Christmastime in France

Aix is getting to be pretty beautiful. My roommate and I have been busy decorating our apartment whilst listening to our favorite Christmas songs. After a day-long field trip to our local IKEA and Carrefour (France's Walmart), we found a small fiber-optic Christmas tree and a strand of lights. We set that up in our apartment, and after adding some red and gold ornaments to the tree, our apartment is feeling pretty Christmasey.

To get to the stores, we have to take a half-hour bus trip to small town outside of Aix called Vitrolles. The bus to and from Vitrolles only runs every so often, so as I was getting off of the bus, I asked our bus driver if he had a copy of the schedule so we would know when we could get back to Aix after going to IKEA. After getting off the bus, the driver immediately called me back and told me to call my friends back as well. He told us he had a 20-minute break between dropping us off and needing to leave again, so he decided to take us to IKEA--for free! We chatted with him on the way there, and he joked and told us how he loves to laugh, unlike those Parisians. They're much too serious.

Anyway! I'm also getting ready to head home in two days. Actually, my flight is leaving in exactly 48 hours. I can't wait! In between now and then, I have one class this morning and a final exam tomorrow morning, so I'll be keeping busy trying to get all of my packing and Christmas shopping finished by then.

This past Saturday, I was actually able to take a last-minute field trip to Les Baux-de-Provence, which is this beautiful little castle village that sits in the Alpilles (the little Alps). The castle is now only ruins, but the village has a really rich history, and it's got some great views. While there, we were able to visit this amazing photo gallery that's not exactly a photo gallery. It's called La Cathédrale d'Images, and it's basically this huge underground cavern that has images and videos projected on to all of its walls. But there are more than four walls--it's enormous, and I don't think you could really understand until you see the videos.

Actually, I had been looking for this place for a long time. I had seen pictures of it, and I knew it was in Provence somewhere, but I had no idea where, and I didn't know what it was called, so I didn't really have a way of finding out. Luckily for me, I happened to be dragged to it by the people who drove us! It was everything I had hoped it would be. I'm uploading the pictures I took right now, so I'll get the link posted on the right as soon as I can. I'm also working on a video compilation of the streets of Aix, but I'm having issues with that, so that might not be posted until I get home. I may spend my time flying home working on that project. I'm flying Marseille > Paris > Atlanta > home!

Well, to everyone at home, à bientôt!

Edit: The pictures are now available!

Barcelona

Where to begin? This weekend was amazing from start to finish. So I suppose I should start at the beginning.

Saturday October 30, 2010

Our bus left at about 6am on Saturday morning, and the drive there was supposed to take about 6-7 hours. We drove along the Mediterranean for a while, and we got to see a lot of charming cities situated on the coast. It was really surprising how much the landscape differed from France to Spain once we crossed the border. It was very mountainey in Spain--and gorgeous!

So we got to Barcelona at about noon, and we headed over to our hostel, which was right up Les Ramblas, one of the main roads in Barcelona. It took a little bit to get everyone from our group situated, but we finally got everyone settled in. From there, Bri and I went to grab some lunch and see some of the city. She had bought a Barcelona guide book, so we ended up doing a lot of walking to see the main sights. Luck seemed to be against us because we kept getting to the churches only to find out they were closed. Not everything went wrong, though. The weather was gorgeous, and we found the main market in the city almost right away: La Boqueria!

The market was awesome. It was huge, for one thing. And for another, I bought some delicious chocolate candies. And you know that makes me happy. So we walked around for a while, getting a feel for the city. At some point, we were looking for a map, and an English man asked us if we were trying to find tickets for the soccer game that night. Bri and I looked at each other and asked how much the tickets were. We were really, really tempted (that's a huge understatement) to buy them and go, but we decided they were too expensive.

Anyway! That night we decided to eat real Spanish food, so we ended up getting Paella, Sangria, and Tappas. From there, we decided to take the metro to check out the city's Magic Fountains, which are these fountains that have a choreographed light and music show every night from 7 to 9 pm. Again, luck was against us, because we got there only to find out that the fountains are currently under construction. Bummer! We ended up just sitting by the empty fountains and enjoying the great view of the city while a Spanish guitarist serenaded us. (There is a video of that I'll be putting up.) We took the metro back to near our hotel and decided to walk along the boardwalk at night, just to see what it was like. It was gorgeous. We sat on the docks and listened to the water and the night for a while. It was a really nice and relaxing. From there we headed back to the hostel to sleep in our dorm bunk beds.

Sunday October 31, 2010

Because we wanted to get a headstart on seeing the city on Sunday, we decided to wake up early. Except we didn't know how early we had actually gotten up. Apparently, Europe has daylight savings time too, and it was this weekend. So we ate breakfast at the hostel--definitely not the best thing I've ever eaten. Then we headed out to see the sights again after a short pitstop to get some Starbucks while we could. We went to the churches again to see if they were open. One of them wasn't, so we went to the cathedral instead to find out what times Mass were for the day. A really nice little Spanish lady helped me, and we decided to come back later that night for one of the evening Masses.

We headed to the beach after that, which was beautiful! According to National Geographic, it's supposed to be one of the most beautiful beaches in the world. It was completely redone for the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, and they've kept it up ever since. Bri and I rolled up our jeans so we could get our feet wet, but we ended up getting our jeans completely soaked anyway because the waves kept coming in bigger than we expected.

The rest of the day was a little slower. We went to Mass at the Cathedral in Catalan, and then we just walked around the city for a while enjoying all the Halloween costumes. We found out this weekend that Halloween is a lot bigger in Spain than it is in France. The costumes were really, really good! We actually ended up getting a Spanish specialty on La Rambla that night: churros and chocolate. It was so good!

Monday November 1, 2010

We woke up extra early on Monday to get to La Sagrada Familia before it opened. We ended up getting there right at 9 o'clock, so we still had a pretty substantial line, but it wasn't terrible. The church is so beautiful on the inside! We had already seen the outside of the church the day before with our group, but we hadn't gone in yet. The inside was absolutely incredible. The church has been under construction since 1882, and it's still not scheduled to be finished for another 30 years. The inside of the church is designed to have a foresty feel to it, and it definitely does. It's surprising how much light is in the church--everything is really brightly lit with natural light. Even the stained glass windows have a brighter feel to them than normal church windows. I really liked it, but I had to leave a little early to get to Mass for All Saints Day in the smaller chapel of the church.

After I got done with Mass, we hustled over to the aquarium. We were told that it is "the biggest aquarium in the world". That information is incorrect. We paid a hefty entrance fee, which we thought was worth it for the biggest aquarium in the world, but we were a little disappointed. We got to see a lot of cool fish--lots of sharks, and there was an underwater tunnel we got to go through, but that was about it in the aquarium. So after that, we took it slow, bought some Cuban cigars as gifts for people Bri knows, and got on the bus to come home.

I'll be getting pictures posted soon; they're actually uploading right now!

Edit: Photos are now available on the right!

An American in Lyon: A Novel

Yeah, you read that right. We're in Lyon now--surprise! And apologies for not having updated again before now, so to make it up to you, I'll try to catch you up.

Well, we went through our short time in Paris with a bang. We saw everything a proper tourist should see: la Tour Eiffel, the Arc de Triomphe, the Louvre, Notre Dame, Les Invalides, the Seine, Parisian cafes, Montmartre, Sacre Coeur, etc. And as much as we walked--and believe me, we walked a lot--we didn't have to do as much walking as we could have, thanks to my professor for a lovely tip about something called the Batobus, which is a bus on the river that takes tourists to a lot of the major attractions in Paris. You can get an unlimited pass for two or three days to get on and off the boat as many times as you like. However, you can also buy a Batobus ticket in conjunction with another company, L'OpenTour, to get a real bus to take you to the landlocked monuments. So that's what we did!

I've always enjoyed speaking French whenever I can at home, especially with my sister. But it's really different when you're the only one in your group than can understand anything a French person says and everyone is relying on you. I have to confess, I miss the days when I didn't have to speak French just to get some food (although it has been very good food!).

So we left Paris yesterday via the TGV. Supposedly, train travel is nice and leisurely. You can relax in your private compartment with your companions, and if you get hungry, you can go to the dinner car and buy yourself a meal or a sandwich. And when you get near to school, you change into your wizard's robes.

Or maybe that was just my wishful thinking.

Instead, with our (my) 400 pounds of luggage, we hustled our way into the Gare Lyon in Paris an hour early so that we could figure out what to do. Remember, we were as new to this ball game as you are right now. Which is not a fun situation to be in when you're thrown in with a bunch of players who don't even speak your language. So Dad found a helpful employee who guided us through the process.

Basically, the French like waiting until the last minute for a lot of things. Apparently, scheduling where trains are leaving from is one of those things. The process of getting on a train at a TGV station goes like this: get to the station, find out which of the two terminals your train will be coming to, and wait. "Wait for what?" you say. Well, my dear readers, I shall tell you. You wait to find out what gate you are at. When do you find out? Anywhere from twenty minutes before to five minutes before your train is scheduled to leave. Fortunately for us, our train's location showed up right at 20 minutes until departure time. So we found our train, bumbled our way into our car, and pathetically asked a nice French lady for help finding our seats. As she spoke no English, she just pointed to our seats, but it was fine in the end.

For her.

Her seat was in the very front of our car. Our seats were in the back. And it seemed that a little old lady and her husband were in two of our seats. After some rapid-fire French between our helper lady and the wife, things seemed to be getting sorted out. The wife was not, in fact, actually the man's wife. She was his cousin, coming to see him off on his trip back to Lyon, and she was only helping him get settled in on the train. So off she went, and we found our seats facing each other at a little table by the window of our car, and everything seemed so quaint and delightful, even the little old French man named Jean-Paul whose seat was next to ours.

But, oh my gosh, that little old man loved to talk. As he said it, "I love to talk." No truer statement has ever been made, my friends. I learned this over the entire two and a half hour trip, during which we (he) discussed religion, politics, French celebrities, and Jean-Paul's life story. We (he) was interrupted once when a woman from the front of the car came back to tell him to "stop talking! You're perturbing the other passengers!"

There was some excitement on our track because a person committed suicide on our train tracks (not on our train, though, thank goodness), so our train got delayed about half an hour. It was a little shocking how blasé the French were about the suicide, but I suppose no one really could have done anything about it from where we were.

Anyway, we are now finishing up our time in Lyon. When we got here, our travel agent had booked us a rental car, so we picked that up. It turned out to be a manual transmission Passat, a nice car if you're used to manual. Unfortunately, my dad hadn't driven manual in over twenty years. To top it off, all of the instructions or switches were in an odd combination of French and German. Long story short: we ended up stalling at the exit of the parking garage for about ten minutes while Dad fought with the parking brake. We eventually solved the situation after the parking garage attendant (who spoke only French and apparently broken Spanish) came out to see what the problem was. Dad, who can never remember the proper way to ask this in French said, “¿Parler inglés?" We got the parking brake off after the attendant repeatedly asked Dad to put the car in "uno"--first gear.

We drove around for a while so that Dad could relearn how to drive manual transmission. Dad seemed to think the best policy was to accelerate if anything seemed to be going wrong with the car. When accelerating seemed like it would be fatal, Dad slammed on the brakes instead. Two moments stand out in all of this: once when we were stopped at a light on one of the few hills in Lyon, Dad somehow had his foot on all three pedals: clutch, brake, and accelerator. Our tires were doing a lot of squealing at this point, but we weren't going anywhere until we got a green light and our car took off like a rocket. The other memorable moment happened when Dad was having trouble deciding which way to turn at an intersection. Our car kept lurching so much that the driver behind us got out to check his bumper to see if he had hit us. I'm pretty sure he didn't.

So after all that hard work on my Dad's part--45 minutes of it--we made it to our hotel. Which, as it turned out, was right next door to the train station. 174 paces away, to be exact. Poor Dad, all that hard work, and we didn't even need the car.

For the rest of the day, Mom and Dad went out and got dinner while I got some desperately-needed quiet time in the hotel room, and then the three of us explored the humongous shopping mall across the street.

Today was the best day by far. Mom and Dad woke up early to go running, and I got to have some more quiet time to myself as I showered and got ready for the day. Our plan was to go see the Basilica of Notre Dame de Fourvière and the local Cathédral de St. Jean. We bought all-day metro passes and set off on our journey. When we got to the cathedral, I realized I forgot my camera today. I KNOW.

The cathedral was beautiful, like all cathedrals here. We looked around and admired the stained glass, and Mom and I picked out some postcards for people back home. We then set off for the Wonder on the Hill, the basilica. It looked like quite a climb to us, and we turned out to be right. Being the model companion I am, I didn't complain at all...

But all the hard work paid off in the end. We walked into the church, and it literally took my breath away. I have never seen something so beautiful in my entire life. Every single surface of the church is covered by some sort of ornamentation. The walls have huge mural-mosaics, and the floors are covered in mosaics too. There is a huge painting on the rear wall of the church of the Virgin and Child, and the ceiling is covered with angels and saints. Everything is gold and blue for Mary, and it all holds some sort of symbolism for the Church. It doesn't seem real, even when you're there looking directly at it. I can't describe the beauty of this place, and the pictures can't capture it; I just know I want to go back.

Simply put: I love Lyon, and I wish we had another day or two here!