So last weekend I got back from a week or so in Marrakech, Morocco, a trip I made completely on my own, which was intimidating in its own respect.
After spending all day traveling, from the train to Marseilles, to the flight to Morocco, and finally to the bus ride into town, I was unprepared to be hit in the face with the the place where the bus dropped me off: right at the Djemma el Fna, the central square of Marrakech. The place was bustling with activity: charmers and their snakes, merchants and their wares, juicers and their orange juice, drummers and their drumming, storytellers and their incomprehensible (since I don't speak Arabic, or Berber, or any language they were speaking in) stories. Not to mention the Moroccans and the tourists who swarmed everywhere, many of the locals zipping by on motorbikes, since I guess that's way cheaper than buying a car.
I was thrown into this madness, this blend of colorful sights, incessant sounds, and exotic smells with the mission only to find my hotel where I'd made reservations by the recommendation of Colette and Christian, my (ex) host family. I had the address, which did me absolutely no good. The only other instructions I had were these: find the Toubkal restaurant on the Place Djemma el Fna. Take the street to its right.
The street to its right, it turns out, is a major roadway in the Medina, the medieval part of the city, but to me it looked more like an alleyway lined with intimidating shops and their owners, trying to get me to buy knock-off All-Star shoes or piles of myrr, or, as happened ever so frequently, some kif (Moroccan marijuana). I managed to keep my wits and not go crazy, but I'll admit I was a bit jumpy when someone offered to give me directions. I'd heard about the faux guides, which are guides that will get you lost, lead you nowhere, and demand your money, and I was in no mood to be harassed by such a character. Thankfully, however, I came across enough people who were actually just there to help and finally after several tries, I found my hotel.
The Hotel El Amal is nestled down a few twisty Medina streets in a relatively peaceful part of the Medina, but still close to the action. I walked into a beautiful, Moroccan-style home with a courtyard in the middle and a couple floors of rooms, and found my room, put down my stuff, and went to pay the nice man at the reception for the first night.
After getting dinner at the Toubkal, I immediately bee-lined back to the hotel and finally had a restful night sleep.
The next morning I undoubtedly got up way too early (I had no watch or clock or cellphone while in Morocco so I never knew what time it was) and after I'd gotten some breakfast, I went wandering around, trying to catch my bearings, and no sooner had a gone more than 50 yards down the main drag/alley near my hotel then I had a guy welcoming me to Morocco and telling me to come check out his store. I told him I'd come back later, with every intention to never see him again.
Well ... that's not how it works in Morocco ... I went back to my hotel and got some stuff together and figured out where I was going for the day, and I found myself walking down the same street. And, what do you know? The guy came up to me again, said that I'd promised I'd come and take a look at his store, that it wouldn't really take that long, and if I wasn't interested I could just leave.
Heh.
Well he sat me down, got me comfortable, and started trying to sell me some huge rugs, which I could by no means afford, haggling aside. So when we got to bargaining I gave him the most unreasonably low price I could come up with, without sounding like I had no money at all.
Well, of course he was insulted, told me I could by some little trinket/jewellry stuff that wards off evil spirits with that much money but certainly not a rug of that quality.
So he busted out some tiny little doormat-sized rugs. Fair enough.
I didn't really want a rug, nor do I particularly need one, but this guy was insistent. So I played the game, and started bargaining, figuring it was just part of the experience. I tried to stay in the unreasonably low price range, and it worked. We dropped the write-the-price-down-for-me game almost immediately, because I refused to budge and we got to the verbal bargaining, in which I haggled it down a few more price notches and got it for fairly cheap.
It's a nice looking thing and I'll have a good memory associated with it. And I helped some random Moroccan out with his business for the day, so whatever.
Then I headed off to my destination, the Palais El-Badi, a once magnificent palace built by an extravagant Moroccan dynasty which was then destroyed by the proceeding iconoclastic, Muslim fundamentalist dynasty (in the history section in the little Moroccan guidebook I had, I found that this was the usual swing of Moroccan politics). The ruins are still pretty nice, though.
Then I absorbed some culture at the museum of Moroccan Arts, which is in an old Moroccan nobleman's house. Very attractive courtyard.
That afternoon I found the CyberPark, where I met a security guard who later in the week invited me out for a night on the town, to see all the "little corners of Marrakech." However, the guy kinda freaked me out, and I didn't take him up on it. I still haven't decided if I should have ...
The next day I went to the Saadian Tombs, the tombs of that extravagant dynasty, which escaped destruction since that Muslim fundamentalist dynasty was superstitious about disturbing the dead. But I didn't get there without incident. On the road that leads to the Saadian Tombs, there's a false-sign designed to trap unsuspecting tourists such as myself. I fell for it, and was soon being led through a shop full of brass pots and pans to a little alleyway out back. The door closed behind me and I was soon greeted by a group of children who'd been playing the alleyway.
One of them introduced himself and shook my hand and whatnot and offered to lead me to the Saadian Tombs. Of course I was completely lost by then, so I couldn't say no. I needed him, and I grudgingly accepted. Well, when we got there, of course he demanded money, and I gave him some small change and he wanted more, but I refused to give him more, since, I mean, seriously, the kid led me for like a minute and a half. I can't dole out a pocket full of change every time a kid takes me on a two-minute walk.
The Saadian Tombs were pretty sweet, though, despite being a little small. The decoration is absolutely gorgeous.
From there, I went on out to the Ensemble Artisanal, where you can watch artisans doing their traditional work (and potentially buy it) without haggling, since the place is sponsored by the government. It was there where I saw the most hilarious mistranslation I've come across so far. It's not incredible, but it's pretty good. Check out the pictures for more detail.
That night, eating at the Toubkal restaurant, I finally ran into some people who I made temporary friends with. Duncan, a Londoner from Guinea who lives in Tangier seven months out of the year, his Moroccan wife, whose name I forget, and his Tangerine merchant friend Mohammed. Kinda weird people, I won't lie, but also kinda really cool. Duncan used to run a psychiatric ward and was possibly a police officer at some point in his life. He was extremely generous with money, which is what made me trust him. He bought me a mint tea at the restaurant, and then we walked around Marrakech a little bit, during which time he got me a glass of sugar cane juice, which is just what it sounds like. There's a big machine that they feed the sugar cane into, and then out comes this juice. Sugar cane juice. Very sweet.
At this point, I'd pretty much seen all the major tourist attractions I cared to see, leaving me only with the souqs left. The souqs are the traditional shopping area part of the Medina, where all the old traditional shops and workshops are. And every piece of literature I've read about them always uses the work "souqs" in conjunction with the adjective "labyrinthine." In any case, I was intimidated to go in, but I braved it, and it wasn't that bad, and pretty cool to see. This is where Morocco can be really cool, even though it's incredibly shady. I avoided making any more unnecessary purchases.
After spending a day wandering through the souqs, I decided to take a day trip the next day to Essaouria, which turned out to be a disaster. I got on the bus around 9:30 in the morning, sat there for the three-and-a-half hour long bus ride, got off the bus in Essaouira, and proceeded to be lost for a further three hours, wandering through what I knew, with no doubt in my mind, were the slums of the city. Finally, I turned around and found the bus depot again and got back on the bus for another three and a half hour long ride back to Marrakech.
The next day was the day to leave, and though Morocco was fun, I had a lot waiting for me back in Montpellier.
Just before I'd left, I'd gotten the keys to and moved in my stuff to my apartment for the summer, which is the same building as the study abroad program office.
So I went through the process again of sitting in the airport, flying to France, landing in Marseilles, and waiting up all night in the Marseilles airport for the train station to open so I could catch the train back to Montpellier.
It was super nice to get back, though, and this week Krista and I have been working on getting jobs for the summer, and we've just hit our first bit of luck just tonight.
Francoise, the director of the Montpellier study abroad program, has a couple oddjobs for us. Tonight, Krista is babysitting her kid, and on Monday, I'm going to be helping to move some furniture. Though the payoff for my furniture moving job isn't quite determined yet, Krista is getting some pretty good cash tonight, which should pay for some two weeks of groceries at least.
For pictures from Morocco and of the new apartment, go here:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2492527&l=659cf&id=13930402
I have to admit that Morocco is drastically different from any of the other places I've visited while I've been here in France and, well, in my life. It's eye-opening just to see another culture, and even more so to see another culture in this light.
Morocco is an impoverished country, whatever the historical/economic reasons may be, and Marrakech especially represents how this poverty is dealt with. Duncan described Marrakech pretty accurately when we were chatting over dinner as a Disneyfied version of Morocco. It's great for the tourists so that they can see the crazy snake charmers (whose snakes have their mouths sewn shut, by the way) and the Barbary apes and the all that stereotypical orientalist stuff.
And it's true, Marrakech revolves around the tourist. Traditional culture is alive and well in Marrakech partially because of all the white people that come to visit and buy carpets and kif and take pictures with monkeys and ride on camels. But at the same time, this tourist centrism breeds a slimy, filmy culture where people will haggle, hassle, and beg YOU for money simply because you're white. The subtle fact that I'm a student and don't have that kind of money doesn't make any difference, and why should it? I've been living an advantaged lifestyle for the past twenty-one years and I haven't done a thing for it except be born in the right place with the right skin color.
I may be proud of my wiles for having avoided the ploys and schemes of Moroccans who were after my money, but I can't help but feel guilty about the fact that the people there could have a better life if mine wasn't so nice.
And it's not necessarily just that I have the privilege of money. The greatest privilege that I enjoy is my American citizenship. It's not just the mobility that this entitles me to, but also it's the fact that I'm entitled to participation in one of the wealthiest societies in existence, with a land mass in its possession that could support it even if it wasn't. And furthermore, the U.S. isn't caught up in a such a tangle of trade deals which take away any real wealth to feed to higher ups. We are the higher ups in the world.
And I can sorta see now why people who live in the third world would want to take the risk and swim, climb, jump, run, or whatever to get to the first world, even if that means living their illegally. It beats being stuck on a piece of land tied up by foreign investors or otherwise stuck in subsistence mode because it came late to the game.
Also, I find it hard to complain about immigrants taking jobs away from hard-working Americans when there are people working just as hard in the third world just to be undercut by American corporations.
Well that's my rant for now.
Friday, June 6, 2008
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
The last month or so ....
So I have a lot of news.
First of all, for those of you who haven't heard yet, I've made the decision to stay the summer in Montpellier, and after about a month of working on this, things are finally coming together. Most importantly, I've got a place to live, and my roommates in Minneapolis have found someone to sublease my spot (thank you so much guys!). After that, I'm still working on getting some little job(s), but I'm confident and I've made flyers ...
Second, I've got to tell you all about our spring break trip. I went with my friends Emma, Flo, Jessica, and Krista, all people I've met here, in a rented car from Hertz up through the middle of France, spending the first night in Freiburg (in the Black Forest) with Krista's friend from Pennsylvania, Stephanie.
The drive was supposed to take like 8 hours according to the online itinerary plan we printed off. It ended up being closer to 15. Oh yeah, and Hertz said we would have a four-door, five person car, we got a two-door five person car, which meant a significantly reduced back seat ...
The next day Stephanie showed us around the town, which was really cool. Freiburg was completely leveled in World War II, except for the Munster, a beautiful cathedral in the center of the town. Since then, the rebuilding effort preserved the original streets and recreated some of the original architecture. The result is a modern-feeling yet still old-style German town.
Then that afternoon we headed off for Munich, driving through the Black Forest and the German countryside, a drive which was supposed to take 3 or 4 hours but ended up being 6 or 7. But on the upside, the German countryside was interesting to see ... the difference between French countryside and German countryside is that the French countryside is mostly cultivated. You drive through France and there's always a village in the distance or something of the sort, but it never looks like in Germany where there are big, forested hills in the distance ... much more like driving through American countryside.
The other thing is that Germans have a weird habit of putting huge crucifixes everywhere along the road ... or at least along the roads we were driving through.
The first big cultural difference I noticed when we got into Germany was when we stopped at a grocery store on the way to Munich and the wine section had wines from all over the world: California, Australia, Spain, Italy ... very few, in fact, from France. The thing that's so shocking about that, I guess, is that I'm so used to seeing whole aisles full of almost exclusively French wine, with maybe a couple really cheap Spanish or Italian wines.
So we finally got to Munich again pretty late at night, and we hopped a Metro downtown to meet up with Krista's other friend from home, Carl.
The next day we went out and saw Munich, including the Englischergarten, a huge garden in the middle of Munich which is definitely the place to be, at least on warm sunny days like that one. There, I finally saw one of those Bavarian folk bands, playing the in Chinese Tower, and we went up on top of a hill that has a decent view of the city.
Also in Munich, we saw the city Municipal building, which has the little dolls that dance at noon or whenever it was (we didn't actually see the dolls dancing, though). We also saw the double-towered church which was spared by Allied bombs during World War II thanks to the fact that the two towers make such a convenient landmark for bombing raids.
The next day we went to Fruhlingsfest, which is like the half-birthday for Oktoberfest, so of course we got to have huge steiners full of Bavarian beer and wander around in the fair atmosphere ... basically these beer festivals in Munich are composed of a Midway type thing with all those impermanent amusement park type rides, ghost houses and the such and then beer tents.
That night we ate at a traditional Bavarian restaurant, where Krista and I split a sausage platter and we all had pretzels. It was pretty good, but definitely a different sort of fare than what France has accustomed me to.
The next day we made our way out again on the road, and spent some 15-20 hours in the car driving through Austria, Switzerland, and the French alps. We stopped for lunch in a town called Hard, Austria, where the McDonald's was unashamed to be displaying male genitals on MTV Europe in front of all these children and other people just eating their lunches. Besides that, the McDonald's building was adjoined to a sex shop ... hmm ... Austria ... land of Mozart, Hayden, Kafka, and Gödel.
One of the cool things about driving through the alps, though, was all the huge, long tunnels we drove through. Don't hold your breath through those, you'll pass out.
For pictures from the couple weeks before and the trip itself, here's a link:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2470452&l=1b26c&id=13930402
After the trip it was back to school for the last week or so, where I took care of all the finals, papers, whatever that I needed to finish my classes ... fairly uneventful except for the unintentional camping trip I took.
We went with Flo one weekend to his hometown of Bedarieux, which is in the mountains which are just outside of Montpellier. He said we were going to a party at a "gîte" he and his friends always went to. We weren't exactly sure what a "gîte" was and when we asked, he said it was like a little building in the woods ... so we figured it was a little cabin. So it didn't seem so weird that we should have to bring sleeping bags. But when we got there, we found out we had to hike up a mountain and then set up camp by the "gîte", which it turns out is just a little picnic table shelter on top of this mountain.
Well ... it was also freezing cold, and we were totally unprepared for that, and besides that we weren't exactly ready to be sleeping on rocky, cold, hard soil and peeing in the woods. It wasn't pleasant. So we left the next day.
Just this weekend we went back to Bedarieux with Flo, for a much more positive experience: a sleepover party in a house his family owns but never uses.
That whole part of the French countryside is fairly beautiful, though. The rocks and the trees and the wilderness is pretty impressive, and you have to bus in to get there, which is also fairly interesting.
On a more somber note, yesterday I saw one of the more horrific things I've seen in my fairly sheltered, middle-class American life. There's a building in Montpellier called the Corum where you can get up on top and look out on the city. The highest part of the Corum overlooks the Tram stop which services the University of Minnesota office in Montpellier, and Krista and I were headed to this Tram stop, walking on the sidewalk which passes closest to the Corum, and to our horror, we saw the final seconds of a group of people trying to pull someone back up lose their grip on him and he fell to the blacktop below, just some 10 or 15 meters away from where we were standing. The sight and the sound was horrifying and both of us have been pretty rattled since we saw it. It's the only time I've ever seen someone die.
We checked the newspaper today, and found the little blurb about it, very poetically stated (and here's my translation) :
"Stupefaction and consternation for a large number of onlookers who, yesterday, around 17h20 [actually it was around 18h40] found themselves in the immediate proximity of the Corum. It was from the roof of the palais des congrès [the look-out area up on top] that a young man, twenty years old, decided to put an end to his days in throwing himself into the void. Upon their arrival, the paramedics could not revive the deceased from his misfortune."
On that note, be safe and glad to be alive.
I'm going to Morocco on Saturday, by the way. I'll tell you about it when I get back.
First of all, for those of you who haven't heard yet, I've made the decision to stay the summer in Montpellier, and after about a month of working on this, things are finally coming together. Most importantly, I've got a place to live, and my roommates in Minneapolis have found someone to sublease my spot (thank you so much guys!). After that, I'm still working on getting some little job(s), but I'm confident and I've made flyers ...
Second, I've got to tell you all about our spring break trip. I went with my friends Emma, Flo, Jessica, and Krista, all people I've met here, in a rented car from Hertz up through the middle of France, spending the first night in Freiburg (in the Black Forest) with Krista's friend from Pennsylvania, Stephanie.
The drive was supposed to take like 8 hours according to the online itinerary plan we printed off. It ended up being closer to 15. Oh yeah, and Hertz said we would have a four-door, five person car, we got a two-door five person car, which meant a significantly reduced back seat ...
The next day Stephanie showed us around the town, which was really cool. Freiburg was completely leveled in World War II, except for the Munster, a beautiful cathedral in the center of the town. Since then, the rebuilding effort preserved the original streets and recreated some of the original architecture. The result is a modern-feeling yet still old-style German town.
Then that afternoon we headed off for Munich, driving through the Black Forest and the German countryside, a drive which was supposed to take 3 or 4 hours but ended up being 6 or 7. But on the upside, the German countryside was interesting to see ... the difference between French countryside and German countryside is that the French countryside is mostly cultivated. You drive through France and there's always a village in the distance or something of the sort, but it never looks like in Germany where there are big, forested hills in the distance ... much more like driving through American countryside.
The other thing is that Germans have a weird habit of putting huge crucifixes everywhere along the road ... or at least along the roads we were driving through.
The first big cultural difference I noticed when we got into Germany was when we stopped at a grocery store on the way to Munich and the wine section had wines from all over the world: California, Australia, Spain, Italy ... very few, in fact, from France. The thing that's so shocking about that, I guess, is that I'm so used to seeing whole aisles full of almost exclusively French wine, with maybe a couple really cheap Spanish or Italian wines.
So we finally got to Munich again pretty late at night, and we hopped a Metro downtown to meet up with Krista's other friend from home, Carl.
The next day we went out and saw Munich, including the Englischergarten, a huge garden in the middle of Munich which is definitely the place to be, at least on warm sunny days like that one. There, I finally saw one of those Bavarian folk bands, playing the in Chinese Tower, and we went up on top of a hill that has a decent view of the city.
Also in Munich, we saw the city Municipal building, which has the little dolls that dance at noon or whenever it was (we didn't actually see the dolls dancing, though). We also saw the double-towered church which was spared by Allied bombs during World War II thanks to the fact that the two towers make such a convenient landmark for bombing raids.
The next day we went to Fruhlingsfest, which is like the half-birthday for Oktoberfest, so of course we got to have huge steiners full of Bavarian beer and wander around in the fair atmosphere ... basically these beer festivals in Munich are composed of a Midway type thing with all those impermanent amusement park type rides, ghost houses and the such and then beer tents.
That night we ate at a traditional Bavarian restaurant, where Krista and I split a sausage platter and we all had pretzels. It was pretty good, but definitely a different sort of fare than what France has accustomed me to.
The next day we made our way out again on the road, and spent some 15-20 hours in the car driving through Austria, Switzerland, and the French alps. We stopped for lunch in a town called Hard, Austria, where the McDonald's was unashamed to be displaying male genitals on MTV Europe in front of all these children and other people just eating their lunches. Besides that, the McDonald's building was adjoined to a sex shop ... hmm ... Austria ... land of Mozart, Hayden, Kafka, and Gödel.
One of the cool things about driving through the alps, though, was all the huge, long tunnels we drove through. Don't hold your breath through those, you'll pass out.
For pictures from the couple weeks before and the trip itself, here's a link:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2470452&l=1b26c&id=13930402
After the trip it was back to school for the last week or so, where I took care of all the finals, papers, whatever that I needed to finish my classes ... fairly uneventful except for the unintentional camping trip I took.
We went with Flo one weekend to his hometown of Bedarieux, which is in the mountains which are just outside of Montpellier. He said we were going to a party at a "gîte" he and his friends always went to. We weren't exactly sure what a "gîte" was and when we asked, he said it was like a little building in the woods ... so we figured it was a little cabin. So it didn't seem so weird that we should have to bring sleeping bags. But when we got there, we found out we had to hike up a mountain and then set up camp by the "gîte", which it turns out is just a little picnic table shelter on top of this mountain.
Well ... it was also freezing cold, and we were totally unprepared for that, and besides that we weren't exactly ready to be sleeping on rocky, cold, hard soil and peeing in the woods. It wasn't pleasant. So we left the next day.
Just this weekend we went back to Bedarieux with Flo, for a much more positive experience: a sleepover party in a house his family owns but never uses.
That whole part of the French countryside is fairly beautiful, though. The rocks and the trees and the wilderness is pretty impressive, and you have to bus in to get there, which is also fairly interesting.
On a more somber note, yesterday I saw one of the more horrific things I've seen in my fairly sheltered, middle-class American life. There's a building in Montpellier called the Corum where you can get up on top and look out on the city. The highest part of the Corum overlooks the Tram stop which services the University of Minnesota office in Montpellier, and Krista and I were headed to this Tram stop, walking on the sidewalk which passes closest to the Corum, and to our horror, we saw the final seconds of a group of people trying to pull someone back up lose their grip on him and he fell to the blacktop below, just some 10 or 15 meters away from where we were standing. The sight and the sound was horrifying and both of us have been pretty rattled since we saw it. It's the only time I've ever seen someone die.
We checked the newspaper today, and found the little blurb about it, very poetically stated (and here's my translation) :
"Stupefaction and consternation for a large number of onlookers who, yesterday, around 17h20 [actually it was around 18h40] found themselves in the immediate proximity of the Corum. It was from the roof of the palais des congrès [the look-out area up on top] that a young man, twenty years old, decided to put an end to his days in throwing himself into the void. Upon their arrival, the paramedics could not revive the deceased from his misfortune."
On that note, be safe and glad to be alive.
I'm going to Morocco on Saturday, by the way. I'll tell you about it when I get back.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
March and April
It's been a while since I've updated here and I'm sure you've all been waiting with baited breath to hear the next exciting adventure in my whirlwind study abroad experience. This time I don't have anything too terribly exciting to share, but I have a number of somewhat touching, little things to tell you about.
First of all, at the end of March, my Mom and Dad and my brother Matt visted me here in Montpellier for a weekend. Although they came here under the guise of wanting to see Paris, I know that they really just came here because they wanted to see me.
I enjoyed showing them around the city I've been living in for the past few months so they could actually see the Place de la Comédie and all the little streets in the city center and meet my host family (which, despite the language barrier, was awesome. By the way, guys, they love the loon you gave them) and a few of my friends here in France. I got to impress them with my mad French skillz and take them to the Marché aux Puces (the flea market!!) and show Matt a little what Montpellier-by-night is like. By the end of the weekend I may have been a little worn out, but it was totally worth it.
Second, just late night my host family did something incredible for me. They threw me a surprise birthday party after dinner which involved fruit cups, black forest cake (I don't remember telling them it was my favorite, but I must have told them something about it at some point and by some amazing fact-retention abilities, they remembered!), a kitschy birthday song recording (Mom, Dad, Matt, you know which one I'm talking about), some muscat-based champagne, and some birthday presents, including a book by Slavoj Zizek, a CD of world folk music, a nice little card about friendship with a Pythagoras quote, and a tacky Hallmark card with messages and signatures from all those attending last night. I can't express how incredibly good it made me feel to have such a surprise and to have just about everybody I care about in France around me giving me their best.
So those are just two little things that made me feel good.
Coming up now is France's two-week long spring break, and though my plans are not completely finalized, we're planning to drive to Germany and after that I may just go to Italy, though I don't have a travel buddy for that, unfortunately. That's what's keeping me from going right now. My friends are out of money since they've been here since August, and though I'd love to go with them on more trips, it's just not a possibility. Oh well.
In any case, it may be rainy, but my one class today got cancelled, so I'm in a good mood and I can just figure out my schedule for Fall semester (since I have to sign up for classes tonight!).
Until next time ...
First of all, at the end of March, my Mom and Dad and my brother Matt visted me here in Montpellier for a weekend. Although they came here under the guise of wanting to see Paris, I know that they really just came here because they wanted to see me.
I enjoyed showing them around the city I've been living in for the past few months so they could actually see the Place de la Comédie and all the little streets in the city center and meet my host family (which, despite the language barrier, was awesome. By the way, guys, they love the loon you gave them) and a few of my friends here in France. I got to impress them with my mad French skillz and take them to the Marché aux Puces (the flea market!!) and show Matt a little what Montpellier-by-night is like. By the end of the weekend I may have been a little worn out, but it was totally worth it.
Second, just late night my host family did something incredible for me. They threw me a surprise birthday party after dinner which involved fruit cups, black forest cake (I don't remember telling them it was my favorite, but I must have told them something about it at some point and by some amazing fact-retention abilities, they remembered!), a kitschy birthday song recording (Mom, Dad, Matt, you know which one I'm talking about), some muscat-based champagne, and some birthday presents, including a book by Slavoj Zizek, a CD of world folk music, a nice little card about friendship with a Pythagoras quote, and a tacky Hallmark card with messages and signatures from all those attending last night. I can't express how incredibly good it made me feel to have such a surprise and to have just about everybody I care about in France around me giving me their best.
So those are just two little things that made me feel good.
Coming up now is France's two-week long spring break, and though my plans are not completely finalized, we're planning to drive to Germany and after that I may just go to Italy, though I don't have a travel buddy for that, unfortunately. That's what's keeping me from going right now. My friends are out of money since they've been here since August, and though I'd love to go with them on more trips, it's just not a possibility. Oh well.
In any case, it may be rainy, but my one class today got cancelled, so I'm in a good mood and I can just figure out my schedule for Fall semester (since I have to sign up for classes tonight!).
Until next time ...
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
In Like a Lamb
With temperatures in the lower 70s for the first couple days, March has been fantastically beautiful so far, but it's all going by too fast! It feels like I just got here and I'm already halfway through my stay. And since I only have each class once a week, it feels like we've gotten nowhere in any of them. They've all just barely started.
So ... now that I've settled into a little bit of a pattern (doesn't feel like a rut yet!), let me tell you about it a little bit.
Monday is my rough day. I get up and go to Histoires des Minorités ("Stories of Minorities") which consists of this French professor, who is definitely a pretty smart guy and is fairly well accomplished and stuff but the way he conducts class is just .... incredibly boring. Three hours of "uhhhhhh"s and "euhhhhhh"s .... This is supposed to be a typically southern thing and I mean things are supposed to go a little slower in the south of France, but that's a little ridiculous. In any case, there are glimmers of brilliance that come through in that class and I think that and the attendance sheet are what keep me getting up early to go to it at 9:15. To do this, I have to get up at about 7:30 or 7:45 so I can eat breakfast, take a shower, and catch La Ronde which is the only bus that takes me from my host family's house to the university without me having to walk at all really.
Then I have about an hour off after Hist. des Min. before I have my CM (not sure exactly what that one means) for Culture Littéraire: La Rhétorique et la Littérature ("Literary Cutlure: Rhetoric and Literature"). A CM is like a lecture section, just with some random French acronym for a name. Anyway, this class would be kinda boring if the lecturer wasn't a pretty decent presenter. He gives material which normally be too technical for me to care about enough pretentious French energy that I can actually pay attention. The lecture hall is definitely the shadiest place I've ever had a class, though. The rows of seats are all accompanied by a long bar-desk thing to write on and the front of the room is decorated by somebody's graffiti tags. There's cheap lighting, no insulation, and the clock is stuck at 8:50.
After another couple hours off I have my TD for the same class. A TD is like the discussion section and the teacher of this class is definitely my favorite. He's definitely got the best pretentious French intellectual attitude of them all and I'm pretty sure I've talked about this class on this thing before, so I won't repeat myself.
Then finally, at 6:45 I can go home, get some dinner, and hopefully, go out again with the 8:30 bus. This is always a big deal. Am I going out tonight? How am I getting to town? My host family lives far enough away that the last bus from their house is 8:30 and it's hard to finish dinner before that time.
And then in order to get home, I take the last night bus at 1 a.m. and walk about 20 minutes home.
Tuesday starts for me around 9:30 when I get up to get ready to go to class at 11:15: my Semiotics class which is focused on advertisiing images, actually, but don't tell the CSCL department that, 'cos I wanna use this class for credit. Anyway, we do go over theory, but we get a little caught up in Advertising sometimes, and, well ... that's technically what this class is supposed to be about ........
Right after that is the class that I had to take in order to take Semiotics: Médias. In that class I'm pretty much reliving everything that I hated about my Mass. Comm. major, but .... still ... I have a little bit of a soft spot for this sort of thing, and this class is about a million times more critical than any Mass. Comm. class I took (which is a pretty easy feat to accomplish, actually ... Fox News is more critical than the J-School). Then I spend Tuesday afternoon doing whatever (like writing blog entries?) until it's time to go home for dinner and catching the 8:30 bus ......
And Tuesday night gets to be a long night since I have no class until 2:15 on Wednesdays!! But it's Phonetics, the class I've always avoided. It happens to be required for a French Major, which is part of why I'm just a French minor ... anyway I hate it. The phonetic alphabet is just as arbitrary as any alphabet and way harder to learn. BUT since I had to take it to be studying abroad, I may just as well declare a French Major when I get back to the U.
On Thursday morning I have three hours, starting at nine fifteen, of Grammar. And this couldn't just be regular grammar... no ... unfortunately it involves way more than just that. But in trying to type up my complaints, I realized that it's probably all good for me in the end anyway, so maybe I won't complain about it.
Anyway, my weekend starts on Thursday at 12:15 and so I get to do whatever I want from then until Sunday night. Last weekend that entailed going to the beach Friday afternoon and enjoying the fantastic weather there. It was a little windy but it was okay. Oh and my friend got stung by a fish thing that hides under the sand and stings feet when it gets stepped on. Yeah ... it seemed very painful: "It feels like I shot myself in the foot!"
And then again on Sunday we tried going to the beach because Sunday was definitely the nicest day since I got here, but unfortunately, transportation is a big problem on Sundays because, well, I don't know if I've told you yet, but the entire country of France all but shuts down on Sundays. Supermarchés, épiceries, tabacs ... they're all closed and the public transport is a million times less frequent. So we had to scratch our beach plan because we missed the 12:30 bus and the next one wasn't until 5:00. Instead of the beach, though, we got to go to the banks of the Lez, Montpellier's river. The river front is extremely artificial, but I guess that's what makes it pretty. We found a nice little park area to sit in anyway where there was some drum circle that I more or less recorded with the sound-record feature on my camera.
One thing typical of Sundays which I actually didn't do this week was the famed Marché aux Puces: the flea market. But it's not really a flea market like you think of in the U.S. The ones in America are lame but the ones in France are awesome. You can pretty much find anything there at low, negotiable prices. As someone who appreciates a good second-hand store in the United States, the flea market is a utopia. They just get a big parking lot and fill it with whoever has stuff to sell. And so you get these people who just circulate through Southern France, Spain, and Morocco, picking little things up along the way to sell. There's also a fair share of stolen and counterfeit things there, but that's part of its charm.
So there's a typical week for me in Montpellier ...
So ... now that I've settled into a little bit of a pattern (doesn't feel like a rut yet!), let me tell you about it a little bit.
Monday is my rough day. I get up and go to Histoires des Minorités ("Stories of Minorities") which consists of this French professor, who is definitely a pretty smart guy and is fairly well accomplished and stuff but the way he conducts class is just .... incredibly boring. Three hours of "uhhhhhh"s and "euhhhhhh"s .... This is supposed to be a typically southern thing and I mean things are supposed to go a little slower in the south of France, but that's a little ridiculous. In any case, there are glimmers of brilliance that come through in that class and I think that and the attendance sheet are what keep me getting up early to go to it at 9:15. To do this, I have to get up at about 7:30 or 7:45 so I can eat breakfast, take a shower, and catch La Ronde which is the only bus that takes me from my host family's house to the university without me having to walk at all really.
Then I have about an hour off after Hist. des Min. before I have my CM (not sure exactly what that one means) for Culture Littéraire: La Rhétorique et la Littérature ("Literary Cutlure: Rhetoric and Literature"). A CM is like a lecture section, just with some random French acronym for a name. Anyway, this class would be kinda boring if the lecturer wasn't a pretty decent presenter. He gives material which normally be too technical for me to care about enough pretentious French energy that I can actually pay attention. The lecture hall is definitely the shadiest place I've ever had a class, though. The rows of seats are all accompanied by a long bar-desk thing to write on and the front of the room is decorated by somebody's graffiti tags. There's cheap lighting, no insulation, and the clock is stuck at 8:50.
After another couple hours off I have my TD for the same class. A TD is like the discussion section and the teacher of this class is definitely my favorite. He's definitely got the best pretentious French intellectual attitude of them all and I'm pretty sure I've talked about this class on this thing before, so I won't repeat myself.
Then finally, at 6:45 I can go home, get some dinner, and hopefully, go out again with the 8:30 bus. This is always a big deal. Am I going out tonight? How am I getting to town? My host family lives far enough away that the last bus from their house is 8:30 and it's hard to finish dinner before that time.
And then in order to get home, I take the last night bus at 1 a.m. and walk about 20 minutes home.
Tuesday starts for me around 9:30 when I get up to get ready to go to class at 11:15: my Semiotics class which is focused on advertisiing images, actually, but don't tell the CSCL department that, 'cos I wanna use this class for credit. Anyway, we do go over theory, but we get a little caught up in Advertising sometimes, and, well ... that's technically what this class is supposed to be about ........
Right after that is the class that I had to take in order to take Semiotics: Médias. In that class I'm pretty much reliving everything that I hated about my Mass. Comm. major, but .... still ... I have a little bit of a soft spot for this sort of thing, and this class is about a million times more critical than any Mass. Comm. class I took (which is a pretty easy feat to accomplish, actually ... Fox News is more critical than the J-School). Then I spend Tuesday afternoon doing whatever (like writing blog entries?) until it's time to go home for dinner and catching the 8:30 bus ......
And Tuesday night gets to be a long night since I have no class until 2:15 on Wednesdays!! But it's Phonetics, the class I've always avoided. It happens to be required for a French Major, which is part of why I'm just a French minor ... anyway I hate it. The phonetic alphabet is just as arbitrary as any alphabet and way harder to learn. BUT since I had to take it to be studying abroad, I may just as well declare a French Major when I get back to the U.
On Thursday morning I have three hours, starting at nine fifteen, of Grammar. And this couldn't just be regular grammar... no ... unfortunately it involves way more than just that. But in trying to type up my complaints, I realized that it's probably all good for me in the end anyway, so maybe I won't complain about it.
Anyway, my weekend starts on Thursday at 12:15 and so I get to do whatever I want from then until Sunday night. Last weekend that entailed going to the beach Friday afternoon and enjoying the fantastic weather there. It was a little windy but it was okay. Oh and my friend got stung by a fish thing that hides under the sand and stings feet when it gets stepped on. Yeah ... it seemed very painful: "It feels like I shot myself in the foot!"
And then again on Sunday we tried going to the beach because Sunday was definitely the nicest day since I got here, but unfortunately, transportation is a big problem on Sundays because, well, I don't know if I've told you yet, but the entire country of France all but shuts down on Sundays. Supermarchés, épiceries, tabacs ... they're all closed and the public transport is a million times less frequent. So we had to scratch our beach plan because we missed the 12:30 bus and the next one wasn't until 5:00. Instead of the beach, though, we got to go to the banks of the Lez, Montpellier's river. The river front is extremely artificial, but I guess that's what makes it pretty. We found a nice little park area to sit in anyway where there was some drum circle that I more or less recorded with the sound-record feature on my camera.
One thing typical of Sundays which I actually didn't do this week was the famed Marché aux Puces: the flea market. But it's not really a flea market like you think of in the U.S. The ones in America are lame but the ones in France are awesome. You can pretty much find anything there at low, negotiable prices. As someone who appreciates a good second-hand store in the United States, the flea market is a utopia. They just get a big parking lot and fill it with whoever has stuff to sell. And so you get these people who just circulate through Southern France, Spain, and Morocco, picking little things up along the way to sell. There's also a fair share of stolen and counterfeit things there, but that's part of its charm.
So there's a typical week for me in Montpellier ...
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
All Right, She Wants A Young American
For the past couple weeks I haven't been travelling, but that's because I've had school and I realized I spent a lot of money travelling to London and Barcelona so I've just felt like I should cut back a little bit. The cliché among American students is: "You're in France to spend money." We're on vacation with homework.
But in any case, I've been trying to keep it a little bit on the homework side and a little less on the vacation side of late so as to save money for the actual vacation-time. This is the third week of class and things are starting to fall into a rythmn, which is comforting yet unexciting. Thankfully, I only have each class once per week ... wait ... that makes it seem like I don't like my classes. That's not one hundred percent true. I don't like certain of my classes (Phonetics, Grammar, the three hour class where we go over one sentence of text per hour ... these are the ones I don't like). But there are a couple of good ones. I'll tell you about my favorite.
It's the discussion section for Culture Littéraire/Rhétorique and though it's arduously technical (okay not that bad) I just really love this teacher for his incredible French pretentiousness. I really don't know how to start describing it but it's pretty much this fantastic greater-than-thou attitude where he makes it so clear that he's the smart one and you, the students, are infinitely inferior. Complete with trailing-off thoughts and once a random improvised excursus on Renaissance-era shift from metaphorical, pseudo-magical figures to "true-to-life" representational comparisons with a few Foucault references thrown in here and there for spice.
On the home front, this week my host family's nephew is staying with us and he loves everything that little boys like so I brought back my childhood last night by watching Jurassic Park in French. I assure you, Ian Malcolm is just as awesome in French as in English.
As for the Bowie-lyric title of this entry, that's there for two reasons: first of all, I keep ending up listening to music with any kind of vague reference to America or American because I dunno ... the fact that I'm constantly defined as "The American" makes me a little more in touch with my nationality even if I could care less about it while at home. The other reason is because I went to a really sweet costume party last weekend in which I disguised myself as David Bowie. Very successful. I'll post a picture of it at some point and you'll all agree how very awesome it was.
In the meantime, I've spent way too much time on this without actually saying much, meaning that I don't really have much to say. I'll finish it off with this:
France is great and I don't know how I'll transition to being back in America, but that doesn't mean that I don't miss all of you. Keep me updated on how America's been doing so I can keep the French up on what's happenin' in my country.
But in any case, I've been trying to keep it a little bit on the homework side and a little less on the vacation side of late so as to save money for the actual vacation-time. This is the third week of class and things are starting to fall into a rythmn, which is comforting yet unexciting. Thankfully, I only have each class once per week ... wait ... that makes it seem like I don't like my classes. That's not one hundred percent true. I don't like certain of my classes (Phonetics, Grammar, the three hour class where we go over one sentence of text per hour ... these are the ones I don't like). But there are a couple of good ones. I'll tell you about my favorite.
It's the discussion section for Culture Littéraire/Rhétorique and though it's arduously technical (okay not that bad) I just really love this teacher for his incredible French pretentiousness. I really don't know how to start describing it but it's pretty much this fantastic greater-than-thou attitude where he makes it so clear that he's the smart one and you, the students, are infinitely inferior. Complete with trailing-off thoughts and once a random improvised excursus on Renaissance-era shift from metaphorical, pseudo-magical figures to "true-to-life" representational comparisons with a few Foucault references thrown in here and there for spice.
On the home front, this week my host family's nephew is staying with us and he loves everything that little boys like so I brought back my childhood last night by watching Jurassic Park in French. I assure you, Ian Malcolm is just as awesome in French as in English.
As for the Bowie-lyric title of this entry, that's there for two reasons: first of all, I keep ending up listening to music with any kind of vague reference to America or American because I dunno ... the fact that I'm constantly defined as "The American" makes me a little more in touch with my nationality even if I could care less about it while at home. The other reason is because I went to a really sweet costume party last weekend in which I disguised myself as David Bowie. Very successful. I'll post a picture of it at some point and you'll all agree how very awesome it was.
In the meantime, I've spent way too much time on this without actually saying much, meaning that I don't really have much to say. I'll finish it off with this:
France is great and I don't know how I'll transition to being back in America, but that doesn't mean that I don't miss all of you. Keep me updated on how America's been doing so I can keep the French up on what's happenin' in my country.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Oh the sun-drenched French girls won't relate to a frozen glare from a Northern state ...
For those of you still waiting for photos, I've been able to get them up on my Facebook account. It should be accessible to non-facebookers via this link:
http://minnesota.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2428937&l=e3b2a&id=13930402
http://minnesota.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2428937&l=e3b2a&id=13930402
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Vacation and First Day of Class
Pre-stage is over! It actually finished like a week ago, and this past week I've been travelling thanks in part to my good friends at Ryanair.com, the airline where, if you book early enough, you get one-cent tickets to various places across Europe. Unfortunately, you can't always get exactly what you want and not only that, Ryanair only flies to obscure, out-of-the-way airports.
So I left Montpellier by TGV ("train à grande vitesse" or "really fast train" for those not in the know) on last Monday morning to catch a plane out of Marseille which went to London. Well ... not really London, since it was Ryanair, we ended up landing in Stansted, a good hour and a half bus ride from the city.
London is a pretty cool place, I guess, but the weather was a little chilly and it's so expensive there. Well ... I should revise that. Shopping is cheaper in London than in Montpellier, but things like eating, drinking, and sleeping are WAY more expensive. For example, a cup of coffee ... nothing fancy only about 12 oz., cost me two and a half pounds, which roughly translates to five dollars. Now imagine the cost of getting a whole meal.
A couple things in London that are really really cool and absolutely free are, number one, St. Paul's Cathedral, which is incredibly gorgeous on the inside and I'd show you pictures but they don't let you take them there; and number two, the British Museum. What an incredible collection of stolen treasure from around the British Empire! I spent a couple hours one day there and three or four the next day and took way too many pictures of stuff but I kinda like that sort of thing and it's better than walking around London getting almost run over.
Which is another thing. London is a very unfriendly city for pedestrians. If you're in a crosswalk and the light turns yellow (the light turns yellow there before it turns green ... like it's a race track or something), you have to run to the other side because even if you're right in front of a car, the drivers still slam on the gas as if you weren't even there. And if you ever ask anyone for directions, if you're not going just down the block, they'll think you're out of your mind to walk so far.
The architecture in London is cool, though. Everything is all Victorian and Industrial Revolution so there are all these big, heavy-looking brick buildings painted up in deep shades of blues and greens or just left bare red brick.
The best time I had in London was actually the night of our flight out. We went to this little nightclub and saw a few DJ sets at a CD release party. The first set was all early 1950s American soul music, like rock'n'roll precursor type stuff. The second set was salsa, and the third set was hip-hop and even featured an MC for a rap or two. Great stuff. The was also the only time I really met any British people because I was clumsy and knocked over my chair when I first got there and because later on my friend Liz and I were a dancing sensation.
We had a long night that night, though with tons of walking and carrying luggage around and getting on a 3:30 bus in London to Stansted, catching a 6:10 plane to Barcelona, taking a 10:00 bus from the obscure airport Ryanair flew us too (Reus, a converted RAF base) and finally getting to our hostel just off La Rambla (Barcelona's main drag) just after noon.
Barcelona was much more decently priced than London, and the cool thing there is art and architecture. I went to the Picasso Museum there which not only contained Picasso's private collection of art, but also a fair share of his works, especially a significant collection of his Blue Period works. Since Picasso was such an intellectual painter, I ended up learning a lot about art in general from the museum and about Picasso himself. Very interesting.
And then there's Gaudi, the most famous and extreme of Barcelona's home-grown architecture school Modernisme, which is filled with organic, fluid lines and shapes and bright colors. It's really extraordinary. I have a few pictures of a couple of examples and one picture (because I ran out of batteries) of the most famous: the Sagrada Familia. Maybe it was just a translation error, but I prefer to think that the literature in the Sagrada Familia referred to the building as a "Temple" and not a "Cathedral" to emphasize the immense vastness of this as yet incomplete construction project. "Cathedral" really would be an understatement. Right now there are only eight towers on the Sagrada Familia, and as huge as they are, there are still three more much larger towers planned with the one in the middle having a gigantic lit-up cross beacon thing on top.
In order to fully experience the famous Barcelona night-life, we ended up going to a club, which was not worth the trouble, it turned out. It was a good fifteen euros to get in (with one free drink) and drinks from there on out were nine euros a piece. It was a clean, large, and overall nice place in terms of decorations and furniture and whatnot, but the people and the music were just .......... gross. Sleazy yuppie gross. Broad-shoulder, square-chin, button-up-collared-vertical-striped-shirt gross. Awful-American-club-music gross.
The next day was a six hour bus ride back to Montpellier and then the Superbowl in the middle of the night in a local pub. I only stayed until somewhere in the third quarter and I apparently missed something important like the Giants making a big comeback or something or something, but seriously it was like 3:30 in the morning and game-time was encroaching a little too much on sleep-time.
Finally, yesterday I had my first French classes, which have been alright but tiring. I can't just space-out for a couple minutes like I can in an American class ... I have to pay full attention. French teachers are funny, though. They know more than you and they'll let you know that they know more than you purely through body language and lecture delivery. It makes them come off as really pretentious, and at least for the moment it's cute.
For those of you waiting for photos, I'm working on it. As a matter of fact, I've been trying to upload this whole time I've been writing this, but the internet is slower than slow right now. They'll come soon, though. I promise.
So I left Montpellier by TGV ("train à grande vitesse" or "really fast train" for those not in the know) on last Monday morning to catch a plane out of Marseille which went to London. Well ... not really London, since it was Ryanair, we ended up landing in Stansted, a good hour and a half bus ride from the city.
London is a pretty cool place, I guess, but the weather was a little chilly and it's so expensive there. Well ... I should revise that. Shopping is cheaper in London than in Montpellier, but things like eating, drinking, and sleeping are WAY more expensive. For example, a cup of coffee ... nothing fancy only about 12 oz., cost me two and a half pounds, which roughly translates to five dollars. Now imagine the cost of getting a whole meal.
A couple things in London that are really really cool and absolutely free are, number one, St. Paul's Cathedral, which is incredibly gorgeous on the inside and I'd show you pictures but they don't let you take them there; and number two, the British Museum. What an incredible collection of stolen treasure from around the British Empire! I spent a couple hours one day there and three or four the next day and took way too many pictures of stuff but I kinda like that sort of thing and it's better than walking around London getting almost run over.
Which is another thing. London is a very unfriendly city for pedestrians. If you're in a crosswalk and the light turns yellow (the light turns yellow there before it turns green ... like it's a race track or something), you have to run to the other side because even if you're right in front of a car, the drivers still slam on the gas as if you weren't even there. And if you ever ask anyone for directions, if you're not going just down the block, they'll think you're out of your mind to walk so far.
The architecture in London is cool, though. Everything is all Victorian and Industrial Revolution so there are all these big, heavy-looking brick buildings painted up in deep shades of blues and greens or just left bare red brick.
The best time I had in London was actually the night of our flight out. We went to this little nightclub and saw a few DJ sets at a CD release party. The first set was all early 1950s American soul music, like rock'n'roll precursor type stuff. The second set was salsa, and the third set was hip-hop and even featured an MC for a rap or two. Great stuff. The was also the only time I really met any British people because I was clumsy and knocked over my chair when I first got there and because later on my friend Liz and I were a dancing sensation.
We had a long night that night, though with tons of walking and carrying luggage around and getting on a 3:30 bus in London to Stansted, catching a 6:10 plane to Barcelona, taking a 10:00 bus from the obscure airport Ryanair flew us too (Reus, a converted RAF base) and finally getting to our hostel just off La Rambla (Barcelona's main drag) just after noon.
Barcelona was much more decently priced than London, and the cool thing there is art and architecture. I went to the Picasso Museum there which not only contained Picasso's private collection of art, but also a fair share of his works, especially a significant collection of his Blue Period works. Since Picasso was such an intellectual painter, I ended up learning a lot about art in general from the museum and about Picasso himself. Very interesting.
And then there's Gaudi, the most famous and extreme of Barcelona's home-grown architecture school Modernisme, which is filled with organic, fluid lines and shapes and bright colors. It's really extraordinary. I have a few pictures of a couple of examples and one picture (because I ran out of batteries) of the most famous: the Sagrada Familia. Maybe it was just a translation error, but I prefer to think that the literature in the Sagrada Familia referred to the building as a "Temple" and not a "Cathedral" to emphasize the immense vastness of this as yet incomplete construction project. "Cathedral" really would be an understatement. Right now there are only eight towers on the Sagrada Familia, and as huge as they are, there are still three more much larger towers planned with the one in the middle having a gigantic lit-up cross beacon thing on top.
In order to fully experience the famous Barcelona night-life, we ended up going to a club, which was not worth the trouble, it turned out. It was a good fifteen euros to get in (with one free drink) and drinks from there on out were nine euros a piece. It was a clean, large, and overall nice place in terms of decorations and furniture and whatnot, but the people and the music were just .......... gross. Sleazy yuppie gross. Broad-shoulder, square-chin, button-up-collared-vertical-striped-shirt gross. Awful-American-club-music gross.
The next day was a six hour bus ride back to Montpellier and then the Superbowl in the middle of the night in a local pub. I only stayed until somewhere in the third quarter and I apparently missed something important like the Giants making a big comeback or something or something, but seriously it was like 3:30 in the morning and game-time was encroaching a little too much on sleep-time.
Finally, yesterday I had my first French classes, which have been alright but tiring. I can't just space-out for a couple minutes like I can in an American class ... I have to pay full attention. French teachers are funny, though. They know more than you and they'll let you know that they know more than you purely through body language and lecture delivery. It makes them come off as really pretentious, and at least for the moment it's cute.
For those of you waiting for photos, I'm working on it. As a matter of fact, I've been trying to upload this whole time I've been writing this, but the internet is slower than slow right now. They'll come soon, though. I promise.
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