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 18th 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 16th 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!
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