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!

Mountains and Monaco

Again--I've been busy! I feel like I sort of bumble my way through the week without updating here, and then I remember all of the good stories all at once on the weekends. So prepare yourselves. This is going to take a while.

I went to classes on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday at the university (or the fac, short for faculté), and everything went pretty normally. On Wednesday morning, I went to hang out with my French friend at her apartment. I got there and was a little lost because there were four different apartments that were marked with the exact same number as hers. So I called her to find out which one was the right one, and it turned out that none of them were hers. Plus, she'd forgotten that we'd made plans for Wednesday instead of Thursday. We got it all sorted out, and she ended up driving us to McDonald's because we were running out of time to eat before our classes started that day. I know--shame! I don't even like McDonald's in the US!

Thursday was a little bit more interesting. One of my American friends here just got coffee sent to her from the US. We have all been missing our usual non-espresso cups of coffee, so we decided to get up and make ourselves a real American-style breakfast: scrambled eggs with peppers, potatoes, and zucchini, with Old Crown coffee. It was amazing--and probably the best breakfast I've had since I've been in France. After we ate, we spent most of our morning just exploring Aix. I thought I'd pretty much gotten to know the city by now, but it turns out it's a lot bigger than I thought it was. So it was fun visiting places I'd never been before!

Thursday night we went to our theatre class, and a bunch of us went out to eat together to celebrate the birthday of one of the American girls here. We ended up going back to her apartment for chocolate cake with sprinkles! It was delicious.

Friday was a little slower, which was really nice. I had dinner with my French family again, and that was really fun! It was only me, the mom, and the two boys, but the three of them ended up spending a long time trying to say the word "rollerblading", which is really hard for the French, apparently. The family gave me two French DVDs for me to watch this week. I'm really comfortable being around them because their family dynamic is really similar to what I'm used to. It makes it really easy to get along with them. I came back to the apartment and ended up spending the night alone in my apartment--and it was wonderful.

Saturday, I went with a few of the girls from our program to climb what is known as Cezanne's mountain: Sainte-Victoire. I have wanted to climb it since I first saw it a month ago, and I finally got the opportunity, so I didn't want to miss it. We left from downtown Aix at about 11:15 and actually started climbing just after noon. We reached the summit at about 4:00 after we stopped and ate lunch. It was absolutely amazing. I've climbed mountains before with my high school youth group in West Virginia, but that was nothing compared to this. We were so high yesterday. It was absolutely incredible.



When we were at the top, the wind was whipping around us. I wasn't sure if it was because we were so high up or because of the Mistral, but there wasn't any wind in Aix, so I'm assuming it was because of our altitude. Awesome! (Actually, it was a little scary because we kept seeing people's hats getting ripped off their heads, so we knew the wind was pretty strong, and there wasn't really that much room to stand at the very top.)

We made it back to Aix at about 6:30 after waiting for the bus to pick us up for about 45 minutes. While we waited, we made friends with a French family that had just climbed the mountain too. Saturday night I was exhausted and a little sunburned, so I went to bed semi-early before our big day today.

Today we went to Monaco and Nice! We met at the bus at about 8:30 and finally got on the road at about 9. The group was actually so big that we took two buses, but I wasn't aware of that fact until we were nearly back tonight. We got to Monaco at about 11, unloaded, and got to the Palace just in time to see the changing of the guard! It was actually pretty anticlimactic, especially because it was hard to see, but it's also not very exciting. Oh, well. At least now I can say that I've seen it! After that, I went with one of my friends to find the casino because I'd been practicing how to play craps online just so that I could play it once in Monte Carlo. It was really disappointing to find out that there is a 10€ cover charge to get in to the table room. So instead Bri and I played the slot machines--which are incredibly difficult to understand for how popular they are. Basically, our gambling was more like us putting our money in the machine and slapping random buttons until we ran out of money. And apparently this was a common experience among the Americans.

One thing that stood out while we were in Monaco was how clean everything was. It was really funny because my friend and I agreed that if it wasn't an independent state from France, it would be the stereotypical French city. And then we realized that it really is the stereotypical French city anyway because it claims to be independent but it relies on others to protect it. Funny, huh?

Another thing that really affected our day was the wind. Oh my goodness! The wind was insane! At one point, we ended up making a video about the near-hurricane conditions. Fortunately for us, the rain didn't actually start until we were on the bus on our way home.

On the way back, we ended up making an hour-long pit stop in Nice at a parfumerie, or in English, a perfume factory called Fragonard. It smelled really, really good! We got a tour of the factory, and then we got to sample their best-selling scents. Their candles smelled soooo good, and I'm a sucker for candles. I didn't have enough cash on me at the time to buy anything, though. Which was probably a good thing.

Wednesday, we have to go to Marseille to get a medical examination for our carte de séjour, and I'm very excited because there is a Starbucks in Marseille, which (hopefully) means that I'll be able to have my Pumpkin Spice Latte soon!!! You really have no idea what that would mean to me. It's bad enough that there aren't any pumpkins here for decorations and pies, but no Pumpkin Spice Lattes would be absolutely unbearable.

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.

Rain and Strikes in France

So today is the beginning of a nationwide strike involving transportation, schools, and hospitals. We were warned that we may have to walk to our school today because the bus system would be down, and it’s a good twenty minute ride from our bus stop to the school, so I was not looking forward to that, especially as today is the first day in forever that it’s slated to rain. It ended up being alright in the end because the bus system is up during the peak hours, but really limited in the middle of the day. We can still see effects of the strike in odd places, though, because the library in our school is closed for the strike. We’re not sure if it’s just today or if this is an open-ended sort of thing.

Yesterday was a really good day. Our apartment is completely tiled, so it hasn't really felt comfortable because we can't take off our shoes. We found an awesome thrift store near our apartment where we found a 5'x6' rug for 19€--a steal, really. So we bought that right away and a fan, and our apartment is finally starting to feel like a home instead of the place we sleep.

I don't know exactly how dry it's been back in the States, but I know it's been really, super dry here. Trees have begun losing their leaves here, not because it's been cold (although the Mistral has been playing games with the temperature here), but because it's been so dry. It started raining last night at about 11, and it was a beautiful thing. I was hosting a dinner party for several of the program students on our street (there are five of us altogether), and we were doing our homework. We were just finishing up when we heard the sound of the rain on the roof. We looked outside the two windows in our living room, and four of us just watched the people and their umbrellas rushing by on the street. It was so simple and still so gorgeous, that moment.