Going to Norway and Eating Bread

First, I want to share (partager, if you will) some facts about Norway that I have researched upon my return that I think will put some aspects of my visit in perspective. The cost of life in Norway is 30% more expensive than in the US, and 25% more expensive than in the UK. The minimum wage per hour is the equivalent of $18, the unemployment rate is 1.7%, and 99% of the population can read and write (as President Bartlet would say, either that or they could also just be really bad at math).

Now, my personal experience there. I left the evening of Friday the fourth with my friend Alison from l’Institut. It took us several vehicles to finally arrive in Oslo (Bus for me into centre ville, train that we very nearly missed because it was at a hidden platform to Marseille, bus to the Marseille airport, plane to Norway, bus to central Oslo). I was very excited to see snow on the bus ride to central Oslo, since I hadn’t seen any since I left the US in January—very odd, considering I usually see several feet appear from January to April. In Oslo, we were staying at a place I found advertised on a B&B website, but it was essentially just a room in his apartment that a guy (Terje) was renting out. It has a fantastic location and fantastic view of Oslo, plus he lets you share the kitchen, which is an excellent way to save money. We were a little worried about whether or not he’d try to kill us, but he showed up at the bus terminal to direct us to his house and was in general quite nice. The best part was that since we were splitting the 300 krone cost between us, it came out to approximately $28 a night. Beautiful.

Saturday morning we got up pretty early, giving ourselves plenty of time to get lost as we attempted to find our plans for the day (we’d blocked out almost our entire week). Our first search was for breakfast, and we decided to stop at the first familiar place we saw: a 7-11! We thought it was hysterical that they existed in Norway. We bought the cheapest muffins they had, which were 18 krone, or about $4. They were disgusting. I couldn’t finish mine, it was so gross. Also, since when does anything at 7-11 cost $4? Norway is expensive. This is going to be a recurring theme in my analysis. We then set off for Karl Johannsgate, the main street in Oslo. We were hoping to find the Storting, the house of Parliament there, with plenty of time to make their 9:30am tour, and we actually arrived early after getting sworn at in English by a creepy guy on a creepy street. Since we had a half hour to kill, we went down to see the Palace, which is where their king lives. Their king is only the third king that Norway has had since becoming an independent country in 1905, and he was actually elected to power. However, his number is VII or something even though there have only been three kings (whose rule was split up by the Nazi invasion) because the kings took the names of Norwegian kings from the Middle Ages (This is your warning: the following paragraph is going to consist of essentially a Norwegian history lesson).

After watching the guards marching around to keep out any invading tribes, he headed back to the Storting, where there was a free tour of the building by an art historian. She was able to give a lot of really interesting information about the history of the portraits, murals, mosaics, and architecture of the building, as well as a brief history of Norway which I will now share with you just to show how much they educated me in the span of 40 minutes. After the Middle Ages, Norway spent almost 1000 years under the power of other countries. They were in a variety of unions against their will, the most important of which was a union with Denmark. This union greatly shaped the dominant Norwegian language so that it is in fact written exactly the same as Danish, with just a different pronunciation. During the Napoleonic wars, Denmark sided with Napoleon, and as he lost, Denmark was forced to give up Norway to Sweden (who was on the winning side) in 1815. Though Norway became its own country in 1905, it was this change in 1815 that really changed the way of life for Norwegians, who became almost autonomous. The union with Sweden was much friendlier, and it was finally dissolved formally in 1905, though Sweden hadn’t had any real power over Norway for some time. One important means of establishing their own independent rule was the declaring of Nynorsk as the second official language of the country (the first is Bykmal or something like that). Nynorsk is a combination of various regional dialects, but it is also a language that wasn’t shaped so much by Danish, so that was an important step for Norway. Anyway, the tour of the Storting was fascinating, and I really enjoyed seeing the inside of it. And yay for it being free!

After our trip to learn about the history of Norwegian politics, we started off for the Henrik Ibsen Museum. Ibsen was a Norwegian who wrote, among other things, a play called The Doll’s House which I read in AP Lit and absolutely adored. Unfortunately, it turns out that our tour guides had lied to us and the museum was not in fact open at 11, and it rather opened at 12. Thus, we headed off in search of lunch to occupy ourselves for an hour in the area. Finding lunch proved to be difficult, and we finally found a place that resembled a grocery store (we were in the downtown area, so they were sparse), where we bought ourselves some sort of potato tortillas (called lomper), a cheese spread to have with that, and some grapes. This came out to 67 krone total, which is about $13. Ouch. It was better tasting than breakfast, though, so that was something. After we finished eating, we went back to the Ibsen Museum, which was a really good time. In honor of his 100^th birthday, they refurbished the apartment where he used to live to the way it was when he was there. That was interesting to see, though also rather morbid—“This is the bed where he died! This is the chair where Susannah died!” I much preferred the rest of the exhibition, which was a fantastic analysis of his works. It really was almost at the level of literary criticism, analyzing the societal trends and reactions to his work. My English-majory self very much appreciated that.

Upon leaving the Ibsen Museum, we set off for Akershus fortress, a fortress and castle in Oslo that dates back to the 1300s, when it was strategically placed on a hill facing the Oslo harbor. They have lots of guards there that march around dramatically, which is pretty entertaining, and it’s really neat to walk around and see all the old walls and buildings. They offer tours of the castle on Thursdays, but alas, we were not going to be there on a Thursday, so that was out of the question (plus you had to pay for those). It was really nice out, probably about 55, and still sunny. Because the fortress was on top of a hill, you got a gorgeous view of the Oslofjord, which is not a real fjord (according to Alison and I). It’s just where water meets land. The real fjords are out west. After walking around there for a while, we started walking back to our apartment for the night. We were on the lookout for food that we could prepare, so we bought some spaghetti, tomatoes, zucchini, and apples to eat for dinner. We stopped at another grocery store on our way back since we hadn’t found anything we could eat at breakfast the next morning at the first store (which was more like a market). There we stumbled across a 1 kilogram bag of granola for only 12 krone (a bit over $2), which was an excellent find, and we also (after lots of staring blankly at the windows of the refrigerated section) found skim milk, or rather, ‘skummelk’. I was excited to see that it was both refrigerated and skim, and eagerly awaited breakfast the next morning. Dinner was nothing special as I’m sure you can tell from the products we bought, but it was at least food.

Breakfast the next morning revealed that Norwegian skim milk, while a significant improvement over the French UHT stuff, is not quite on the level of American/British skim milk. Our second day in Oslo was significantly less productive than the first: we simply went to the National Gallery, an art museum. However, this is a pretty darn impressive art museum. It has Edvard Munch’s “The Scream”, which I was excited to see since I’d recreated it in art class as a child. It also had a lot of his other works, including two pictures painted eight years apart of his sister Inger. I had a lot of fun comparing those, given that I have an obsession with all things time-related, largely due to another obsession with post-colonialist literature. They had a fantastic display of Norwegian landscapes that were absolutely incredible. I adore landscapes (they were the only things I was ever able to draw well), and I adore anything with mountains in it, so I really liked those. They also had a random room of impressionist paintings, which took me by surprise. They had some early Paul Gauguin’s and Degas’, as well as a few very cool Picassos. The first floor of the museum was a little harder to get into since it was entirely in Norwegian (it was a lot more landscapes), but that was also interesting.

We had hoped to go to the Vigesland Sculpture Park afterwards, but it was pouring, so instead we stopped in the National Gallery of Design for about an hour until it closed, hoping that the rain would let up. It didn’t. We decided to brave the Sculpture Park anyway, but we only made it about a half a block before turning around. We decided to just return to the apartment for the rest of the day. It was after 4pm, we still hadn’t eaten lunch, and we were far too exhausted to deal with the pouring rain. We still managed to profiter by stopping at a café on our way out and buying three Norwegian pastries called boller for 10 krone (an excellent deal). Boller are hard to describe—they aren’t all that sweet, and they’re very dense. They’re spiced with either cinnamon or cardamom, and you can get them plain, with chocolate chips, and with raisins. Our favorites were the plain or with chocolate chips, and our goal for the trip quickly became trying to eat them as often as possible. We had trouble finding an open grocery store (we needed sauce) given that it was a Sunday, and in general in Europe, nothing is open on Sunday. When I get back to the US I’m going to go grocery shopping at 11pm on a Sunday night just because I can! However, we did eventually find it, and we spent our evening watching Norwegian television.

Since we’d skipped the Vigesland Sculpture Park on Sunday, we added it to our long agenda for Monday and made it our first stop. Our two days in Oslo had taught us that the rain tends to get heavier as the day goes on, so we set off pretty early. We also walked over there, despite the fact that it was quite a hike. I really, really liked the park. The sculptures were really, really neat, and the design was incredible. I would love to live near there and be able to go running in a place like that regularly, but alas, that is not the case. We spent a lot of time there walking around and looking at all the sculptures, and I think we easily could’ve spent a whole day there were it not for the fact that we had lots of other places to get to.

There exists in Oslo a separate peninsula called Bygdøy where they have a lot of the museums that attract tourists. Normal people take a ferry that costs 30 krone each way to get over there from Central Oslo. Alison and I are not normal people. We walked. It was a fairly long walk, but I liked getting to see more of residential Oslo, and as it wasn’t yet raining too hard, we didn’t mind the walk. Our first stop over in that area was the Viking Ship Museum, where they house three ships that were buried with Vikings from the 800s to the 1200s. Those were really cool to see, and I was impressed with how well the carvings on the side of them had held up. They also had sleds, statues, cloth, and other artifacts that were buried with the ships on display. Our next stop, keeping with the ship theme, was the Fram Museum, a large part of which is taken up by the Fram, a very large ship that has been the furthest south and the furthest north of any ship in the world. They had a lot of history of both Arctic and Antarctic explorations there, which was really interesting to read about. Outside the museum they also have a ship called Gjøa, which was the first ship to successfully navigate the Northwest Passage (when captained by Amundsen). After visiting ships that had been to cold places, we moved on to the Kon-Tiki museum, which contains one ship made out of papyrus (Ra II) and a raft called the Kon-Tiki. These ships had both made explorations to warm places under the control of some guy named Thor Ican’trememberhislastname. This guy spent about a year of his life on a Pacific island with his wife, and the indigenous people there told him their ancestors had come from the East, not the West, as most archeologists always suspected. Since the archeologists told Thor this was impossible given the technology the people had at the time, Thor decided to prove him wrong by building a raft using that technology and sailing across the Pacific! A very straight-forward way of proving other people wrong. That was the Kon-Tiki. The Ra II came about when he wanted to prove that boats made out of papyrus would not, in fact, sink after 14 days of sailing, and thus the Egyptians could’ve traveled significantly further than archeologists believed. However, it is worth noting that the Ra II is the second because Ra I was dashed to pieces against some rocks. Thus, while papyrus will not necessarily sink after 14 days, it still does not make the sturdiest of boat materials.

Having departed from all of our boat-learning experiences, we decided to take the boat back to central Oslo instead of walking as it was pouring by that point. We then had some errands to run: bought some food for dinner, as well as buying as much of the food as we could manage for our trip to Flåm. We unfortunately did not have access to a kitchen there, so we were trying to save as much money as possible by living off of grocery store food. We thus bought a lot of bread, some nutella, more granola, some bananas, and some apples. We also bought tuna, but that turned out to be a terrible bust. More on that later.

Tuesday we got up early to catch our train to Flåm, which we did successfully. It was a very touristy route, largely because so many tourists go to Bergen, but also because there’s a tour called “Norway in a Nutshell” where you take a train to Myrdal, then a train to Flåm, then a boat to Bergen, then a bus back to Oslo from there. We were only going part of that route (to Flåm, only not with the tour), but we were accompanied by many people going the whole way, some of whom were sitting just across from us on the train. Within about five minutes of sitting down, there was a guy who was eagerly talking about his life for the whole world to hear, and I learned that he was not only an American, but from a Chicago suburb. He started ranting about our governor, which had me cracking up since our governor is apparently doing such a bad job that I can be on a train in Norway and hear people complaining about him. Unfortunately for me, I’d made the mistake of wearing a Chicago Skates shirt that day, and sure enough, the guy noticed and started talking to me. Figures. If I’d been wearing my Michigan Figure Skating shirt, he would’ve been a UofM alum. The countryside was absolutely gorgeous, and I loved getting to see so much of it. A lot of the train ride took us up into the mountains, and the highest point (Finse) is 1,222 meters above sea level. We changed trains before taking the Flåmsbana railroad to Flåm, which was a beautiful journey in the Flåmsdalen Valley.

We found our pension without too many problems, but unfortunately we had a hard time finding out about hikes in the region, given that the tourist office was closed. As nice as it was to be in Norway during the off season, with fewer tourists and a lot more peace, there was the slight problem of everything under the sun being closed constantly. Typical hours for anything we wanted to see were between 11am and 4pm, sometimes shorter. Grocery stores are typically closed by 5 or 6, and some banks are only open 3 days a week. Ai ya! The woman at the pension gave us a good idea for a two hour hike that we decided to do for that afternoon. There’s a bike path that goes along the fjord that you follow for 4 kilometers, and then you climb up to this old farm called Ottesen, which has been a farm for over a thousand years. From what we saw, it’s quite the tourist attraction in the summer, but given that we were there in winter, there were only some newly-sheared sheep to greet us. It had a fantastic view of the valley, and we enjoyed staying there for a bit. We then went back for our gourmet dinner of tuna and pita. Unfortunately, there was a problem with the tuna. It was gelled. Who gels tuna? To what purpose? YUCK. We were not fans. I ended up eating an apple, a banana, and nutella after choking down some tuna. Alison and I found it a bit ironic that we got fantastic fruit the whole time we were in Norway, but the one time we bought fish, it was a disaster.

Wednesday was long. We got up early to walk to the next town over, Aurland, where supposedly there was another tourist office. We followed the bike path for the first 4 kilometers, and there was another path for the last 1 kilometer, we had to walk on the shoulder of the road, which was quite nerve-wracking. We were quite pleased that we didn’t get hit, as that would’ve been a downer for the trip. There is a ferry that goes between the two towns, but it only goes twice a day, and it’s 310 krone round trip ($60). Thus, as was the theme for the trip, we walked! It was a gorgeous walk, and it turned out to be quite successful, since the tourist office in Aurland was open, and the lady there gave us lots of information about hikes. We decided to set off on a 6-hour one, which was described as “fairly easy, some hills”. Just for the record, if you’re ever translating Norwegian into Midwestern English, “some hills” translates as “scaling the side of a mountain”. Okay, so maybe it wasn’t that bad, but we were definitely going straight uphill for the first 4 hours, and that, for me, is not what “some hills” signifies. Nevertheless, we were both in pretty good shape, so we were able to enjoy it. The path went along a waterfall, so there was a lot of stream-hopping going on (Don’t worry, Anna, Nicole, and Gayle, I’m sure there’ll be streams left for us to hop when I return). We stopped for lunch around 1 o’clock, then kept ascending. We were very excited at the first site of snow we had, but as we kept getting further and further up, more and more of it appeared, and it was definitely not a novelty by the end of the hike. The path linked up with a road for a little while, which we followed. Eventually the lady had told us that it would split off again to another path that goes up to Mount Prest, but she warned us that there might still be snow there. Ha. We actually paused just at that point to take a picture of me with snow—snow that went over my head. Ergo, no summiting Mount Prest, but we kept following the road up through some cute towns. I told Alison I wanted to interview the people and write a book about them, so “if they could appear now speaking fluent English and dressed in traditional Norwegian regalia, that would be fantastic.” Unfortunately, it was not to be—I think that the towns might’ve been mostly for summer houses, which is disappointing. We finally turned around at 3 and headed straight down the road back to Aurland instead of retracing our steps, which allowed us to get a really good view of the fjord. We stopped and bought ourselves yogurt to have for dinner (yay! Food that had been refrigerated!), then walked another 8 kilometers back to Flåm. It’s worth noting that the 16 kilometers just from Flåm to Aurland comes out to just under ten miles, and that was only about 3 hours of our ten hour day. I have no idea what we walked the rest of the time, but I think it’s safe to say we got in over 20 miles that day. Exhausting. We slept ten hours that night.

Thursday we decided to hike back into the Flåmsdalen Valley instead of into the fjord, which turned out to be a really nice hike, as well. We walked through some really cute little towns, saw some adorable Norwegian preschoolers, and then found the path for the hike. This was once again all uphill, but it was along a dirt road, as opposed to a very overgrown path, so it was a little easier. However, we once more ran into the problem of snow. They kept the snow plowed up to a certain point, but after going for about three hours, we hit solid snow on the path. We kept walking on it for a while, but it was pretty steep and we only had gym shoes on, so we were not well equipped for climbing it. We paused for a bit to admire the view before beginning our descent—on our way down, we saw a woman doing the same path we’d come up on, only she had cross country skis. I told Alison that if we’d had skis instead of gym shoes, we definitely could’ve kept going. Once we got back down to sea level, we followed the river further back into the valley for about an hour and a half, just taking in some more beautiful sights. We returned that evening after only 8 hours of hiking (not much compared to the day before), and we ate ramen for dinner. It was actually really exciting to have warm food after eating so much bread. Slept another ten hours Thursday night.

We didn’t have to leave Flåm until 5pm on Friday, so we set out hiking again that morning. One of the suggested paths took us up to Ottesen Farm again, and then went from there to Aurland. We decided to do that hike and then pair it with a short two-hour hike that started and ended in Aurland. Unfortunately, our plans were foiled when the path from Ottesen Farm turned out to be not one path, but rather a good dozen that intersected and veered off regularly. Apparently at one of the many intersections, we took the wrong path, and our path eventually faded into nothingness. We were never lost, since we could always hear the road we were walking parallel to, but we definitely did not know where to descend. We ended up forging our own path down a very steep slope, essentially skiing/sledding, minus the ski, the sleds, and with moss replacing the snow. It was insanity. We finally made it down to the road to discover that we hadn’t even made it the 4 kilometers from Ottesen to Aurland—we still had another kilometer to go, and we’d been hiking for almost three hours (it was supposed to be a 1.5 hour hike). Thus, we decided we’d have to cancel the second hike, and instead we ate lunch in Aurland, bought more yogurt that we could eat for dinner, and then walked back to Flåm on the side of the road again since we were not feeling up to another wilderness adventure. In total, only 5 hours of hiking on Friday, so that was a very light day. We spent our time in Flåm browsing through the gift shops that are open two whole hours a day, which were ridiculously out of our price range—I thought it might be nice to bring a Norway deck of cards home. Ha. It was the equivalent of $12. Love Nerts though I do, no deck of cards is worth that much. We also browsed through the Flåm grocery store (we’d been frequenting the Aurland store) and found it entertaining, though inferior to Aurland’s stores. We caught our trains back to Oslo okay, did not meet anyone complaining about either of our governor’s on the ride home, and found our hostel quite quickly. We crashed as soon as we got there—we’d been going to sleep around 9:30 in Flåm, and given that it was 11:30 when we got into Oslo, it was way past our bedtime.

Our last day in Oslo it was alternating between snow and rain. Not super fantastic weather. We went to City Hall in the morning, which is where they give out the Nobel Prizes. They have some fantastic murals on all the walls that I really liked seeing. The murals were all very touched by the WWII experience in Norway, since the contest to paint the murals was initiated in 1936, then canceled when the Nazis took power and imprisoned many of the top artists in the country. It wasn’t until after the end of WWII that the decoration of the city hall was able to continue as planned. After going outside and discovering that no, the rain had not stopped, and yes, it was definitely snow by this point, we walked over to the Modern Art museum. I didn’t like the museum as much as the National Gallery, but they did have some really interesting things there. However, our general conclusion was that modern art was exhausting, and we were wiped out after our trip there. We left there to get our stuff together to leave, which was insanity in and of itself, but we made it out of there.

So that was Norway! Last week was a bit crazy with all the papers, but thankfully that has ended. This weekend we went on an excursion to Carpentras where we got to see an artisan candy producer make berlingots, which was pretty cool. We also went to a wine tasting, and I tried a specialty wine called Muscat that was de-licious. It was a bit pricey, so I didn’t buy any, but if you find yourself in Provence any time, you should definitely try this. Saturday evening one of the girls from school threw a party in her hosts’ theater, which was fun. There were essentially two groups: one group smoking and drinking, and one group drinking a little and mostly just dancing around to the Frank Sinatra music. I was in the second group—we had an excellent time.

Today (Sunday) I went on a picnic with some friends at Jardin de Doms, a garden that has a gorgeous view of the region. We walked around there for a bit after eating, then split up when rain started to threaten. I have to walk in and out of the city center on Sundays or if it’s after 7:30pm, which is a pain, and I definitely got caught in the rain during my 40-minute walk back home. It is still raining as I write this, but I’m really hoping the rain chills out, because a bunch of people are getting together to play cards and make crepes tonight, and it would be so much easier to walk there as opposed to taking a taxi there and back. I miss having public transportation 24/7. No Euchre players (sadly), but supposedly everyone is a really big fan of a game called Jungle Speed, which is apparently in the Spoons family of card games. I’m hoping that it’s something like Stresser, but we will see.

No big plans for the following week. Some friends and I are hoping to climb Mount Ventoux, the largest mountain in the region next weekend, but we have to find someone to drive us to the base of the mountain since there aren’t any buses that go there. It’s the last week of classes, which is good, because I’m sick of pretty much every class I’m in, but it’s also sad because I don’t feel like going home. Finals are the week after next—I’m not too worried about them. After that, my mom and grandma are flying into Barcelona, and I’m taking a bus over there to meet up with them. We’ll work our way back to Avignon, and then I have approximately a day and a half to myself the 11^th and 12^th of May before I leave to get back to the States. *sniff* I don't want to go back to the real world!

No Norway just yet

I lied. I'm not yet finished working on my Norway entry (I had 15 pages of French to write for this week!), but hopefully I'll get that up on Monday.

Until then, Norway photos can be found here:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2010693&l=52103&id=1158900089

and here:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2010694&l=2e023&id=1158900089

Lots of details to come next week once I've finished the entry!

Paris!

I apologize for the delays on the Parisian news. I’ve received many complaints, but I do from time to time have to do homework and thus the blog takes second place.

Pictures from Paris can be found here:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2010535&l=89cec&id=1158900089

And here:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2010536&l=3314b&id=1158900089

First of all, I would like to open this entry by saying that I’m refusing to come home. I’ve decided I like it here even if there isn’t skim milk, and I’m not sure I can give up having a new adventure every weekend, even for skim milk. Thus, I’d like to extend a blanket invitation to everyone to come visit me, since I won’t be back. Please bring plain M&Ms, the Italian M&Ms I bought taste weird. What would be ideal is just going home for a week—long enough to eat some M&Ms, drink some skim milk, speak some English, and pick up my skates—and then return here to benefit from the warm weather, amazing bread, and general French-ness.

This past weekend’s adventure was Paris! All I’d seen of the city before today was the airport, which was—well—an airport. Thus, I was quite excited to get a chance to actually see the city. Mireille gave me a ride to the train station early Friday morning, which was nice, since I didn’t have to take a taxi that way. No one was seated next to me on the train, which I liked, and it was a quick ride, just over two and a half hours. I’d purposely picked a TGV that didn’t have any stops between Avignon and Paris. Once I arrived, I was led around in circles by the signs in Gare de Lyon who were giving me very different instructions about how to get to Line 1 of the Metro. They led me in the completely wrong direction, and thus I had to wander around in circles for a good fifteen minutes before I finally found it. However, once I did find the stop I was looking for, I managed to purchase my ticket, select directions, and get off at the correct stop without any problems. I was most proud of myself for that. Once I got off at Tuilieres (I made it off at the correct, stop, too!) I took about three steps in what I thought was the right direction before realizing that I was walking towards the Louvre, not away from it, so I quickly turned around and due to the prominence of street signs (compared to street signs in Rome, anyway) I found my way to the hotel quite quickly. I was surprised that I didn’t get more lost, but I’m not going to question my luck—instead I’ll be grateful for it.

The hotel was lovely, despite my inability to understand the concierge (three times in a row) when he was welcoming me there in French. I’ll choose to blame it on the fact that he was talking too softly and with a Parisian accent rather than accepting the fact that I still, from time to time, have trouble understanding French. However, the hotel did have an endless supply of free marshmallows and gummy bears, which I certainly enjoyed. One of my friends (Paul) from Marquette was flying in to Paris for the weekend, and he got in just a little bit after I arrived. We set off pretty soon for lunch at Place de la Madeline, where we had yummy sandwiches and Madelines, which are delicious pastries. I had a caramel one—it was caramel flavored, with a little bit of caramel in the middle of it. Quite good. We walked around Place de la Madeline for a while, and peeked in the church in the middle of it, which was gorgeous. Then we started walking towards Place de la Concorde, another gorgeous plaza with a giant obelisk stolen from ancient Egypt. I believe my friend Paul has memorized the ancient history of the entire world, so please feel free to ask him for the details and he will give them willingly.

After Place de la Concorde, we started to walk towards the Champs Elysées. It was at this point that my luck started to go its usual way and the rain came along. We stopped briefly at Monoprix to purchase umbrellas and postcards (We had only one for three of us and that one broke rather rapidly), then continued on our way towards l’Arc de Triomphe. It thankfully stopped raining briefly at l’Arc de Triomphe, and I liked getting to see that. I risked my life taking a picture of it from the middle of the street, but I made it out alive. We walked back down the other side of the Champs Elysées and stopped at what was called a drug store but was really like a department store. I had fun browsing around the book section (no surprise) and a huge selection of newspapers, but alas, there was no Chicago Tribune. Upon exiting, we saw that the rain had started up again, and thus, our leisurely walk through Tuilieres Gardens was…less than leisurely. More like trying to avoid being drowned to death, really, since there were puddles everywhere. Nevertheless, it was fun to see

After arriving at the Louvre, Paul’s brother went with their parents and we met up with Sarah (a friend from MU) and one of her friends, Renée. Paul worked in Paris last summer and spent much time going to the Louvre then, so he had basically internalized a map of the place and we set out on a very specific route that would allow me to see the highlights while the others (who had all been there before) could see some new things. Paul’s knowledge of all things ancient came in handy once again as we received a monologue on why Venus de Milo should actually be called Aphrodite (Greek, not Roman), and another one on why the Middle Egyptian kingdom is inferior to the other kingdoms. Sadly a floor with a lot of the paintings was blocked off (boo), but we did get to see some that I really liked, including one of Pont du Gard that was super awesome because I’ve actually seen Pont du Guard. I did see the Mona Lisa, though I really just wanted to see it because I played a Louvre computer game when I was about 6 at a friend’s house that always opened with that picture, so I felt as though it was necessary.

After our tour of the Louvre was complete and a brief stop at the gift shop, we went to meet up with Paul’s family for dinner, which was quite delicious. Dessert was even more delicious—I cannot remember the name of what I ordered, but it was a bread-like pastry sandwich with ice cream in the middle and chocolate sauce all over it. Yummy. We walked back to the hotel from there, and I fell asleep quite quickly (though I was awakened at 6:30 am by a wake-up call sent to the wrong room. Boo). I meet Paul’s family for breakfast, and we started to make plans for the day.

Saturday morning someone made a surprise appearance: the sun! I was beginning to think that the sun simply didn’t exist outside of Provence, but apparently it does from time to time make appearances elsewhere. We walked over to Notre Dame, and thus got to see the Louvre in the sun (much nicer than in the pouring rain). Notre Dame was beautiful, and it was at this point that I started to make plans for what I would do with all of the buildings in Paris once I take over the world. I like the idea of using all of the gorgeous ones for my personal use. We looked around Notre Dame a bit, then went inside to look at everything in there. It was beautiful to see everything inside, though I think the outside was a bit more impressive. There was a mass going on while we were there, and I think that it must be rather distracting to attend a mass with swarms of tourists around. After looking at the inside, we got in line to climb up to the top of it, which I was really excited about. We waited in line about a half hour before we were able to get in. They very cleverly force you to wait in the gift show until you’re allowed to start climbing, which is certainly one method to boost sales. The climb up wasn’t too difficult, but it felt very circular and I start to get rather dizzy. The view from the top, however, was beautiful. I’m so glad that it was sunny then, because Paris looked gorgeous.

I successfully managed to not fall down the steps on our way out (it felt very steep) and after walking around the building to appreciate it further, we set out for lunch, which was then followed by delicious Berthillon ice cream. I had chocolate and caramel, and the caramel was amazing. Caramel served me well during my trip to Paris—caramel Madelines and caramel ice cream. From there, we took the Metro to the something Galleries, a HUGE mall. At one point in the store they have this beautiful dome. It’s entertaining to see essentially a shopping mall housed in such an architecturally gorgeous building. We browsed around there for a bit before walking back towards the hotel with another stop at Place de la Madeline so that I could purchase another Madeline pastry. I relaxed (I was rather exhausted) at the hotel for a few hours before dinner, which was also quite delicious. At one point when we had too many questions about the desserts, the server brought all the desserts out in front of us and set them all on the table. We weren’t sure if we were supposed to just start eating everything, but it was entertaining to see all the dessert in the restaurant spread out on our table.

After dinner, we took a taxi ride tour of all the monuments at night, which was absolutely beautiful. It was still clear (yay!) so we could see everything. The Eiffel Tower was lit up (apparently they only added lights to it in the year 2000), and everything was gorgeous. We also got to see the building where they imprisoned Marie Antoinette, and after seeing both that and the Tower of London I cannot help but think that American prisons need to start looking more impressive if they’re to stand up to the French and British prisons. We arrived back at the hotel, then I set out to meet up with Sarah again in hopes of going out dancing. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find a place where people were actually dancing, and most of Sarah’s friends decided to just go out drinking, something that didn’t interest me at all. And thus I headed back to the hotel, but at least I can claim that I’ve had a taste of the Paris nightlife.

The next morning I ate breakfast with Paul’s family again, and then I checked out of the hotel. I took the Metro over to meet up with Sarah at a market she likes to frequent, and that was definitely fun to see. I’m a bit jealous of all the fresh fruit and vegetables they can get all in one place—it’s a little more complicated in Avignon. We spent about an hour walking around there, then we walked over to the Eiffel Tower, which I still hadn’t seen close up. By this point, of course, it was pouring rain again. This rain thing is getting a little bit old. I decided that I didn’t really need to go up to the top—if it had been sunny, I would’ve enjoyed it, but given the miserable weather, I decided it wasn’t worth it. We walked around the gardens behind it for a while, then took a train to the Latin Quarter so that I could walk around there for a little while. I enjoyed that, and then we went back to the Berthillon ice cream place. I am nothing if not a creature of habit, even if I only get 3 days in one city. We then took the Metro to the Gare de Lyon so that I could take my train back to Avignon. They’d had a first class ticket that was the same price as a second class ticket, so I rode first class for the first time in my life. It wasn’t as exciting as I’d hoped, though I did get a seat by myself, which was nice. I unfortunately left my umbrella on the train, so if it rains again in the next month (and it will, I have no doubt) I’m in trouble. Nevertheless, I adored Paris and when I take over the world it shall be my capital (Chicago can be the second city).

However, one thing that really stuck out to me in Paris was how many people spoke English there. It definitely made me glad that I’d chosen to study in Avignon. In Paris, as soon as people realized I had an accent they started talking to me in English, while in Avignon there simply aren’t enough people who know English for that to happen. Southern France is definitely the place to go if you want to get a chance to use your French.

I leave this Friday for Oslo and Flam. Snow (!!) is in the forecast (for EVERY DAY that I’m in Oslo), which has my friend and I pretty excited—we’re both Midwestern girls who haven’t seen snow since we left. Those of you who have experienced the Midwest winter of late may not understand this desire. However, I was also delighted to see that the sun rises at 6:30am and sets at 8pm, which is fantastic—nice long days. I’ll be in Norway until the 12^th/13^thish (I arrive very very late on the 12^th and probably won’t get home until early on the 13^th), but when I return you can expect to hear about all of that. I make no guarantees about when you’ll hear about Norway, since I have five lovely papers due the first week back (yuck), but at some point by Friday the 18^th there should be an update.

Roman in the Rain

Pictures from Baux de Provence (last weekend) can be found here:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2010307&l=f2955&id=1158900089

Pictures from Rome (this weekend) can be found here:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2010423&l=d34b6&id=1158900089

It is 3 PM on Easter Day, and in the past 32 hours I have slept one half hour. Thus, it is entirely possible that absolutely nothing I say here will make any sense at all. Also, given my state of exhaustion and simultaneous crankiness, this entire entry may come out very bitterly. I will be sure to edit it tomorrow after I sleep a lot (I’m going to bed immediately following supper, and no one can stop me) and gain some perspective. The last time I went without sleep for this much time was when I first arrived in France, and then it wasn’t even that long because of the time change.

I lucked out when I went to England. I was in the rainiest city in the UK (Swansea), and I had sun the whole time I was there. It drizzled one night in Bath after we were already in for the night, but I made it through my time in England with spectacular weather. Clearly, the weather gods had it in for me as I headed for Rome this week. My friend Norma and I had been following the weather for several weeks ahead of time, and though we held out hope for change, it always seemed to forecast rain for the two days we would spend in Rome. And oh, my, did it ever.

We left Avignon Thursday afternoon after packing sandwiches to bring along for dinner. The train ride to Nice was uneventful—I made friends with the woman next to me, who gave me her trashy magazine to read when she was done. I was glad for the mindless entertainment, and I was amazed that I understood almost the entire magazine. Apparently poring over Capitalisme Contre Capitalisme or translating policier (thriller/mystery novels) into English or reading Jacqueline Remy’s essays on what it means to be French have actually improved my vocabulary. I hadn’t realized that l’Institut was doing this, but they have very sneakily been making the vocabulary and work more challenging as time goes on so that we don’t realize we’ve learned anything until we try and read trashy French magazines. We had about two hours in Nice, during which we searched (unsuccessfully) for bathrooms, ate our dinner, and decided that the Nice train station was really not our favorite in the world. It looked considerably nicer upon our return, however, when the presence of French and blue skies won us over.

Our train ride from Nice to Rome was, in a word, long. It was a 12 and a half hour ride, and the Italian trains are definitely not as nice as the French TGV trains that we’ve all gotten spoiled by. Our tickets there were only €15 (€40 for the trip back), so taking the train was clearly cheaper than taking a plane, but I definitely figured out why it was so much cheaper: no one with enough money to fly would’ve considered it. More maddening was the fact that the train ride could’ve been cut down to approximately 8 hours if the train had been going TGV speed or even train normale speed (the normal speed in France), and if the train hadn’t stopped for up to an hour at various train stations. Norma and I developed a little bit of a French superiority complex while in Italy—ironic considering that last time I went to Italy I was convinced that everything Italian was better than anything French. I think it all depends on the weather. We shared a compartment with another group of American girls and one Italian guy. The other girls slept almost the entire train ride, and I was quite jealous. The Italian guy seemed a little sketchy at first, but at one point I asked Norma in French if she had any mouchoirs (tissues). She didn’t, but the Italian guy overheard me and gave me his mouchoirs, and at that point Norma and I decided he was a good guy. I probably slept about 4 or 5 hours total, but they were definitely not consecutive hours, never more than an hour and a half at a time.

When we finally arrived in Rome, we wanted to dance upon getting off the train, but instead opted for wandering around lost for about 40 minutes as we attempted to find our Bed and Breakfast. Turns out the map I’d printed off from the website mistakenly made the street look like it was North-South instead of East-West, so after pulling out a map from a guide book that another girl had lent to us, we finally found it. The B&B was quite nice, quite clean, with lots of chocolates around for us to eat, but one small problem: the owner spoke no English. First thing I do upon getting internet on Tuesday is review it online and say that the claim that the owners know English is a lie. Norma’s taken two years of college Italian, so she was able to communicate, but she just as easily could’ve not spoken Italian, and then we would’ve been in trouble. The owner was quite nice and offered us coffee right away, but still. She didn’t speak any English.

Once we had gotten settled at the hotel, we set out on foot for the Vatican (which was on the other side of the city from our hotel). We had decided in advance that we were fine with walking most of our time there. I feel like I see a lot more of a city when I have to get around it on foot, plus we were really not in the mood to figure out a new transportation system in just two days in a language that neither of us spoke well. We found our way without getting too lost, although a general lack of street signs did make our journey complicated, and some of the streets would arbitrarily change names without any warning (or any notice on our map). Once we had found our way through the complicated part of our journey, we found a cute pizza place to stop and eat at. We were able to get delicious pizza for only €1.50 and the price made it that much more delicious (as did the fact that we hadn’t eaten in about 20 hours). After eating, we continued on our way, valiantly ignoring the darkening skies. I really loved just seeing the Vatican, and St. Peter’s square in particular was really powerful. We weren’t allowed in St. Peter’s Basilica, since they were getting ready for the Good Friday mass, but the Vatican museums were open. One random British lady tried to get us to pay some €35 for a ‘semi-private’ tour of the museums, but when she failed to give us a card or offer any other information on the tour guide besides the fact that she was “the second-best tour guide in all of Rome”, we were a bit dubious and instead paid the €8 student fee to get into the museums.

It was hard to find our way around the museums, and we ended up making a lot of decisions on where to go based on where the crowds were pushing us. I loved seeing all the artwork at first, though after about an hour everything started to look the same. However, we told ourselves that this was a good time to be inside since it had started to pour outside. We figured that this way we could get the rain over with and enjoy the rest of our time outside (ha). The Sistine Chapel was the culmination of the museums, and I really liked seeing that—it was incredible. We stopped at the Vatican post office to send some things, but discovered that the post people there are not as nice as the post people in Avignon (we keep lists in France of where people will be nice to you and where they will not be. The bank ladies are not nice at all, but the post people and the train station people are very helpful). On our way out, while paying too much attention to what was around me and no attention to what was in front of me, I managed to trip and step on my ankle sideways, which wasn’t a whole lot of fun. At first I didn’t think I’d injured it too badly, but it started hurting more the next day, and it’s bothering me quite a bit now, enough to keep me from running this morning. I don’t take well to being injured (especially when it interferes with my workouts), so I’m holding out hope that it will be miraculously cured tomorrow. Even though I was holding out that hope last night, too.

While in line to get into the museum, we’d seen a gelato place called Old Bridge that was recommended to us by my cousin who was in Rome for a semester last year. If she’s reading this right now, thank you very much for the recommendation, Erin, we absolutely loved it and went back again the next day. The rain had let up a bit by this point, but the temperature had dropped (plus we had just eaten a bunch of gelato), so we decided to head back to the hotel and put on some warmer clothes. It started raining again during our walk back, and when we left again to go to Trevi fountain, it was pouring. I’m sure Trevi fountain was quite nice, but my feet were soaking wet and we were just a little bit miserable from the pouring rain. Norma and I joked that we probably wouldn’t recognize anything in Rome if we saw it without the rain—we’d assume that it was from some other city. We got dinner on our way back to the hotel (delicious pasta), then collapsed with exhaustion for the night.

We got up fairly early (around 8) the next morning to eat breakfast before we left for the day. Breakfast wasn’t too spectacular (lots of packaged items), but the coffee was good and appreciated (we were pretty tired), and we also got a bunch of free packets of Nutella that we took with us for use at lunches. Hard to argue with free Nutella. We then set off for the Coliseum. It poured on the way there. Really poured. I’d even gone so far as to wear my not-so-cute-but-very-sensible shoes for the day, and even these shoes got soaked through. We had a pretty funny umbrella system figured out for taking pictures—one person would hold both their own umbrella and the umbrella of the person taking the picture. It was complicated. I did really like seeing the Coliseum, and it was a lot of fun to just take it in while walking around it. After that, we set back off for Via Nazionale, a street with a lot of stores on it where we hoped to do some shopping. We had the most fun at a grocery store (I love going to grocery stores in different countries). Despite my begging, Norma told me that no, I could not buy a huge hunk of parmesan cheese to take back to France with me, because we had nowhere to refrigerate it for another 24 hours. She was probably right, but I have a huge addiction to real parmesan cheese and I was sorely disappointed to not be able to bring some back. I also looked for non-UHT skim milk, but apparently the Italians are like the French in this area and I was unsuccessful. Maybe when I go to Norway? I did, however, find plain M&Ms, and that made my day.

A short note on M&M’s: I love M&M’s. They have been my favorite candy since I started eating candy, and nothing makes me happier than a handful of plan M&M’s (other than a handful of plain M&M’s and a good book). However, imagine my amazement and shock when I came to France and discovered they only sell peanut and crispy M&M’s! The horror! The panic! I have a terrible grudge against peanut M&M’s. Why ruin some perfectly good chocolate with peanuts? When I was little I used to try and just eat the chocolate, not the peanuts. As for crispy, aside from being newfangled notions, they also remind me of a summer camp I went to that I didn’t like a whole lot. The only thing I did like was that (unlike my ice rink) that rink had candy in the vending machines, including a ready supply of crispy M&M’s. However, having finally finished that summer camp, I refuse to revisit my old days. Thus, I was most happy to find M&M’s.

We were hoping to get lunch along Via Nazionale, but all the restaurants there were still serving breakfast. We decided to kill some time at a bookstore Norma thought she’d seen that wasn’t too far away. Turns out, however, that it actually was quite far away—more than halfway back to the Vatican, but we kept plodding along. Once we got there, we were almost at the pizza place where we’d eaten the day before, and we were really hungry by this point, so we decided to stop back at that place for some more delicious and cheap pizza. After that, we went back to the bookstore and hung out there for a few hours. It was less exciting than French bookstores, largely because I know no Italian. After exhausting that indoor entertainment (did I mention it was still raining?), we went to get cappuccinos and tiramisu at a café nearby. We were really glad to sit down for the first time in a while, and we were also able to dry off a little bit while in there. Norma at this point just wanted to go sit in the train station until our train left (at 9PM, and it was at that time 1PM), but I flat out refused to spend 8 hours in a train station while I was in Rome. She decided she wasn’t comfortable in the train station by herself, so we decided to walk back to the Vatican and walk around there more for the rest of the afternoon. We spent a lot of time underneath the awnings in the square in order to avoid the rain. It was nice to sit and just people-watch for a while, and it was much more interesting than sitting around the train station would’ve been.

We made a perhaps not-so great life choice and decided to get gelato despite having just eaten tiramisu. However, when one has 36 hours in Rome, some of which must be spent sleeping, one must benefit from as much gelato as one can, and so we decided to do that and skip dinner altogether. My stomach was not feeling so hot from all that sugar, so I clearly would not have been able to eat dinner, anyway. Nevertheless, it was absolutely delicious. We ate the gelato back under the awnings at St. Peter’s (couldn’t let the rain melt it!), and then set off for our long trek back to the hotel to pick up our luggage. We stopped at a really neat stationary store that wasn’t too expensive on our way back, and that was a nice break from the rain. Just as we were approaching our hotel, the rain started to let up a little bit, and when we exited it to head over to the train station, it actually looked like the sky was clearing up—just in time for us to leave. Gotta love our luck. We had about 45 minutes to wait for the train, during which time some guys tried to steal Norma’s purse. They tried to distract us in order to do it, but we figured out pretty quickly what was going on and were able to keep our stuff. After that excitement, we went over to the ticket station where I was determined to get my passport stamped again. However, unlike my experience in Ventimiglia where the agent was happy to stamp my passport, the agent in Rome looked at me like I was insane and made me repeat myself three times before finally agreeing to do so in a tone that implied he was less than happy. Norma and I ended up laughing in his face because he was so melodramatic about the situation. As Norma said: “Well, I’m sorry your country doesn’t care enough to monitor who’s coming in or out on a regular basis!” We found the situation completely hysterical, probably because we were so exhausted (and wet).

The train ride back to Nice was LONG. I slept a grand total of 20 minutes, which did not make me happy. We had a crazy Italian lady in the car with us—Norma had a conversation with her that, when she translated it for me, had us both cracking up. The lady was going to France, where she was going to help children who couldn’t speak. Only catch was that she couldn’t speak French at all. She got off in Monte Carlo with all her worldly possessions (one of which was a huge box of pastries), and Norma and I have no idea what she was planning on doing there. I’m not sure if any of this would’ve been as funny as we found it if we hadn’t been so exhausted. When we finally arrived, France greeted us with gorgeous bright-blue skies and lots of people who spoke French. We were delighted to be able to communicate and understand everything around us once more, and the TGV train felt absolutely luxurious after 12 hours on the Italian train. I had a funny old French lady next to me on the way back to Avignon—she was very excited about it being Easter, and she promised me she wouldn’t bother me too much, since she was getting off in just a few stops. Unfortunately, there were also three really annoying children on the train, two of them siblings whose mother was incapable of controlling them. She kept repeating arrêtez de pousser, j’en ai marre (Stop moving, I’ve had enough), and I felt like telling her that I’d had enough, too. We got off in Avignon, took the Navette back into the walls, then I took a taxi to my place (no buses on Sundays) and collapsed. I fell asleep for three hours in the afternoon and woke up thinking I was still in Rome. I went back to bed immediately after dinner, and slept a glorious 13 hours.

Today was pretty low-key. My ankle’s still bothering me, so I was unable to go running this morning. I worked on some homework, read an Anna Quindlen book (Blessings, which was excellent), and enjoyed the fact that I was back in France. Despite all my complaining in this entry, I’m really glad I went to Rome. I loved seeing the Vatican and the Coliseum, and I loved seeing Trevi Fountain about as much as I could given the fact that I felt like a drowned rat. It was definitely hard to keep our spirits up with the constant rain, but it was still a fun trip and I got a lot out of it. However, I was also quite happy to be back in sunny France where I can easily communicate, even if there isn’t delicious gelato or pizza.

I leave for Paris for a weekend in just four days, so expect more news on that next week. And let’s just hope that the weather gods decide that I deserve some sun after what I went through in Rome!

Two treatises, a short story, and Les Baux de Provence

First, a short treatise on the verb profiter.

According to my French-English Dictionary: profiter: vi [tirer avantage]: ~de [vacances] to benefit from; [personne] to take advantage of; ~ de quelque chose pour faire quelque chose, to take advantage of something to do something; en ~ to make the most of it.

This is not a verb I had ever heard in a language class before coming to France. It simply was not used, and it is one of the many verbs I hear constantly, so clearly my professors didn’t go to the same France I’m in. Profiter is the replacement for “Have fun!” over here. When you leave for somewhere, you are told to profiter from it. Any recommendations given are with urges to profiter from your time here. I was recently told by Mireille that if I did not go to the doctor and get lots of medication for my cold, I was not going to profiter from my trip to Rome or my time in France. When making a purchase at Baux de Provences today, the sales lady was pleased that I was “profiter”-ing from the half-price sale. Americans tend to find the use of this verb pretty entertaining, and we throw it in our franglais conversations on a regular basis. Example:

“Je ne t’ai pas vu around recemment. Est-ce que tu been profitering from tes vacances?”

This, along with the verbs gêner (to bother) and bouger (to move, to budge), is probably one of the most common verbs I hear, and I urge all those coming to France to become familiar with it.

Second, a short treatise on the French and medication.

I sadly have been a victim of the common cold over the past week. I felt it coming on early last week, but it held off until Monday night, when I slept horribly and awoke the next morning feeling as though a train had run over me—a TGV train at that. Lots of coughing, sneezing, inability to breathe, and all that fun stuff that comes with a cold has been plaguing me ever since. Now, having a mother and many other relatives who are in the medical profession, I have long since been aware of the fact that there is really nothing one can do to get rid of the common cold. One can take ibuprofen if there’s a fever or a sore throat, one can drink lots of liquids, but given that the common cold is a virus, antibiotics really won’t help. Unfortunately, someone forgot to share this information with the French. They first have a terrible time believing that it is possible for someone to get a cold when the weather isn’t cold. I explained that colds are pretty common when the weather changes quickly, as it has been doing here, and everyone decided that I actually had allergies, not a cold. I learned pretty quickly just to accept that; it’s not worth fighting over. Then there is the problem of the medication. The moment anyone gets a headache, sneezes, sniffles, coughs, or wheezes, the nearest French person urges them to run off to the Pharmacy to get “medicaments”. The French will not rest until they have been given at least four different medications to take for their cold, whether or not the medication helps at all. I have been to the doctor only once in the past 5 years for illness, and that was when I got a fever of 103.4 at school last winter. And even that time, it just turned out to be the common cold with a higher fever than usual. With a cold, I tough it out with cough drops and ibuprofen. Unfortunately, this does not seem to be the French fashion. I’m hoping my cold disappears fast before anyone else can urge me to get medicated.

Third, a short story on why one should not carry one’s French-English dictionary with them around Avignon even if one’s purse is already too full and starting to rip and the dictionary will probably rip it more if it is placed in the purse.

By Katherine Jacob

I was innocently walking from school Wednesday, hoping only to make the 6:06 bus so that I would not have to wait until 6:24 for the next bus. Little else was on my mind besides hoping that I wouldn’t have a weird guy step about an inch and a half away from me, tell me not to be scared, and then ask me a question I didn’t understand (that was Tuesday). However, as I walked along a street I noticed a guy next to me trying to catch a glimpse of one of the two books I was carrying: Capitalisme Contre Capitalisme, by Michel Albert, and my Larousse French-English dictionary. Apparently it was not economics that interested him, as he stopped me and asked me if I spoke English, to which I responded yes (in French). He then switched over to English and asked me if I was English.

When you’re an American in Avignon, you get a lot of people who are over the moon that you’re in their city. They’re genuinely curious about why you’re there, and they want to show off everything they love about France. Additionally, some 70% of the people you meet decide to try out their English on you. Sometimes this leads to entertainment (a drunk guy asking me and three of my friends if we would be sleeping around later), sometimes confusion (a girl asked me if I spoke English in English and it took me about a minute to respond because I couldn’t figure out what she asked because of her accent), and once in a while you encounter some genuinely good English that makes you feel guilty because your French is so bad. Regardless, I’ve gotten used to being peppered with questions about why I’m here, what I’m studying, and where I’ve traveled.

This guy’s accent was considerably better than other accents I’ve encountered here, and so I assumed he had studied English at some point and was interested in it. I told him that I wasn’t English, but American, which he found quite exciting. He wanted to know where I was from, and I responded, then he wanted to know why I was there. I told him I was studying abroad for a semester and he gave me a blank stare and asked me why. This should’ve been my first warning that this was probably not someone normal, but I explained that I was interested in French and that I wanted to improve my French (default answer as to why you came to France to study: Pour améliorer le français!). He then wanted to know what I was planning on doing for a job. As I am not even sure of this, I simply gave my default answer which is that I want to do non-profit work. He didn’t know what this was, so I gave him the French name: le secteur sans but lucratif. He didn’t know what that was, either (probably because it’s a pretty small sector in Europe), but then asked me my sign. What did this have to do with my work? Well, nothing—turns out he wanted to know my astrological sign. While I do not mind talking about things that actually have to do with me, the only thing I like about my astrological sign is the roller coaster of the same name at Cedar Point. Thus, I told him I had to be catching my bus.

The moral of this story is that one should never carry one’s French-English dictionary in plain sight no matter the condition of one’s purse.

Fourth, our trip to Baux de Provence today (Saturday).

We left around ten this morning to go to Baux de Provence for an excursion with l’Institut. Our first stop was the Cathedral d’Images, which was absolutely amazing. France keeps doing this to me: I’ll leave for an excursion with very low expectations, thinking that whatever I’m going to see just isn’t that exciting. A Cathedral of Images? Sounds like an art museum. And yes, I can appreciate Van Gogh (the current exhibit) as much as anyone else, but I really didn’t want to sit around and look at an art museum while in France. Once again, as with Pont du Gard, France proved me completely wrong. The Cathedral d’Images is a huge limestone quarry constructed out of the natural rocks of the region. Because it’s built into the landscape, you feel as though you’re still outside. Inside the Cathedral, you’re completely cut off from the light, and the art display is essentially a light show of Van Gogh’s paintings. They display the images on the walls, posts, and floor of the Cathedral, and have the show timed with classical music. It was incredible to see, and the music really made it a lot more powerful. I loved seeing that, and was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it.

After the Cathedral d’Images, we piled back in our bus to go to the town of Baux de Provence, which is quite “touristique”, as Mireille told me (touristy). It was a medieval town located on a high point in the region for defensive purposes. There are a lot of cute gift shops there, as well as lots of restaurants that are way out of my price range. You can get a gorgeous view of the valleys and hills surrounding the town. We also had a tour of the historical castle at the highest point of the city. It’s not actually a castle, since it’s all ruins, but you can see the original framework where a hospital was, and they had a lot of information about how defense of the city work. There were reconstructed catapults, as well, and that was neat. However, it was very, very cold and very, very windy, so none of us really managed to fully appreciate it. Everyone was tired out from all the walking around, and the most of the bus was dozing off during our ride back. We drove by St. Remy, an old Roman city, where they had an Arc du Triomphe and cemetery monuments that you could see from the road.

That’s about all from Avignon this week. I leave for Rome on Thursday night, so my next update will include exciting Italian news!

The world keeps turning in Avignon

I had an entry typed out, but I looked over it and realized it was quite uninteresting and thus I won't bore anyone with it. News from here:

-The Euro keeps rising and the USD keeps tanking. $1.55=€1, and that is just plain unfortunate news as far as I'm concerned.

-We had a dreadful cold spell last week. At one point it was colder here than it was in Anchorage (though I imagine they were having a warm spell) with a low of 28, and the cold had descended in the span of about two hours. We also had the insane mistral wind, which was up to 120 kilometers per hour (about 74mph). That lasted almost three days, which was a little insane. Thankfully the weather is more or less back to normal now, though it is a little rainy.

-I am sick with a cold once more. This is not good news either, but I'm hoping the cold disappears before I leave for Rome next week.

Last Friday we finally had our guided tour of the Palais de Papes. Our secretary told us that the building is always cooler than outside, which is quite nice in the summer—unfortunately, it was freezing while we were there. I did enjoy seeing the inside, though I would’ve liked more time there to look around on our own. The Palace was built in two stages, and there are two separate pieces: the old palace and the new palace. There isn’t a whole lot of the old palace that’s in its original form, most of it has been repaired to look more or less like the original. Some of the walls are still the same, though, and we were excited to notice some of the symbols on the stones there that were the same symbols on the walls of L’Institut. It’s hard to imagine that all of these buildings were created with such limited technology, and it’s even harder to imagine that some people spent their whole lives just constructing them. They also had one room dedicated to John the Evangelist and John the Baptist that still had some of the original paintings on the walls. The new palace has a lot more of the original structures, and it’s beautiful. There was one gorgeous chapel where they used to hold masses that was just incredible. Most of the statues there were destroyed during the Revolution, but there are still some of the original forms remaining.

After the tour we look around at some of the rooms that had information about the history of the Palais. It’s very entertaining the get the French version of the history—they refuse to consider that the Avignon Papacy was anything but legitimate. We also climbed up to the top of one of the towers, where you got a beautiful view of the city. Unfortunately, the wind was even worse up there than it was on the ground, so no one managed to stay up there too long to appreciate the view. We were too eager to get back to L’Institut to thaw out. I had lost feeling in my feet within about five minutes of starting the tour, and it was a good 45 minutes after it was over before feeling finally returned.

Nothing too exciting to report, hopefully there will be something entertaining in Baux de Provence on Saturday.

How many weeks until I get to leave the country again?

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.