A very busy week in Avignon

First of all, all of the pictures that I've taken so far can be seen (I hope) through this link: http://marquette.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2009729&l=11810&id=1158900089

Now, on to a very long update about a very long week.

First, a moment for a very superficial but still important observation about Avignon: My hair absolutely loves it here. Anyone who has spent any amount of time with me and the frizzy mess that betrayed me when it went from straight to curly knows that my hair is constantly battling the elements. Well, it just so happens that my hair is getting on amazingly with the weather here. There’s very little humidity, it’s not cold enough to dry it out, and in conclusion, I’ve been having a week and a half’s worth of good hair days. Also worth noting is that my skin is considerably less dry here. There’s definitely something to be said for living in temperate places as opposed to the United States Midwest. However, it does seem to be drying up again, and I’m not sure whether it’s because I’m working out at a gym again or because my skin’s used to the climate now and has gotten over its culture shock. If it has gotten over its culture shock, I wish it would teach me how!

I’m also really enjoying only having classes four days a week. I’m sure with traveling that I’ll be doing in the future, I’ll appreciate it even more, but even now I’m enjoying that the extra time on weekends. L’Institut is open on Fridays, so I can go in and get some work done, as well as enjoy the internet access before the weekend really starts. It’s also a good meeting place for students who have to work on projects, as I do.

The big news of the week is that I switched host families. I was having a very hard time at the other house, and once they found out I was leaving, it got even harder for me. Thankfully that’s all over with. I’m now living outside of the city walls (no protection from Germanic tribes after all, unless they come while I’m in school), which is nice. It’s a little more spread out and I feel like I can breathe a little (please note that it is still just as crowded as your average Chicago neighborhood, and that should give you an idea of how cramped the city is). I take a bus to and from school, which is pretty easy, and L’Institut pays for it. I went to the transportation office today to buy my bus pass, which is like a Chicago Card in that you get to wave it at a sensor instead of putting it the thing next to the turnstile for it to deduct the money. I got told by the person who gave me the pass that my French was excellent, and I felt like saying, “I’m probably slaughtering your language, but thank you just the same!”

The buses here are much nicer at the ones at home, and they’re exceptionally clean. It takes about 5-10 minutes to get into the city, and then it’s just a one or two minute walk to the school. Yesterday I left the city around 6:20 and it didn’t take long to get home at all, but I discovered today that Avignon does in fact have a rush hour. I left at about 5:05, and it took me almost a half hour to get back to the house. It’s still considerably faster than the commute I was accustomed to in high school, so it didn’t bother me—I was too delighted by the knowledge that there was a rush hour. If it takes a traffic jam for me to feel at home here, then I guess that’s what it takes! The only down side of living out of the city is that it makes it a little harder to get together with the other students. I get about 10€ a week from L’Institut to use for taking a taxi, so it’ll definitely still be possible, but it will take planning. The buses stop running around 7:30, so my goal is to aim for events where I’ll only have to take a taxi one way, not both.

I went to work out at a gym today (Friday). Through L’Institut, each student has a certain amount of money that can be used for extracurricular activities—dance lessons, music lessons, yoga, museum visits, and many other options including an option of just getting free tickets to concerts, plays, and movies. I ended up deciding to get the gym membership, even though it means that’s the only thing I can do. Going today was a very interesting experience. I got semi-lost on the way there, but I called L’Institut to figure out where I’d gone wrong, and it turns out I had the right building that I’d been looking for (3h) but that the number for the gym was actually 34. They draw their fours and ones differently here—ones look like fours or sevens, and fours look like h’s.

Upon arriving, I couldn’t find anyone at the front desk to show me around, so I just hopped on an elliptical and started working out. Next time I go I want a tour, because there’s a ton of open space and I don’t know if we’re allowed to use that or if it’s for classes. Also, I wouldn’t mind knowing where the locker rooms are. There are very few weight machines that I recognized, though there were some that looked both new and familiar. However, the sign on them said we weren’t allowed to use them. I have hopes that they change that soon, because I haven’t the slightest idea how to use the other machines. I also realized I had a problem with the free weights: all the numbers were in kilograms. It’s little things like that that really throw me off here. I can deal with the language, but smaller things tend to bother me much more. The elliptical was a little bizarre as well. You couldn’t change the incline, and it told me that after 40 minutes I’d only burned 300 calories, when I’ve been doing ellipticals for a year and a half and I can always burn 450 calories in 40 minutes. I can’t decide whether the machine here was lying to me or whether I was lied to back home. Also, wiping down a machine after using it seems to be a foreign concept. Let’s hope that Merca doesn’t exist in France. I was the only female in the free weights area, which I think some guy commented on. He started to talk to me, but I never feel like having conversations in the gym so I decided to pretend I didn’t speak French well and just said “Pardonne, je ne comprends pas.” It’s nice to have that excuse to fall back on, and I think when I get back to the States and people talk to me, I’m going to pretend that I can’t speak English. The guy asked if I was from England, and I told him yes—much better England than the US.

A food update: If I let myself, it would be incredibly easy to eat Nutella on a freshly baked baguette for lunch every day. As it is, I have let myself buy neither a container of Nutella (which tastes so much better here) nor any baguettes, and instead I watch enviously as the others eat it at lunch. There’s a grocery store called Shopi not far from L’Institut, and the school has refrigerators where we can keep our food for lunches. Thus far I’ve bought fresh fruit, Greek yogurt, whole-grain bread, a low-fat chèvre (goat cheese) spread, and the only sandwich meat they have here: ham. I am eating quite healthily, and while I’m not completely immersing myself in the French food, it’s not completely American, either. Of the many cheeses I have tried, I adore chèvre (I knew that before coming here), and am quite fond of Brie and Roquefort (which tastes like blue cheese to me, but better). The only cheese I decidedly don’t like is Camembert. My wine exploration has been much less exciting. They often leave out wine for us to drink at lunch, and the one time I was feeling adventurous, I poured myself half a sip, drank it, made a face and went to get myself some water. Breakfast has been a little random, but I’m determined to find a healthy cereal here that doesn’t have dried fruit in it. I had mentioned to Mirielle, my new host mother, that I liked cereal in the mornings, and so she very kindly bought some for me. Unfortunately, she bought me something called “Pétals Sucré”. It’s essentially an off brand of Frosted Flakes, and I ate it with much guilt, as I never eat sugary cereal. I tried to tell myself that it was probably no worse than pancakes, but I nevertheless felt quite sure that it was going to rot my teeth. However, I had a banana on the cereal, and I also had a Clementine for breakfast, plus an apple with lunch and both a pumpkin soup and cauliflower at dinner dinner. That was essentially for you, dearest Mother: I’m eating my fruits and vegetables! I’ve gotten advice on my skim milk hunt (for starters, it does exist here) and when I go to Shopi next week I’ll be in search of both skim milk and healthy, dried fruit-less cereal.

Having to speak French all the time, I’ve become hyper-aware of my flaws. I’m not sure if I had these problems before coming to France, or if I just didn’t speak French often enough to realize my habitual mistakes. The first problem, which I’ve worked very hard to remedy, is my tendency to drop the pas that’s needed for a negation. When you want to say something negative, you have to put a ne before the verb and a pas after it to negate it. It’s pretty acceptable to drop the ne, but you absolutely cannot drop the pas, and whenever I get really immersed in what I’m saying I tend to change thoughts without finished the negation. Additionally, I’m absolutely dreadful at future tense. First of all, in French there are several future tenses, the most common of which are futur prôche (near future) and futur parfait (future perfect). I theoretically know how to construct the future perfect, but since I don’t think it exists in English, I never think of using it in French. Instead, I use near future, which is the ‘going to’ construction, for example, I’m going to go to London for the break. However, in French you’re only supposed to use that when it’s in the very near future, maybe a day or so. Thus, the above example should not be je vais aller à Londres pour les vacances, but instead j’irai à Londres pour les vacances. Unfortunately, I can never seem to think of the proper means of doing that in conversation, and I’m afraid I might have to start avoiding any and all conversations about the future.

That was your French grammar lesson for the day, and I am now going to take a shower before watching the European Figure Skating Championships on TV. I squealed when I saw that they were going to be on (with commentary by Philippe Candeloro!), and Mirielle wanted to know what could possibly be so exciting. She said I could watch them, and I’m very much looking forward to it. Also worth noting before I go is that I’m missing the US National Figure Skating Championships I think for the first time since 1995. This is very, very traumatic for me. My obsession with watching skating on TV has declined since 2002 when the ISU went crazy and decided that no one could know which judges gave what marks, but I always kept watching US Nationals since the money went to USFSA, not the ISU. I’m feeling quite sad about that, but I’ll have to console myself with Philippe*.

That’s about it for today (Friday). Tomorrow L’Institut takes us to Nîmes to see Pont du Gard (which I think is just an old Roman aqueduct, as that’s all they show in the pictures) and then to a Musée du Bonbons (if it really is a candy museum, I’m going to be pumped), and I’ll add information about that before I post this Monday.

*For those of you who perhaps weren’t quite as obsessed with figure skating in 1998 as I was, Philippe Candeloro won the bronze medal at the 1998 Olympics (Behind Ilia Kulik of Center Stage fame and Elvis Stojko, but before Todd Eldredge) with a Three Musketeers program where he pretended to sword-fight during his straight-line footwork sequence.

Saturday Evening:

The excursion with L’Institut was a lot of fun, but I’m now completely exhausted. I took an 8AM bus into the city and ended up arriving far earlier than I needed to. I wandered around the city for a bit, then ran into a few students from L’Institut at a café. I joined them for a chocolat chaud that was not as good as the one I had my first day here, but it was still better than American hot chocolate. Most of the other students ended up walking by us, so we walked en masse to the train station where the tour bus met us. After having a few people get lost, we were able to leave before too much time had passed for Nîmes, a town that’s a certain number of kilometers away, but since none of us know how far a kilometer is, the number meant nothing to us. Once there, we went with the tour guide to an old arena built by the Romans for bull fighting. It was absolutely huge, and it was really cool to see. After that, we went to see a temple that had been built there by a Roman Emperor before the tour guide gave us about two hours on our own to eat lunch and explore the town. I stopped at the Tourism Office with several other girls, and the women there recommended going to the gardens not far from where we were—this was an excellent recommendation. The gardens are part of an old palace, and it was absolutely beautiful. I can’t get over my surprise of seeing flowers blooming in January, and the architecture was incredible. We explored around there for a while, then stumbled across a temple built for Diana. We spent about an hour of our time there, and it was absolutely incredible.

We started to look for somewhere to eat, but one girl and I decided to find something to eat later as we were sidelined by a papeterie/librarie—essentially a book store with loads of books, craft supplies, and notebooks. I had a blast looking around, and just barely restrained myself from buying a Le Petit Nicolas calendar. Le Petit Nicolas is a French children’s chapter book that I read my senior year in high school, and it’s absolutely adorable. It’s about this little boy, Nicolas, who is probably 7 years old, and all the exploits he and his friends get into. I’m determined to find a copy here to buy, and I’d rather have that than a calendar, so I’ll have to wait until I find that. We stopped to get paninis on our way back to the bus, and they were delicious. Paninis here come on freshly baked baguettes, and the baguettes make everything else taste better.

The bus then set off for Pont du Gard, which is, as I thought, an old Roman aqueduct. However, it’s incredibly better in person than in the photos. It’s absolutely enormous, and the area around it was gorgeous. It runs over the Rhône, and there are lots of hiking paths around the area to follow. We spent a lot of time running around the different paths and taking pictures from good viewpoints. Everything was so gorgeous, and I love seeing green plants in January! We only got to spend about an hour and a half there, and I definitely would like to go back again so that I could spend more time on the hiking paths. I really was amazed by how beautiful everything was, and I took enough pictures to prove it.

After that, we set off for the Musée du Bonbons, a candy museum run by Haribo, a European candy company. It was rather like the museum in Hershey, Pennsylvania, only not as high tech. Also, this company doesn’t make any chocolate, which was simply a travesty. I fail to understand the point of candy that isn’t chocolate, and thus I was quite disappointed by the immense candy gift shop they had at the end—what’s the point of a huge room full of cheap candy if there isn’t chocolate? It definitely wasn’t the highlight of the day, but there was some interesting information there. If nothing else, they had everything translated from French into both German and English, and it was entertaining to see how badly it translated to English. We hopped back on the bus back to Avignon after that, and we had a pretty peaceful ride back. I had a nice dinner with Mirielle, who got a laugh out of my reaction when she asked if I ate rabbit. She said that she doesn’t eat it, but she always asks the study abroad students if they eat it to see their reaction.

Tomorrow I’m going to walk to church in town to see how long the walk takes, and then I’m going to grab some lunch down there before coming back to work on homework. I’m going to try a different church at a later time to see if I can find a more lively or upbeat congregation, but based on what I’ve heard about the religious in France, I’m not necessarily expecting. Hope that everyone is doing well!