chateau at Fontainebleau. We didn't actually go in (we didn't have long to stay before the sun set; lunch lasted a long time, since they hadn't seen each other for a while), but we did walk around some of the gardens (of which there are many). I'll put up the pictures sometime soon.

Catherine stayed at her parents' house, while Lea and I stayed at her brother Eric's house just a few blocks away. Eric's son has a ferret named Coquinne (rascal, more or less), and I spent a good deal of my time at their house either playing with her or begging to play with her. I didn't realise how serious my ferret withdrawal was until I saw her. They also had two amazingly sweet dogs named Arie and Zoe who snored the entire night and made it difficult sometimes to fall back asleep. We had raclette, which is always welcome, and that was the end of the day.

Sunday:

Not a whole lot. The morning Arlette (Eric's wife), Lea and I took a nice walk with the dogs through the forest close by, which was nice. There were some boulders in the forest that we climbed up and that was fun. After that, Catherine picked us up and we went back over for lunch with Sylvie and her parents, which was raclette again. I made Rice Krispie Treats for dessert and had to bite my tongue to keep myself from laughing when they put creme anglaise on top (so of course, I had to try it and it's actually quite good). What I found funniest, however, was that the grandmother loved them-- she had seconds, and quite a big piece-- but the little kids refused to touch them. Just such a complete reversal from the norm...

We played Uno for a while in the afternoon, had coffee and cake, and then we went back. On the way home I tried to catch up on my reading for French, and didn't quite succeed but got close. Camille met us at home with quiche (which was good, despite the fact she kept insisting that she'd ruined it) and we stayed up for a while talking politics and water conservation.

Monday:

As I mentioned at the beginning of the post, Camille was kind enough to drive me to school today, so I got to sleep in and thus negate for a while the effects of the daylight savings time change, which was nice. The morning was fairly quiet; we started the Great Depression in History. I knew all the answers when he asked about the US, but the French end is new to me (I'm sketchy on the Great Depression in Europe in general, to be honest), so it'll be interesting. I really love learning history from the European perspective, just for the change in focus. It'll be disappointing going back to Geography.

In English I made myself an example of the English-speakers who mispronounce the difference between 'ou' and 'u' in French. The activity was to make lists of things that are round in English for the purposes of learning vocabulary, so obviously mine was in French, and I had to read it out at the end for the rest of the class. The word I messed up was 'roue,' (wheel), which, when I pronounced it, sounded like 'rue' (street). I get nervous when I'm put on the spot and my accent is terrible when I get nervous. So I wasn't terribly happy, but now at least I'll always get it right.

After dinner Camille showed me some clips of French comedy on Youtube, which I loved even if I had to stop it sometimes and ask her to explain why she was laughing so hard. Florence Foresti was my favorite so far. I don't know if there's any translations of her routines available (or whether that would even work, since she does a fair amount of wordplay like any comedian), but she was fabulous.

Anyway, this week not too much on the agenda, but still more interesting than last week. Opera on Wednesday and the theater on Thursday, at least. And you never know what things just happen. So, until next week (Sunday, this time, I think), and ciao!

Another week

2009-03-23T10:04:00.000-07:00

Another week here and gone without remark. Apologies for the delay, but look on the bright side: now you don't have to spend a week in suspense wondering how I did on the Bacs blancs, since I took them today. You just have to get to the end of this post. I'm considering making Monday update day, since it seems like I'm always doing something on Sunday that leaves me too exhausted to write at the end. We'll see. For next week it definitely will be Monday since I'm going to be getting back late on Sunday (more on this later), but for the future...play it by ear, I guess.

I have to say, the week wasn't terribly exciting. But in any case, je me lance:

Tuesday:

In Theater we had a panel of inspectors come, and for some reason it gave me nerves despite the fact that they weren't judging us, but the teachers. In any case, it was a pretty fun class: we did a lot of little exercises in place of a long rehearsal, which was a nice change of pace. During my favorite, you had to come on stage, take seven steps, make some sort of confession, do an action to go along with this confession, and walk off stage again. It's hard to explain, but it was really quite funny watching it. Evidently we made the teachers look good, because we heard in class on Friday that the inspectors had given them a glowing review. So it was a nice day. And we got out an hour early (again on account of the inspection).

Wednesday:

Nothing memorable. I took a run for the first time since January (a real run-- PE doesn't count) out to the house that could be a chateau. I asked Catherine and she didn't know, but she thinks it's very possible since there are a lot of private chateaux in the region.

Thursday:

No school because the teachers, students, and buses were all on strike. My bus line was still going, though, so in the afternoon I went into town, got myself lost, and then got myself un-lost just in time to catch my bus home. It was fun. Lea had a bunch of friends over and wanted to make them a cake, which translated into I made them a cake, because Lea doesn't know how to cook and six eleven-year-old girls in the kitchen at once means into a lot of sugar going in every direction, which ends all over the floor. But I didn't mind; I like baking. And I got a piece of my creation, so all the better. The cake turned out okay even though I didn't beat the egg whites correctly. I'm bringing the recipe home; it's better by a factor of a thousand than the one I use, and slightly easier (except for the egg whites. You have to beat them until they're foam, basically, which takes a while).

Friday:

Not much that was memorable. In English we're talking about the history of Northern Ireland, which I was always kind of fuzzy on, so I've been learning something, too. In the evening, Catherine called to arrange for me to get a ride out to a reunion with other AFS students in Orleans. And that was it.

Saturday:

I got up late after staying up until one in the morning on Facebook chat, packed, read for a while, and then Catherine picked me up to go to the train station. I didn't see any of the AFSers when we got there, so I boarded the train by myself and read more or less the entire way there (about an hour and a half). When I got off at Orleans I had about ten minutes of panic because I didn't see anybody from AFS there either, but once everyone had cleared out of the station, one of the AFSers saw me looking extremely lost and asked me if I was Angela. Greatly relieved, I said yes and joined the group.

We took a tramcar most of the way to where we were staying and walked the rest. From what I could tell it was a boarding school of some kind; there were classrooms and a cafeteria in one building and dorms in the other. After we left our things in the rooms, we did a couple of group activities. There was a mix of students from abroad studying in France and French students preparing to go abroad, and the different groups did different things. Our first activity was to name all the aspects of French culture we'd discovered so far on our stay. None of us were quite sure how to answer such a broad question, so we said mostly things like cheese and baguettes and strikes. The volunteers weren't impressed.

Next, we watched while the French students did another activity. One of the volunteers read a story to one of the students, who had to memorize it and then repeat it to the next student who came into the room. The original version was two pages and extremely bizarre (about a Miss Sausage competition in Montrose, Minnesota and one girl who sabotages/assassinates the rest of the contestants in various ways); by the time it had gone through all fifteen students, it was one sentence and still pretty bizarre ("En fait, il s'agit d'une saucisse qui se casse quelque chose sur la tete" = okay, so it's about a sausage that breaks something over its head). The point was to be careful what you say to people about your experience abroad, because things distort and exaggerate themselves in the retelling. But much more amusingly demonstrated.

I also finally met my AFS liaison in Tours. Her name is Aziliz and she studied in the US a few years back (in Minnesota in a little town called Arly or something like that-- have you heard of it, Dad? She hadn't heard of Wasica). She was really nice; we talked for a while about French cinema.

After dinner, we did another activity where all the French students were paired up with the exchange students. The French students were given a piece of paper with a geometric design on it and we had to re-draw it based on their description. The catch was that we were seated back-to-back and we weren't allowed to ask any questions or for them to repeat themselves if we didn't understand. My design turned out wrong, but I was kind of close, if I flatter myself. It was hard to hear with everyone talking at once. There was a brief break, and then we did another activity. It was a fake ceremony of a kind, difficult to describe, all done in complete silence, and at the end, we had to do an analysis of the imaginary culture. At first, it was assumed that women were inferior in this culture (all the girls were seated on the ground, and the boys were in chairs, and when water and bread were passed around, they were placed directly into the boys' mouths whereas the girls served themselves), but after the volunteers informed us that the earth was considered sacred in this culture, it turned out that women were actually the superior ones, since they were allowed to touch the ground. A lesson in making assumptions about different cultures. Interesting enough, if it did go on a bit too long. I ended up going to bed at around one in the morning and I was one of the first ones to go to bed. And we got up at seven the next morning. Hence why I was too tired to write Sunday evening.

Sunday:

We did a few more activities in the morning, still along the theme of cultural misunderstanding, and had a big lunch with all the pastries at the end that the French students had made. During the afternoon the students hung out and played various games while the parents talked and had their own meeting. Rachel (the other American student in Centre) and I talked with a French student headed to the US next year, and then a student from Brazil joined the conversation and we ended up trading ways to say 'shut up' in various languages... in general, just fun and silly things like that. It was really nice to meet everyone like this and trade experiences. I'm looking forward to the next one.

Monday:

The day started out really foggy and beautiful, but it didn't do much to lift my spirits. It was interesting to think, though, that this time a month ago, I was getting up in the dark, and it gave me something to be thankful for.

We started out the day with a four-hour French exam. Yes, four hour French exam, you read that right. And I thought the ACT's were miserable... It was entirely analysis of poetry, and luckily the poems were fairly recent and in language that was easy to follow, so I didn't have any trouble with the comprehension. What was frustrating was that it took me much longer to write my analyses than in English, and my observations were in much simpler and childish-sounding language, which was embarrassing. Usually writing in French is easier for me than speaking because I have more time to think, but the fact that I was writing longhand and in pen made it difficult for me to go back and correct my mistakes. That and the fact that I thought I had four different things to write, where in reality I only had two. There were two parts to the exam, one initial question and then three different analysis options. Evidently on the second portion, we had the choice of which one we wanted to write, but this wasn't clear to me: this was my first test in that class, and it wasn't marked on the paper that you were supposed to choose one (I checked afterwards to be sure. Four times). I actually wouldn't have known that I only needed to do one until after the test, when Laurene asked me which option I'd done. And I said, "You could choose?" So that was rather annoying, because I'd rushed a bit and done all three rather superficially, whereas I could have done one much better and more in-depth. But oh well.

After lunch, we had an hour and a half science exam, combined Biology and Physics, over the eye and vision. This was easier; I understood all the questions and knew exactly how to answer about 75% of the time, knew how to answer but wasn't sure how to phrase it about 15% of the time, and had no idea for the rest. The trouble was that I hadn't understood the directions, and ended up having to rewrite the test entirely on different sheets of paper when I was only halfway done with the physics and then had to rush through the end on that, so I'm not thrilled with how that went either, but it seems like I had an easier time than most of the French students from how they said it went for them afterwards. Still, by the end I was rather frazzled, so I bought myself a Nutella crepe at the stand by school while I was waiting for my bus, and after that I felt much happier. The fact that I didn't have to do the math exam improved my mood, too (it was over material from the beginning of the year that I wasn't there for, so there was no way I could have taken it). At home, I translated a letter for one of Catherine's friends and went over later to deliver it. She (the friend) was quite nice and told me all about her travels around the States. She loves Miami. She really, really loves Miami. She would be a brilliant sales agent for Miami, I think. And then I came home and helped Lea with her English homework. Much calmer evening. Very pleasant.

The week seems calm, nothing much on the radar. I get out every day at four because of the way the schedule was rearranged to fit in the exams, so that's nice. On Saturday we're headed up to visit Fontainebleu (a chateau), which I'm looking forward to. We'll be spending the night and all of Sunday, and I don't expect to get back until later, so the update will be next Monday (as I said earlier). So have a good week, everyone, and until the next!

First week back from les vacances

2009-03-16T10:41:00.000-07:00

Another week, another day late. But look on the bright side-- this way, you get to hear about one extra day for every day the blog is late. Not that a whole lot happened today. Anyway:

Monday:

A very "fun" day: in French, we started work on Le Rouge et le Noir, which, as I found out in the first five minutes, we were supposed to have finished during the break. I hadn't understood that: when she said, "we'll pick up with Le Rouge et le Noir after the break," I thought that meant that we would start it then. So this has been interesting, trying to catch up on the reading amidst the analysis of the text. Luckily, we're still doing at least every other class analysing poetry since it's the subject of the Bacs blancs (the practice for the end-of-year exams), so I'm not completely lost. The reading is going very slowly, however. I started Wednesday and I'm on chapter nine. Roughly one-seventh of the book. Not exactly what you'd call 'swimmingly,' but for my second language and for such a difficult text I'm trying to take it as a victory rather than a failure.

...I also quit Italian. There's no meaningful way I can participate in the course when the rest of the class is learning the subjunctive and I don't even know the indicative.

That's about it for Monday.

Tuesday:

The last rehearsal before Portes Ouvertes, which was Saturday (more in a bit). After practicing my bit opening the show, there was general agreement that it would be great when I opened the show because I have such a cute accent. Compliment? I still haven't decided. And then at the end of class, Julie happened to ask me how I was getting to the theater that evening. Theater? I asked.

"Yes, we're going to see a play. You didn't know about it?"

But luckily there was another student who couldn't attend, so I used her ticket. It was a monologue by Wallace Shawn called 'Fièvre' (original title/translation: The Fever), which was interesting in that I think I almost could have written it, a couple of months ago. Not in terms of style, of course, but in terms of subject. It was interesting; it either gives you a lot to think about, a lot to feel guilty about, or is insufferably annoying for trying to make you do so, depending on how you want to approach it. You can read it online if you search the title/author on Google; I did because I was curious how the French translation differed from the original. But it works better listening to it being performed. Very impressive: one actress speaking for an hour and a half without pause, barely moving from one spot on the stage. She wrung her hands a bit, and that was more or less it for movement.

Strange thing: I happened to see Fanny at the theater. She was there with her host family, her dad who's currently in Paris improving his French, and one of her dad's friends. Evidently the latter had helped with the translation of the piece, so she was able to get them all tickets. It was just such a strange coincidence to see her there. I guess it's a stranger coincidence that she's in France, in the same city and at the same time as I am, but even still, what are the chances of running into her like that? Small world.

Wednesday:

Honestly, not a whole lot. I embarrassed myself in History by not knowing who the commanding general of the US army was during WWI, but I made up for it by being able to explain isolationism and the Monroe Doctrine. So, not entirely bad. And I failed to mention this in the Monday paragraph-- I got back my first test in French, and the grade was 13. The French system runs from 0-20. The highest grade in my class was a 17, and the lowest was a 10. One of the English teachers later told me that on the French system, you will only rarely see grades higher than 17, and anything from 13 up translates more or less to an A on the US system. So not bad, for the first try. I'm pretty pleased with myself.

Thursday:

The schedule changed to include an extra hour of math every week, which I was thrilled about, as you can imagine. And my brain completely broke during Spanish. The class had gotten back projects that they'd handed in before my arrival, and I was supposed to be helping one of my friends correct hers. Her problem was that she had translated the French too literally, so the expressions she used didn't make any sense in Spanish. The trouble was, I didn't know some of the expressions she was using, even when she told me in French what she was trying to say. So, burnt out from the three-way translation, the language-processing center decided to mutiny and I ended up saying, in English, "So, I think I know what you did wrong," before I caught myself. This bodes ill.

Friday:

After school, I met Fanny in town in order to spend the night at her house. We went more or less straight to her house after dawdling a few minutes in a fabulous REI-like store in order to waste time before the bus arrived. Her host mother Catherine had another guest over who brought a bottle of ratafia with her, which I think is now my favorite alcoholic drink. Unfortunately, according to her, it's not something you can buy-- you have to know someone who knows how to make it, so chances are I'll probably never see it again. It's made from champagne, and it's sweet in a very pleasant way, not overpowering at all. It's also quite strong, but the taste isn't... I'll clearly need better vocabulary if I ever hope to be a sommelier. There was also leek tart as a main course, and Fanny's host brother made cigarillo cookies for dessert (the tubular kind you stick in ice cream).

Catherine has a cat named Kalinka, who is the polar opposite of my cat in temperament. She fell asleep on my bed and stayed there almost the entire night. It made me miss Roxie a bit (because while Roxie is a canine, she would actually do that. Puddy shuns my bed when I'm sleeping in it. In the afternoons while I'm at school, evidently, it's acceptable).

Saturday:

In the morning, Fanny and I took a walk around the neighborhood, which is very pretty and will be even more so in a few weeks after all the plants have come fully into flower. After that, I caught the bus to get to Vaucanson for Portes Ouvertes, where I completely screwed up my lines during the extremely abbreviated rehearsal, but managed to deliver them correctly for the actual performance. Evidently I was understandable, and I didn't stumble over the pronunciation, so I'm overall happy with how I did. The scenes themselves went really well, especially considering we had to replace one of the actors at the last second. Overall, a sucessful afternoon.

I went home for about an hour and then left again in order to make it to Fanny's house again in time to go to a concert. Her host father is a professional flutist, and he got us free tickets to a concert his orchestra was giving that evening. It was a beautiful performance: they did pieces by Mendelssohn, Chopin and Magnard. I hadn't been to an orchestra accompanied by a piano before; the effect is beautiful. I need better musical vocabulary too, evidently.

We got back to the house around ten and had dinner, and by the time that was finished, it was nearly midnight, so I ended up spending the night there. Fanny and I stayed up talking until two in the morning, and Kalinka slept on my bed again.

Sunday:

Catherine picked me up at ten from Fanny's house, and we went home briefly so that I could shower and change before we went out to Florian and Cristelle's for lunch. It was nice to finally meet them, after hearing so much about them, as well as their daughter Thaïs, who is impeccably behaved for being two years old. Their house is in deep wine-and-chateau country and the area around is simply gorgeous. We stayed out for the afternoon working in their garden and came home after sunset. When we got in, Catherine and Léa went to McDonald's, since Catherine didn't really feel like cooking, and I made myself sautéed potatoes and put curry powder on top, just because. She also offered me sardines since she had some in the house, so I tasted those for the first time, and they're actually quite good. I went to bed early since I hadn't slept much the night before and, on top of that, I had school today; thus I forgot to update the blog.

Monday:

Not a whole lot. We watched a presentation in the morning by Action contre la faim; evidently they're holding an event just before Easter break in order to raise money to fight hunger in Afghanistan. It's a pledge run, so now I need to find a sponsor...as well as sell tickets to raise money for the trip to London in May. The trouble is that not only do I not have any idea who I should try to sell them to (they suggested grandparents if we were stuck for ideas, but unfortunately my grandparents are on another continent), I don't have any idea what the tickets are for. So at the moment, I'd be trying to pawn off numbered slips of paper at two euros apiece. I'll ask the theater teacher tomorrow.

And in the afternoon during the two hours of free time between English and Theater, I took crazy pictures with Rachel, Lucille, and Coralie, which are probably going to end up on Facebook in the near future, but oh well. I was also forced to sing the first few lines of 'Angie,' because I was the only one that knew the lyrics (or the band that originally played it), as well as read the first paragraph of 'Hard Times' (I had to translate the word 'fact'). It was an interesting afternoon.

And that's about it for the week. 'Til the next!

That was nice of me...

2009-03-10T10:53:00.000-07:00

So, I uploaded the pictures yesterday to Photobucket like I promised...I just forgot to write a note telling you all so. Sorry about that.

Link, as always:

http://s711.photobucket.com/albums/ww120/bleumarten/

I swear I'll put it on the sidebar at some point. But tonight I'm going to the theater rather unexpectedly, so it'll have to wait.

Ciao!

Les vacances: week two

2009-03-08T12:06:00.000-07:00

So, I'm back and well and I have school tomorrow. Fun! Photos will be coming tomorrow, since my poor camera needs to charge before I can upload them onto my computer. But they are coming this time, I promise. The events of the week, quickly recounted:

Monday:

Honestly, not a whole lot. I went to the doctor and evidently I had some sort of minor infection, bronchitis of some kind...nothing serious. He prescribed some antibiotics and something for the cough and sent me on my way. And that was about it for the day.

Tuesday:

I took a long walk in the morning before the five-hour train ride and found a gorgeous old house that looked quite a bit like a chateau...and when I turned around, I realised that it could very well be a chateau, since this is the region for it. I still need to ask Catherine about it. When I have the answer, I'll let you know. The train ride was nothing spectacular; I started by reading and ended up playing round after round of Memory with Lea so that she wouldn't get too bored (she didn't have books or anything for the train). We found Camille almost immediately and walked for a while around Toulouse's plaza (evidently it's quite common for the towns in the south of France to have plazas like Spanish cities). From there it was another hour and a half's drive to Foix, where Camille is studying and thus has her apartment. We got in at around ten thirty/eleven and went to bed more or less immediately.

Wednesday:

We got up early this morning in order to go skiing at Ax-les-Thermes. I loved Camille's breakfasts: she made bowls of hot chocolate and then dipped Nutella-covered slices of brioche and baguette in. Even apart from being sugary and wonderful and chocolate by itself, it makes for a pleasant wake-up in an apartment with fritzy central heating.

Because her car doesn't do well with snow, we took a train and then a bus to get to Ax-les-Thermes. Normally the train runs direct from Foix to Ax-les-Thermes, but they were doing work on the tracks while I was there, so we took the train to another small town that I've forgotten the name of and then took the bus the rest of the way. All wearing our ski gear, because we're that fabulous. I had to borrow more or less everything because I hadn't anticipated skiing when I packed for France (Tours is in central France, remember, far from the mountains), so I looked very mishmash and thus doubly fabulous.

Camille took Lea on one of the green runs to practice since it was Lea's first time skiing and told me that I could go ahead and ski wherever I wanted for an hour before we met up for lunch. The skiing, I have to say, wasn't brilliant-- there hadn't been new snow for nearly a week, so it was crusty and icy on a lot of the runs. I did find a couple of nice ones going from a lift farther from the entrance but only got to ski them once since I had to leave early to meet Lea and Camille. We did the green run together again and stopped about halfway down for a picnic lunch. After that, we left Lea on the bunny hill to practice some more and Camille and I did some more difficult runs together. By the time we finished, it was beginning to snow quite heavily. I thought we were going to leave, but Lea was so put out by only having done two real runs that we went out for a third...which was a mistake. Everyone was cold, miserable, and it was nearly impossible to see. But in the end we made it to the bottom in one piece, if a bit frozen, and back at the apartment we took hot showers to warm ourselves back up. Happy ending.

Thursday:

We got up early-ish again in order to drive out to Carcassonne, which has one of the better-preserved medieval chateaux of the region (there are two basic types of chateaux, the medieval or "strong" chateaux, which are for defense, and the Renaissance chateaux, which are for showing off how rich you are). Having never seen a chateau like it before, I took pictures like a madwoman, as you'll see tomorrow. We spent the morning and the first part of the afternoon there, touring the battlements in high wind, which was about as fun as it was cold. On the way home, since we got back a bit early, we also went to the Chateau de Foix, where I took more pictures and got even colder. In the evening, we bought warm baguettes and Camille introduced me to the region's cheese and sausage specialties. Delicious as usual. I'll never get tired of French cheese.

Friday:

This time we could sleep in a little more, since the two things we visited weren't too far away from Foix. We set out first for the Grotte de Niaux, one of several caves in Europe where well-preserved paintings from the Stone Age have been found, dating back over 14,000 years. I've been wanting to see them for ages, ever since reading about them in one of my history classes in middle school (and, okay, I'll admit, after reading Jean Auel's Children of the Earth series). It was truly incredible, seeing them and imagining the people that painted them, and the simple thought that their traces have survived so perfectly, for so long. What was equally as interesting was that in the cavern we visited, there were two paintings of bison, nearly identical and about twenty feet apart on the same wall, that were made a thousand years apart. Given how much has changed in the last thousand years, it was, for lack of a better word, mind-blowing to imagine a culture that changed so little for thousands and thousands of years. It gave me shivers. And it made me wonder.

After that, we went to the Grotte de Lombrives, evidently the largest cave in Europe. It was impressive in size-- we only saw a small part of it in our hour-long tour. There are tours offered that last seven hours, and even still there remain still huge portions of the cave closed to visitors for reasons of research and preservation. There were some interesting formations (my favorite was a strange little projection close to the ceiling called, "les cuisses de la femme pendue:" the hanged woman's legs. It looked like what the name says, and amazingly realistic for cold stone), but all the same I was slightly underwhelmed after the first cavern. The other trouble was that I had a hard time following what the guide was saying; he had an extremely thick southern accent, which made him difficult to understand. The first guide didn't have much of an accent and she spoke English, so she could translate the words I didn't know, such as "bucatin"-- ibex (don't worry, I only asked her to translate a couple of words; for the rest, I listened to the tour in French like everyone else. What was funny was that Lea and Camille were the only two people on the tour whose native language was French-- there was me, an Australian couple, and then an Austrian man. But the tour was given in French nonetheless).

On the way back from Lombrives, we stopped off at a little bridge dating from the 12th century and I took some more pictures, as you'll see. Later in the evening, we all watched the Enfoirés on TV. The Enfoirés are an annual music special for the benefit of the Restaurants du Cœur, France's system of soup kitchens. Evidently almost every big name in French music was there, and they sang all the French as well as American hits (they even did "I Kissed a Girl," to give you an idea). It was certainly quite the show; the costuming alone was incredible. And for such a good cause, too.

A good ending to a good day, certainly.

Saturday:

Once again, we got up early in order to drive out to Collioure, a beautiful little town on the Mediterranean. We dipped our feet in the water but not much else; it was frigidly cold. Instead, we walked around the town and saw the painters, the colorful houses, and toured the chateau (a medieval chateau, if you're curious. I took pictures). On the way back to the car, we stumbled upon an ice cream shop/patisserie that sold churros with Nutella-- evidently a Catalonian specialty, according to the lady who made them. Whether or not this is true is irrelevant to the fact that churros and Nutella are a match made in heaven. I'm going to open a shop with just that and perhaps crêpes in the US, and I'll be rich. Who needs college anyway?

On the way back home, we stopped off in Perpignan and tried some more Catalonian pastry (as if we hadn't been sugared up enough already). We split three desserts: a cream dessert called 'Lema', a millefeuilles cake (which I don't think is Catalonian, but it looked good so we got one anyway), and a small cookie/cake thing that reminded me quite a bit of Mexican wedding cookies. Interesting the cultural echoes, how they distort... Anyway, all were delicious, but I think the Lema was my favorite.

Sunday:

Not much. We drove out to Toulouse and walked around the plaza again in the hour we had to kill before the train left, saw one of the more famous churches, and then left. Five hours on the train, reading mostly (Camille bought Lea a magazine, so we only played Memory for the last thirty minutes after she'd finished reading it and started asking me every five minutes what time it was). And now I'm home and writing this.

That's it, since it's late and I have school tomorrow. I don't see much happening this week, but you never know what surprises are around the bend. Don't expect anything greatly exciting, though.

'Til tomorrow for the pictures. Ciao!

Les vacances: week one

2009-03-02T00:25:00.000-08:00

Apologies for the one-day delay in posting-- when I got back in last night from Paris I was so exhausted that I barely made it through the first course at a party we had last night before excusing myself and going to bed. I'm sick-- Catherine's taking me to the doctor later today since it's been nearly a week and I don't feel much better-- and I'd barely slept the night before; hence the exhaustion. But I slept for a good ten/eleven hours last night (which is more than I've slept at once for a while), so I now have the time and energy for the blog. So, Paris and the days before:

Monday:

I went into town with Susan, Sandrine and a few other Mettrayennes to see Twilight (I know, I was kind of like, "What, Angie's going to see Twilight?" too). However, despite the fact that I didn't really like the movie, it was nice to hang out and go into town-- it got me out of the house, anyway. And the movie had a few unintentionally funny moments-- during a scene that was supposed to be highly romantic, they were playing an Iron and Wine song in the background that is decidedly not a love song. I had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing. When we came back we went for a walk around the fields together before everyone went home, which was nice. We were originally going to take the dog with us, but Catherine had taken him to work (it was kind of nerve-wracking for a second, though: I came home and the crate was open and empty, so I thought I hadn't shut it properly and he'd escaped...). A pleasant day.

Tuesday:

I spent the morning taking walks with Darwin in order to keep him distracted from eating my feet while I was trying to read or do work on the computer. Later in the afternoon, I met up with one of my friends from the Iowa Young Writers' Studio, Fanny, who happens to be in Tours studying French at the same time as me by some strange twist of fate. We walked around town, saw some of the highlights like the little record store and a chocolate shop that sells sweets in the shape of cell phones and flowers, and I almost but didn't quite get us lost at least twice. She came over for dinner as well, where Darwin tried repeatedly to eat her feet despite the walks he'd had that morning and spending the afternoon playing in the gardens Catherine was working in. We had raclette, which hopefully was good enough to make up for his behavior. All in all, a nice day.

Wednesday:

I woke up with the beginnings of the cough that still hasn't left, and very nearly missed my train to Paris after Darwin decided he really didn't want to come back inside when we let him out to pee. Luckily my car was right next to the stairway from the main part of the station-- I got on and the train left literally one minute later. Sophie met me at the station again, and after picking up Elisabeth, we went to the Rodin Museum. Rodin, if you're not familiar with him, was the sculptor who made the Thinker as well as the Gates of Hell. The museum was quite beautiful-- it had very much the feeling of an old house (which makes sense, since I think that's just what the museum used to be), which made it very intimate and personal at the same time as being extraordinarily beautiful. In the afternoon, we went to the theater to see 'Le Malade Imaginaire.' I could get the general idea of what was going on, but the specifics were difficult for me to follow. The audience would laugh at times and I would have no idea what was supposed to be funny. But there was about an equal number of times that I got the humor, so I guess it all balances out in the end.

For dinner, we had a fondue, but not a fondue with cheese-- we had a pot with hot sunflower oil, and we'd dip pieces of meat and vegetables in to cook. It was very good.

Thursday:

I got up at around eight-thirty and read for about an hour before going out to meet one of my friends from Tours who happened to be in Paris at the same time on the Champs-Elysees. I got there at around ten and sent him a few texts to figure out a place to meet up while I walked around a bit. I ended up doing an entire circuit of the Champs-Elysees as well as a few of the side streets before he messaged me back to say that he'd gotten up late and wouldn't arrive for another half hour. It was cold outside, and I was sick, and in Paris, so what's the logical response?

Go to Starbucks, of course.

So I wasted a pleasant half hour with a grande chai and a chocolate chip muffin, and took pictures with my crane.

After another fifteen minutes' worth of telephone tag, Armand and I finally met up and we did another full circuit of the Champs-Elysees and went into a few stores. I found a copy of Good Omens in French but didn't buy it, which I'm regretting. I mentioned the Starbucks stop to Armand and he decided we were going there again since he'd never had Starbucks coffee before. Evidently I got him addicted, because he got a second coffee, a venti, after he'd finished up with the first. We took some more pictures of ourselves drinking coffee and then said goodbye (he had to get ready to leave that evening).

After Armand left, I walked through the Tuileries (which are pretty in a skeletal sort of way in the winter) to get to the Louvre. The Louvre, which is overwhelmingly huge from the outside, is even more overwhelmingly huge from the inside. I decided to skip the popular stuff and picked a gallery that I thought would be quieter (Ancient Mesopotamia) to look at more thoroughly. I think that was definitely the way to go-- even that collection was simply breathtaking. It brought back memories of ninth and tenth grade history, where we'd learn about how this or that collision of culture or religion brought on these or those changes in art-- things I knew, but had never really seen for myself. And in a room of art from ancient Iran, there was an incredible case of pottery with designs that could have been found on Pueblo pottery in New Mexico. It's incredible how symbols repeat themselves, all across the globe. We really aren't as different as we want to believe we are.

I finished up Mesopotamia with about another forty-five minutes to spare before closing, so I decided to sprint across the galleries to make it to the North America/Oceania/Africa gallery (even then, I found the combination somewhat strange), just to see what was there. I got there with about twenty minutes to look-- it was a pretty small gallery, though, so I saw everything, even if I didn't get to spend as much time as I would have preferred. There was a sign at the front explaining how this was the Louvre's attempt to elevate "primitive art" to its proper place in the cultural canon. It was clear from the wording that they're not quite there yet (what do we mean with this word, primitive? Are people who can carve gigantic heads from stone and erect them without cranes primitive?).

In any case, I got to take a self portrait with one of the Easter Island heads, so I guess I can't complain.

When I came home, we made our own sushi for dinner and served it on one of those wooden boats. I took pictures of it with my crane. A lovely arrangement, as well as delicious.

Friday:

I got up early-ish again to go to the Picasso Museum. My bus stopped inexplicably about halfway there and everyone was ordered off, so I had to walk about thirty extra minutes in order to get there. Added to that, I got slightly lost twice by misleading signs, but it was in the Marais, so it wasn't a terrible place to get lost. Very old and very pretty, and rainbow flags all over the place since it's more or less the Castro of Paris. I felt very welcome. By the time I got to the museum, I could only spend about half an hour there because I'd already made plans with Sophie to meet up for lunch on the Champs-Elysees. It's a fairly small museum, so I sprinted and saw more or less everything, but I know I didn't have the time to appreciate it. Even the glimpse was wonderful, though. I'm not complaining.

I walked back to the Hotel de Ville to take the metro over to meet Sophie and Elisabeth. We went to a little restaurant that was famous for its carpaccio. So of course, I ordered the risotto, because I make that much sense.

After lunch, Elisabeth and I went to the Musee de Cluny, which is a museum of artifacts from the Middle Ages. The most famous piece of the museum's collection are the tapestries of the Lady with the Unicorn-- if you do an image search on Google, you'll recognise it immediately. In person they're simply stunning; you really appreciate the hours and care the artist(s) must have put into creating all of them. All the fine detail, from the little flowers in the background to the folds in the Lady's dress to the unicorn's reflection in the mirror... The rest of the museum was wonderful as well, of course. It was just that the tapestries made the biggest impression. But then again, the Lady with the Unicorn is a hard act to follow.

After that, we went to a bookstore just across the street, where Elisabeth managed to read an entire manga in the time I spent looking around (she reads fast, in my defense). I found a French translation of a Portuguese novel that looked interesting, as well as translations of the Sandman comics. Unfortunately, the latter were far too expensive for me, but the first wasn't.

We had cheese soufflet for dinner and then went out for a ride on one of the Bateau-Mouches (little flat boats on the Seine, mostly for tourists). It was cold and it's kind of the off-season (I say kind of because there's still a good number of French tourists on winter vacation right now), so we had the boat mostly to ourselves. We went past the Louvre, the Musee d'Orsay, and the Eiffel Tower, among other monuments. I tried to take pictures, but my camera doesn't function well in the dark to start with, and the motion of the boat made it even worse. I gave up after a couple of tries.

After the ride, we met up with my cousin Mathieu and then headed out to John's house in the country. We got in around twelve-thirty and didn't get to bed until one.

Saturday:

A quiet day. I spent most of it reading. I think it might not be too much of an exaggeration to say that I spent all of it reading. In the few moments I wasn't reading, I went out into the garden, made a few calls, and baked scones. They didn't turn out terribly, but they didn't turn out brilliantly, either.

Sunday:

Another quiet day. I really didn't feel well at all, especially since I barely slept the night before given that I woke up every half hour from being unable to breathe, and again spent most of the time reading. We went out to a local fromagerie in the morning and made acquaintance with some of the goats. There were eight-day old kids (the goat kind) that were absolutely precious. I tried to take pictures but for some reason my flash seems to be on the fritz and only a few of them came out. We bought some of the cheese and had it at lunch-- I think I'd be hard-pressed to come up with I time I had better goat cheese.

We also went out to a local market by the river. We caught it at the end, so there wasn't much to see, but it was nice all the same.

On the way back into Paris, there was so much traffic that for a while we were worried that I was going to miss my train, but luckily we got to the station with a good twenty minutes to spare. By this point I was so exhausted and out of it that it took all my concentration not to fall asleep on the train so that I wouldn't miss my stop. I was planning on going to bed as soon as I got home, but I'd misunderstood that they'd waited for me to start the dinner party. By some miracle, I stayed awake long enough to eat a little bit, and then Catherine finally ordered me to bed when I refused the cheese course (yep, I was feeling that terrible, that I refused a French cheese course). I slept, and now I'm feeling not much better but at least not as tired.

I'm leaving for Toulouse tomorrow provided that the doctor says I don't have anything contagious/serious, so there'll be more on that next week. And later this afternoon/evening I'll post pictures from Paris. I didn't take quite as many this time as the last and most of them are of food, but it's something.

Ciao!

Carnival and other various madness

2009-02-22T13:15:00.000-08:00

Well, the title's a bit misleading. I think Carnival was the event of the week; otherwise, things were fairly quiet. Since the day-by-day format seems to work fairly well, I'll roll with it.

Monday:

Honestly...not a whole lot. Mondays are the hardest day of the week since it's one of two days where I have classes until six (the other is Friday, so I don't care as much)...even in English it was a grammar day, so I sat and doodled while the rest of the class worked. I feel like the scale is unevenly tipped, since oftentimes they get little exercises as homework that would be kind of useless for me to do, but then again, who am I to complain about having less homework?

Yeah, so that was the long way of saying 'nothing of note.'

Tuesday:

My first test in French, in History/Geography, which I'm hoping went okay (I won't know until after the break). I understood all the questions and knew how to answer them; I just don't know that I expressed myself effectively in answering. But the teacher seems quite nice and I think he'll give me some leeway for still learning the language. I aced the map section though-- it was a rough schema of the major transportation lines in Europe. I overdid it the first time when we had to draw one for homework, so for the test it was cake.

Oh, and it appears I have a part in the 'Portes Ouvertes' for Theater-- I get to welcome the audience and give a brief summary of the skipped parts of a play that we're only playing a couple of scenes of. So I'm involved, and speaking, which is most important. Speaking as part of theater, even so little, helps me know exactly what I'm doing wrong when I'm speaking French, so I think it was a good idea even apart from just wanting to take it up again for the sake of taking it up again.

Wednesday:

I found out this day that I'll be going with my theater class on a trip to England in May. We'll be going to the Globe once and seeing at least one theatrical performance every night. Five days. I'm ridiculously excited, even though it's months away. England has been on my places-to-go list pretty much since I started reading; I think half or more of my favorite English-language authors are British. So, yes, looking forward to that!

Thursday:

CARNIVAL.

We missed all the morning classes, all the way until two in the afternoon. After changing into our costumes, we listened to a few of the school's garage bands play for about an hour before there was the grand defilé-- I hesitate to translate this as 'parade' since it was more like a fashion runway than anything else, for individuals and groups.

The whole school gets really into it; even the teachers get dressed up. There was one group of teachers who went as the Three Musketeers, another group who went as...some seventies thing (I missed the reference), and the English and Math teachers dressed up as ridiculously exaggerated versions of the other. There were some pretty good student groups too: some blue aliens (complete with spaceship), the Disney cast (Mickey, Minnie, Donald and Daisy), the Simpsons, a pair of dead rockstars (their makeup was too fabulous for words)...

There were also some costumes there that reminded me that I'm not in the US anymore and 'PC' doesn't quite exist in the same incarnation (several students dressed as stereotypical Indians), and a couple that just made me think (a contingency of boys dressed in drag-- why do we laugh? What exactly makes it so funny? And why wouldn't it have the same effect if a girl came dressed in a suit?). But overall, fabulous fun and wonderful pictures for future blackmail--um, I mean fond memories, of course. That's what I said, right? If you want to see them, send me an e-mail-- for privacy reasons I'm not posting them on Photobucket.

Other than Carnival, Thursday...Math is going to kill me before the end of the year. Yep. That's about it. Oh, and I wrote a piece for English class in French about As I Lay Dying while the rest of the class was taking a reading comprehension test. It was interesting considering I haven't read As I Lay Dying yet. (I wrote a summary of an article (which was in French) about how the novel was an author's inspiration to truly begin writing).

Friday:

There was a bus strike, so most of my teachers for the morning couldn't make it to school. Susan's father drove us an hour later, which meant I got to sleep in. A very agreeable way to start. And then I spent the rest of the morning vaguely researching expressions of solidarity in the US for a project for ECJS (Social Studies, more or less). I say vaguely because the rest of my group wasn't there due to the bus strike, so I flipped through the New York Times and a couple of history books and then realised, when I started counting New Mexico references in the text, that I wasn't really working anymore. And then in the afternoon we played Hangman and Scattergories in Math, since half the class was gone due to the strike. Afterwards was Italian, where we kind of did work but not really since half the class was gone, and then that was it. We played cards for an hour waiting for the bus to arrive, and then we went home. A very relaxed way to end.

Saturday:

After getting up an entire hour and a half later than normal, I proceeded to do pretty much nothing all day. I took a long walk in the morning, which was beautiful in the park because it was misty and cool and dead quiet, and then went into the town square in Mettray to buy a baguette for lunch. I realised as I was halfway home, walking with the baguette under my arm, just how perfectly French that was. In the US, you wouldn't walk down any street with a baguette. It just wouldn't happen. You can't even get real baguettes in the US to start with (no, the ones they sell at the supermarket do NOT count). It's little things like that that I love, and am going to miss when I come home.

Oh, and I learned how to cook these delicious scallop-like things called "noix de St. Jacques." I'm trying to learn little recipes to take home, and this so far is my favorite by a huge margin. It's incredibly rich and probably takes about ten years off your life, but it's so good that it makes up for it entirely. And it takes less than fifteen minutes to make. It's my kind of recipe.

Sunday:

A friend of Catherine's dropped off her puppy for us to babysit during the vacation. He's a little boxer named Darwin, and is precious and a puppy and is helping greatly to relieve my angst of being pet-less. It's just a shame that I'll be gone most of the time he's here; I'm leaving for Paris on Wednesday, so it's tomorrow and the next day that I get to spend with him and that's it. His owner comes home this Saturday. I took walks upon walks today with him all over the place, including at the market, where he did his best to try to jump on all the mothers carrying their young children... I also made flan again this afternoon, which worked out this time and actually tasted like flan and not rubber. I think next time it might be good with apples in it, if I can find a recipe for that. I served it for some more of Catherine's friends, a florist at the local market and his wife from Ohio, who came over for dinner this evening. We talked about from everything from the lack of good cheese in America to the evils of television to the declining standards of art and parenting in general. And it was decided for me evidently that I need to keep coming to the local market so that I can fall in love with some French boy there and stay here forever (that's what happened to the florist's wife). ...I let it go. Some things just aren't worth the pain of explaining, especially in a second language with people you don't really know.

So that's the week. Wednesday I leave for Paris, so my next entry will be just after coming home; therefore, you should expect some good stories then. In the meantime, it's eleven -thirty here, so I'm going to bed. Wishing you all well, and until the next!

Week the Second

2009-02-15T11:03:00.000-08:00

My projection from last week appears to be correct, since I'm here writing to you another week on in this adventure. The highlights, day-by-day:

Tuesday:

Quiet day. Long, but overall quiet. The big event is trying to explain what a screwball comedy is in French ("You can just translate literally if you're having trouble...."-- tell me, my readers, can you explain 'screwball' in English, even?). The reason it came up is because we were reading in French class the director's note about the opera we went to Wednesday evening, and he mentioned that it was being presented in a modern context, in the vein of the American screwball comedies of the '30's. So the teacher naturally asked me to explain...

Oh, and this also marks my first time acting in nearly three years. It's more difficult when you don't know the lines. Just for future reference.

Wednesday:

Since the opera isn't until seven, Armand, Sandra, Coralie, Rachel and her boyfriend and I go to the movies. 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,' subtitled in French. It's a movie I'm fond of for several reasons, not the least of which are the memories I have of the people I've seen it with (Amanda!), so it was nice to see it again. It was interesting to watch the subtitles; you really lose a lot of the nuance of language and dialect. Translating art is a difficult job, especially when it depends on wordplay... (I've heard that Terry Pratchett was translated into French; I want to find a copy of one of the translations just to see how they even tried to do it).

Anyway, after the movie we split up for dinner. I went to the Kebab with Armand and Simon (who was in town for the opera but didn't see the movie with us) and had a cheese panini and another one with Nutella for dessert, and everyone else went to McDonald's. It always makes me sadder for some reason to see people at McDonald's in France. I feel sometimes like they're getting the worst of American culture over here, all the pop culture stuff without the alternatives. Speaking in terms of brands, restaurants, music, books, everything. And it's a shame, because a lot of the things I'd like to introduce them to don't seem to have been translated or are difficult to find or both. Just have to make more of an effort, I guess. Translate them myself. Oh, god, I'm trying to imagine translating Geek Love into French now...it's weird enough to explain in English...(Ayden and Fanny will know what I mean).

So, after dinner was the opera, 'Il Viaggio a Reims' (The Voyage to Reims). I'm going to call this my first real experience at the opera, because the first time I went it was outside and raining, so we left after the first act. (It was 'Don Giovanni,' if you're curious). But this was spectacular. I never really appreciated the power of the human voice until that evening, with the soloists singing so loudly, without a microphone, that I could feel it under my skin as clearly as hear...it was incredible. And also quite funny. The screwball comedy update really suited the opera well, I think. Overall, a great evening. We got home at around ten-thirty and I was completely exhausted.

Thursday:

PE in the morning again, but this time it didn't rain, luckily. There was also Math, where my brain nearly exploded again, and English, where I gave a short presentation on the differences between the French and American education systems (it sounds so formal, but really it I was just comparing Bosque to Vaucanson and it spiraled from there). I am now the class's dictionary of Americanisms. Which is funny, because I use a good few Britishisms at home. Including the spellings, sometimes. On Thursdays, students do freewrites in English, so I do mine in French. The teacher gave me back mine from last week and said she couldn't believe I'd only had one and a half years of French, so I was overly pleased with myself for the rest of the day.

Friday:

We went to the movie theater in the morning to watch a series of short films. The first two were interesting, the last three were second-rate. The two that I liked were: 1) a documentary of Times Square, edited to create a high level of tension that really wasn't there (utterly fascinating), and 2) a surreal story about an abusive father and his relationship to his family, and how his daughter changes him (literally). The third actually was kind of interesting-- it was an animated feature of an interview between a girl and her mother about her mother's life in Russia, but I'd seen the animated interview in a different context and done much better, so it dampened things for me.

Apart from that, theater, where I got back my analysis of Genese No. 2 with more impressive comments (why, yes, I am a little vain, thanks for asking...), Math again, Italian (work with the subjunctive, which was interesting considering I don't even know the indicative), and English. This time in English we listened to an old Madonna song ('Papa Don't Preach'), and the teacher promised to lend me a Sherman Alexie book. And I was berated for asking for homework (I found it unfair that the rest of the class had an assignment for the weekend and I didn't-- it was a little workbook thing on vocabulary that would have been kind of pointless for me-- so I thought I'd even the score). I think English is rapidly becoming my favorite class, even if it does feel kind of strange to speak English in the middle of a day of French, with people I'm used to speaking in French to.

At home, Catherine taught me to make a little dessert with apples that I can't remember the name of. It was good, though. I'm enjoying my forays into French cuisine.

Saturday:

After a late lunch, I went into town with Maeva and a few of her friends. I found a Neil Gaiman book in town at the English-language bookstore (The Graveyard Book)-- it wasn't the one I was looking for (Coraline), but I got it anyway since I hadn't read it and ordered the one I was actually looking for. We did a tour of downtown, went into the city cathedral, which was gorgeous (including the crypt), and saw a group of women protesting something outside of the Fnac (I think it was the commercialization of Valentine's day-- no one there really seemed to understand it, though). I also found some chocolates for my parents and a couple of books of poetry by Apollinaire (again for myself), who we've been studying in French (the specific poem we just finished with is online here, in French and English: http://www.pierdelune.com/apollin4.htm). I'm really coming to love Apollinaire; I found the poem we read in French utterly beautiful (it was stuck in my head for days afterwards. Yes, I get poetry stuck in my head), and then my interest was piqued further by the fact that we have the same birthday. So now I have 'Caligrammes' and 'Poesies Libres,' and I've read the first few pages of the former and am enjoying it immensely.

Oh, and on this day I also received a package from Sophie (my aunt in Paris) with more photos and the text of a play by Moliere that we're going to see when I visit during winter break. So I have a lot of things to read. Pas trop depaysee, moi (not feeling too far from home).

We also went to a crepe party in the evening put on by Lea's tennis organization, which was nice.

Sunday:

A quiet day. I made some calls, did my homework, lounged, went on a few errands with Catherine. I made tortilla soup for them, but it really isn't the same when eaten with Gruyere and a baguette. There's still one more packet left, so we're going to search harder for tortillas, cilantro, and a different cheese, or just go without next time. If any of my readers have a suggestion for a substitute for cheddar that might be found in France, please let me know! I also attempted to make flan, but it burned and was rubbery because we didn't add enough milk. But we ate it anyway. Because we're cool like that.

And that's it. This week is the last before the two-week winter break. On Thursday there's a carnival at school where everyone is dressing up; I'll be sure to bring my camera. If you're curious, I'm going as the ultra-Francaise, complete with beret and baguette. That's the major event, but I'm sure there will be other things to recount by next Saturday.

And more photos online, always at http://s711.photobucket.com/albums/ww120/bleumarten . I'm trying to figure out something to link it at the side of the page, but I keep forgetting because I'm lazy.

Until next week! Ciao, and bisous a tous.

Yay, pictures!

2009-02-09T12:50:00.000-08:00

I opened up a Photobucket account where I'll be depositing all my pictures from now on. So, the link is:

http://s711.photobucket.com/albums/ww120/bleumarten

Quick entry on today:

It was Monday, and it was an ending-at-six day, so everyone was more or less exhausted by the end. I contributed to the discussion in French and made sense (unlike my last disastrous attempt in History/Geo), which I was proud of myself for. We went to a rehearsal of the opera we'll be attending on Wednesday during the afternoon, so I got to skip Italian and English. It was interesting to watch it being performed without costumes (just not quite what you're used to), and certainly quite fun. At the end, there was a brief Q&A session. Two highlights: the cast was composed of over a dozen nationalities, from South Korea to Russia to the US to Italy, and there was one girl in the audience who asked whether or not they were supposed to be in costume or not (it was really obvious that they weren't-- jeans and casual dress. Not exactly opera wear). And during the afternoon before Theater I hung out in the CDI (the library/computer center; I forget what the acronym stands for since everyone just calls it that) with Julie, Apolline and a few others and we had fun pronouncing things terribly in each other's languages ("Ahn-gleesh!" "Wee, je parle trez byen luh fran-say"). And... that's about it for highlights. It's late, so I'm going to bed.

'Til the weekend!

La premiere semaine

2009-02-08T12:35:00.000-08:00

'Ello, 'ello, I'm back again. I've survived the first week of French lycee, so I'll go day by day and give you the major events.

Tuesday:

The morning passed well enough, French literature and History/Geography. After lunch, we got early because the Theater teacher took a snow day. (In France, when it snows, the schools don't close but the buses won't run, so if your bus doesn't run you're not obligated to come). In the fifteen minutes it took to figure out that she was absent we stood around outside the room singing Disney songs like 'Hakuna Matata' in French and English. It was fun. I got flowers for my rendition (I believe it was Julie that had brought them for her scene).

Wednesday:

We had another fabulous music exchange this morning during the récré (short for 'récréation, which is kind of like an elongated passing period. It lasts fifteen minutes instead of five, so you have some time to hang out). The Beatles, the Yeah Yeahs, ABBA, Tori Amos, Iron and Wine, Joe Dassin, and Edith Piaf, among others, and, of course, Disney (Mulan, the Lion King, Peter Pan, Brother Bear. Bilingual, as usual). Since school gets out at one on Wednesdays, I went into town with Armand and Susan for the afternoon. They took me to the old part of Tours and we went around to a couple of shops. First, a cool little indie record store, which was fantastic not only for what it sold but also for being fabulously modern inside of a centuries' old building (or, at least, a building that was impersonating very well being centuries'-old). After that, a little English-language bookshop, where I pointed out all the books that I'd read or heard of (the list would be too long for this blog). Armand and Susan had only heard of a few of them. It's interesting what aspects of American culture you find here and which ones you don't: One Tree Hill but not A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Angelina Jolie but not Maya Angelou. But then again, it's the same thing with France in the US, I think. I'm finding little things every day that surprise me.

After the English bookshop we went to a French one, where we looked at books on cinema and the Loire valley (the latter for my benefit). After that, we went to a larger chain that's comparable to Circuit City, only bigger and with books, called Fnac. We looked at more books on cinema and music and we had another game of 'Have you heard of/seen this?' with movies and TV shows (Greatest disappointments: 'Deadwood' is even less popular in France than it is in the US (but somehow I'm not entirely surprised by this), and 'Little Earthquakes' wasn't included in a book of the 500 greatest albums of all time). It seems that all the French students know American pop culture better than I do, which is funny and kind of embarrassing at the same time.

And that was more or less it. As we walked to the bus stop Armand and I listened to 'Downtown' on his Ipod, which was fun because of the 'Lost' reference and also because we were walking downtown. All in all, a great time was had by all. I'm looking forward to the next time already.

Thursday:

PE first thing in the morning. We took a bus to a track some fifteen minutes away and ran laps in the rain. It made my PE class at home seem pathetic, where walking to Starbucks was our final and we cancelled in the case of weather... I also had my first Spanish class, where my head nearly exploded between three languages. However, it's Spanish at a lower level than what I'm studying at home, so I think things should work out okay. And it's only two hours a week. Also my first math class, where my head nearly exploded again. It seems to be similar to a STAM course, so it's fairly simple math once you know the tricks, but when people try to explain the tricks to me in five seconds in French it just...doesn't work. Hopefully things will work out. Hopefully.

Otherwise, things went fairly well. In English we talked about teenagers and cliques, and I got to try and explain the concept of the preppie. It's really strange to speak English at school, since I'm used to speaking French there, as well as to listen to my classmates speaking English...But it's a pretty relaxed and fun class, so I'm enjoying myself.

That evening, we went to the theater to watch Genèse No. 2, which was...interesting. Even the French students had trouble following it. There were three characters: a narrator of some kind, God/a psychiatrist and Lot's wife/a schizophrenic patient in an asylum. And it gets stranger from there. Instead of curtains there were these semi-transparent reflective panels, behind which musicians were playing, and on the floor there were screens where little films played at certain points. The actors often spoke very fast and about fish that prostitute themselves (I'm serious: I asked afterwards to see if I'd understood correctly) and what's exists if nothing exists... Even still, I loved it for being so strange. We had to do an analysis of it the next day in class, and even though I only halfway understood it I wrote more than almost everybody else. Evidently my habit of going way over the limit writing-wise in English is holding over into French. My teachers had better beware...

So, continuing Friday:

Apart from the theater analysis, there was also more math, more head-explosion, finally figuring out my schedule, and two hours free because both the English and Spanish teachers were absent. And I got a cell phone. Mostly for if I'm trying to arrange something for the afternoon from school or for emergencies. It's funny to have one here, since I barely use mine at home.

Saturday:

I got up early and took the train to Paris to spend the weekend with my aunt once-removed, Sophie. We went to a local patisserie/boulengerie and bought some croissants and a pain au chocolat aux amands, my favorite pastry in the world. It started snowing in the afternoon, so we decided to take advantage of the bad weather and go to the Musee d'Orsay. It was fabulous to finally go after hearing so much about it; even apart from the works of art the building itself was just beautiful. I took a good few pictures-- none of the paintings, because I feel like they speak for themselves, but of the architecture. I also took pictures with my crane with some of the statues (for those of you who don't know the project: I found a little paper crane by the Santa Fe Peace Monument, and I've been taking its picture everywhere and writing poems about it, to be collected in a larger volume at some point. I've already collected a short version for Art credit and published it under 'Something That Could Happen.' If you didn't see it in your local bookshop, it's because there are only two copies in existence, one of which belongs to Bosque and the other to my mom). By the time we finished with the museum, it was nearly dark, so we went home and had raclette to help warm ourselves up. With ice cream for dessert, of course. We also watched a Woody Allen movie (Sweet and Lowdown), which was fabulous (but can Woody Allen ever be unfabulous?).

Sunday:

I got up the latest today that I have in six months (ten o' clock), had a breakfast of croissants spread with Nutella, and then we headed out to Sainte-Chapelle. Despite not being religious, I love visiting old churches. They remind me that objects can tell as many stories as clearly as books do. I took more pictures with my crane, holding it up to the stained-glass windows. We walked over to the Jardin de Luxembourg for lunch, and on the way we stopped over at a little flower and pet market (I'm not kidding, that was the real combination. They even had ferret kits), as well as at Notre Dame. There was a service going on as we walked through, which gave the visit a different dimension. The priest was giving the mass over a microphone, and I tried to imagine what it was like when the church was first built, and it was just one person speaking, their voice filling the entire space...

We had crepes for lunch and sat in the garden to eat them, which was lovely. There were bunches of fat little sparrows who crowded around our feet and jumped up and down begging for little pieces. I have pictures of them, too. We were going to have sweet crepes for dessert, but Elizabeth (my cousin), who was on roller shoes, tripped and scraped herself up pretty badly, so we went home and had the crepes there instead. Sophie taught me how to make them and, even better, how to flip them up in the air from the pan. All I need now is the proper machinery and I'll be able to make them at home. I bet that type of pan can be found somewhere (start searching now!)... The afternoon we stayed in and read, wrote, made little bead creatures and listened to Norah Jones and Alanis Morisette. At seven Sophie made me some more crepes for me to take on the train and then we headed out for the station. I saw the Eiffel Tower all lit up really briefly, but unfortunately I didn't have time for more than a glimpse before my train left. And now I'm back, and writing this.

So, all in all, a whirlwind of a week, learning all manner of new things and making new friends. The language is coming slowly but surely: if we think of language as like train tracks, the switches are getting so smooth now that I barely have to stop and think to understand. Speaking is another story, but I get a little better every day. Slowly but surely. I've learned to smile and laugh when I make mistakes rather than get frustrated. It gets you farther.

So, it's late, and I have school tomorrow, so I'm definitely going to try to work out the photo thing tomorrow afternoon once I get home. I'm sorry for the delays upon delays...but the pictures are coming. And you won't be disappointed.

So, until tomorrow!

School and....Stuff

2009-02-02T11:12:00.000-08:00

Hi,

So by the time I had the time to write yesterday, I was way too tired to even try writing anything. But this way, you get to hear about my first day of school. Aren`t you lucky?

Yesterday we were divided into separate groups for vans to the train station; mine got up around six in order to catch a train at nine (I know; I was saying, `really?`too). The AFS volunteer at the station gave the four of us tickets to Orleans, and we were rather unsettled by this because only one of us was going even close to Orleans, and for one of us Orleans was almost in completely the wrong direction. But everything worked out; we got off at the station we were told to get off at, and an AFS volunteer met us almost immediately, followed closely by the members of our host families. Catherine, Lea and one of their neighbors in the grade below me named Marie-Eva were there (Camille will be at the university until April). We played some board games and walked around Mettray during the afternoon; that evening, they had a little party so that the neighbors and some of my classmates could meet me, which was really sweet of them to do. They had a good number of questions about New Mexico and the US in general; everyone seems fascinated when I tell them I can drive, and moreover that I drive myself to school. Oh, and when you hear about the French kissing each other`s cheeks when they meet each other-- it`s utterly true. When someone arrives at a party, they have to kiss everyone there. On the bus, everyone who knows each other kisses good morning. If you find someone you know in the hall at school, you kiss hello. I shouldn`t be surprised by this, but it`s just not what I`m used to (rather like the keyboard I`m typing with). Some people try to shake my hand since they know I`m American, and that just confuses me more, since I`m expecting them to offer their cheek and not their hand...

Anyway, school:

I got up at six-thirty this morning to go out and meet my bus while it was still dark and cold and raining (it actually snowed a little today). One of the neighbors in the grade below me named Jean walked me there, where I saw some more familiar faces from the party and felt better about things. One of them, a girl named Suzanne, decided she was going to be my mentor and showed me everything, which was a good thing: I was almost completely lost during some of the discussions of the schedule and etc. We worked that out during the first period over coffee: I`m following the Litteraire track, which means that most of my classes are in the language/literature/social studies category (two hours of math per week-- whoo!!!). I`m taking French literature, History/Geography, Spanish, Mixed Math (I`m told that since all the Litteraire people are in it that it`s pretty easy; I`m keeping my fingers crossed), Phys Ed (obligatory all three years in high school, but only for two hours per week), something called `scientific instruction` (which evidently translates into physics and biology, alternating every week. Another two-hour deal), a Social Studies, Theater/Cinema (the `heavy` track; five hours per week), and in place of Latin, I`m doing Italian...at level two (I think it should come fast, though, with my Spanish, French and Latin... I hope. But it seems really fun: they`re doing a study of opera right now, so we`re going to the opera next week as a class, which I`m looking forward to).

...You know, reading over that, it sounds a thousand times worse than it is. But it really isn`t as terrible as it sounds. The eight-to-six schooldays are definitely going to take getting used to, but I can follow the class material pretty well as long as my attention doesn`t wander (students talk as much during class as in the US and it is even more distracting when you`re having trouble understanding the language), and the day only goes until four on Tuesdays and twelve on Wednesdays, so I think I`ll survive. Besides, I`m guaranteed sucess in at least one class: English.

English is obligatory for all students, so I couldn`t opt out for being a native speaker, but after attending the first class today I`m glad I didn`t. The students were really excited to have me there, as was the teacher (who was really nice, and really funny). They made me a little video where they all introduced themselves, and it was really sweet, as well as funny: there was another Lost fanatic in the class (`I always watch the subtitled version, because the dubbed version sucks`), another person who loved tomatoes, and evidently more psycho-killers than you`d first be inclined to think (I think someone found psycho as a synonym for crazy, and the usage caught and spread like wildfire). And it seems I`m just as much of an oddity here as in the US: they all think I`m crazy for liking Proust and Baudelaire, and have heard of none of the things I read or listen to, while I keep disappointing them by saying, `No, I don`t really like Akon/MTV/Tom Cruise/etc`(I seem like a real idiot because I don`t recognize the French pronounciations of the American names a lot, but I usually get it when they repeat it and express their amazement, because everyone in the US knows X, right?).

So, yes. In short, thanks to Suzanne, who I clung to like a lost puppy, I survived my first day attending a real French lycee and am actually looking forward to tomorrow.

Dinner is soon, and I don`t really have much left to say, so from now on these are going to become a Saturday or Sunday evening thing (afternoon for you all). So, a bientot!

Short update

2009-01-31T09:32:00.000-08:00

So the wireless broke basically right after I wrote that entry, so there won't be any pictures for a bit. I'm meeting my host family tomorrow, so depending on whether or not they have internet I might be able to upload some then.

I'll make another entry on meeting them, and then from there I'll shift this into being a weekly thing. But for now, today:

We had our brief orientation for two hours in the morning, after a breakfast of croissants spread with a Nutella knockoff (I felt very French eating it). It was much more helpful than the one in New York, namely because we had an actual French person answering questions about France for us. It was pretty relaxed and fun, and we talked about everything from where one uses 'tu' or 'vous' to racism and homophobia. Much better than making skits about the history of AFS.

After that, we had lunch, and I ended up being at a table where exculsively Portugese was being spoken at one end and exclusively German at the other. It was an interesting experience. Ocassionaly Marina (my Brazilian roommate) would make a comment to me in French, but most of the time I was left out of the conversation. It was interesting, I wasn't angry or anything. Just gave me some things to consider.

After that, we went on a drive around Paris and got out briefly to go walk around the gardens by the Eiffel Tower. I have pictures from that too coming soon, not to worry. It was really cold, but beautiful. I love Paris. And for Tammy-- I saw the Musee d'Orsay, but unfortunately we didn't go in. But I thought of you as we drove past it.

And that's about it. We've got a two-hour break before dinner, and then they're officially giving us our travel itineraries tomorrow. I'm really excited to meet my host family, after all this time speculating and wondering about what they're going to be like.

So, tomorrow or maybe later, depending on the internet. 'Til then!

So the hostel has wireless. Cool.

2009-01-30T10:47:00.000-08:00

Which definitely means I'll have the opportunity to upload some photos from the walk, provided orientation doesn't run too late tonight. Failing that, I'm sure there will be some free time tomorrow. But I thought I'd let you know, at least.

Right now it's ten minutes until dinner and, if you read my last and extremely rushed entry, you'll know why I didn't have lunch and barely had breakfast. So if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go prepare for that...

I MADE IT!!!

2009-01-30T10:12:00.000-08:00

After a long flight, I finally made it to Paris! The flight was smooth; I didn't sleep well but it passed fairly quickly for being seven hours long. Customs and passport control were very easy-- they barely even looked at my passport. We were met by an AFS volunteer right at the exit of the bag claim, met up with some Chilean students and went to lunch at, guess it--

McDonald's.

I couldn't make this shit up if I tried.

I didn't eat anything, so along with jetlagged I'm extremely hungry from not having eaten anything since yoghurt on the plane about ten hours ago. I'm in a pretty good mood overall, though: I've been making friends with a lot of the other students, from all over the world: Brazil, New Zealand, Switzerland, Iceland... And I've been practicing my French a bit with my Brazillian roommate: she doesn't speak English, so to communicate we both have to speak French. So it works out. The orientation thus far has been in English since a lot of the international students have come with almost no French, but most of them speak pretty good English with a few exceptions. We're staying at a hostel of some kind that appears to be mostly for disabled people, four to a room. We took a brief walk around Paris in the 30 degree weather and played soccer and other random games. I've got pictures, but not the time/method to upload them: I'm using the lobby's computer and only have fifteen minutes to write.

If that came out disjointed and strange, it's probably a combination of the lack of sleep and the rush from the limited time. But I'm alive and well and dinner's in an hour and sleep in another two, so I look set to survive another day. I meet my host family on Sunday, so there's a full day of orientation in Paris during which I have no idea what's happening.

I'll tell you if I have the time!

Once more from New York

2009-01-29T13:26:00.000-08:00

Hi again.

Not that there's much more to say. There was orientation, which consisted of watching a documentary following AFS students from New Zealand on programs in Spain, Austria, Canada and the US, doing vague skits about the three golden rules of AFS (no driving, no hitchhiking and no drugs, in case you were curious), and holding a brief teleconference with someone who came back from France and is currently at Harvard. Now we're just hanging out. Austria, Portugal and Italy students already left, so it's just the France group left until six thirty. With nothing to do. The plane leaves at eleven tonight. It's going to be a long day...

To spare you the boredom, I'll quit and go read the Economist (we exhausted conversation topics about three hours ago, and everyone is exhausted from being unable to sleep from excitement and doesn't really feel like talking anyway). So, the next one really will be from France, unless something interesting happens at JFK.

Even more briefly, from New York

2009-01-28T17:43:00.001-08:00

Hi. I'm in New York in one piece.

I'm too tired to write any more than that. So the next one will be whatever my first opportunity in France is, or something from JFK if I have the internet. I'm almost assured the time, since we're getting to the airport at 6:30, even though the flight's not until nearly midnight. So I can talk about orientation and the other AFS France students, or something. Yeah. It's late, and I've gotten three hours of sleep.

'Til the next.

Briefly, from Denver

2009-01-28T08:00:00.000-08:00

Yep, you read that right. Denver.

I got rerouted again at the last minute this morning (when I checked my cellphone, there was a polite message informing me that my flight to Chicago had been cancelled...about two hours before it was supposed to take off), and luckily I managed to get a flight leaving earlier than the Chicago one, but later than my first one to Dallas. There wasn't as much time to say goodbye, but I think that might have been a good thing. Less time to dwell on how much we're going to miss each other. We were debating minority representation and identity politics pretty much right up until we got out of the car at the airport. It was a nice way to leave, and I'm serious when I say that. I sometimes don't say goodbye when I hang up the phone; see you later is better. Because leaving is never as final as you feel like it is.

They put me through extra security (something to do with having been rerouted so many times; the explanation didn't make much sense and not just because I only slept three hours last night), so by the time I got to the gate my section was boarding. The flight was overall pretty smooth. I started one of my three English books and listened to music and watched the sun finish coming up. It wasn't a terrible way to start things off.

Anyway, so for right now I'm using the free WiFi at the airport and I've got a two hour layover. So far my flight to LaGuardia appears to be on time, but I'm not holding my breath. I'll post something from New York if I can so that y'all know I got there in one piece. If not, I'm not exactly sure when I'll get the chance to write again. It all depends on how long orientation lasts, whether I have internet at my host family's house, etc, etc.

I miss you all; you're in my thoughts.

Until the next!

It's late at night...

2009-01-27T22:37:00.000-08:00

...and I can't sleep...

Bags are packed, flights are more or less arranged. The airline called this evening and left a message saying that my flight to New York was cancelled, but then, just before I died of a heart attack, they kindly mentioned that they'd rerouted me through Chicago and I'd actually get in ten minutes earlier and leave an hour later than before. So, cool. I just hope that this one doesn't end up cancelled, too...

But, yeah. I'm crazy and nervous and completely unable to sleep. But I leave tomorrow! Wow, what a thought...

I might write something from the airport or the hotel in New York, if I have the internet and the time to do so.

Updates as I can.

The fog clears a little more

2009-01-18T12:35:00.000-08:00

Some good news: I received a short e-mail from my host mother this afternoon. She received our letters and told us a little more about her family: she works with elderly people (I assume in some sort of nursing home or assisted living facility; she didn't specify), and has four children. Florian, the oldest, is married and lives about an hour away with his wife and daughter, Camille is at the university in the south of France studying sustainable development and tourism, Louis is actually studying in Finland (and not Britain...small gap in comprehension...), and Lea, the one who's left at home, is eleven and in her first year of middle school.

They all seem quite friendly; I've been exchanging a few short letters with Camille and I already mentioned in my post on the phone conversation that Catherine sounds really nice as well. It sets my mind at ease a little, now that they're more than just signatures and names on an e-mail, that I have somewhat of an idea of what to expect. I'm really looking forward to finally meeting them-- it's just hard to believe that it's less than two weeks until I leave! Time flies...

...but unfortunately, my thesis isn't quite yet done, there's still some last minute French to be crammed into my brain, and there are still a few more errands that need running, so I'm definitely not going to be bored as I round the home stretch.

Next one when I leave, in all probability!

The visa drama ends

2009-01-10T16:04:00.000-08:00

So, this post is a few days late, but in any case:

The visa troubles are finally over. My mom and I flew to LA on Monday evening and had surprisingly good sushi at this little hole in the wall across from our hotel. Our cab driver from the airport was interesting; he either drove ninety or zero and cursed at the traffic in Russian. We got to the consulate the next morning forty-five minutes early. When it finally opened, the consul spoke through an intercom:

"Hello. Do you have a cell phone?"

"No," I answered.

"Turn it off now. If it goes off while you are within the consulate, you will not be getting your visa." (And yes, he really did speak in overemphasis like that. And with a fabulous accent).

So, I went in, I paid ("Is this your own visa card?" "Yes." "Are you sure?"), they sorted through my forms, and they told me that everything was in order except that I was missing my parents' bank statements for the past three months. I had another form that was supposed to substitute for this, but when I tried to argue the point, this was the response:

"Look, it is very simple. You will go up to the fourth floor, you will connect yourself to a computer, you will print out the documents, or you will not be getting your visa."

So verily, we went up to the fourth floor, connected ourselves to a computer, printed the documents, and lo, I got my visa. We flew home a few hours early and had some extra time to prepare for leaving the next day for Florida to go to my grandfather's eightieth birthday party. While I was gone, a little note from my host family arrived wishing a happy new year. It was signed by my host mother and two girls named Camille and Lea, but no Louis.

Hmm.

But, the day after we arrived in Florida, I gave them a call like I'd been planning to. I spoke to my host mother Catherine, and it went pretty well considering that I'd never spoken on the phone before in a language other than English. It was difficult starting out: I froze after saying hello, but luckily she prompted me ("This isn't Angela, is it?") and I was fine from there. She told me a little about how school is going to work out and we chatted about the weather (it was snowing when I called, which is fairly unusual for the region). And I solved the mystery: Louis didn't sign the card because he is currently studying in Britain, and he's going to be out for my entire stay (I'm getting his room). That still doesn't explain why AFS didn't tell me about Camille and Lea, but at least I have an idea of what's going on. I tried to ask how old they are, but I don't think she understood my question. I'll find out when I get there, so I'm not too fussed.

I feel a little less anxious now that I've spoken with her-- she seems very nice, very considerate, and most of all, very patient with my French (but I didn't do terribly; I only had to ask her to repeat herself twice). I'm still intensely curious about all the things I didn't get the chance or have the vocabulary to ask, but it'll all just have to wait. Only nineteen more days-- less than three weeks. Wow...

Updates as they come, but I don't think there's much more left to happen until I leave.

Some News

2008-12-30T16:45:00.001-08:00

My French teacher had an apt simile this afternoon for how AFS gives you information-- little by little like drops from a eye-dropper. Anyway, I received two little drops today:

First: it does turn out that the French consulate requires the original documents for the visa, but AFS just notified us that they're shipping them overnight to us and we'll get them tomorrow. A relief, since our appointment at the consulate is on Monday. So that's a load off my mind. All the other forms are set, the appointment and the flights are confirmed; all that's left in the process is to actually get the stamp in my passport.

Second: AFS also just gave us some more information about my host family. As well as the host mother, Catherine, I'll have a brother who's my same age named Louis. In addition, AFS sent us their telephone number and encouraged breaking the ice. So, that'll be happening within the next couple of days, and I'll post again about how it goes. I won't lie and say I'm not nervous-- this will be the first time I'll have had a sustained conversation in French with a French person-- but I'm also excited to finally start getting to know the people I'll be living with the next six months (and I bet they feel the same).

Four weeks from tomorrow, I'll be off to New York. Wow. All this planning is finally going somewhere concrete. Exciting, yes, but just hard to believe, since it's all happening so fast...

I HAVE A PLACE!!!

2008-12-23T21:06:00.000-08:00

Finally, a significant development!

I finally got the name of the school I'll be attending, as well as my host family's address and the name of the person who will have custody over me while I'm abroad. I'll be in a little town called Mettray, which is just a few kilometres northwest of Tours. Here's a map:

Going from the little map of the entirety of France in the upper righthand corner, I'm in the region of Centre, in the Loire Valley of central France, specifically in the department of Indre-et-Loire, and from there just outside Tours (imagine a little tiny dot there).

I believe the family I'm staying with is headed by a single mother, given that she was the only one to sign the custody form, but other than her name (interestingly, she has the same name as my real mother) and address, I really don't know anything else about my host family.

Still, everything seems that much more real, now that I have a place and a name to refer to. It never felt as serious before, having to answer the question of 'So, where in France are you going?' with 'Uh...I dunno.' I've been dancing around all evening and bursting out randomly with, "I'm going to METTRAY!!!" All the vague nerves and excitement I've been feeling this past month have found their outlet. I was so excited that, when I sent off an e-mail to my French teacher telling her the news, I didn't realize until after I'd pressed 'Send' that I'd written half of the last sentence with the letters off by one on the keys, making it really difficult to read (the essential stuff I typed correctly, it was just the 'have a good week, Merry Christmas, see you on Saturday' that got messed up).

A fantastic early Christmas present, in any case. And now I don't have to worry (quite as much) about getting the visa on time. We received the information via e-mail, in scanned documents, so we need to call the consulate after Christmas to see if it's okay to use these in the application or whether we need to wait for the originals. If the latter is the case, we may or may not have to delay our appointment, depending on when they get here, but at least now we don't have to worry about whether we'll get them before I'm scheduled to leave.

So, yes. Happy Holidays, everyone! And, as always, updates as they come.

"In between tonight and my tomorrows"

2008-12-19T21:31:00.000-08:00

"It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present, you know what I mean?"

I've had Rufus Wainwright's 'Grey Gardens' stuck in my head more or less all day, and I'm not sure why. Maybe it's the sadness that's hidden underneath the bright rhythm. The album it's on, Poses, is a wonderful one that I haven't really given an in-depth listen to since I bought it a few months back. Maybe over this break I can get to know it a little better.

It's been an interesting day, strangely quiet for how stressfully it started. Somehow I achieved the strange miracle of leaving a full ten minutes later than yesterday for school, but arriving there at the exact same time. My car, among its other talents, seems to have the ability to defy the space-time continuum. I always knew it was special...

The last exams all went well. The one I was the most nervous about actually went the best of all of them (Spanish, and I was never all that worried to begin with), and I finished up my Latin exam about half an hour early, which was nice. English could have gone better-- the essay topic I chose was too big for five pages and I didn't prepare enough in advance-- but life goes on.

Anyway, not really any news on France. I just felt like I should write something since today was my last day at school here in NM until August '09. Actually, small news: I did attend a conference call Wednesday night with the other AFSers bound for France. We had a Q & A session with a returnee from last year, and now some of my anxieties about what my transcripts are going to look like once I get back have lifted. Interesting overall, a few more details on what to expect once I get off the plane and when I meet my host family, etc.

I'm not sure exactly what this mood is. I feel this way at the start of every break, kind of like the way a pond looks after a rock's been thrown in and the ripples have all dissipated. Quiet, but with a nervous expectancy: well, that's over...now what? Doubtless between French and the infamous thesis I'll find plenty to do, but it's always that first evening that the gap between the big events seems too large to fill.

In the meantime, I've been thinking about people: people in general but specifically the ones that I know-- everyone I miss right now and everyone I'm going to start missing very shortly, and how many more people have managed to squeeze themselves into those 'everyone's in such a short period of time. Also some things about language, how it's not perfect like math and that's why I'm good at it and how 'circle back' is its own weird little idiom distinguishable from just 'circle' (try making a sentence with the first and substituting the second-- it doesn't work); about re-learning how to knit; about the writers who win the Nobel Prize and the ones who don't; and about how everything I'm currently reading or listening to was recommended to me or given to me by someone else. And then I realized that for nearly a year, for my choices of books I've been mostly going off the suggestions of other people or its place in 'the canon of classics' (whose membership is debatable, I'll freely admit). With a very few exceptions, mostly in poetry, everything I've been reading (or listening to: I've been doing the same with music) has been because people tell me to read it. And I'm not sure how that feeling sits with me. My eyes have been opened so some amazing artists and writers because of these recommendations, and in some cases they've led me to make my own discoveries, but still, how little of my reading/listening came of my own initiative is interesting considering in the past, I mostly just browsed sections of the bookstore and came up with titles that sounded interesting when I wanted something to read. Just a difference in approach, I guess. And it creates a bond with the person who recommended it to you (Ah, see, I just knew you'd love it! What'd you think of the end, with x and such happening to so-and-so?...).

So...I'm not unhappy, just pensive, and wondering where things go from here. In terms of everything, not just lecture.

That was a lot of rambling; I'm sorry. (Pertinent) updates as they come.

Pre-Break Madness

2008-12-12T16:34:00.000-08:00

It's been a crazy past couple of weeks, rushing here and there and trying to get all these things done before break. Once I get through exam week things should be much calmer since I'll be done with school, but between French and junior thesis and Los Angeles and the GSA it looks like I'm going to be on my feet pretty much until the day I leave. But that's not a bad thing :)

So, I guess I'll start with the news immediately pertaining to France: I finally have my departure dates! I'll be leaving New Mexico on the twenty-eighth at around seven in the morning, get into New York later that afternoon, have my pre-departure orientation, sleep (if I can), and then my flight for Paris leaves at eleven pm the next evening to arrive at about eleven am. I still don't know where I'll be going after Paris, but all things in good time, I guess.

The POCC/SDLC Conference went amazingly well. To be honest, most of the information presented in the workshops wasn't new to me, but I learned worlds from the other students there. It was incredibly moving and powerful to see so many people who had never felt safe or represented find the space to be able to stand up and say, "Yes, this is who I am, and I'm proud of it." It gave me a lot of things to question in myself and in my community, as well as the tools to work through those questions. I've had and been having so many great discussions with people stemming from the conference; I just regret that I don't have the time to talk to everyone I'd like to talk to. It's difficult to condense, especially for the five-second, afterthought, "So, how was that thing in New Orleans?" But still, I feel like I came out of the experience changed on a profound level: more self-confident, more comfortable in expressing my opinions, and better able to work strategies for building a more inclusive community. Definitely worth it. I hope I can go again next year.

The adjustment to being back has been a little difficult in terms of catching up with everything that I missed and keeping up with the new material, along with working to help set the agenda for the first GSA meeting, which was today.

It's been a long, intense process in getting it set up, and the turnout was just incredible: seven or so faculty members and around twenty-five/thirty students. Everything went smoothly-- we even got done a couple minutes early-- and at this rate I think that the group will be ready to start in with activities and events when school gets back in in January. I'm really going to miss being a part of it while I'm abroad, but I'll have the entire year next year and hopefully I'll be able to come to some of the January meetings before I leave. Mainly, though, I'm just happy that all of our efforts has finally come to something concrete.

I thought about how at this time last year, I was only just starting to come out to my friends, and would have been nervous to even show up at a GSA meeting, never mind help to direct it. Amazing how much progress can be made in so little time.

I'm curious to see how things are similar and different for LGBT students (and just for LGBT people in general) in France.

Updates as they come.

Introduction

2008-11-28T12:14:00.001-08:00

Most of the people reading this should know me already, so I won't bother with too long of an introduction.

At the moment, I'm still waiting on information from AFS so that I can get my student visa-- I have to fly to Los Angeles and pick it up in person from the French consulate. I'm anxious to get that done, being hyper about these kinds of details anyway, but also because in this information I'll finally find out where in France I'm going. From what they've told me I might get it as early as next week, but probably not until later in December. We've got tentative tickets and an appointment in January at the consulate, so hopefully the info will arrive before then...

I won't be bored in the meantime, though. Along with French, I've still got several projects to be thinking about for school, as well as the NIAS Student Diversity Leadership Conference next week, finals, family over for the holidays, a novel in progress and another work I'm co-writing with a friend etc, etc... Probably just as well that I'm not just twiddling my thumbs and going, 'come on, can't I just leave already?' Besides, I'm having fun with all of it.

I'll post updates as they come.