I’m going to start this with some very, very sad news. Last Friday Le Monde’s front page headline was that the US dollar is at its lowest point ever against the Euro. It got up to $1.52 to €1. Just in time for me to buy my train tickets to Rome! The only upside any study abroad student has been able to come up with is that it is now easier to do the math from the dollar to the euro in your head than it was when it was $1.40 to €1. I’m torn between not withdrawing any money until the exchange rate gets better or withdrawing tons of money and assuming that the exchange rate is going to get worse. If I could find a nice economist to predict for me what’s going to happen over the next two months, I would really appreciate it! One guy at the Institute took out €500 at Christmas (he was here last semester), and I’m quite envious thinking of how much he saved by taking it out then. As it is, I’ve put myself on a strict budget of €10 a week, which means my lunches have not been very exciting. It crossed my mind that if I stopped going to the gym and going on runs, I could probably stop eating lunch altogether, but I decided that I’d rather work out. I splurged on a container of honey that was €4 (I couldn’t find any that was cheaper!), but I’m hoping it’ll last me a while, and it tastes delicious with Greek yogurt. My daily lunches thus contain the following: One apple, a Greek yogurt with honey, and some walnut bread. Perhaps if the exchange rate gets better I can go back to some indulgent food—say, a turkey sandwich.
My friend and I realized today that this coming Wednesday is going to be the half-way point of our semester, which is weird to think about. I don’t feel like I’ve been here for long at all, and there are so many things that are going to happen (LOTS of traveling) in the remaining weeks that I feel like there’s still quite a bit of time left. However, I realized that not including this weekend, I only have one open weekend left between now and the weekend before finals, and that’s next weekend. Next Friday we have a tour of the Palais de Papes. I’ve really wanted to see the inside ever since I got here, so I’m really looking forward to finally doing that. I also found out this week that I’ll be adding a trip to Paris to my agenda. Originally I was going to wait until my flight left to stay there, since my flight leaves from Charles de Gaulle, but I found out that one of my friends from MU will be there the weekend after Easter, so I decided to go then so that I can see him, as well as another girl from MU who’s studying there for the semester. Within three consecutive weeks, I’ll be in Rome, Paris, and Norway, so that’s going to be quite a bit of traveling, but I’m really looking forward to it.
This week in general was pretty calm. It was my first week without my Political Science class, and I enjoyed it immensely! Dropping that class was quite possibly the best decision I’ve made since deciding to spend my life savings on a semester in France. The director, who had initially okayed my decision wanted me to reconsider when she found out I’d gotten a B for my midterm grade. Apparently she thought I was dropping because I wasn’t doing well in the class, not because it was too much work for a class that wasn’t even going to help me graduate. However, I was well aware of the fact that I could do the work—I’d just rather not. And so I shall continue my semester without that class, much to my delight (and the envy of everyone still forced to take the course).
I made it to the gym twice this week—it’s much easier to just run around my neighborhood than to make the hike over to the gym, which takes a good twenty or thirty minutes from my house. I usually take the bus into the city, then drop my things at L’Institut, then jog to the gym (it takes about ten minutes). However, if the weather gets any warmer than the balmy 65 F it’s been all week (I do hope you Midwesterners are enjoying yourselves with all that snow), the gym is going to be unbearably hot. There’s no air conditioning there (there’s almost no air conditioning anywhere in France), but they have mirrors everywhere that reflect lots of sunlight and it gets really warm in there, especially when you’re working out. I much prefer running outside while I’m here. I normally hate running, but I it’s so much more interesting here, with so many more things to see. However, my knees are very, very displeased with all the running I’ve been doing, and because I’m still hoping to test senior moves next summer, I try to balance out my running with going to the gym so that my legs don’t fall off.
Friday evening I went to Les Amoureux de la scène, a performing arts competition at a theater called Le Chien qui fume (which translates as The Smoking Dog, quite an entertaining translation since smoking is no longer allowed inside any buildings in France). The last Friday of every month, they have the competition (which is FREE to attend), and at the end of the evening, people get to vote for their favorite three performances. In May, all of the performances that won that vote come back for a final competition. It was really entertaining to be there. The first group qualified itself as pop rock, but I’m not sure I’d be so kind as to dub that name to their music. They were not generally well received, and we students thought they needed to go back and be a high school band. After that, there was a theater sketch put on by a couple who called themselves Les Gnus, and it was awesome. Very, very funny, and very well acted. I really enjoyed that one—I voted for them. We then had a woman named Karen singing, though she acted more the role of an entertainer than a singer. She was also pretty enjoyable. We had another guy sing as he played the piano, and he was pretty good, as well. A band from Montreal performed after him, and they weren’t that great. The last performance was a bit of dance, circus, and theater. It was really well done, and I liked the way the incorporated the three aspects together. The results will be posted online next week, and I’m hoping that the theater sketch made it through to the final.
Saturday morning I went running with Norma, another girl from L’Institut, around the city walls. It was gorgeous outside (as it has been all week), so that was nice, and then we want back to hang out at her house for several hours. We were on the hunt for a cheap way to get to Rome for Easter, and we succeeded, finding €30 train tickets to Rome on a night train. I’m really excited that we get to take a night train there, even though the train ride takes about 11 hours, and that’s only from Nice (it’s about three hours from Avignon to Nice). However, because they’re night trains, we have essentially four full days in Rome, which is fantastic. We’ll end up missing a few classes each in order to make our schedules work with the train schedules, which I feel a bit guilty about, but I haven’t missed a class yet this semester and I think that going to Rome for Easter is a perfectly legitimate excuse.
Part of the reason I’m anxious for the traveling to begin is because I feel like I’ve seen all there is to see in Avignon. I am officially bored of the city, and once I see the Palais de Papes there will be nothing else to see. It’s hard to find cheap things to do that are also interesting, while they do exist. Also, because there are so many places I want to go I feel like I’m wasting any weekend that I just spend in the city. I’m very much looking forward to the crazy amounts of traveling I have ahead, even if it will probably completely exhaust me.
That said, I have definitely appreciated more than once that Avignon is such a small town. People in general are pretty friendly and helpful, and they get excited to meet people from other countries. At Le Chien qui fume, a woman overheard our accents and was elated that there were “les etrangèrs” there. She was with her daughter and a study abroad student from Germany who’s here for the semester as well, and it was interesting to talk to them. My taxi driver last night also wanted to hear all about the school program here and heartily approved of my decision to study in France. People are generally very excited to show off Avignon, and I like feeling welcomed. Our accents give us away—people can easily tell that we aren’t French. However, almost everyone has moved beyond being immediately taken for American. Almost no one guesses the US when they ask where we’re from. I personally am usually taken to be English or Australian, for reasons beyond my understanding.
The rest of my weekend was fairly boring—finished up some homework, read Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants in one sitting, which was excellent, and generally looked forward to more traveling, starting in two weeks! The weather here has been unbelievable, making it to the mid-sixties every day this week. It’s hard to believe that there was weather like that in February, and now that it’s officially March, it seems just as bizarre compared to what I’m used to at home. The down side of this (and yes, there is a downside) is that I have noticed over the past few days mosquitoes. I’m less than pleased about that development, though I think I’d still take this weather and mosquitoes over the ten feet of snow at Marquette right now.
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