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.

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!