All of my favorite things

I love my life. Seriously, it's not even fair how many good things have happened to me--not only in the past year, but in my entire life. And I've got another one to add to the list: I'm coming home for Christmas--and my cousin's wedding! For a long time I thought that the only possible way for me to go to Kelly's wedding would be to come home for the weekend between my two finals weeks here. Not so! God loves me: I will be home for a solid two weeks. I can't wait!

Okay, so that's pretty awesome, but I'm also going to tell you about how I spent my favorite holiday whilst abroad (Thanksgiving, in case you didn't know). It was a pretty normal day: I woke up, got ready for the day, and then headed over to my friend Bri's apartment to have a baking/studying day. We made a pumpkin pie, but--alas--the evaporated milk I had bought was not evaporated milk. Instead, it was extra thick cream. We made do my halving it with normal milk, and then acting like nothing had happened. It turned out pretty well! It tastes a little different than my usual pumpkin pies, but it could have definitely been worse.

Then I headed over to theater class, which I love, laughed a lot, and then walked home in the pouring rain without a single umbrella among my class. It was fun. I changed really quickly, and walked with my neighbors to the restaurant where our program was going to have a Thanksgiving meal. It took forever to find due to a recent name change, but we found it eventually and ended up having an amazing meal. The turkey was delicious, and the stuffing was the best I've ever had. The cranberry sauce was more like warmed pie filling, but it was good nonetheless. The downer was the mashed potatoes: they were definitely instant, which I don't understand in a refined French restaurant. But oh well.

I saw Harry Potter in French on Wednesday, and it was really, really good! Then Friday, I celebrated my birthday with some of my friends by going bowling and then karaokeing afterward. Bowling was... interesting. Definitely the smallest bowling alley I've ever been in, and half of the balls make a thunk-thunk-thunk sound as they "rolled" down the lane, but we all made it out alive in the end.

Then Saturday, I went with my friends to Marseille to see another professional soccer game, and while we were waiting for the bus, it started snowing!! Which is my favorite thing, and it's only supposed to do that once a year here. But so far, the weather has pretty much mimicked the weather in Indiana, so I'm not sure how much I should believe. Anyway, it made me really happy, and then when we got to Marseille, we went to Starbucks to warm ourselves up. Then after we all got soaked during the game, I came back and watched a Disney movie--another thing I'm convinced I will never outgrow.

I just can't believe how lucky I am. So thanks to everyone in my life for being in my life. You're all great!

Oh! And today, I'm 21!

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!

Before Barcelona

I think this is the longest I've gone without updating--and I'm sorry for that, but this week was definitely the busiest school week I've had so far. I had a big presentation in my literature class on Tuesday, so I spent all of Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday morning working on that. Then after that was over, I spent Tuesday night and Wednesday morning studying for my midterm in my Languages of the World class.

My presentation went pretty well, as far as I can tell. I know I made at least one mistake with gender agreements when I was speaking, which was really dumb because I had written in down the right way. But the professor kept referring to what I had said after I was done, and she kept using my examples as really good examples, so I'm hoping that means I got the equivalent of an American A. My midterm was so-so. I don't really have any idea on how well I did because it was a short essay test, and I don't really know exactly what my professor was expecting, so I'll just have to wait and see how I did.

Last weekend, I was playing soccer with my friends at our soccer court. We all take turns playing goalie because nobody likes being stuck in one place for very long, but it's also nice to take a break sometimes. Whenever I'm in goal, the other team usually scores a minimum of two goals. And usually the only reason it's not more than that is because someone switches positions with me before I can do any more damage. My turn didn't exactly end like that the last time, though.

See, I like soccer because I have terrible--and I mean terrible--hand-eye coordination. When I'm in goal, I'm supposed to use my hands to stop the ball, which I have already explained is definitely not my forte. So usually I try to do something involving my feet stopping the ball. I have more success with this than with my hands--usually. So when the ball came to my feet, I thought I had the save in the bag. No sweat. So I didn't exactly watch where I was putting my foot on the ball. Instead of stopping the ball, I stepped on the ball and swiftly wiped out in a weird side-ways, clunking, everyone-thought-I-broke-my-arm kind of way. It wasn't anything too impressive, just a scraped elbow for which I have to use three band-aids to cover the entire wound. It's a nice little badge of courage.

Tomorrow I'm leaving for Barcelona! Despite France being a "secular" country, they still take all of the major Catholic feast days off. So for All-Saints' Day (November 1st), we get a week off of school. I'm going with my friend Bri for the weekend. A few of the other students from our program are also going to be going, so we might meet up with them there. I don't speak any Spanish, so I'm hoping that Spain is like France in that most people are bilingual--with English being the second language. (I know, how terribly touristy of me!) But I suppose if French is the second language I'd be alright, too.

I'm going to be gong to IKEA again this afternoon and then Carrefour to do some shopping. Carrefour is France's equivalent of Wal-Mart--which I hate--but it's cheap, and they have everything you could wish for on the planet, so I suppose I'll take it. It's also my last hope for finding canned pumpkin here, otherwise I'm going to have to go straight for the whole pumpkin, if I can find one.

I'll take a lot of pictures for you this weekend, and I'll get them uploaded on Tuesday sometime once I'm back in Aix, so check back then!

A long update

Well! I have been busy! Because this update is going to be so long, I'm going to have little headers with the different sections in case you don't care too much about one subject.

School

We started real university classes on Monday, and (shockingly) I think they're going pretty well so far! My first class is a second-year lexicology class, which is basically an application of linguistics skills, and I'm well-versed in that department. I feel like I'm where I would usually be in a class in the States, which sort of makes me feel like I'm not challenging myself enough because everyone only ever talked about how horribly difficult our classes would be for us.

I'm also taking a comparative literature class that discusses the way translation has affected the meanings of works and how characters have evolved over time in their different representations. We're focusing on Faust and Macbeth, but we're reading everything in French, which should be interesting! Those are the two school classes I'm most excited about, but I'm also taking a Languages of the World class with a million first-year university students. The class size is too big for me to like it, and I feel like I've already learned all the material in another class I took in the States, except it was in English before. The funny thing is that most of the terms are so technical that they end up being the same thing in French but with an accent. For example, Indo-European languages are "les langues Indo-Européennes". So I'm hoping that class will be an easy A.

My other classes consist of a Modern and Contemporary African History class, a theatre course offered by the program, and a University Methodolody class offered by the program. I think I might end up dropping the African History course because it is a four-hour class for third-year French History majors. I've never taken a history class before in college, so I don't feel like I'm sufficiently prepared to take an advanced history course, especially in French. But we'll see!

I really like the theater course. It's a course designed to help us with our oral French, but it's really fun because we end up doing a lot of improvisation involving acting and being ridiculous--two things I rather enjoy doing anyway!

Meeting Real French People!

On Thursday of this week, some of my friends in the program hosted a dinner party/potluck at their apartment. All in all, there were at least twelve people who ate and several more who came later in the evening. The girls in the apartment have a French roommate (named Violette), and she invited several of her friends to come to the party too, so I got to meet real French people who are my age for the first time! At one point in the evening, we learned that one of the French girls (Sonia) had studied in England for a year. I was coaxed into speaking in my English accent to see if she could understand me better without the American accent. It turned out that Sonia could understand me fine either way, but another girl could only understand me when I spoke in the accent. So for the rest of the night if I spoke in English at all, I had to speak with an English accent so that everyone could understand the conversation.

On Friday night, I had my first dinner with my French exchange family. The way the dinner was to go was explained to me as, "You will speak to the children in English for an hour and a half before dinner, and then during dinner, they will correct your French." Which made me feel really confident in my French abilities. The organization for it happened really quickly; Thursday night I was told I might meet the family on Friday night if they called me back on Friday, and then early Friday afternoon, I heard back from the mom in the family and we got everything set up for that night. I really like the family. The kids are ages 16 (girl), 15 (boy), and 13 (boy). It was nice to be in the middle of a family setting again. I mean, the program kids all joke around about how we're a huge family at this point--and it's true, it's what it feels like--but I miss the real thing. It was nice to be among bickering siblings again--and I really do mean that wholeheartedly.

Marseille

Yesterday, I went with a few of the program kids to Marseille to see a professional football game here--or as we Americans are prone to say, soccer. We were able to find tickets to the game for only 30€, and train tickets are also pretty cheap to Marseille. The game was fantastic! Marseille won 2-1 versus Sochaux, so everyone was happy. The Mistral was playing games with the temperature here again, so we were all sort of freezing, but it was like we were at home again watching an American football game. We were all pretty happy with the results of the night. After the game, we went out to eat and I got Marseille's specialty: bouillabaisse! It was okay, not amazing but not terrible either. I'm happy I got it at least once, anyway. The bouillabaisse was followed by profiteroles and coffee, and it seemed like a pretty great French night overall.