La Vie à Angers

Parting is Such Sweet Sorrow

2008-12-20T08:01:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-16T01:57:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-14T04:42:00.001-08:00

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...

2008-12-10T10:38:00.000-08:00

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)

2008-12-09T01:56:00.000-08:00

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)

2008-12-08T02:23:00.000-08:00

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)

2008-12-04T09:32:00.000-08:00

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.

Paris Part 1 (Sacre Coeur, Pere Lachaise, Centre Pompidou)

2008-12-03T09:30:00.000-08:00

On Saturday my friend Alex and I went to Paris. Our train left at 7:15AM, so we had to get up super super early (okay well like 6AM, but that's hard on a Saturday morning!) We arrived at Paris-Montparnasse at 9AM sharp, and amazingly my friend Andrew (who's currently studying in Germany) woke up and met us at the train station. From there, we hopped on the metro and went to see Sacre-Coeur, a white, relatively new church in Paris (it was built in the 1800s). Here's a picture of Andrew and me in front of it (click to enlarge):

It's utterly massive, and at the bottom of the stairs lurks a troop of random men that try to sell you string and then curse at you when you don't want to buy any. It's good fun. After that, we wandered briefly around Montmartre. The area we walked through was essentially a giant conglomerate of fabric stores; Montmartre is supposed to be the artsy neighborhood. Case in point, check out this grafitti:

Once we were finished wandering, Alex and I parted ways with Andrew and headed over to Pere Lachaise, which is a giant cemetery in which a bunch of famous people are buried. I'm not really sure what the appeal in it was, but it was cool to go hang out briefly with Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde (all told, they weren't very good company).

From there, we decided to go to Centre Pompidou, the big modern art museum in the center of the city. It looks like this:

Cool, right? I was so excited to even see the building; I had been wanting to go for years and years. In front it has a big gallery of permanent outdoor art:

We got a little distracted by something else before we actually went into the museum, but I'll talk about that next time I write. Here are some photos from inside the museum:

Alex and me chilling by the escalators

Some pipes on top of the museum

A hallway in the museum

I think this piece is funny. It's a regular old urinal, tipped on its side, signed and called art.

This piece was see through, and I was apparently ambivalent toward it.

There's a lot more yet to come from my crazy Paris day-trip, stay tuned!

Epic Lame

2008-12-02T09:40:00.000-08:00

So first of all, I'm sick. No fun, especially when I have as much work as I do to get done.

Speaking of work, half of it is because of my literature course, in which I have to finish reading a 500 page book, write a paper on it, and give a 15 minute presentation on Baudelaire. And I just found out today THAT I DON'T EVEN NEED TO TAKE THAT CLASS. My adviser told me it was necessary in order for me to graduate, but apparently because I also took translation, I didn't need to take literature. And she told me I did! I can't even express how frustrated I am right now...she's the head of the department! Shouldn't she know what's required and not required for the major??! Not to blame her entirely, I should have really double-checked what she said to me. But still, this development has got me feeling like this (replace Sam with 19th century literature):

Uhm...let's see...nothing without a good side...I passed my translation test, miraculously, and my langue professor no longer thinks I'm not going to finish my memoire...that's happy. What else...I just ate a bunch of rice pudding, mmmmm. Further, I can count the days until I come home on my fingers and toes...here are some happy pictures!

Alex, me, Katy, Alex and Brian

Alex, me, Brittany and Katy post-Thanksgiving...looks like someone's in a food coma

Thanksgiving and Soccer

2008-11-30T05:01:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-26T08:15:00.000-08:00

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)

2008-11-24T02:29:00.000-08:00

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)

2008-11-23T02:53:00.000-08:00

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!

2008-11-20T12:08:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-19T01:36:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-18T02:32:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-17T02:39:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-16T08:50:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-15T06:02:00.000-08:00

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)

2008-11-12T01:48:00.000-08:00

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.

Edinburgh

2008-11-09T06:09:00.000-08:00

Is bloody crazy! I don't have much time, but what I can tell you so far...

It took 12 hours to get here between Angers and Glasgow
We are hanging out with almost exclusively French people
I got attacked by a girl in a club, but she definitely picked the wrong American to mess with
We rode the same bus 3 times within 30 minutes
I cooked crepes for French people

I'm sure that's not it, but those are the highlights I can remember right now, some of which I will certainly explain in greater detail when I have more time.

Scotland!

2008-11-06T04:33:00.001-08:00

Hello, just a petite coucou to inform you that I am leaving for Scotland today in about an hour! I'm sorry I didn't have the chance to tell you about how the American elections went here, but I'll tell you now it was super-fun...they said on the news that everyone is going to remember exactly where they were when Obama won the election...I was passed out in a bar! Don't worry, I wasn't drunk, just asleep because the bar stayed open all night so the Americans could watch the election, and when Obama was announced as the winner, it was about 4:30 in the morning here.

So anyway, I'm going to go to the train station now and see if my train is actually running...the train employees are all on strike, so only about half of the trains are running. Hopefully that turns out well.

Halloween in France

2008-11-03T02:26:00.000-08:00

Let me preface with this: if there was not a massive number of American students in Angers, there would have been no costume party. The French just don't do Halloween.

Fortunately we're all here so we had a Halloween party! Yay!

Alex and I went together as good and evil

This was Brittany's response to the fact that we missed our sorority's masquarade ball

Here's a kid in a Pooh bear costume, I think his name is Yuki

There's me...Suzy dressed up as a devil, Mat(t) as a guy in a suit, and Alex as a guy in a suit wearing eyeliner (creative, guys)

Hiroki went as a cowboy assassin

All in all it was a great time. Although, walking through the streets of Angers in costume did merit some funny looks...especially since the situation was something like this: me, in my devil costume with my roommate who is not wearing glasses (and legally blind) and waving around a fairy wand. Because of her inability to see, I was steering her around with my trident...people looked at us awfully funny.

This morning I had an art history exam that I was horribly nervous for because I had to move it up to Monday (today) from Friday (4 days from now) so I could go to Scotland on time. Fortunately, amazingly, I knew the responses to all the questions. Phew! The rest of this week is going to be absurdly busy, since I have to keep up with my work and get ready for a random trip to Scotland. Awesome.

I Guess I'm Just Les Genoux des Abeilles

2008-10-31T05:47:00.001-07:00

Les genoux des abeilles = the bees knees.

Let me expand on that a little. So I was doing homework last night; I had opted to not go out dancing with some of my friends. Around 1:15AM (not bad for me) I decided to go to bed. The easiest way for me to illustrate this scene is in the form of a script...and So I present to you:

Cell Phone ARRGH :( aka What Happened Last Night
Time: 1:30 AM
Me: zzzzzzzz
Cell phone: RING RING RING BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ RING
Me: ...allo?
Cell phone: Bonjour Erica? C'est Florian ca va? (blah blah blah let's hang out on Saturday oh are you asleep my bad)
Me: Grunt.

Time: 2:00 AM
Me: zzzzzzzzzzz
Cell phone: BEEP BEEP BUZZ BUZZ
Me: &%&^% ??
Cell phone: Sean says: You're going to be yourself for Halloween?
Me: bah. :-|

Time: 4:00 AM
Me: zzzzzzzzzz
Cell phone: BEEP BEEP BUZZ BUZZ
Me: ARE YOU SERIOUS?!?!?!?!?
Cell phone: Alex (non-roommate) says I am by your house!!
Me: ummm....zzz.

Time: 4:01 AM
Me: zzzzz
Cell phone: BEEP BEEP BUZZ BUZZ
Me: grooooan.
Cell phone: Alex (non-roommate) says come outside!!
Me: wait, is this a joke?! zzzzz

Time: 4:02 AM
Me: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Cell phone: RING RING RING BUZZ BUZZ RING
Me: Whaaaaat :'(
Cell phone: Hiii it's Alex I'm close to your house and I was wondering if you wanted to come hang out!
Me: It's 4 in the morning, Alex...
Cell phone: I know but I'm walking home from dancing and I passed your house and I was going to leave at like two but then my friends were like "no stay stay!" and so I stayed and I was about to leave and this song came on and it went like "(singing) lalalaaaa lalalalalaaaa" and...oh you were sleeping weren't you"
Me: ....................
Cell phone: Okay then beaux reves belle fille!
Me: *sob*

I would have just turned my phone off, but it is also my alarm clock...so no luck.

Anyway, costume party tonight, yayayayayayayayay!!!

My ACCENT??

2008-10-27T16:25:00.001-07:00

Last night I went to dinner at my friend's house. I met this particular friend (his name is Samuel) at the post office in Angers a couple months ago. What was weird about this dinner is that Samuel left for Scotland about a month and a half ago. Ergo, I went to dinner at Samuel's house...to eat with his family, who I didn't know at all. But they have a couple daughters who are learning English, and decided to profit from Samuel's anglophone friends (my roommate went too). We, of course, decided to profit from the offer of free food.

The family ended up being super nice; we sat around and ate for a good two hours or so. Meanwhile, Alex and I spoke English to Camille, Samuel's sister. She understood well enough (her friend had no idea what was going on), but seemed to have an easier time understanding Alex. I wondered about that, and tried to slow down my speech. Not much luck. Camille's mom explained to me later: "I think Camille and Marie (the friend) have trouble understanding you because of your accent." and I thought to myself "Oh, okay---wait, what? I have an accent?!" Apparently people from the Ohio/Pennsylvania region have some sort of accent that's hard for non-native English speakers to understand...and the more I think about it, the more I can kind of hear it, at least compared to Alex. It must be the muted 't' sound (like, when I make that sound, it's not as pronounced as someone learning English would need it to be).

On the one hand, I'm sad that I'm currently of less use to these girls than Alex is; I tried to enunciate my syllables, but my Ohioan twang must be too strong because they still had to work to comprehend. On the other hand, maybe it's good for me there with my "accent." It's not very strong, and it's probably good for these girls to get used to different accents in English, since there are so many. Anyway, they invited us back at least two more times, which is very cool.

Speaking of Samuel, Alex and I are going to visit him in Scotland in about two weeks...I'm pretty excited. We're most likely going to visit Loch Ness, and if that's the case, Samuel and I have dared each other to jump in for a quick swim...it's going to be sooooo cold, but so fun. I can't wait.

Here's an unfortunately aimed picture of Matt, boy Alex, me, Katy and girl Alex!

Pumpkin Pictures!

2008-10-27T09:05:00.001-07:00

Woohoo two entries in one day!! I know there exists an exponentially more bizarre picture of me carving pumpkins, but it's on Brittany's camera, and I'll show you that as soon as I have it.

The one that looks like it says "fail" at the top right is mine...way to go, self.

Pumpkins, Candy, and Axe Murderers

2008-10-27T03:34:00.000-07:00

Last night was a much-needed break from everything French. My friends and I all gathered at this bar where we like to hang out, because the owner decided she was going to buy a ton of pumpkins for us to carve. So! We carved pumpkins :). It was kind of hard, because French pumpkins are not at all like American pumpkins...

An American pumpkin

Some French pumpkins

So you see, carving one of these flat friends wasn't exactly the easiest thing in the world. I tried to carve the word "Falstaff" into mine (that's the name of the place where we carved the pumpkins)...it kind of worked. There will be pictures eventually, but I didn't take any so I'm at the mercy of my friends as far as that goes.

After we finished carving pumpkins, Alex² (two friends named Alex, therefore Alex squared...) and I went for dinner, then went back to Falstaff to watch two gratuitously violent movies (The Hills Have Eyes 2 and Grizzly Park). The Hills Have Eyes 2 was exactly like the original, only with less burning alive and more random men trapped in port-a-potties. Grizzly Park was probably the dumbest movie I've ever seen, but in the company of friends it was fun to watch.

About Halloween costumes...I'm not sure if that's going to happen or not. But! I've determined that I own enough black and white striped clothing to be a prisoner if I need a costume. :)

Chipotle

2008-10-24T15:18:00.001-07:00

:( This is, oddly, what I miss most about being at home. Sigh. Less than two months, tasty burrito bol, less than two months.

Living Dead

2008-10-22T05:47:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty sure that's what they'd call someone like me right about now. I'm so exhausted that no amount of coffee can save me, and I have too much work to take a nap. Normally I never choose working over sleeping, but I want to go to my friend's friend's band's concert tonight, and so I need to get everything done. Plus, I'm waiting at the university until 3:30 for my other friend, so we can go get coffee.

I think, no I know, the problem is that I'm only getting 4 or 5 hours of sleep every night. I know it's not enough, but I'm afraid that if I sleep, I'll miss something. I mean, it's not every day that I'm in France (well right now it is, but that's not the point). And it's not so much that I expect something horribly interesting to happen at 3 in the morning here (although sometimes things happen), but I can never say no to an invitation to do something interesting, which means that I'm up later working and tending to my own homeostasis (aka showering and feeding myself every once in a while) and therefore exponentially more tired.

Tonight I will go to bed early. <---I say that every night; it never happens.

Hmmm...

2008-10-20T15:45:00.000-07:00

I've been boring lately. I spent my weekend hanging out with some French kids. On Friday, we went to a concert for a band that was very cool. Not much else to report. Here's pictures from Germany!

the door to the Dom, the giant cathedral in Cologne

Sooo huge!!!

Outside the cathedral (I'm not kidding, huge.)

The stained-glass windows were amazing.

Me, Didem, and Brittany. The hand thing is our sorority sign...I'm not in a gang or anything haha.

Wuh?

2008-10-17T04:57:00.000-07:00

So today in my art history class, we stopped talking about prehistoric art, and started talking about a period that, roughly translated, is the period of Antiquity (I know nothing about art in English). It went from the first century BC to the fourth century AD, our professor explains to us. And this girl somewhere behind me raises her hand and says something to the effect of "Umm...I don't..." and before she could finish, my professor goes on to explain how BC and AD work. The girl responds with "Oh I know but these dates...I don't agree." Now, it wasn't that she disagreed with the time period in which this particular art movement happened...she disagreed with using "before Christ" and "after Christ". And I'm sitting here thinking, "Hold on a minute girl, do you mean to say 'I reject your reality and would like to substitute my own'? Are you really disagreeing with a time system that is essentially universally accepted by Christians and non-Christians alike, just because you don't believe in Jesus? That seems unnecessarily snooty and standoffish." The professor had to explain to her that she wasn't talking about religion, just art. Well, duh. Come on now. It makes me wonder, if this girl is so opposed to our dating system being based around Jesus, how does she function? I can just imagine it...

Random person: When is your birthday?
Girl: [random date], twenty years ago.
Random person: Okay, so 1988?
Girl: No, just twenty years ago.

Brittany and I felt sort of like this about the whole thing:
That's actually a picture of our "I don't speak German" faces, but same difference. Anyway, I have my last class of the week in about twenty minutes...I'm not sure how I'm going to survive, I'm so tired. It's hard having the internet at my house and all my friends in a time zone that's six hours behind me...my 2AM is their after-dinner chill on the internet time. It's rough.

ZzZzZz...

2008-10-16T09:51:00.000-07:00

Pardon my utter lack of interesting updates, but now that we've settled into our classes, not much of interest happens.

I did, however, try to explain baseball to someone who had never seen it before. That's really hard to do, especially when you don't know any baseball words in French...like, how do I explain a strike? I can't use the word "greve" because that means a strike that workers go on...I can't use the word "coup" because that's the kind of strike that leaves bruises...so therein lies the challenge!

Mostly I've been sitting around in my room. There's not much to do at the university, and it's been raining...so I've been watching a whole entire TV series on my computer and reading books. Hooray!

Tomorrow I'm apparently going to a concert, so this should be fun :D

A Bad Joke?

2008-10-14T14:14:00.001-07:00

So ten Asians, two Russians, a Frenchman and an American walk into a room....

...no actually, it's my Business French class. I'm the only anglophone there.

Wow.

Here's a kind of random picture of me and Brittany and Paul!

Hooray!!

2008-10-12T03:35:00.000-07:00

It's so nice out today, I think I'm going to spend the whole day reading in the park--how wonderful is that! I hope I have enough book left to read....we'll see, I guess.

Not much else to report yet...so here's some pictures from my last day in London! (perhaps I'll take my camera out with me today and take some pictures of the park(s))Here's the Tower of London!

Here's a newspaper I found in a bush; I thought the headline was funny.

Here's where a bunch of people got beheaded/hacked to bits in the Tower of London, yummy.

Here's the white tower, inside the tower of London.

And here's Tower Bridge with a boat in front of it!

Thus concludes my London saga...stay tuned for Cologne! (and maybe even some more Angers...)

Oh PS. I got my hair cut. Here's the result...not as short as I wanted, but I still like it:

Woo! Okay, park time!

Eh bien.

2008-10-09T05:24:00.000-07:00

Okay! I've decided which courses I'm taking and they are as follows: Language, Translation, Business French, 19th Century Literature, and Art History. I figure it's not worth fighting with the political science department back at home, so I'll just finish my minor when I get back. Plus, I know I'd never think to take an art history class in the states. So that's that.

My dad is coming out to Europe this weekend, but I won't get to see him. That's too bad, but Poland and Romania are nowhere near where I am, so I understand. I mean...I could always take one of those shady Ryanair flights and go see him, but he's on a business trip, and probably wouldn't have time for me. But it's all good!

In other news, my meal plan ran out, so I'm on my own as far as eating goes. This makes me nervous, but is probably a good thing, since I'm always terribly nervous when I try to order food here. I'm not sure of the etiquette, or the right words to say and...oh wow!!! Do you ever cut yourself and not notice you did it??! Yikes...I guess this puts me down another pair of pants. Talk about needing to do laundry...I officially have one clean pair of pants left...which are khaki. Actually! I caught it early enough and got the whole stain out...now I just have a wet spot on my pants, boo. Man, cleaning up blood wasn't something I had on my list of things to do today. Anyway, I digress.

Oh yeah, food. I need to figure out how to live on a budget and not be malnourished. This will be interesting. Here's some pictures from Day 2 in London!

We went to this GIANT store called TopShop...they had pretty much everything, so I tried this crazy number on. America's Next Top Model? Maybe? Maybe?

Brittany tried on a...well, this.

Here we are with our front row seats...

...for this little play you might have heard of...

Yeah, we had front row seats to Wicked. Sweet.

The Longest Blog in the History of Ever

2008-10-07T01:34:00.000-07:00

Hello, sorry I haven't updated my blog in a week or so...I've been either extraordinarily busy or extraordinarily lazy...unfortunately it's been the later since I returned from Germany, but here I am now so yay!

(On a side note, I was up until 4 in the morning talking with my friends from the states last night, and I woke up at 7:30, so I'm horribly, horribly tired. Bear with me.)

Anyway! I don't know where to begin. How about some subheadings!!!

School
My first "official" day of classes was yesterday. This consisted of once again taking placement tests (ugh) and then spending the rest of the day "shopping" for courses. I went to Art History, Contemporary Geopolitics, and Business French. The only one I know for certain that I'm taking is Business French. I can opt to take it 3 hours a week and then take the University's exam at the end of the semester, or take it 6 hours a week, take the University's exam, and then take something called the DFA1 in January. The DFA1 is a test I can take to get a diploma that basically certifies me in the speaking of business French. I would typically take it in France, but since I'll be back home I have to find a French Chamber of Commerce in the US and take the test there. So I'm going to do that. Business French will be the death of me.

I think I've ruled out contemporary geopolitics, because I can't understand the professor.

We still have to take language classes (that's what the placement tests were for). I placed into the highest one again, and again I have no idea how, but I can't complain. The only thing I'm dreading somewhat is the fact that I have to write a 3000 word essay...in French. (That's about 10-12 pages according to the google search I just did...I think I feel faint, haha). Otherwise, it shouldn't be that bad.

I know for certain that I'm taking a French/English translation course (they also offer French/Japanese, but I think that would be a bit too challenging), and my other options are: The Politics of the 5th Republic, Art History, and 19th century literature. I have to pick two of the three, which will be hard. Art History would be interesting, but I don't need it for anything. Politics of the 5th Republic would be dreadful, but I'm tired of Allegheny's political science department and would like to finish my minor here. Taking a literature course would clear up some space in my schedule when I get home, because I need to take one more to complete the literature requirement for my major. So, the poli sci class and the lit class would make completing my psychology minor much easier...but wouldn't be nearly as enjoyable as art history. Unfortunately, I'm starting to think enjoyable is going to have to fall by the wayside, because there are only so many hours in my day.

Germany
I really didn't do all that much in Germany, which is perfectly fine with me. I went and saw the Dom, which is this amazingly huge cathedral. We strolled around the city at night, but mostly we just hung out with Didem and her friends, which in all honesty was the kind of vacation I needed. I haven't uploaded my pictures from Germany yet, so I'll put those up later.

London
Here are pictures from Day One. I'll put them up a day at a time, because there are a lot. (also, someday I will get the pictures from le Chateau d'Angers up...promise)

Here's Big Ben...not as big as I thought it would be!

Buckingham Palace, also not as big as I'd imagined.

If you've read or seen Harry Potter, this should be familiar. This is at the King's Cross train station.

This is Camden. It's basically entirely punk rock shops. I loved it.

Here's the House of Commons overlooking the River Thames at sunset...sweet.

Here's the biggest ferris wheel in the world! (The London Eye...and the technical term is "the world's tallest cantilevered observation wheel"...whatever that means)

So here's a sign that's in the cantilevered observation wheel. Do not lean against doors. Yeah, you see those lights outside? That's the top of a skyscraper. I don't think I'll be trying to exit this pod anytime soon, thanks.

The House of Commons from the cantilevered observation wheel (I love this term). We were up pretty high.

And here's me in front of Big Ben at the end of our first day.

If you made it through all that, kudos. The next one will be easier to digest, promise.

Germany

2008-10-01T13:20:00.001-07:00

So I made it to Germany in one piece. Let's just talk briefly about how lucky I've been getting at the airports. Example one: flying from Nantes (France) to London, I had stupidly packed all of my shower products (all in containers of more than 100mL, none of which will fit in a one-liter bag). So I figured, I'll try and go through security. If they pull me out of the line and yell at me for my shampoo, I'll just throw it away. Waste of money, but no big deal. My bags (purse and duffel bag) go through the machine. My heart races. The guy in charge of the x-ray machine asks me "ma'am, do you mind if I go through your...purse?" I was like ...seriously? YES SIR PLEASE GO THROUGH MY PURSE. My purse had nothing of interest in it! Meanwhile, my three giant bottles of shower products get on the airplane with me and go to London. Example two: this morning, as I was leaving London Stansted to go to Dusseldorf (Germany) I was confronted with the same issue. However, the security at Stansted was very stern about liquids (ie have all of your liquids in a bag and out of your luggage so we can inspect them). No chance I'll be getting my shampoo through there. So after much deliberation, I decided it would be cheaper to spend the 16 British pounds to check my bag than to throw away my shampoo and buy some more. So I approach the desk and ask to check a bag. "How much does it cost?" I inquire. The woman responds "Well normally it would be 16 pounds, but our system is down today so I'll just take your bag." !!!!!!!!!!! I didn't have to pay to check my bag! What luck!

Anyway, how was my first day in Germany? Good question. The airport shuttle picked us up from our hostel and 3:15AM...our flight took off at 7:25AM...arrived at 9:35AM. We hopped on a bus for an hour to get to the train station to be on the train for an hour or so...and then Didem (my sorority sister) and Andrew (her boyfriend and a friend of mine) met us at the train station at 12:30PM. We ate lunch, and then went back to Didem's house with the plan of dropping off our stuff and going sight-seeing all day. Not so much. I sat down on the couch around 3PM....and woke up to "Hey guys it's dinner time, wake up." Sooo I did nothing today! Which is fine. I feel good. Hopefully things will start happening tomorrow.

Rainy, Rainy London

2008-09-30T16:09:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-28T16:17:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-09-26T03:44:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-24T04:11:00.000-07:00

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....

2008-09-23T07:18:00.000-07:00

...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!

2008-09-22T03:50:00.000-07:00

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"

2008-09-20T02:38:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-18T03:50:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-17T04:30:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-16T04:22:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-15T03:51:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-11T08:04:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-09-10T06:03:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-09T04:01:00.000-07:00

"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

2008-09-05T04:26:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-02T05:37:00.000-07:00

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?!

2008-09-01T02:24:00.000-07:00

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.

!!!

2008-08-30T05:47:00.001-07:00

I'm all packed...mostly. I just need to take a shower and then I'll be able to finish packing everything. My trip to France doesn't begin until tomorrow, but my journey begins today. The rest of my family is going to Minnesota for my cousin's wedding, so they're dropping me off at my friend's house today. Fortunately, this friend and I are flying out to France together. I leave at 5:30 PM on Sunday. The next time you hear from me, I'll be in France!

-Erica

My Life In A Suitcase

2008-08-27T09:41:00.000-07:00

Well, I've almost finished packing...I think. How am I supposed to really judge that? I mean, I think I have enough clothing, no, I know I have enough clothing to survive while I'm there, but is it correct for the climate? Is it the right sort of clothing? I know it isn't...France is so much fancier, and I spend most of my life in heavy metal t-shirts...not exactly classy, guys.

And then, what else do I bring?! I've got shampoo and all that, but do I need like...school supplies? I'm finding it very easy to forget that my destination is a developed country with convenience stores and millions of people that manage to live and go to school without having to shop in the United States.

Another thing that puzzles me is this whole idea of a money belt...yes, I understand that I'll be carrying around my passport and having that stolen would be very, very bad, but the things I've read have suggested that I carry my money in there too. Do regular French people do that? Probably not. What makes me different? I mean, I know I'll have an accent and whatnot, but I'd like to think that I'm less conspicuously American than most of the other Americans that visit France. Do they tell French tourists to do this when visiting the United States? So many questions.

Speaking of questions, I've been considering calling my host family again to find out if they have kids and stuff, because I'd like to bring them a gift, but I have no idea what to bring. I wish I had been thinking when I was at school this summer, and just picked something up from the bookstore. Alas, I did not do that. Now I'm pondering venturing into Amish country to search for something "American," although when I think of "American" I don't think of Amish people...oh well.

I have three nights left in my own bed...woah.

Getting There

2008-08-03T15:36:00.001-07:00

Okay! So I bought my plane tickets a few weeks ago, and I got my visa on Monday. Awesome. Now all I need to do is contact my host family, figure out how to buy train tickets in advance, and pack.

Of course, I have no idea what to pack.

Also, above is the giant shiny bean I saw when I was in Chicago, getting my visa. Hooray!

Maintenant..

2008-07-06T20:26:00.000-07:00

Let's see. Since I've last written...

I've almost given my mother a heart attack about my visa
I've almost given my mother a heart attack about my plane tickets
I've almost given my mother a heart attack about my housing
I've almost given my mother a heart attack about how everything will be paid for
etc...

The keyword there is almost. She's doing fine, so I'm obviously doing something right. What I need to do now is buy a bunch of plane tickets so that I can get to Chicago to get my visa, and then get to France. And somehow I have to figure out how to buy a French train ticket two months in advance. Oh jeez, it's less than two months now. Eep.

Maybe I should start packing.

Oh Yeah

2008-04-27T21:56:00.000-07:00

I found out the other day that I got accepted into UCO. Just figured that was important to note here.

Visa: I have to go everywhere to get where I want to be

2008-03-20T22:15:00.000-07:00

Not too long ago, I decided it would be a good idea to check out how to get my visa to spend 3 months in France. I had imagined that it would involve filling out an application, and then visiting the consulate to get everything cleared. This consulate of my dreams was in a large city only an hour away from me. Apparently this only happens in a world where unicorns and fairies exist.

So what's the reality of getting a visa to study in France? Well first, I have to create a dossier on the CampusFrance website. Okay, I think as I click on website. My dad has probably done something like this before and he can...WHAT??? the website is entirely in French. Being a French speaker, this is fine for me, but it means that I have to figure the whole thing out on my own, since nobody else in my family speaks a lick of French (aside from my mother, who can say "close your mouth" and "open the window", which I don't think will be much help here). I managed to figure out how to create my dossier, but now there are 50 million other things I have to figure out on this webpage which will take me a good while.

Let's pretend now that I've figured it out. All I have to do is fill out the visa application and schedule an appointment at the consulate in...CHICAGO. Ack. That's a good 6 hours from my house, and from what I've heard about trying to schedule appointments at consulates, I'll spend a night camping on the streets of Chicago.

I can't wait.

Applying to UCO

2008-03-09T12:37:00.000-07:00

I recently filled out my application to CIDEF, and to UCO. I'm not entirely sure what CIDEF stands for at the moment, but it is basically the program at UCO for foreign exchange students. They hold an intensive language program from September to October, to get students prepared for the upcoming semester, and to keep American students on a schedule similar to that in the states (since in France, semesters typically last from October to late January).

What surprised me about these applications was how short they are. I remember when applying to my current school, I had to fill out many more pages with much more information, and I was using an abbreviated application. I wonder if the UCO an CIDEF applications are shorter because I have already been accepted to and attending an accredited university. Although now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure that I was filling out an application for only one semester (in my excitement, I didn't think about this).

Overall, the process took me about twenty minutes. All I have to do now is decide what kind of host I would like to live with next fall, and turn in my application to my college's International Office. Hopefully I can manage to do this before Friday. I don't think it will be too hard.

It begins!

2008-03-07T13:19:00.000-08:00

Hey there, internet. My name is Erica, I am a sophomore in college in the Midwestern United States. I was recently accepted to spend a semester at the Universite Catholique de l'Ouest (Western Catholic University) in Angers, France. I've created this blog to document my experiences before, during, and after studying there.

Hopefully, this will serve as a way for me to keep in touch with everyone at home, and anyone who is interested in following the life of an exchange student.

A bientot! (See you soon, but here I mean that I will write again soon)