Beaches, Operas, and Viva!

Two weekends ago I trekked horrifically far (a whopping two hours on train… gasp!) to the disturbingly lovely beachside town of Biarritz.  It had quite a Southern California feel to it, with ice cream and sand and water… you know, all the makings of a typical beach town.  With the slight exception that on Sundays, everyone (well not me and the other prudish Americans I was with) goes topless and cavorts around the beach.

 

Sandwiched within my fantastical Biarritz weekend (the Friday night of which we stayed in Anglet, a lovely little Biarritz suburb that also has land access and was where our hostel was located, the downtown area of which has many bars and restaurants, including a Tex-Mex place called Chili’s… different from the US chain, but still passable “Mexican” food and strawberry margaritas), was a day and a half trip across the French border to San Sebastian (thank God Lauren took three years of Spanish in high school…).  Aside from being in Spain (goal: check!), having a beach, and wonderful weather, we got to experience Spanish night life at its finest.  This means that our hostel was in an ideal location, and although Lauren and I did not end up staying in the private double room that I thought I reserved, and although we ended up sharing a room with five other people and a bed with each other, and although I didn’t go to sleep until 4am because the ideal location of the hostel meant that there was a party outside our window all night, I still had some wonderful sangria that I did not pay for and the glass that I did not return to prove it.

 

After standing outside our hostel (in front of several bars) in the street for a couple hours, we returned to our lovely bed to rest up for the Jesus Hike.  San Sebastian has a huge Jesus on a hill that faces the one in Rio, and not only is there a lovely view from the top, but ruins the whole way up the cobblestone path and a church that lots of cute little old people go to Mass at on Sunday mornings.

 

Following copious amounts of picture taking with Jesus, we returned to our hostel to gather our belongings and headed to the San Sebastian beach, where the perfect weather provided us with a couple good hours of sunbathing (and one too many completely naked 70-year-old-man sightings) before we had to get back to the train station and (darn) return to Biarritz.

 

The rest of the day was much more of the same… sunbathing (I got a tan!), beach time, I had some gelato, and we headed to the train station to return to Bordeaux.  One of the far more interesting parts of the weekend was the train ride; not only were we in a car with lots of smelly people (and no windows and no doors), but someone had too many beans for dinner, if you catch my drift, and we were forced to abandon our seats for awhile to visit our "amies" in the car ahead of us… luckily, not only could we bask in the Biarritz sun, but we could do so with about seven of our friends, four of whom not only shared our hostel room, but were located in the more pleasantly scented train car ahead of us.

 

After returning to Bordeaux, Lauren and I attempted to take the tram and walk home… we took the tram quite successfully, but the walk home was another story… having never been home from the tram station at night by ourselves walking (it was pointed out to us in a car once), we got extraordinarily lost and spent about 40 minutes wandering around Bègles, blindly following the signs for the Stade, the rugby stadium next to our houses.  Returning home after seeing a creepy guy in a garden, I locked my door and promptly fell asleep.

 

The following day, Fall Semester at Bordeaux 3 officially began.  My first class of the week/semester/day/France experience turned out to be a class on the “subject forgotten from the French textbooks…” that’s right, it was a course on American History!  Clearly that wasn’t the 18^th century religion, cultures, and ideas of Europe class that I signed up for… after realizing that about 5 minutes in to class, I also realized that I was stuck in the lecture for the next hour and fifty-five minutes.  The seats in French lecture halls are basically the same as at Davis… like stadium or theatre seats.  Except, instead of having desks attached to the chairs that go up and down, there is a large plank of wood that stretches across the entire row, and once you sit down and put your feet under it, and the person next to you does the same thing, you’re stuck there until everyone else gets up.  Meaning that after I had decided to drop the class, I sat there and doodled because I had no way to get out besides being extremely obvious.  Thankfully, my second class of the day turned out to match the description and was only an hour and a half.

 

Tuesday commenced with another adventure.  My class was in room C200.  One would think, having visited numerous other buildings and rooms on campus that followed this logical numeration, that this amphitheater was in the C building, on the second (technically third) floor.  NOT. Aside from the fact that I was already late because I missed the bus by two minutes and had to wait for a tram that I could cram myself onto, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what the sign on the walls of the second floor of the C building meant, the ones that were supposedly sending me to C200.  This is an example of the idea that no matter how much you study a language, certain idioms and abbreviations don’t make sense unless you know the colloquial context.  In this case, I could translate every word on the sign, but had no idea what the thing meant as a whole.  Luckily, I ran into an also-lost German girl and an understanding French student, and eventually made it to class about 30 minutes late.  Which was fine, because the prof was just setting up the PowerPoint (!!).

 

The rest of the week went fairly smoothly, although equally stressful.  Following that class, the discussion section (TD) I went to with everyone else in the class still didn’t have a prof after half an hour, so we all left, only to find out that the TD was rescheduled to Friday.  At 1:30.  For two hours.  Lovely.  In addition, my Thursday TD was cancelled last week (a fact I was unaware of until I realized that me and one other guy were the only ones in class five minutes after class was supposed to start… at that point, I checked the bulletin board in the history department), but all of the profs are used to having international students in their courses and come up with alternate (most often meaning “fewer”) assignments for us to do, which is perfectly fine by me.  One guy even translated a word I didn’t understand into English for me.  Très bon.

 

Friday night, a group of us headed to the Grand Theatre, a famous Bordeaux architectural delight, with capacity for 1,114 people and absolutely amazing interior design.  The ceiling and stage are ornately painted, and it gives you quite the feeling of 16^th century glamour.  We went to see an opera, which turned out to be in English (bah, whatever… I think that means we got the best comprehension out of everyone!), and was… um… the work of fantastic light technicians.  To put it mildly, I enjoyed it, but I think I’m more of a play-musical-symphony kind of person.  Needless to say, it was a lot of fun and one of those things that the tour book recommends doing.

 

The week closed out with a day trip to Saint Émilion, a town known for its wine (clear from the moment you get there… every storefront offers shipping around the world and English-speaking staff).  The landscape is absolutely gorgeous, and Lauren and I of course had to be touristy and do the guided tour of the catacombs and church… although we did take the one in French, not the English one.

 

Yesterday I went to a Mexican Independence Day celebration with my homestay family.  It was quite the unusual experience, and definitely very interesting and lots of fun… “Viva Mexico!” is all I have to say about that, since written words just don’t do the event justice.

 

Week Two of school started today… I now understand why there is an hour break for lunch (as opposed to the 11:50-12:10 break at Davis)… you spend half of it waiting in line!  With 60,000 students, a good percentage of whom are on campus any given day, it gets slightly ridiculous very quickly… thank goodness my mom is sending me peanut butter, because if I have to wait in line every single day for 20 minutes, I might revert to seventh grade and cut in line…

 

Stay tuned for more adventures from the land of wine and cheese!

La Raclette

No, the title does not refer to a place, a class, or a sport.  It describes a delicious traditional French meal preparation technique, which I have had the good fortune of experiencing twice in the last week.  “Une raclette” is a table-top cooker, like a fondue pot but more sophisticated.  The top is a round, flat griddle, about a foot in diameter.  There is an inch gap or so underneath this, where the heating element is located.  Small, triangle shaped pans with handles go into this gap, where one melts cheese and warms other delicacies.  On the top, you cook veggies or meat (or in our case, fry cold cuts) or both, then scrape the cheese on top.  Delicious.

This was the first meal that I experienced in my host family, a mom, a dad, and a son who are quite nice and have been hosting students from California for ten years (TEN YEARS?!)… the mom is actually an American (and therefore the dad teases her quite a lot… “my American wife, she drinks too much”… imagine that in English with a French accent), she grew up in Texas and went to college at Whittier in LA.  French happens to be her third language.

My weekend en famille went quite well… Lauren lives across the street, so my “mom” took us to the train station to get bus schedules and then to the mall on Saturday.  After that, I went with her to a birthday party, where I was offered a job teaching English.  Apparently foosball and Borat are good conversation starters with the 13-16 year old age group.  There was a slight issue with the WiFi; Microsoft Outlook decided to delete some important emails, including the one with the password, but it was soon fixed.

I woke up Saturday morning to find my door open… strange, but didn’t think much of it.  Then, about 3 minutes later, the cat opened the door (yes, the cat opened the door… as in jumped and pushed the handle), ran in, and hopped up onto my lofted bed.  I attempted to chase it off, but it merely sat there and looked mad, as if I was disturbing it somehow.  I then employed Balam (my host brother, who is 10) to chase the cat away, which he did by yelling at it and making angry noises.  The cat is far too smart… it decided it would be funny to open the door to the bathroom yesterday while I was taking a shower… I heard a door open, didn’t think that it would be the bathroom, saw the door was closed, and then realized the cat was sitting there, looking at me as if I should have taken a faster shower so I could let him out of the bathroom.  It will be an interesting time here with the cat, to say the least.

Sunday included a trip to the Parc Bordelaise, a beautiful park in Bordeaux with a set of interesting animals in the middle.  There’s also a pond and a small café, and a puppet show on the weekends!  After lunch at Hippo (think gourmet hamburgers) where we heard the birthday song play about five times (apparently in France they find it amusing to blast a jazz choir singing you happy birthday over the restaurant PA system), we returned home, ate another delicious dinner several hours later, and Lauren and I figured out the bus schedule to take us to school the following morning.

After many days of trekking to campus and wandering the halls in search of schedules and departments (and thanks to the Centre de Californie’s subject binders) I now have classes!  Some classes, anyway… hopefully I successfully get into all my courses, because I have to go introduce myself to the professors after class (which starts officially this upcoming Monday), and I don’t have priority because I’m an international student.  Stressful, but the process is hopefully coming to an end, and I can already feel the relief at the end of the tunnel!

This weekend, after much ado, we have decided to go to Biarritz and San Sebastian.  Both beach towns, Biarritz is about two hours away and San Sebastian another two hours from there.  Be prepared for pictures!

Unlike Toulouse, I called ahead this time, but only to the hostel in Biarritz, because I speak approximately zero Spanish, so getting around and finding someplace to stay the night in San Sebastian will be the primary adventure of the trip, I’m sure!

A Weekend in Toulouse

This weekend was our first free weekend.  No excursions, no meetings, no pique-niques… the schedule even said “libre.”  So, being the bold and brave travelers that we are, Lauren and I decided that “we should go somewhere this weekend.  Where?  I dunno, but somewhere besides the cinema!”

 

A quick look at the map and Toulouse was chosen.  Add a general invite to everyone standing around us, and a group was formed.  Our first official adventure!  (Although in French it is une excursion, because avoir une aventure, literally translated as “to have an adventure”, actually means to have an affair.  I was given this little lesson on Monday morning when my teacher asked me what I did this weekend and I said “Je suis allée au Toulouse pour avoir une aventure!”  She looked slightly horrified before correcting me.)

 

8am train to Bordeaux for the 8:25 train to Toulouse… ran through the Bordeaux station in search of Quai 6, in the process almost getting on the TGV to Paris.  After the man in the official hat instructed us to “montez-la!” we promptly hopped on the train only to see the doors close swiftly behind us and the train exit the station.  I get the feeling that I will find it unfortunate that the trains leave on time here in the near future.

 

Two hours later, we arrived!  In the rain!  After a quick stop for some baguette and café and a look at a very undescriptive map with lots of symbols, we set out for the Office du Tourisme, in hopes of a) directions to the hostel and b) a real map.

 

Thankfully, both were accomplished (due most likely to the fact that the girl at the counter spoke broken English and I speak broken French), and we set out for our next destination: the Cité de l’Espace.  Toulouse is the hub/plant/place of creation of Airbus, Concorde, and the Ariane 5 rocket, and they have an entire “city” dedicated to this.  It has a moonbounce chair, a planetarium, and an IMAX, among other attractions.  We decided to walk there, to counteract the copious amounts of pain au chocolat and bread that we’ve all been eating.

 

Alas, the path was abound with distractions.  After a stop at the Église des Jacobins and the Musée des Augustins (free with student card!) we looked at the map and calculated how far we had walked and how much further we had to go.  The result? Not very far and VERY far.  Thus, we wandered through centre-ville and located a café, where we consumed more café and proceeded to be “French.”  Two hours later, we headed out for the nearest metro station, successfully navigating ticket buying and metro-mounting.  Then, we proceeded to walk down a very long street and discovered that we should have gotten off the metro one stop earlier… the story has a happy ending though, because after our long trek uphill, we arrived at the hostel!

 

After this, we learned two very important things: first, the hostel was full, and second, there is only one hostel in all of Toulouse.

 

Our plan of attack after this mild moment of panic was to head to Champion, the nearby grocery store, in hopes of finding a tour book or pamphlet with cheap lodging.  Fate smiled on us, however, and we asked the security guard if he knew of any cheap hotels.  After he switched positions with his colleague, he took us back to the hostel (slight communication barrier), then to the metro stop, helped us buy tickets, gave us directions, wrote down his phone number, and instructed us to call him after he got off work at 8 if we couldn’t find anywhere to stay.  He and his jolie femme (beautiful wife) had three rooms and we were welcome to stay there.  Ah, the French.

 

Returning to our point of entry, the train station, we inquired about switching tickets to that night, instead of the following morning.  The last train out was at 9:30, and the window closed at 7:30, giving us an hour and a half to find someplace to sleep.

 

Wandering through the streets of Toulouse (okay, so we went 200 feet away from the train station), we came across a hotel promising a room for four for only 64 euros.  This was equivalent to the price of a night at the hostel, so we decided it was a possibility.  As luck would have it, room 105 was available, with two double beds, a full size bath, and a balcony!  We handed over the cash and the concierge handed over the TV remote.

 

After a short trip to the store across the street, we returned to our luxury accommodations with food and wine, turned on the France-Austria football game, and proceeded to enjoy ourselves.  Basically, we had no idea where we were in Toulouse (aside from “near the train station”) and were in the presence of a functioning television, something that none of us had seen for the better part of two weeks, so we were quite content to stay at the hotel and stare at the TV screen.

 

The next morning, Lauren, Jaime and I headed out to the corner café and consumed some cappuccinos, returning to the hotel for check out at 11.  We then headed to centre-ville, stopping at a fresh meat and fish (and pasta and pastry and bread) market… quite a sight, to say the least.

 

Then we headed to the Sunday morning flea market, somewhat of a tourist and local attraction for the Toulousians… you could literally buy anything.  Comic books?  Sure!  Purses?  Why not?  Olives?  But of course!  A zipper?  Definitely!

 

After stopping to admire the basilica nearby, we headed to yet another café, where we indulged in crepes and salads.  The food here is beginning to be a problem… there is far too much of it and it is far too good.

 

After that, it was off to the train station, where for a measly 3.10 euros we traded our tickets in for an earlier train ride, which turned out to be a wonderful idea, because the train we were on was a TGV headed to Paris after it stopped in Bordeaux.  This means that the seats were huge, comfy, and had lights.  We arrived in Bordeaux slightly delayed and missed our train to Pessac; instead, we hopped on the tram, along with everyone else at the train station.  Finally, around 8, we made it back to the dorms (our train left at 4 and is only supposed to be a 2-2 ½ hour ride).

 

Post-drop off of all our stuff, Lauren and I headed to Chez Mario, where we proceeded to order and consume an entire large pizza in about 15 minutes.  Lauren and I are approximately the same size, so this was a feat to behold.

 

Following our speed-eating session, we returned to the dorms to unpack, admire our souvenirs, and prepare for our second test of the season, another lovely placement test au DEFLE.  One successful weekend for the books… and since we didn’t make it to the Cité de l’Espace, perhaps a day trip is in order later in the season…

 

Did I mention that the TGV bathroom had purple toilet paper?  I love this country!

The Raid Game

KRISTIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIN!!!

KRISTINNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!!!

HELP!!!!

This is what I heard last night, calling out to me from the dark.  While you might be expecting a story comparable to Caitlin's Mt. Fuji tale, with dangerous weather and a strong sense of trepidation while adventuring through France, I'm afraid that I shall have to disappoint you at this point in time, because Jackie was not calling out to me from a mountainous cliff or darkened alleyway, but rather from her dorm room, with my can of Raid in her hand.  

We've created a new game since our arrival in Bordeaux.  Its called The Raid Game.  You see, the French have no concept of those strange American contraptions called "window screens," thus, when you open your window to air out your room, the entire insect population of Southwest France decides to throw you a housewarming party.

I, however, am a party pooper.

Armed with my can of Raid, I turn on one light in my room, watch the bugs flock towards it, and spray the buggers.  Then I switch lights and kill some more.  Such a sense of satisfaction to see the critters twitching on the floor.  Jackie joined in the game last night, but required some teammate back-up when a particularly resistant creature decided to defy the Raid can and fly directly towards her face.  After spraying madly, I walked into her room to see her crouched down in front of the closet, making noise and moving stuff to bring the critters into the open.  Teamwork is always the best way to proceed, if that gives you a hint about who the victors of the game were :).

I may not be the most athletic and sporty individual, but when it comes to the Raid Game, I am a CHAMPION.

Oh my god, California!

Me and Lauren enter the movie theater “Bonjour Monsieurs!”

Me and Lauren turn on computers and start using the WeeFee

 

One hour later….

 

Lauren: Hey, my family is on Skype!  <Begins Skyping>

 

One and a half hours later…

 

Lauren: KRISTIN! Does Champion close at 8?

 

Me: Oh $&@#! I think it does! <Cut to shot of clock, reading 7:53>

 

I think you can guess where it went from there… we madly ran across the parking lot to Champion (it’s a grocery store, don’t know if I mentioned that before), only to discover that the door was indeed “ferme” as the homeless panhandler has so kindly informed us.  Cut to us running around the building, sprinting to the open door when someone walked out.  Following the cashier screaming “trois minutes!” when we ran in, the manager turned off all the lights while Lauren was somewhere in the cereal aisle.  However, once the manager heard me speaking to her, he said “Ah, she speaks English!  You should practice your English with her!” (the “you” that he referred to was our favorite grumpy cashier)… this guy then proceeded to question us, half in English and half in French, with the conversation going roughly like this “Where are you from? The US, we’re students from California.  California!  Oh my god California!  They’re from California!  Yeah, we’re here for a semester at the university.  California! Can you believe that!”

 

The guy then bid us farewell, we were very gracious, and seriously hoping that he is the manager every single time that we go in there, because we’re from California, by god, and that means that we get to shop at Champion until 8:01, unlike the rest of Pessac.  Therefore, my fairly bad French accent can get me late-night produce and has just made me a new friend at Champion… not a bad place to have connections to the management, if I do say so…

 

Overall, a successful adventure… I got me some gum and salad fixings, Christine some peaches, and my new tram pass works wonderfully!

Les huîtres

So today, we went on our first group excursion, to several places.  There is an area called Arcachon that produces a great quantity of oysters, has the largest sand dune in Europe, and has multiple lovely beaches with fairly decent temperature of water.

 

I think I can sum up the trip like this: the bus has mandatory seat belts, a call button, a personal fan, and a tray table with cup holder, as well as a movable arm rest, handles, and a mesh pocket for each passenger.  Lunch was oysters, bread, butter, various cheeses and meats, and wine.

 

C’est bon, no?