Rainy, Rainy London

Okay, so I didn't take too many pictures today, so it'll be easier for me to tell you about what went on without feeling bad about not being able to put my pictures in.

We had a ridiculously busy day. We started off by going to the Tower of London, which I wasn't all that excited about, but it ended up being very cool...I went into a church that had 6 saints buried in it! That's craziness. And we got to see the crown jewels, which were actually pretty awesome. After that we went to Subway (!!!!) and Ben & Jerry's (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) for lunch, which was a pretty sweet deal. We had to walk for a bit afterwards, because the tube station we took to get to the Tower of London was closed, but we ended up in the area of London where the Globe Theatre and TATE Modern are...now I'm personally not all that interested in theatre, and Brittany's not all that into modern art, so we split up. I am SO GLAD I got to go into that art gallery...while I didn't really understand half of the things I saw, I'm glad to have seen them.

Afterwards, we went on a Jack the Ripper tour. This talked about his victims, potential suspects, and the investigation surrounding it. It was put on by the same group of people that conducted our tour of the Tower of London, the Yeoman Warders...I guess it's basically their job to live for the history of London, so you can imagine the tour was nothing short of fantastic. It was sort of creepy, because two of the murders happened 120 years ago TO THE DAY. Shiver. Also, there was one girl he murdered that apparently looked a lot like me, so every time my guide would talk about her he'd gesture in my direction, which was fine until I found out that he basically chopped this girl into wee bits and filleted off her face...they identified her body by her blue eyes and blond hair...shiver. But overall the tour was very interesting, despite the rain. Then we got steak and potatoes!

We're heading off to Germany in a couple hours...our airport shuttle is picking us up at 3:15AM, so I'm not entirely sure when we'll be sleeping. Oh well! Only live once, right?

Oh and one more thing! It is entirely possible to plug a French plug into a British outlet. Get a toothpick or something and press down the prong in the bottom part of the outlet (you know how it has 2 on the top and one on the bottom) and then put the French one in. It doesn't fit quite right, but it works. Awesome, right?

London

Hey, so I pretty much love it here. I had a great day today, but I'm really tired so I'll have to tell you about it later....in the meantime, you can check out my friend Brittany's blog...I think she's sitting next to me talking about our day in great detail...

http://britinfrance.blogspot.com

Anyway, yeah. I'm staying in a hostel and it's sort of weird, but I kind of like the weirdness. It's totally laid back and pretty close to a bunch of interesting things (and a tube [subway] station), so traveling around isn't all that expensive. BUT EVERYTHING ELSE IS. I am going to be so broke when I get back...but I have no idea when I'll get to come back here sooooooooooooooo. Oh well!

Really Quick!

Here are some pictures from my birthday party!!

From left: Alex, Brittany, Elizabeth, Amy, me, Alex, and Katy at a restaurant eating ice cream and crepes

Alex, Shea, and me

me with my wee tiny birthday cake

Alex and me at the restaurant

Elizabeth, Katy and Brittany

Brittany and I are setting off tomorrow for London...we'll be there for a few days. I'm not taking my laptop, so I don't know how often I'll be able to update my blog. After that, we're heading over to Cologne, Germany to see my friends Didem and Andrew. It should be pretty fun.

Birthday

Sooo here's what happened. I ate dinner with my host family, and we had a chocolate cake for dessert which was TO DIE FOR. They gave me chocolates and a card :) And Alex got me a scarf and a shirt, and train tickets to either Nantes or Paris, my choice. OH! And the card the gave me, oh wow it was fantastic. I'll upload it onto my computer when I get home so you can see it. After that, I went to a restaurant with Brittany, Alex, Alex, Katy, Amy, Shea and Elizabeth, and we had dessert...again. Then we went to Falstaff, where the owner had bought me a little cake...so that was dessert again...then Quentin and Denny and his girlfriend Sophie showed up, and it was just wonderful.

I had dessert five times yesterday.

I have the best friends ever.

And I'm so, so tired. So after I go to the train station today, I'm going to bed.

Joyeux Anniversaire....

...to me...I'm totally 20 today. Which is really crazy. Unfortunately, I have a ton of work to get done tonight before we can celebrate...we were apparently going to last night, but my friends (being brilliant) made plans, and guess who they forgot to tell....mmmyup, me. So! That was a bit of a disaster. So we'll probably try again.

Anyway, sorry this update is so short, but I need to take a shower and write a paper and create an oral presentation and eat dinner and practice on Alex's guitar (okay well I don't NEED to do that, but the fact that she's letting me learn to play her acoustic guitar is VERY cool...so I'm going to :-D)

Also, here's a random thing I noticed when I was at a church service the other weekend: everyone uses "tu" when they talk about God. "Tu" is the pronoun you use to talk to someone you know very well, like a friend or a sibling or a family member. "Vous" is what you use when you're talking to someone you don't know very well, or a superior, or an adult (if you are a child). I guess it makes sense, but it definitely taught me a lot about the usage of "tu" and "vous", and a bit about relating to God. Neat.

Ouf!

So to briefly recap my Saturday, after that bus-missing debacle, I ended up visiting the chateau d'Angers (and climbing one of the walls, as seen below)


Anyway! The point of my entry today is...I almost got hit by a car this morning! Eek! I mean, it wouldn't have hurt, but still. I was crossing the road, at a crosswalk, with the walk sign illuminated. I was almost to the center of the road when, tout d'un coup (all of a sudden) this van on the other street was like "hmm, I think I'll turn left now" and flies around the corner, into the crosswalk, and nearly into me. I jumped out of the way and flailed a bit, uncertain about the proper translation of "YOU JERK THAT IS YOUR CAR YOU ALMOST HIT ME WITH THERE! I HAVE THE GREEN LIGHT AND THE RIGHT OF WAY!!!" So instead I just waved and made an angry face.

Right now I'm trying to figure out a plan for the vacation Brittany and I are taking during our first break. It's kind of incredibly stres....challenging.

Ps...the Apocalypse has toilets....

The verb of the day is "gaspiller"

Gaspiller: to waste ex: "J'ai gaspillé mon argent ce matin" (I wasted my money this morning)

I'm finding this to be horribly, horribly true. I was supposed to be at my school at 7AM this morning to get on a bus to go to the ocean. 6:50, Brittany sends me a text message: "Where are you?" Panic ensues. Apparently, my alarm clock is too ahead of the times for it to think that I might actually want to wake up on the weekend. So it doesn't go off. Anyway, back to how I have ten minutes to get dressed at to UCO, which is a mile and a half away.

So I throw on some clothes, and RUN out the door, run run run run run, periodically checking in with Brittany to see if the bus is still there. And then I remember a route that my host mom was telling me about, that I thought might be faster. So I turned. On the wrong street. Now, great, where am I?! It's 7AM and I am in Angers, kind of lost and very upset. And apparently the bus has left. So I just turned around, reoriented myself, and went home to go back to bed.

The ironic part is, had I chosen to take my normal route to school, I would have intersected the bus. Go figure. And another thing, I'm not sure if this is ironic or just unfortunate, but I hurt my foot last night in leaping over some random trench, and now three of my toes are kind of swollen up and it hurts to twist my foot around, but I can't find any random pressure pain points, so I don't think it's broken. So I'll just let it go.

Anyway, I slept until 11, which was SOOOOOO nice that it almost made up for the fact that I missed the bus. What's more, today and tomorrow are part of something that's called "Les Journées du Patrimoine." This means that all the museums, chateaus, random government buildings, and other fancy houses (even private ones) are open to the public FOR FREE all day. So that's my new plan.

Oh and. I got the internet to work on my computer :)

Woah

So I had this dream last night that was absolutely nuts. I'm pretty sure it's because of a book I'm reading (Twilight), but it was also a pretty accurate metaphor for my life.

In my dream, everyone that spoke French was a vampire. Being in France, this is somewhat worrisome for me. The thing was, they didn't kill people by biting them and drinking their blood or anything...they'd do it by gathering around someone and speaking very, very fast French at them until they died. I was a little nervous at first about getting talked to death, but as the dream went on, I realized I was more at risk of becoming one of the ...vampires, I guess, than of being attacked. I think that scared me more than the prospect of being killed.

It's kind of cool though that my subconscious is confident enough in my ability to speak French that it thinks I'd sooner be a language vampire than a language victim. Or something like that.

Either way, today is better. I got my laundry done, Tim is helping me with my housing situation, and I'm not stressed out. Here's a cool picture! It's from the gallery that stretches over the river at Chenonceau!
And one more thing...here is a picture of...well...you see...there was this lion statue. And well...

we climbed it :)

Arrrrrrgh

Okay so I'm all mad now! I just wrote a really long post about how I was mad, and then it deleted itself! Now I'm SUPER mad! For one thing, I forgot I had some homework to do today until the VERY last minute, so I had to do it while I was getting ready for school, which includes checking my e-mail. I checked my e-mail, and I had a note from someone I was supposed to live with in the spring "Oh hey sorry, residence life says you can't live here since Riley isn't going abroad" WHY DIDN'T ANYONE TELL ME SOONER?!??!?! I mean. UGH. I know I have no right to be mad at my friend, or anyone living in that house, but still, it's unneeded stress! And I still can't get the internet to work on my laptop, and I REALLY NEED TO DO MY LAUNDRY but I never ever have time, and ugh. I'm so grumpy. Here's a picture of Brittany, Paul and me in a pot at Chenonceau...I'll put more pictures up after I figure out how to outsmart this computer.

Here's Brittany enjoying the wine

There's Paul with his head in the bread oven

Here's me discovering that the wooden thing was cemented into the bowl

Here's my roommate Alex (and me)

Les Accroches-Coeurs

Once a year, the town of Angers has a festival that they call "Les Accroches-Coeurs" which basically translates into "Seized Hearts." It's a giant street festival, or more accurately a town festival where performers flood the streets with music and modern art. It was totally bizarre. I had my camera for one of the events...it was like someone did a bunch of drugs and then wrote something down and insisted a spectacle be made of it.

Mont Saint Michel/Saint Malo

Okay this is really late, because I've already gone on two more excursions since I went to Mont Saint Michel, but it was so amazing that I think it merits its own entry.

Mont Saint Michel isn't, as I had previously thought, just a giant cathedral on top of a giant rock. It's a whole TOWN! I mean, only about 50 people live there permanently, but still...that's some crazy real estate right there. We had to walk up about five million stairs, but when we got there, the cathedral itself was astonishing. And it was HUGE. There's not much else that I can describe to you, so here are some pictures.

One of the cathedral walls

Another wall

A window in the cathedral

A hallway in the courtyard

Brittany, myself, and Paul in the courtyard

Some people crossing the sand to get to the cathedral. They needed a guide because it was quicksand.

After visiting Mt. St. Michel, we ventured into Saint Malo. I guess the town was supposed to be interesting because it was walled in, but to me it was just a normal French town with a wall around it. Fortunately, it was right on the ocean, so I just hung out there for a while.

Here's a guy on the beach

Here's the other side of the Atlantic Ocean!

I have yet to talk about Les Accroche-Coeurs, l'Anjou Troglodytique, and Les Chateaux de la Loire. I'll get to that soon.

Drole Histoire

I love language barriers. Seriously. Here is why:

I met this boy name Samuel at the post office on Saturday (random, I know). We talked for a while, later exchanged phone numbers and the like. Anyway that's not the important part of the story. My friend Samuel left for Scotland today, so last night he had a going-away barbeque at his house. I went with my roommate, Alex. There, we met 20ish French people. That was kind of exhausting, because everyone does "la bise" (la bise is the greeting where you make kissing noises on either side of a person's face to say hello and goodbye). It went pretty well...our French was good enough that we could have conversations, so we made a couple of friends.

It wasn't until I'd been there for a couple hours that I first encountered a translation problem...and it wasn't on my part! (hooray!) I was talking to a boy named Quentin, who was passing around a camera so that everyone could take pictures of everyone else. I guess it was my turn, because he holds the camera out to me and asks, with complete seriousness, "Do you want to shoot people?" He had been speaking English to me to practice (I responded in French). So I look at him sort of sideways and say "excuse me?" He says, "Do you want to euhh...shoot people...you know...with the camera...?" I couldn't stop laughing. I guess he was translating literally from French, where it's possible to take a picture of someone by shooting them. (I know we have photo shoots and shoot pictures, but when was the last time you shot someone to take their picture?)

It was interesting. Oh! I think today is internet day at my house! Maybe I'll put up pictures tonight :)

Ouf.

So I had my first exam today...which was no good. First off, I was really tired. I fell asleep around 2:00am, and then I must have had a nightmare or something because I just shot out of bed at like 4:30 in the morning, and had to walk around my house for a while before I could fall back asleep. So this morning I had a cup of coffee with my breakfast...and let me tell you this, French coffee is SO MUCH STRONGER than American coffee. So all morning I'm sitting in my class, wide-eyed and trembling. My hands were literally shaking, I was so wired.

And there was the exam itself. It was so hard! I thought I knew everything pretty well, but my professor included a ton of vocabulary that A) we didn't go over in class and B) I had never seen before. I guess everyone else agreed that the exam was unfairly hard, but it's still frustrating.

Hmm what else...oh yes. I look conspicuously American today, for at least three reasons. One, I have my hair back in a regular old ponytail. That's so rare here...everyone normally wears their hair down or at least kind of styled. Second, I'm wearing a regular t-shirt, like the kind you'd get for participating in a race or something. NOBODY wears these. I mean, you'll see boys in them sometimes, but NEVER girls. Third, my t-shirt is bright red...and I'm starting to wonder if the French believe in colors at all.

Anyway, that was sort of random and ranty. Everything else is good. Hopefully my laptop will be hooked up tomorrow, so I can tell you all about Mt. St. Michel :)

Alunir

"Alunir" is officially my all-time favorite French word. It's a verb, the last 2nd class verb in the French language, which means, literally "to land on the moon." How sweet is that?! I wish there was a verb like that in English.

This weekend we went to Mt. Saint Michel and Saint-Malo....but I'm not going to talk about that until I get my pictures uploaded, so I can show you. Instead I will just tell you about what I've been thinking about lately.

First of all, living here is, on the surface, not very different than living in the United States. You have your supermarkets, your cars, your restaurants...it's all decently developed here. But there are little tiny differences that make France seem like such a different place, which it totally is. For example, my host family doesn't keep their milk in the fridge. Apparently this is totally normal here...and very, very strange for me. I could so go for a glass of cold milk right about now.

And another thing! I know this is more of a global thing that somehow we Americans just didn't buy into, but everyone eats whole pieces of fruit with forks and knives! Not like, in one bite, but let me just say, if you've never cut up a peach with a knife and a fork before, it's not as easy as it sounds.

And something else...I haven't quite figured this one out. Apparently it's very rude to A) blow your nose and B) sniffle when you have a cold. My professor said that French people don't sniffle, at all, ever. So then, how does one go about having a cold!? I mean, the only thing I can think of is just sitting there with a tissue under your nose and letting everything just sort of drip at its leisure (gross, I know). I guess I'll figure that out when I get sick.

I'm sure there are about 5000 other things I want to talk about, but I'll get to them later. It's almost class time again.

Il pleut

It never stops raining here, seriously. I think I've only seen the sun once since I got here...I know it hasn't been that long, but it's still somewhat maddening, especially when I have to walk about a mile and a half to school every day (I could take the bus, but the idea intimidates me so I think I'll pass for now). I placed into the highest level of classes for the French intensive program that's going on this September. I'm pretty excited, but at the same time I wonder if I got there because I deserved to, or if I just got (un)lucky.

My family is interesting...they're an older couple, probably in their 70s. They have a son named Nicolas who's probably 40ish, and he lives with them. That wouldn't bother me normally, but the bathroom is right outside his bedroom door, and half of the door is glass (not exactly like a window, but you can definitely tell when someone is in there and what they're doing). Not to mention the horribly bizarre shower...if you can call it that. It's more like a bathtub with a showerhead. The showerhead isn't attached to the wall or anything, and there's no curtain, so you have to just sort of kneel in the bathtub. It'll take a lot of getting used to.

Tonight I'm going to go see "Le Puy du Fou"...it's supposed to be some huge theatrical spectacle that happens outside. I've heard it will be amazingly cold. I hope it doesn't rain too much. There's a picture of what it's supposed to look like...gotta go to class now, later.

Mon Voyage

Zut alors. I had a crazy time getting to France. The flight was fine, I didn't sleep at all. Then we had a 6 hour layover in Charles de Gaulle to wait for the TGV to Angers. That was fine for about 5/6 of it, and then I suddenly became violently ill, and somehow ended up throwing up on the floor in the airport. Ooops. But fortunately the train left shortly thereafter so all I had to do was find someone that worked there to say "euhhh desole' mais j'ai vomi dans la couloir"....and then our train got all messed up and the doors closed before we could get off, so we ended up going to Nantes and hopping on another train to get back...which was probably illegal.

My family is nice, I'll write more about them later, but right now Paul and Brittany are itching to get out of here so that's what we're going to do.

Au revoir!

France?!

Soooooo I'm in France. I've been here for like four hours, trapped in the airport. Well not exactly trapped, but waiting for my train to Angers...I feel sort of uncomfortable, because I really need to use the bathroom, and it costs 50 centimes to do. Unfortunately, I don't have a 50 centime piece, so I'm pretty much out of luck. The flight over wasn't that bad, but I didn't sleep at all...so I'm getting very close to having gone 24 hours without sleeping and running off of the 6 hours I got on Saturday night. Urrrrrrrgh I'm so tired. But I got here. At least to Paris. Things will be good. Hopefully.