England and English-speaking!

I’m back in France after a long week traveling in England and Wales, and I saw lots of exciting things so get ready for a very long entry. My photos of everything that follows can be found here:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2010037&l=946ea&id=1158900089
and here: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2010038&l=d91f1&id=1158900089

Now, the traveling. I left Avignon Friday, February 15^th. I took a train to Marseille, then a bus to the airport there to wait for my plane. Another girl from my program was leaving around the same time, so we did check-in, security, and then lots of waiting around together. She left a little bit before me, and then I waited another half hour or so until my plane left. It was the first time I got to walk out of the airport and then climb the stairs directly into the airplane (instead of just walking down the terminal into the airplane), so that was very exciting. The flight was on time, which I very much appreciated, and it was a quick flight, only about two hours. Once I arrived and gathered my luggage, I exchanged a traveler’s check, which was a very painful experience. For $50, I was given ₤20.10. ₤3 had been part of the commission, but even so the exchange rate wasn’t exactly good. I had a few hours until my bus left for Wales, so I bought myself a salad and two pints of real, refrigerated, non-UHT skim milk for dinner. The milk was delicious. J There was a little confusion with my bus, since they had me changing buses at Heathrow and both arriving and leaving there at the same time. However, it turned out that the bus I was going to change to stopped at Gatwick, so I just boarded that right away and no change was necessary. We got stuck in London traffic, so it was an even longer bus ride than expected, but after almost 6 hours I arrived in Swansea, Wales.

In Wales I was staying with Ruth and Padraig, friends of my family. It was wonderful to see them, since I don’t think I had seen them in over a year, and it was even more wonderful to speak English while I was there. Despite being the rainiest city in the UK, I actually had sun every day that I was there. All the signs in Wales are in both English and Welsh, which I thought was very neat. Of course, my understanding of Welsh is non-existent, so it all looked more or less like Parseltongue to me. On Saturday, they took me to the cliffs along Swansea bay, and it was absolutely beautiful. It looked like I imagined Ireland must look like: very green, with the sound of the waves quite peaceful. We drove down to Rhossili beach after that, which is also along the coast. There’s a shipwreck from the 1700’s buried in the sand there, along with a long beach. We stopped for tea there (the British really do love their tea, and I discovered while I was there that I’m quite fond of it as well) before heading back to the house.

On Sunday I went to church with Ruth and Padraig. It was my first time at an Anglican mass, but the mass felt infinitely more familiar than the Catholic masses in France. I suppose the fact that it was in English helped. Ruth and I walked down to a shopping center that afternoon so she could show me the way to the bookstore. I can entertain myself for hours in bookstores, which was my plan for Monday. After dinner that evening Ruth went to work and I baked banana bread. I’ve missed having a stove that I can cook with, so I was very excited to have the chance. I also watched a skating show called Dancing on Ice, which is a skating version of Dancing with the Stars. It was entertaining, and I have to give them credit for doing lots of lifts to hide the fact that really, none of the stars could skate at all. I saw maybe one double three turn sequence and that was the extent of the footwork; some of the stars couldn’t even handle crossovers. I also watched a Snooker game on TV with Padraig. Snooker is generally like pool, but with much more complicated rules and much more strategy involved. I got quite interested in it, and Mark Selby came from behind to beat someone O’Sullivan.

Monday I did return to the bookstore, which was a lot of fun. I spent several hours there browsing around and had a terrible time narrowing down my book selection, but I eventually decided to get Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. I had fun looking at the British versions of the Harry Potter books, and they also had a Latin version of the first Harry Potter. At first I thought it had to be a joke, since the title had something about “Harrius Potterus”, but no, the whole thing really was in Latin. I also looked around at some clothing stores. I really liked the styles, but due to the whole exchange rate problem, even the clearance items were out of my price range. For dinner that evening we went out to TGI Friday’s which, while not exactly Welsh, was still delicious.

Tuesday morning I had to leave for London, and I was quite sad to leave Wales. I felt like that was as close to home as I would get until May when I go home, and I felt homesick as I was leaving. I took a bus to Heathrow to meet up with my cousin, Annie, who was flying in for a week. Based on pure luck I managed to find her without too much trouble—I had randomly picked a terminal to try, and as I arrived there I saw her walking by. We took the train to Paddington Station, and as we were walking to our hotel for the first night, I saw a store with a big stuffed Paddington Bear. After checking in, we went to go find food, and then we walked around Kensington Gardens, which weren’t far at all from our hotel room. There are several of parks and gardens in London, and they’re all HUGE. Chicago probably has more in quantity, but theirs are much larger and have many more statues and fountains. It was really impressive, and it was all beautiful. London has flowers blooming already, as well, so apparently the whole snow concept is a strictly North American thing. I found a Peter Pan statue, which was pretty cool. By this time the sun was starting to set and it was getting cooler, so we went back to our hotel room to get coats. Afterwards we took the Tube to a bookstore, where we browsed for quite a while until we were overtaken by hunger and we got dinner. We ate at a place called Hummus Bros, and the hummus was delicious. When I get myself out of debt from this trip and earn enough money to go back, I’ll definitely be making another stop at that restaurant.

Wednesday we got up early to start our first full day in London. We were going to take the Tube, but it was still the peak hours (tickets are more expensive before 9:30a), so we walked through Kensington Gardens towards Buckingham Palace. The palace itself wasn’t that exciting, but there was a gorgeous statue across from it. We then walked through another garden towards the Houses of Parliament. We soon stumbled across Big Ben, which was very cool, and then we went into Westminster Abbey. Once you get over the creepiness of Westminster Abbey essentially being an indoor cemetery, it’s very cool. It’s amazing to see how old it is, and to see tombs of so many famous people. I loved the Poet’s Corner, which is where tons of famous writers are buried. At one point I glanced down and saw a sign that said Chaucer was buried there, which felt very surreal. I also recited part of Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott over his grave, and that was just awesome. There’s another church that’s connected where Winston Churchill is buried, along with several other Prime Ministers. The gift shop, which had outrageously priced items, was also entertaining—they had Christmas tree ornaments for each of Henry VII’s wives, and I was sorely tempted to buy those. After Westminster, Annie and I made our way over to a Tube stop to go to a used bookstore. As we walked by Big Ben again, we got to hear it strike noon!

On our way to the bookstore we looked around a market for a little bit, and they had some really cute things for sale. The bookstore was very cool (and things were actually in my price range!), and we enjoyed ourselves there. We then stopped over at Hummus Bros again for lunch (hey, when you can find a delicious and cheap meal in London, there’s no reason to look for other restaurants), then took the Tube further outside the city so that I could see the house where Sylvia Plath lived. Yeats lived there as well, and then later Sylvia Plath moved in. People still live there, so we couldn’t go in, but I was really excited just to see the outside. We walked along Regent’s Park to get back to a Tube stop, and the park is absolutely beautiful. The gardens are gorgeous, and they had tons of statues and fountains there, as well. We walked by the London zoo, where I saw an ostrich for the first time in person. I had always thought they were larger than they really are! Once we got to the Tube stop, we took the train to King’s Cross, where we had a photo op at Platform 9 ¾. That was exciting, too! After that it was back on the Tube to Covent Garden (which is actually not a garden, more like an outdoor shopping center with some public spaces as well). Covent Garden is where they filmed the opening of My Fair Lady, and although I thought I saw where that was, everything in the area looked like it could’ve been a part of the film, so I wasn’t sure that I actually saw the specific location. There was a street performer there juggling, doing tricks, and riding a unicycle. He was really funny, and I enjoyed watching it. We browsed around the shops before deciding they were all out of our price range (it’s a very touristy area), and then we left for St. Paul’s, where we were hoping to hear the boy’s choir sing Evensong. Unfortunately, it turns out it had been at 17:00, not 7:00, so we missed that. The church was still beautiful, though, and I was excited to see it. We went to get dinner, then went back to the hotel and fell over exhausted from our long day.

Thursday morning I woke up still quite tired out, but I was determined to get a run in. I was glad I went, since I ran around Kensington Gardens so I could see more of that, and it was absolutely beautiful. I loved seeing all the statues and monuments—so much that I rather lost my sense of direction, and in true Katherine style, got lost. I suppose I’ll just be glad that I can say I’ve been lost in both France and England now. I wasn’t actually that far out of my way, just a bit further West than I thought, but one woman I asked for directions scared me and told me I was miles out of my way. She also sent me in the wrong direction (South instead of East), but I saw a lagoon I recognized on my way there and turned around. It just ended up being a much longer run than I had planned—a little over an hour. On the up side, I now know that I can run that long, which I didn’t know before. Annie and I ate breakfast (it’s included at the hotel) and then checked out, since we were off to spend a night in Bath. We took a bus from Victoria station, and the ride was pretty uneventful. The driver did give us a lot of background information on the cities leading up to Bath, so that was interesting to hear.

We arrived in Bath and had no sense of direction, so we took a taxi to our Bed & Breakfast. I absolutely loved it there. It was absolutely beautiful. We stayed in the Pink Room, which was decorated in pink and complete with a drawing of the view from outside our window, entitled “View from the Pink Room”. Pictures of the room can be seen at the links above; I was so excited that it had to be photo-documented. After getting settled in, Annie and I headed to Sally Lunn’s for tea. Sally Lunn’s is I believe the oldest building in Bath, and it’s named after a woman from the 1500s or something who was a famous baker. Her recipe for buns is still used today, and according to everything we read, it was an essential visit in Bath. We got tea with the buns, and the tea was absolutely delicious. The buns were quite good, as well, but the tea was incredible. I’ve discovered that I really like tea with milk in it, and that will probably become a habit once I get back home. I’m really not a fan of the French tea—it’s very bitter and doesn’t have much depth of flavor. We had a nice time at tea, then wandered over and found a half-price bookstore that kept us entertained for another few hours. There were some amazing deals, and I had to restrain myself from buying out their entire section of classics, all priced at a reasonable ₤1.99. After leaving there before we could spend all the money in our bank accounts, we did some wandering around Bath, which is an absolutely beautiful city. The architecture is amazing. There’s a bridge with shops over the length of it, lots of old churches, beautiful stone work, and then the Bath Abbey. The Abbey is incredible, and I discovered that I had retained some knowledge from my history class freshman year when I was able to correctly identify part of the architecture as flying buttresses. We stopped for dinner at a pub where I had delicious baked cod, and then we went back to our gorgeous room for the night.

Friday morning I got up early so that I could take a luxurious bath—I was, after all, in Bath, plus I was just really excited to have access to a bathtub. It was quite relaxing and enjoyable. Annie and I went down for breakfast, which began with fresh fruit. The fruit tasted incredible, and we also had some tea, then an omelette. I was in heaven, and I will recommend this place to anyone who goes to Bath. It’s absolutely a fantastic place to stay, and it wasn’t that expensive at all. It was the same as the hostels we stayed in while in London, and infinitely nicer. We then checked out (sadly), but left our luggage there for the day and set out to walk around Bath more. It was just a bit cloudy, and though it looked like it might rain at any second, it didn’t. I successfully survived my time in England without getting stuck in the rain once, and that was pure luck on my part. We saw the house where Jane Austen lived while in Bath, which wasn’t at all far from where we stayed, and that was very neat. We wandered around the Royal Crescent, a curved row of houses behind a huge grassy area, which was beautiful. We did some window shopping (and stopped in another used bookstore) after that until the Jane Austen Centre opened at 11am. The Centre was pretty cool, and it had a bunch of costumes from the PBS version of Persuasion on display, so that was cool to see. That said, the exhibit wasn’t as thorough as I had expected. It focused mostly on Jane’s time in Bath and afterwards, and while I suppose that makes sense considering its location, I was expecting more details. I suppose I’ll just have to go to Chawton, where she lived for quite a while, next time I’m in the area!

After visiting the Jane Austen Centre, Annie and I walked back to get our luggage, and the owner of the B&B very kindly gave us a ride to the bus station. Given that it was windy and a bit chilly, we appreciated that quite a bit. The ride to London was quite long, especially since we hadn’t eaten lunch. We finally arrived around 7pm, about 9 hours since we’d eaten breakfast, and we were quite hungry. We took the train to our hostel for the night, which was sadly not as nice as the B&B in Bath. Then we set off in search of a restaurant we’d found in one of Annie’s travel guides. It was called Jakob’s, and it had Indian and Persian food. De-licious, as was most of the food I ate while traveling. I had chicken and eggplant parmesan, with an eggplant salad and a Greek salad. For anyone who may be in England and who is fond of eggplant, you will appreciate knowing that eggplant is known as aubergine there. Aubergine bewildered Annie and I during our entire stay until that last night when it finally clicked. The meal also came with delicious bread, and we got dessert since we hadn’t had dessert the entire time we’d been there. It was getting late, and we were tired, but I was determined to accomplish something my last night in England, so we went down to see the Tower of London, where Anne Boleyn was killed, along with many others. It’s more like a series of impressive buildings and fortresses than a tower, but it was awesome to see it. We also walked across Tower Bridge, which is absolutely beautiful (as long as you don’t think too much about the fact that it’s a bridge—I’ve always been rather terrified of bridges over water). From there you can get a nice view of the Tower of London as well as a view of London Bridge, which was not falling down, but instead lit up. Finally giving into exhaustion, we went back to the hostel, where I very promptly crashed.

Saturday morning I had to get up early to catch my flight back to France. *sigh* I was sad to be leaving the country of English-speakers, but it had to be done. I took the Tube to Victoria station, then took an express train to Gatwick. I entertained myself in the airport by (surprise, surprise) spending most of my time waiting in a bookstore. They didn’t announce our gate until 30 minutes before the plane was supposed to leave, and we ended up leaving about 45 minutes late, which didn’t make me very happy. There was another American sitting next to me on the plane who was studying abroad in Aix, and it was interesting to talk to her. I caught a bus from the airport to the train station, then took a train to Avignon, then walked to another bus station and took a bus to my house. By the end of the day I had been on three trains, two buses, and a plane. Quite a bit of traveling!

The rest of my weekend was pretty low-key, just getting ready for classes today. I decided to drop my Political Science class after a lot of thought on the subject. I really wasn’t enjoying it at all, and it wasn’t even about the subject that it was supposed to be on. Since I’m no longer double majoring in Political Science (instead it’ll be Women’s Studies), the class wasn’t even going to count for anything. I felt like a huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders—the class was canceled for just today anyway, and one of the other students started jumping for joy around the room when he heard. If that’s the case for getting a break from one class, imagine how relieved I felt to be getting a break from all future classes! I was kind of beating myself up for thinking about dropping the class, but it was the right decision. If I didn’t have to go through all the stress and anxiety, why should I?

I don’t have too many plans for this week. My roommate from Marquette might be coming to Avignon this weekend, so it’d be nice to see her. Other than that, I’m looking forward to more traveling around. We have a tour of the Palais des Papes through l’Institut next weekend, and the weekend after that there’s an excursion through l’Institut to Baux de Provence. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to go to Rome for Easter; I had such a fun time during my day trip to Italy that I really want to go back. Some students are also talking about planning a trip to Normandy, and I would love to do that. We have another week off of school in April, and I’m going to be going to Norway with another girl from the program. I’ve really wanted to go there for a while, so I’m looking forward to that trip.

I’m off to do some reading for my Economics class. I hope that everyone at home is doing well. Please send e-mails, I love to hear from people!

Traveling time!

I'm just adding this to let everyone know that I'm alive, it's just that nothing very interesting has happened here lately. Midterms are this week, which is never a whole lot of fun, so I've been hard at work on that. However, tomorrow the fun starts as I leave for London and Wales for a week. I'm not sure what my internet access will be like there, but if I get a chance I'll be sure to post updates from there. If not, I'll be back with lots of information about my trip. I feel that, as an English major, I'm returning to my homeland even though I've never been to England before. It should be a lot of fun!

Pictures from Nice, Antibes, and Northern Italy

Pictures from this past weekend can be found at:
http://marquette.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2009801&l=5ed03&id=1158900089

Now I have to get back to the many pages of French waiting to be written!

Nice, Antibes, and Northern Italy

I don't have my pictures from this past weekend uploaded yet, but I'll add the link here as soon as I get that done.

My week passed without excitement until the weekend, when I left for Nice to visit my roommate, Klare, from Marquette. Classes are going as well as can be expected, I suppose, and I survived my first Political Science presentation in an entirely different language. I’m really enjoying my economics class; the professor gets really into teaching the subject and the text is pretty interesting. I’m not taking any English classes while I’m here, and I really miss those. Hopefully I will not have forgotten how to write when I return to Marquette in the fall, as that would be most inconvenient.

Friday there were no classes, as usual, and so I went to L'Institut for a little while in the morning before going to the train station to buy myself a ticket from Nice to Avignon for Sunday. I was quite pleased that I was able to do so entirely in French. However, that got less exciting as the weekend went on given that I ended up buying several train tickets while speaking French. The director of l’Institut was going to Nice for the weekend, and so she offered me a ride there on Friday, which was very nice of her since I only had to buy a one-way train ticket then. The drive was beautiful, and she gave me a lot of history of the regions we drove through. Highways in France have numbers, but those numbers are hardly ever used. Instead, there are signs for the cities, so you have to know which cities you’re going through in order to get to your final destination. You can also pay with credit cards at the tollbooths, which I thought was pretty cool.

I got dropped off at the Nice train station around 5pm, and I then bought a round trip ticket to Antibes, which is where my roommate is (Second train ticket purchase in French). Unfortunately, it turns out that you have to use round trip tickets the same day (not the case on buses, which is why I bought it round trip) and so I accidentally donated €3,80 to SNCF. It’s about a 30 minute train ride to Antibes, and then I had about an hour and a half to walk around downtown until my roommate got out of classes. Antibes was remarkably more intelligent than Avignon at some point in its history and made the decision to get rid of the city walls. Apparently they left a small part of it somewhere for the charm, but they decided that perhaps city walls and streets meant for carriages weren’t conducive to modern life. It definitely looks a lot more like a modern city than Avignon does, which was a nice break after three straight weeks of antiquity. I spent most of my time peeking into several bookstores, which has become one of my favorite ways to pass time in France. I get a kick out of looking for books I read in English and seeing what they changed when translating it into French. I found a translation of one book I read in high school, and it took me a while to figure out that I had read it since they changed the names of the main characters from Remy and Dexter to Julie and Damien. The Harry Potter books are also great for finding quirks in the translation—Snape has an entirely different name, and unless my deductive reasoning skills are less than I think they are, the French word for wand is, that’s right, a baguette. I opened up Harry Potter et les Reliques du Mort to a random page, and Harry was insisting to Dumbledore that Voldemort had killed Harry with his baguette. After entertaining myself in the book stores and walking through the square at the center, I met Klare at the train station and we went back to her apartment for the night.

Saturday morning we (Klare, her two roommates, and I) got up early to go get pastries for breakfast before we left for Northern Italy. I had a delicious almond croissant. It was absolutely amazing, and I definitely didn’t regret skipping the pain au chocolat even though I still haven’t tried that. We went over to the train station to buy our tickets (third train ticket purchase in French) to Ventimiglia. The trip took about an hour, and we went through Monte Carlo before getting to Italy, which I suppose technically means I can add not just Italy, but also Monaco to the list of countries I’ve been to. The train runs right along the sea most of the time, and it was absolutely beautiful to watch. We walked around Ventimiglia for a while looking for a market that one of the girls had been to before (and looking at all the delicious pastries in every bakery window), but it wasn’t going on that day, so we decided to go ahead and go to San Remo, which Klare had heard really good things about. It was only about a ten minute train ride there, and we started exploring the city with no particular agenda.

One of the things we all noticed about Italy is the fact that people actually wear colors there. The French definitely prefer black, and just walking down a block in Ventimiglia we saw several wonderful shades of red! It also felt like it had a much cheerier atmosphere. In Avignon, the people at l’Institut tell us strictly that there is to be no smiling in the streets, because no one smiles in the streets (which is true), but in Italy there were lots of people who looked happy to be there. Everyone we encountered was also wonderful about the language barrier. I was a little worried about going to Italy where all I knew was ‘grazie’. However, all the people were fantastic about it, and no one got upset when I accidentally responded in French or when we had to resort to pointing to get our message across. There was also some sort of festival going on for Carnival and Mardi Gras, so all the little kids were dressed up in costumes, which was really fun to see.

We did a lot of wandering around San Remo before we found a pizzeria where we very fittingly had pizza in Italy—it was delicious! The waiter spoke broken French, so we communicated through that and pointing, as well as a few key words some of the girls knew from Spanish. We did some shopping at a story that had a ton of sales (I got two shirts and a sweater for €14), then walked down by the sea for a while before stopping to get some gelato. The gelato was absolutely amazing, and I thoroughly enjoyed it even though it wasn’t remotely healthy (I bought an apple later out of my guilt). We found some really cool gardens in San Remo as well. They had a lot of palm trees and cacti, which made me feel like I was in a different world. I still can’t get over the shock of seeing flowers in bloom in February. Our train back to Ventimiglia had compartments we could take for ourselves with closing doors, which was quite the novelty. We spent another hour or so walking around Ventimiglia (where I successfully managed to avoid buying a chocolate cannoli). The big highlight of that time was figuring out where to get our passport stamped. We were pretty sure that the people at the ticket booths didn’t speak English, but we really didn’t want to leave Italy without getting a stamp in our passports to prove that we’d been there. The other girls decided I would be elected to go ask where we could get our tickets stamped (since I was the only one who knew French), and the guy told us he could stamp them. I’m sure he was wondering why the crazy girls were so excited about a passport stamp, but it sure made our day!

After arriving back in Antibes, we decided to attempt making croissants, so we did a run to the grocery store by their apartment. It was by far the biggest grocery store I’ve seen since coming to France, and I had a blast looking around at everything. We decided that we were going to make the croissants more like pain au chocolat by buying chocolate to stuff in them. We bought the cheapest generic chocolate we could find, and it was still absolutely delicious. Making the croissants was considerably harder than we’d anticipated, partially because the recipe was using US measurements, and we were only able to measure using the metric system—and not even that accurately then, since we didn’t have anything that would measure less than 200 grams. After using two calculators and making one phone call to the US to have someone there look up the conversion online, we finally guesstimated enough to form the dough. Unfortunately, the work was far from over as we had to roll it out several times, then fold it up, then let it rest for 30 minutes, then repeat. We decided to just refrigerate it overnight a little before midnight because we were too tired to keep going. This might have been a bad decision, but we probably made so many mistakes that it can’t all be blamed on that decision. When I got up this morning I rolled the dough out one more time and then shaped the croissants while filling them with chocolate before letting them rise. They didn’t rise as much as they were supposed to, which suggested that perhaps we didn’t put enough yeast in (or maybe we put in too much flour…or too much butter…or not enough salt…). After baking, we discovered that they definitely were not as fluffy as normal croissants are, though we had achieved the layered quality on the inside. The moral of the story: when in doubt of your baking abilities, just stuff the pastries with chocolate and they’ll always taste good.

Today (Sunday) I took the train back to Nice and hung out there for about an hour and a half until my train left for Avignon. I walked around the city for a little while, but there wasn’t a lot to see since pretty much everything shuts down in France on Sundays. The only restaurants open were McDonalds and KFC, and it seemed to me that most of the people in the train station were speaking English. I had a seat next to the ticket window for a while, and listening to everyone check to make sure the vendor spoke English made me feel much better about my ability to speak French. I might have an accent that they don’t appreciate, and I might make plenty of mistakes, but at least I can get my message across. The train ride back to Avignon was uneventful, and I then took a bus into the city and a taxi to my house (the buses to my house don’t run Sundays, but I get about €10 a week from L’Institut to use for taxi rides). Despite the fact that I’d eaten far too much junk over the weekend and I really didn’t ever want to look at food again, Mireille set out the following for dinner: An entire quiche Lorraine, a beef and carrot stew, pea soup, rice, bread, and cheese. This struck me as a lot of food for two people, and she then informed me that she wasn’t at all hungry, so I should just eat whatever I wanted, and that there was some chocolate mousse for me in the fridge. I have a theory that she’s trying to fatten me up Hansel and Gretel style, and thus I’ll be heading to the gym tomorrow morning after my first class in an attempt to counter that. Mireille’s incredibly sweet, but if I ate everything she offered me I’d have to go buy all new clothing to fit me.

I don’t have any big plans for this week, though I do want to do some shopping on Friday before the ‘soldes’ end. The soldes are big sales that last until next Saturday, and most stores have things up to 70% off, so I figure this is my chance to buy things in France without going broke. I have mid terms next week, which won’t be a whole lot of fun, but after that I get to leave for London and Wales for my first break. I’m really looking forward to that, especially since I had such a blast traveling today. And best of all, a land where they speak English!