Thanksgiving and Soccer

So! What does one do for Thanksgiving in France? Well, nothing really...it's kind of an American holiday. I had planned to cry into a ham sandwich all night, but fortunately my super awesome roommate invited me to the Notre Dame Thanksgiving (there are about 20 of them here from that university, so their adviser throws a feast every year). That was fun; only a couple other non-Notre Dame students got to go, so I felt really fortunate.

The next day, a bunch of us went to a professional soccer game! It was rainy and cold the whole time, blah. And we almost won, but the other team scored a goal at the very last second, boo :( Overall, it was amazingly fun and I'm sad that I didn't go sooner. But! We're planning on going to the next home game on December 19th, which is our last night all together here. That'll be fun. Here are some pictures!

They're a league 2 team, which is like minor league baseball, but they still have an insane fan base

Alex, Brian and Mat being super excited about the tie game

Alex and I being excited about the tie game (with our awesome scarves and the crazy striped jacket I had the fortune of buying in London)

Yesterday I went to Paris. I'll talk about that later.

The Fight I Got In In Scotland

This is kind of a weird story.

My first night in Edinburgh, a large group of us consisting of people from France, China and the United States decided to go to a dance club. It was fun for a while, and then this happened:

Girl in black dress: bumps into me with her butt
Me: moves a couple feet
Girl in black dress: bumps into me with her butt
Me: moves a couple feet in another direction
Girl in black dress: bumps into me with her butt kind of hard
Me: moves to the other side of the building

About 15 minutes later...
Me: moves back to where my friends were
Girl in black dress: bumps into me with her butt kind of hard
Sam: turns to girl and asks "What's the problem?"
Girl in black dress: screams something in rapid Scottish English

I saw this, knew that English isn't Sam's native tongue and that he probably couldn't understand the girl, and decided to step in myself.

I tap her on the shoulder. "What's the problem?" I half say, half yell (it's loud in there)

She turns to me, shoves me, and ever-so-politely tells me: "YOU'RE THE F___ING PROBLEM, B__CH!!!"

I could only express puzzlement that bordered on alarm. Along with an incredible rage. I was certainly not raised to take that kind of treatment from anyone. So I shouted something back at her and shoved her back. She stumbled back a couple steps, and I braced myself for whatever was going to come next, because from what I could see, one of us was leaving with a broken face, and it sure as heck wasn't going to be me.

And then my tiny roommate jumped in between us and started saying a bunch of stuff that I'm sure was along the lines of "cut it out!" but I was so angry that I didn't hear anything. I'm amazed that she didn't get hurt, this girl and I were so fixed to attack. Alex told me later that she did that out of concern for the other girl's well-being; she wasn't worried about me holding my own in a fight. I'm not sure if I believe her, but I think she was probably right. I was so furious that I was shaking, and continued to shake for a good ten minutes after that incident.

After I sat down and cooled off for a little bit, I decided to get up and enjoy the remainder of my night. Evidently (and I didn't notice this until recently) the girl that had shoved me decided to sulk for the rest of the night. Case in point:


There's me and Sam at the club...but wait! Look again:


Huh.

Getting to France Alive (Amazing Race part 3)

In the last episode we left our heroines outside of a hostel in Prestwick, Scotland, without a key and a promise that one could be found under the flowerpot. Oh yes, I forgot to mention that part before. Since we arrived so late, the owner of the hostel said that she would just leave the key somewhere that we could find it.

What she failed to mention, much to our dismay and amusement, was that the yard was full of flowerpots. Double-digits worth of them. Hoping that the owner followed the same logic as we did, we checked the small flowerpot near the door. Nope. We checked the one on the other side. Nope.

The one on the step to the porch. Nope.

The one on the path leading to the porch. Nope.

The one across from the last one. Nope.

We checked every flowerpot we could find, to no avail. What were we going to do? We didn't want to wake up the owner of the hostel, after all she had made a bunch of special arrangements for us. Then it dawned on us: the key could be under the pot with a tree in it! But how do we pick up a giant ceramic pot with a tree in it? The answer: very, very carefully. It was a team effort. Alex and I picked up the pot, and then with some crazy aerobics I managed to lean down, look under the pot, and extract the key. Awesome! The taxi driver probably thought we were mad (he had waited outside to make sure we got into the hostel/marvel at two Americans rearranging flowerpots in the rain in the middle of the night).

We got inside, and this is what we found:

Our lovely, wonderful room with one hard bed (which I love) and one soft bed (which Alex loves)

Breakfast and a taxi number set out for us!

Seriously? Shampoo for thin blond hair? Heavenly.

I took a shower for the first time in a couple days (ahhhh), had a cup of tea, and went to bed. For two hours. Our alarm went off at 4AM...we can sleep in til 4:30, right? So we did. 4:30 and we both had to essentially fly out of bed in order to make our taxi. We got outside at 5:02, and our taxi driver informed us that he was about to leave because he had been waiting for ten minutes...we were both like "uhmm k" because we had requested a taxi for 5AM, not before. But no matter. The taxi takes us to the airport.

We check in without issue, stop at Starbucks (!!!) poke around in the duty-free store, and head for our flight. This is where the fun starts (because everything that happened up to this point was horribly, horribly boring, right?)

Here we are on the plane before take-off. Don't we look happy and awake?!

Being college students with a limited budget, we flew with Ryanair, a budget airline. And when I say budget, I mean budget. All told my flights cost me less than 200 dollars round trip. Of course, this means that we flew in an airplane with an advertisement-covered interior, whose speakers randomly played techno music, and whose flight attendants sold scratch cards. They have an impeccable safety record, but needless to say, riding in an airplane covered in gaudy colors is kind of worrisome. Plus it was cloudy, so there was quite a bit of turbulence. This scared Alex a little bit, but mostly I slept through it.

And then this happened:

BING!

I wake up.

"Ladies and gentlemen, we are now beginning our descent into Paris-Beauvais. We ask that you please return your chairs and tray table to the upright and..."

I'm asleep.
...
...
...
Someone screams. No, a few people scream. I snap awake, unaware that I had been sleeping, to see what's going on. I look out the window through my sleep-blurred eyes and see the ground moving in an S pattern below us as the plane makes an unreasonable amount of noise and we jolt suddenly downward. We're crashing. We have to be. Why else would the ground swerve? Why else would the plane keep getting louder? Why else would my life flash before my eyes? And then I feel the resistance normally caused by the brakes of a plane against a runway, take a deep breath, and look again.

Oh look, there's the airport. At the same level was we are. We're not crashing! Good, I thought, because my last thought would have been something along the lines of "Aw gee, my mom is going to be so mad at me for this!"

Nonetheless, I was happy to be alive:

Here I am being happy and alive!

Alex got through customs with her faulty visa by pretending not to speak French (way to go, border patrol), and we ventured off into Beauvais for a few hours, which I will tell you about soon, I'm sure.

Phew.

Getting to Prestwick Airport (Amazing Race part 2)

So, do you remember the grand adventure that getting to Scotland was? Getting back was just as intense. In fact, it was so intense that I have to divide it up into two parts.

Our flight left Prestwick at 6:40am on Tuesday morning, so we decided to go out the night before and stay in a hostel. Alex, Sam and I left Heriot-Watt university in Edinburgh around 9:30pm. We took the bus downtown to the train station, which took about 45 minutes. When we got there, we (obviously) went to the desk to purchase train tickets. The guy there tells us "There's a train that leaves here at 11pm and goes to Glasgow Queen Street...the train to Prestwick leaves from Glasgow Central though, and if your train gets there on time you'll have about 12 minutes to get from one station to the other, but it's about a five minute walk, so you can go ahead and do that" Okay great! we think, and we buy our tickets (just to Glasgow Queen Street, on the off-chance that we miss the next train). Alex and I say our goodbyes to Sam, and get on the train.

It ends up getting to Queen Street about 2 minutes late, which means we have ten minutes to get across town to the other train station. No biggie, we'll just walk faster. What we failed to consider was that the directions we were given consisted of "turn right, walk down a few streets and turn left, and then turn right again and it's right there." Glasgow is the CAPITAL OF SCOTLAND. Directions like that don't work! To make matters worse, it was raining. So the scene ended up like this: after realizing that our directions lead us to essentially anywhere, Alex and I started running toward where we thought the station might be, stopping periodically to ask people, all of whom were friendly, but all of whom gave us different directions to the station. Once we finally got something clear and simple, we booked it as fast as we could to the road where the station was (so fast that even a man on the street begging for money said he understood when we said we didn't have time to stop and give him change). We also stopped to take this picture:

A statue with a traffic cone on its head

When we got to the street where the station was supposed to be, we were expecting something kind of obvious...I mean, it is the main train station of the capital of Scotland and all...but nope, we didn't see anything. It's about 12:13am at this point, which meant that we would have two minutes to get to the train station and on the train. Kind of hard when you can't even see the station. We were about to just take the financial hit and hail a taxi when--oh hey there's the train station tucked into a wall over there!! So we sprinted over there, hoping beyond all reason that the train was still there. When we got there, we had just enough time to see what platform the train was on before the sign for it disappeared (implying that it left). Well, we might as well jog over and make sure, we figured. Somewhat disheartened, we made our way over to platform 12 to find that HOLY COW THE TRAIN IS STILL THERE DID THEY JUST BLOW THE WHISTLE? WE NEED TO RUN. I have never run so fast with a heavy bag in my life. We waved frantically at the guy working on the platform, and he looked at us like "Seriously ladies? What do you think I'm going to do, stop the train with my bare hands?"

...
...
...

We got on the train. The train was in motion before we even managed to sit down, but we made it. Breathlessly, we bought tickets from the lady working on the train, and celebrated our epic victory. I was so thrilled that I even called my mom.

Success! Here we are, sweaty and glorious, with our hard-won tickets

Victoriously calling my mom

The train stopped in Prestwick Town, and we got off (or in Scottish terms, we "alit" from the train. That sounds so much fancier). The "train station" was basically a platform and...well, it was just a platform. Surrounded by nothing. So here's me and Alex, pretty much all alone on this platform at one in the morning in some random town in Scotland. The only other people there were two guys that got off the train when we did. So, without any other options, we asked them if they lived in Prestwick. Fortunately, they did. So we ask, "Can you help us find a taxi?" to which they reply "Ah...hmm...*Scottish incoherence* follow us!" Well, okay. So we follow these gentlemen down some road, around a corner, around another corner, etc...I guess I must have been pretty tired, because I didn't think anything of the fact that we were following strangers around in the middle of the night. We came to this building, they open the door and shout in "ey we got some lassies that want a car!" to which there was some murmured response, and we were instructed to go into the building. It was really just a shady little room with a guy behind a desk...but what else were we going to do? "A car will be here in about 5 minutes" he tells us.

Sure enough, about 5 minutes later two legitimate taxis show up. We get in to continue on to our hostel, and I will finish this story later.

Busy busy busy!

So I just realized that I have mountains of things to do in the next month. Therefore, I may be updating less to make time for all of these projects I've been ignoring....or I might not, because this is a pretty nice distraction. I think today counts as one of the days where I need to work...so in the meantime, here's a picture of me and Sam and the biggest leaf ever:


Also, I come home in like a month. Woaaaaaah! I feel like I just got here (but also like I've been here forever). Anyway, my literature test certainly has no plans to study for itself...

Things That Are Silly

This, once again, has nothing to do with Scotland. But I just talked about that yesterday! Besides, I'm not in the mood to discuss anything worthwhile, so here are pictures highlighting the somewhat ridiculous moments I've had in Europe (as always, click to enlarge the photos).

I am Fashion

Germany.

Scotland. Way to go, socks.

We Respect Culture

Alex's finger up a cherub's nose

Pulling a Mary Poppins in the fireplace

Brittany in London with a monument on her head

me in Angers with a cathedral on my head

What in the World?

What is this thing? in Chambord

A life-sized car in...a snow globe? Outside of Chambord

This is my new boyfriend...in Scotland

This is my other new boyfriend...In London.

When I am a graffiti artist, I too will repeat the name of my favorite facial feature on every surface available (Scotland).

Pasta Hut?!??!?!?!

Europe is weird.

Edinburgh Pictures

Sooo here are some pictures from our first day in Edinburgh, with some commentary of course. This is really just the first half of our day (that is to say, not the night) because we were up until about three in the morning. So here's Edinburgh in daylight! Ps. Daylight in Edinburgh is rare...the sun is only up for like six hours a day at this time of year.

This was the view I got of Edinburgh after climbing a really big hill (with my big green bag)

Here's me and Alex at the top of the unnecessarily tall hill

This is basically how Sam and I looked all day...I was like "PICTURES AAHHH" and he was like "I am rugged and European."

I don't know what this is, but I thought it looked cool

So we were walking down the street, and we saw this bear. I have another picture of some kids kind of poking it in the face, but after a bit of Sam dragging Alex by her bag, I got this picture.

Upon looking through my pictures, I'm realizing that I didn't take any pictures of the castle in Edinburgh. That's a little sad, but it's not so bad...I prefer having a picture of my friends with a man in a bear suit than a castle that I can find on the internet. Or maybe I'm just being optimistic. Probably a mix of the two.

I've discovered recently that I'm unendingly optimistic. Well, not so much discovered, but put to use. When I'm at more liberty to explain, I will. I just want to say that if I wasn't programmed to see the bright side in everything, today would be a very very bad day.

Even More Random

So I had every intention of updating today to tell you about my first day in Edinburgh, and then I ended up having the most random night last night, and I've decided I'd rather tell you about that.

Almost every Sunday, Alex (non-roommate) and I go out for dinner. Usually this means simply getting kebabs or pasta, and then going to Bar du Centre for a while to talk. Last night though, was (almost) completely different. Instead of going for pasta or kebabs, we went to an Asian restaurant. I had canard laqué, seen to your left, which is basically roast duck and green onions and some kind of sauce. It is so good. And I ate the whole meal, rice included, without the assistance of a fork (aka entirely with chopsticks). Go me! Alex had some kind of curry chicken, and attested to its deliciousness.

Afterwards, we were promenading in town (I use the word promenade because in French, se promener means to take a walk, so in my mind it translates into promenade, which just sounds kind of funny) and saw a bunch of flashing lights on the other side of the river. I, with my affinity for all things sparkly, insisted that we go over there. So we cross the river to investigate, and it ends up being a fair, like the Jaycee fair at home, with stands selling fried food (and crepes, haha) and various rides. Alex was like, "Let's go on a ride!" and I was a little on edge about that, because most of the non-lame rides I saw were those terrifying spinny things, aka those big sticks with the seats on either end that are like the ferris wheels of my nightmares, and I dislike ferris wheels to begin with. The picture to the right is a better example than my description. There were three of varying sizes, so of course we stopped in front of the biggest one, which was bigger than any I had ever seen in the U.S. Then again, I don't frequent fairs, but that's beside the point. We stand there for a while and Alex asks me, "Do you want to go on it?" "Do I have a choice?" I replied.

"No."

So. I went on the big scary nightmare ferris wheel. And...it was really fun. For as nervous as I was, I was almost disappointed. But let me tell you, seeing this (although from a greater distance), was really weird:


And then of course we went to Bar du Centre to celebrate the conquering of my fear of nightmare ferris wheels. It was a good night.

Random Life

First of all, I had my interview with my sorority. For those who didn't know, which is pretty much everyone, I'm trying to take over. By take over, I mean I'm trying to get elected president. I don't think it will work, since the other girls that are running are better-known and more involved, but I figure it's worth a shot, since it's something I think I could be great at. If I don't get that position, I'm looking to be the DSE (Director of Standards and Ethics) or the EVP (Executive Vice President). It'll be interesting to see how that goes.

Second, today a couple of girls came to visit my host parents. They were the girls that had lived here two years ago, in my room and Alex's room. They came upstairs like "Can we come in? Great!" and Alex and I were like "ACK!!" because our rooms were all messed up...fortunately they didn't care. It ended up being really weird, because they were eerily similar to us. There was Ellen, name starts with an E, a little bit impulsive and kind of edgy, lived in my room. Then there was AJ, name starts with an A, very straight-laced and a fan of things that are normal. It was really crazy.

Next! Recently, in a valiant effort to procrastinate, I've been messing around with the photomerge feature in Adobe Photoshop. Thanks to the combination of that and the stitch aid on my digital camera, I can make really sweet panoramas. You can see one up top that I put behind my header, and below are some other ones I've made (click on an image to see it full-size...they're HUGE.)

Taken from the TGV on my way home from Paris...not bad for over 100mph

The interior and exterior of the Dom in Cologne, Germany

Inside the Beauvais cathedral

I'll get back to Scotland eventually, but I wanted to throw some of these pictures up for everyone to see. I hope you like them.

Heavy Green Bag

My first full day of Scotland consisted mainly of my heavy green bag. I mean, touring Glasgow and Edinburgh...with my heavy green bag. Fortunately, I got to give the air mattress I had been carrying to Sam as soon as I got there, but I still was grumpy about it. Case in point:

Here you can see that hateful green bag, which doesn't look nearly as heavy as it was.

This is my "I would throw this air mattress at your head if you weren't smiling like that" face

First, we mainly just walked around Glasgow, during which time I saw things like this:
And of course, we went to the cathedral, which looked like this:

It was really cool, because it looked tiny, but when you went inside there were stairs to go to a part underground, which was huge. This has been an awful lot of pictures for one entry, so I'll talk about touring Edinburgh later.

Getting to Scotland (Amazing Race part 1)

I'm going to split Scotland up into multiple entries, one because it's long and two because I don't have all of my pictures up yet.

So first things first, we had to get to Scotland. More specifically, we had to get to Glasgow and my friend Sam. This ended up requiring two trains, a metro, a bus, an airplane and a taxi.

The two trains, the metro and the bus all happened in France. Because of the cheap airline we took, we had to fly out of Paris-Beauvais. I'm not sure why they call it Paris-Beauvais, because it's effectively an hour outside of Paris. Anyway, the SNCF workers went on strike so only about half of the trains were running. We got really lucky, because both of ours were on time. The total travel time by train was about two and a half hours, with an hour in between to take the metro (Paris subway) from Paris-Montparnasse to Paris-Nord (two train stations in Paris) for our train to Beauvais. Afterwards, Alex and I got dinner at a Belgian restaurant, then hopped on the bus to get to the Beauvais airport (about 30 minutes). On the bus we met a couple of Canadian college students that were studying in Rouen and en route to Barcelona for the weekend. That was pretty cool.

So at the airport, check-in went fine...then we had to get through customs. I went up to the desk, the guy stared at my passport for a minute or two, then stamped it and let me through. Alex was behind me in line, so she goes up to the desk (I'm standing on the other side of the customs guy waiting now). The guy looks at her passport for a really long time and says something to her. I don't know what he said, but she got this terrified and confused look on her face. The guy kept looking at her passport and shaking his head, while she tried to explain something to him. Eventually she got through. I'm not sure how she did it, because the problem was that her visa was only good for two months, after which she had to have a carte de sejour. She hasn't finished going through the process for the carte yet, so the guy basically said to her "I can't let you leave France. Actually, you're not even supposed to be here, so you need to come with me." Fortunately, she had a piece of paper stapled into her passport that said she was in the middle of getting her carte, and that's how she got through. It wasn't very official at all, so I know now that if I need to sneak across a border all I have to do is staple a paper to my passport. The flight was fine after that.

Once we got to Glasgow-Prestwick (again, about an hour out of Glasgow, why do they even call it that?!) it was about ten til midnight. We were thinking, okay, Sam said there was a train headed in our direction, so we should be able to just take it back to Glasgow, right? Nope. The train was headed to Ayr, (Prestwick is between the two) but there was no train headed back. We found this out as we were standing on the platform, waiting. In the meantime we met a French couple who was also trying to get to Glasgow, but spoke no English. So we thought okay, we'll just take a bus. Sadly, all of the buses available appeared to be tourist buses. So, we walk into the airport and ask an employee where we can find a regular bus going to Glasgow. He says "aye, there's a bus that leaves right about midnight from o'er there!" So we go back to where we saw the tourist buses (which are no longer there), and ask some guy over there when the bus leaving at midnight is coming. He says "I'm sorry lassies it just left!"...it wasn't midnight yet. Evidently the tourist buses we saw were actually the legitimate buses to Glasgow. So what do we do now? We've missed the train, missed the buses, and a taxi is expensive. Oh wait! We've still got this French couple with us; we can all share a taxi and it will be affordable! So we called a taxi. Our driver was utterly incoherent. Not by any fault of his own, but because of his super thick Scottish accent. Every time he spoke, Alex and I were like "?????". Somehow, miraculously, by the grace of God, we ended up in Glasgow. All we had to do then was meet up with Sam, who greeted us with a smile and a giant bag of cookies, even though he had been waiting in Glasgow for a full three hours. From there we walked to our hostel and finally, finally got to go to bed around 3 in the morning.

Phew.