Parting is Such Sweet Sorrow

I'm sorry for the long silence, these past few days have been kind of hard to process. I finished my exams (I think I did very well on my literature exam), and only have one more person to say goodbye to. Of course, that doesn't mean at all that I'm ready to leave; I'm not.

Last night we went to another soccer game and it was great; we won. And my friend Sam finally got back from Scotland, so that was awesome (but he got his bike stolen! I swear he probably thinks it's me that's causing all this, because he lost his wallet and his driver's license while I was visiting him in Scotland...)

Alex left this morning... :(

My train leaves Angers in 2 hours and 4 minutes. Sigh.

Here's some pictures of some people that I've come to love.


Here's Brittany (as I'm sure you know by now). I could not have asked for a better friend to be in Angers with me, and to travel with (an international flight all by myself would be scary [and boring!]). She's my sister, both in my sorority and in my heart, and I'm super blessed to have spent so much time with her.


Here's Alex. I don't even know where to begin. A wonderful roommate, my partner in crime, and my shoulder to cry on when things got rough (although I'm not sure if that's by choice or just because we shared a room and she felt obligated...hahaha). The craziest adventures I've had on this continent have been with her, and it will be lame not seeing her every day.


Here's boy Alex, Mat, and Brian. These are all boys from Kansas University that basically kept me in stitches with their humor and quirks (and trust me, they're quirky boys). Definitely people I'll keep in touch with...I'd even go as far as to say that they're roadtrip worthy.


Here's Tori. She's a friend I made WAYYY too late into this trip, but one that I plan on staying in touch with for a long time.


I'm not ready to leave. But I can't wait to get home.

Randomness

I'm sure I'll have something interesting to say soon enough, but for now I'm just focusing on trying to study for my exams (it's so much harder in French!) and trying not to scream at my translation professor for his what I feel are unfair teaching methods (he's a fan of giving us assignments that tell us to translate all this awkward British English, or English that looks like he's translated from French for us to translate back), and then if we can't do it, he gives us failing grades anyway. So basically, if I don't do AWESOME on my next exam, I run the risk of getting a not-so-awesome grade in this class. I'm trying to remind myself that it's okay, that all I need to do is pass the class to get credit for it (these classes don't affect my GPA in the United States), but it's hard for me to not worry. I just have to keep thinking that 48 hours from now I'll be completely finished with school...but between now and then I have three exams and a 15 minute oral defense of the 10 page paper I wrote last week. Aie. Challenging. But possible!

Also, I need to do my laundry and start packing. Home seems so much closer now that I have some definitive plans for when I get back....!

So! Pictures. Here's some random graffiti I found around town:


The first two I found walking to school, and the third is sprayed on the side of a telephone booth (obviously) on campus.

Here are some pictures from ma vie quotidienne (my daily life):

Here is a talking bus. It's not actually talking, but those words there say "I am not in service"

Here's my new definition of fast food: a chicken sandwich on wheat bread with lettuce and tomatoes, a coffee, and a pastry.

This is le Diplomate, a tabac (newspaper and tabacco store that also serves coffee) where we go almost daily to drink coffee and eat our lunches.
This is my fridge. I know it appears to not make sense, but the temperature here hovers around 40 degrees F, and I don't have any flowers in the box outside my window so...but yeah, it doesn't work so well in the rain. This is a picture of mushy yogurt :(

Finally, if you plan on spending any time in Angers, bring not only one umbrella, but many, or the funds for many. It's windy and they snap like twigs.

Cointreau Museum

Yesterday, a few people and I went to the Cointreau museum in St. Barthélemy, just outside of Angers. What's Cointreau? According to wikipedia, "Cointreau (pronounced [kwan'-tro]) is a brand of triple sec liqueur, and is produced in Saint-Barthélemy-d'Anjou, a suburb of Angers, France. Cointreau sources its bitter oranges from all over the world, usually Spain, Brazil and Saint-Raphaël, Haiti." Okay, now that we're all educated and stuff...

This was the second time we tried to go to the museum; the first time, we went out there only to find that we needed a reservation in order to do anything. Logically, we made our reservations and came back this weekend.

Here's Diana, Alex and Brian holding up the Cointreau logo, that looks an awful lot like it should be for paper towels

The tour itself was pretty interesting...we walked through the production factory and then above the bottling part. I liked it, but I'd imagine it was cooler for someone who hasn't already taken a tour of a butter company :) and a chocolate factory.

Here's me and Alex in front of the giant Cointreau vats

After the tour, we got to participate in a "degustation" or in simple terms, a tasting. It was really cool, we all sat around at tables like we would in some classy bar, while a bartender explained a whole bunch of stuff to us in French. First he had us try it straight. PHEWWWWW it had a bite to it. But once you get past that, it's sweet and orange-y. And then he told us to put an ice cube in our glass. I thought to myself, "Okay, I don't see what the big deal is, it'll probably be the same thing only cold...

But no! It changed colors!!! Well, not exactly, but it got kind of cloudy, and tasted different. It was sweeter and less like..alcohol-y. Afterwards we learned how to make Cointreaupolitans, which consist of Cointreau, cranberry juice, and lime juice, put in a tumbler and shaken with ice.

Here's Jen making her Cointreaupolitan

Here's what a finished one looks like

Diana and Jen with their cocktails, looking awesome cuz my camera rocks

Alex, Diana, Jen, Brian and me

So over all it was a pretty good time. Today I have to write a paper and study for my DFA (business French) exam, and decide if I'm going to chance bringing wine home in my luggage or not...I got 2 bottles as Christmas presents, but seeing as I'm not 21, I'm kind of taking a risk by trying to bring them back. Not a huge risk, mind you; if they have a problem with it they'll just confiscate the wine, which means I'll have wasted about 30 dollars. Otherwise, I have to ship them to the US, which would cost about three times as much. But either way, these are Christmas presents for people (who are all over 21!), and I don't want that to get messed up...I'm just going to have to pray that this goes well, because I can't really afford to ship it back. I don't know. I'll call home today and see what they think.

Just a little thing...

I was Christmas shopping in a cave today. Not literally a cave, like with bats and stuff, but that's what they call wine stores/cellars here. I was the only customer in the store, so I spent a bit of time chatting with the guy working. Somehow we got around to talking about my accent. I told him that it bothered me, that it was annoying when people couldn't understand me no matter how hard I tried to say something, and that I didn't like that people could almost instantaneously recognize me as an American, or at least an English-speaker. And what he said in response really struck me. He said:

"Don't worry about your accent, keep it. You know French well enough, you have the vocabulary and you speak it with ease. Your accent is charming and it's cute, but most importantly, it's part of who you are. Keep it."

Part of who I am. Hm. It's hard for me to think of my accent as a good thing; I hear so many other Americans speak French with the same accent, and it makes me cringe. But I guess he's right. My native language is full of harsh sounds. It's a square, rough, ugly thing that in no way facilitates the speaking of a pretty and flowing language like French. But it was what I grew up with, what I still use daily, the reason I know almost everything that I know. It determined what culture I grew up in; to a certain extent English determined how I would see the world.

Thanks to English, I have this accent, this funny, obnoxious American accent. And even if I can't do it yet, I will learn to be proud of it. I can look at it like I look at every scar I have. It's there, it's obvious, and it tarnishes something that a lot of people have in a flawless form. But I worked hard for it, at the very least I had a heck of an adventure for it, and it is part of who I am.

So, cave worker, thank you. I'll probably never see you again, but you've made a huge impact on my life.

Paris Part 4 (The Eiffel Tower and the restaurant)

Before I get into this, let me just preface with: I JUST TURNED IN MY MEMOIRE WOO YEAH WOOOOOOHOOOO YAYYYYY! Anyway. That doesn't mean I'm in the clear; I still have two papers, the oral defense of my memoire, and like six exams...in the next week and a half (oh gee) but I think I can do it...I hope, at least...haha.

So let's see. I left off on the Champs-Elysees. We were walking around looking for some place to eat. Remember what I said about food between the Centre Pompidou and Notre Dame being expensive? This was worse. The Champs-Elysees is where one goes to be a tourist AND shop, so of course the food there is going to be expensive. Silly us. What's even sillier is the thought that followed: "Let's go see if we can find anything cheaper by the Eiffel Tower."

So we hop on the metro. The metro stop by the Eiffel Tower is the exact opposite of the one by the Arc de Triomphe. To get to the Arc from the metro, you have to walk all of about 500 feet. To get to the Eiffel Tower, it's a pretty epic merchandise-riddled path, I'd guess about a half mile or so (but I may just think that because it was intensely cold outside, and when I say intensely cold I mean like 35 degrees, because France is cooler than the US in the sense that it's warmer. Did you follow that?) First things first we decide to go see the Tower.

As you may have seen in my last entry, the Tower is currently lit up blue. I don't think it was the last time I was here, but no matter. Up close it looks something like this:



We even, for the first time this whole day, got someone to take our picture!


Cool. We opted to not go up in the tower; we had both been there before, it was cold, we had limited time, and we were hungry. So instead, we walked around the park on the other side of the tower and I took pictures until the street vendors came up and tried to sell me little keychains. Here is a normal picture:


And here is the same one, after I messed with it. I really like the colors, but that could just be me:
Anyway, now we were really pressed for time (well not really, we had an hour or so, but when it comes to eating in France, that's seriously pressed for time). Of course, the restaurants by the Eiffel Tower cost an arm and a leg each, so we went back to Montparnasse (the train station) to look around there. Amazingly, the menus were relatively well-priced. But everything was crowded. We were about to give up hope and go get cold-cut sandwiches like we had for lunch, but then we saw this little Lebanese restaurant...well, we figured, that could be good. There was pretty much nobody there, but we chose to try it anyway. We told our waitress (who I'm guessing was the mother of most of the employees) that we were in a hurry, so she took our orders right way and made sure our food was prepared first. And it was sooooooooo good. They even brought us baklava for dessert, for free! I mean, I wish I could explain to you how wonderful this restaurant was. We shook hands with the owner before we left. Then we scurried to the train and came back to Angers.

Unrelated, but I really miss actual food. I'm not exactly allowed to use my kitchen, my host family only provides 2 meals a week, and going out for dinner is expensive, so here is what I have been living off of:

Breakfast (this is actually pretty impressive for me, to be honest)
-a bowl of cereal
-a cup of coffee
-a glass of orange juice
Lunch
either...
-a cold-cut sandwich (chicken and vegetables on wheat bread or ham and butter on white bread)
-a pastry
-a Coke
or...
-a kebab (which isn't like an American kebab; it looks like the picture to the right and is essentially some kind of meat with sauce, lettuce, tomatoes and onions in some weird bread)
-french fries
-a Coke
Dinner
-a cold-cut sandwich (see above)
-several servings of rice pudding or apple sauce
-a liter of fruit juice (seriously, I drink so much fruit juice)
or...
-a take-out box (a la Chinese food) of pasta
-a cup of pudding
-a Coke

Occasionally I go out and eat something else, but like I said, I can't really afford to. And it's not like I'm being particularly unhealthy, I'm just getting bored with the lack of variety in my diet. But I am a week and 5 days away from microwaved popcorn, Starbucks, and my dad's cooking. Sweet.

Paris Part 3 (Arc de Triomphe and the Champs Elysees)

So let's continue this Paris business. After having (extensively) toured the Centre Pompidou, we decided to be tourists and go visit the Arc de Triomphe. We had both already been there, but the last time each of us were there it was a) summer and b) daytime.

So, one metro trip later...
Bam! Sorry the picture is blurry, I didn't really want to stop and be a tourist. What's cool about this picture, though, is that it's exactly what you see when you come out of the metro station that's by this place...talk about an impressive sight to see while coming up some filthy stairs.

If you want to, you can pay a small fee to go on top of the Arc...Alex and I had both already done it, but again...it was summer and it was daytime so...


...to get up to the top you must climb a never-ending spiral staircase (okay, so it's something around 300 steps, but it feels a little eternal). Inside there was a museum...


...that we totally took seriously (pictured above is a cast of one of the sculptures on the side of the arc...and Alex). Anyway, despite the epic trek up the stairs, the view from the top was totally worth it...it looked a little something like this:

looking toward l'Arche de la Defense

looking in the opposite direction (I'm not sure what this direction is called)

looking toward the Eiffel tower

zooming in on the Eiffel Tower and taking a blurry (but awesome) picture

looking down

To explain this last picture, the Arc de Triomphe is at the very center of the GIANT roundabout at the end of the Champs-Elysees (that super-famous avenue in Paris). Now you might wonder, how did Erica get across what clearly seems to be at least ten lanes of traffic? Simple, I said a little prayer and ran. Joking! There's a staircase that leads into a tunnel that goes under that giant traffic mess, so you're not constantly seeing pancaked tourists in the roundabout. I probably could have stood for hours and just watched the traffic circulate...that's what I did the last time I was there. For example, if you look at the traffic, all of the cars are going the same direction except for two of them, which appear to be trying to traverse the automobile river (seriously, find them). What do you do in a situation like that? The last time I was there, I saw a tiny car nearly crushed between two buses...check out this video that someone took from a tour bus in the roundabout. Neat. Also, here's this one, which is a better example of how I was seeing things.

After having lingered a sufficiently long time on top of the freezing Arc, we decided to stroll down the Champs-Elysees (right there is a link to a song that everyone in this country knows. It's like their equivalent of our Bohemian Rhapsody or something)

There were Christmas lights...they were very cool...it looked like the trees were covered in melting ice.

Only one more entry til I'm finished with Paris!

On a side note...in less than two weeks I'll be back home. Thing I'm looking forward to right now: napping on a couch.

Paris Part 2 (Notre Dame and Point Zero)

About that little detour that Alex and I took before entering Centre Pompidou. We had originally started wandering down the road in search of cheap food (which, aside from little sandwich shops, does not exist in any location that is even remotely tourist). During this time, we saw Notre Dame off in the near distance (near distance? Like the near future, only tangible I guess). Well, we figured, we've only got one day in Paris, why not go over there and take a picture?


Bam. Picture. And then I remembered the last time I was here and the cool thing that I did. There's a little marker right out front of the cathedral called Point Zero. This little round thing serves as a reference for all the mile markings on the roads in France. It's a popular tourist superstition that if you step on it when you come to Paris, you will come back later in your life. When I was here in 2005 with my high school's French club, I walked over it about ten times. Now this might just be superstition, but in my opinion...


...it works. And just for good measure...


...I'll be back.