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.