If they had a sandwich like this in the US....

Avignon, April 12th 2008

The second week moves so much faster than the first.
This is the lesson I have learned over these past seven days, these past seven days in which I finally found the rhythm I dreamed of in my journal entries. 'I need a routine, then I'll feel stable,' I wrote. Stable is a good word for this week. I have the hang of the class schedule, know which days are the best ones to bring my laptop to campus, know what time I have to leave St. Lazare if I want to get to the Avenue de la Trillade by 7:15. I haven't looked at a map in days...not even sure where mine is... I know where to buy the most incredible strawberry ice cream in all Europe, and which boulangerie's pain au chocolat is served warm and which is only mediocre. This is an important thing to know when one is in France—pain au chocolat is...well, how shall I put this...instant addiction?!
Flaky, like a croissant. Oblong in shape, rounded over the top, with swirls of chocolate peeking out at either end hinting at the heavenly deliciousness inside. If you head to the boulangerie on Louis Pasteur across from Cybermedi@, and you've got good timing, you get it warm and in a white paper sleeve. Generally something like 80 centimes, it's a good way to get rid of those pesky 20 centime coins. You finish this sinfully enjoyable snack already thinking about your next one. Those of the group who haven't yet tried them...well, those of us who have try to convince them not to start. There is no turning back, and we are all setting ourselves up for snacking heartbreak on return to the states. If I could, I'd bring a whole batch back into the country in June...wow...
Umm...let's avoid talking about it, actually...this close to lunch it's not a good plan.
The point is that I think I've found my rhythm, I'm starting to get the hang of living in France, and that makes switching things up way more fun. Instead of O'Neill's, let's change things up and go to Level One. Instead of eating at the first place with a menu, let's hold out and shop at Les Halles. The variables are starting to become moveable, and I really enjoy that.
I think the last time I updated was Monday...?
Well, Monday night we ended up at O'Neill's, the Irish pub—me, Kristin, Cathy, Amanda, Justin, Nicky and Caitlin eventually. Then Justin's correspondent Orly and some friends walked by, asked to join us, and before we knew it we were shoving half the two-seater tables on the sidewalk together to form one big table. Seating was roughly based on nationality: the Americans on one half of the table, the French on the other, with the exception of Orly sitting in the heart of English-speaking country, and Cathy on the French side. Nicky and I were the two with an American sitting on one side and a French student on the other, so we were the most bilingual that night. Orly speaks English when he's with us, so he's never shy about sitting right in the middle of the US group.
On the English speaking half, they had somehow struck up a game of charades. Meanwhile, the French students were discussing driving and drinking ages, how they compared, what they were in the US versus Europe, the logistics of learning to drink before learning to drive. Then they stopped and Alexandre and his buddy arm-wrestled...then they went back to serious discussion...meanwhile, I found myself trying to participate in both groups. After all, this is prime 'voluntary French' time, but honestly, who can resist playing charades with a French guy, even if it is in English?
Tuesday was pretty routine, and I stayed in that night, so there isn't really much to say about it.
Wednesdays here are the OU group's free day. With the exception of the last week of April, we never have classes on Wednesday. So Kristin and I headed out for lunch, then met Amanda, Justin, Nicky and Caitlin and decided to check out the Musee Angladon.
Honestly, I didn't really enjoy Odilon Redon. A little too out there for me, and he does very strange things with light that weren't particularly fun to look at. But that was just the featured artist. The Angladon also boasts a few Picassos, a Van Gogh, a Cezanne, a Manet, and the wall of amazing that is the three Degas sketches it has to its name.
I spent more time with those three sketches than with three rooms of Odilon whats-his-name.
Three euros admission to college students. Not half bad, right?
Here's a strange thing, though, there were an awful lot of children there. Very young children. Apparently on Wednesdays little French schoolkids link hands in pairs and learn to appreciate art. Now I've said before how intimidating we find French children, these little people who are completely ignorant to their command of their own language. If you have ever spoken to a French child, you have definitely repeated, over and over, variants of the phrases, “I don't understand you,” and “please talk slower.” Either that or you just smiled, nodded, and pretended to comprehend them. So an entire class-full of them can be an auditory overload. Especially in an art museum—one moment everyone is quiet and contemplative, the next moment the door clangs open and in walk twenty jabbering little francophones out on the town.
After the museum we wandered the Rue de la Republique for a while, went into several shops without buying anything, and headed back to our houses. Cathy had just met with her correspondent, and narrated that adventure. We hung out in Cathy's room that night, and hammered out our film critiques for Resistance. Kristin invented many a creative insult for me for being the first one finished. Cathy and I took turns DJ-ing from our laptops for a few hours and it probably took us longer to finish our papers than it would've if we'd been working in separate rooms, but honestly, where's the fun in that?
On Thursday not much notable happened. Thursday is the longest, and earliest-starting, day of classes for most of us—three of them essentially back-to-back, two hours per class. And any day starting at 8h30 with two hours of history...well, let's just say that Thursdays take a lot of effort to keep the enthusiasm afloat. I had my journal meeting with Katy, which cut into my instant messaging time with Mom. I also tried the dining hall at lunch. For 2€90 a student gets an entree, a side, a crudite, a dessert, and bread (yes, this is France!). Cheapest, yet biggest lunch I've had here, even if it was dining hall food...and yes, dining hall food is dining hall food, no matter what country you're in.
If Thursday is the toughest day, Friday is the easiest. One little class—Oral Production—which last Friday consisted of writing a dialogue in which one person is lost and the other gives directions. James and I got our location assignments—we were at the train station, we were looking for the Palais des Papes, write a dialogue giving directions.
If you're here in Avignon with me, you probably get why that's funny...well, actually you heard the dialogue. If you're not in Avignon, this is funny because the “directions” are basically to walk in one enormous straight line. So my directions consisted of “straight, straight, keep going straight, don't turn, go straight some more, and there you are.” And I got a participation grade for saying so. Yeah, oral production is an adventure like that. Participation grades rock my socks.
After that, the linguistics majors and Kristin (sorry Kristin, that's just how I thought of the group that day) went out to lunch. That was pretty awesome. That's also the day that will go down in history as the day I had my first steack-frites.
Danielle, actually a lot of the French, call it an “American sandwich.” It consists of mayonnaise, strips of hamburger meat, lettuce, french fries, seasoning, and more mayonnaise, all on a warm baguette. If pain au chocolat is the addictive snack, the steak-frites (sometimes with a “c” before the k) is the addictive lunch. I've never had anything like it in the states, despite the “american sandwich” label. As Major put it, “If they had something like this in the US, I never would've left the country.” Another culinary heartbreak to set aside for June. I wonder if you can carry a sandwich on a plane...
Friday night there was a new place opening up right next to the Redsky. There were a bunch of us there, and we went through the familiar routine of having so many people that we had to steal every available chair in the room to seat everyone around a single table. We, and when I say “we” I mean “they” played a round of kings...note to self, at least buy a Coke if the social activity for the evening is going to be a drinking game...and then Cathy and I headed home, because we had an excursion early the next morning and we wanted to get some sleep. Apparently we left just in time to miss an “adventure” that they're still talking about, involving one incredibly drunk correspondent and a game of truth or dare. He's still grounded, and I don't know if the group's ever going to invite him out again. That's as far into that as I'll go, but it was fun until then. Cathy and I congratulated ourselves on our excellent timing.
Saturday's 8h45 report time ended up becoming a 9h15 departure, as two of the boys were MIA. One cell phone call fifteen minutes after report time woke Ian up. I called Major, who'd thought report time was at 9h45. So we got a late start to Baux de Provence. Roughly thirty minutes in a bus cruising through some of the most gorgeous scenery I've ever seen. Of course, isn't it just our luck that the gorgeous scenery never lays itself out in a straight line. There were twists, hairpins and hills enough to make the strongest of stomachs quake with motion sickness.
Les Baux de Provence is a preserved medieval village perched on enormous stone cliffs. Once you've braved the hike to the top, and navigated the uneven, rocky ground out to the edge, the French countryside lays itself at your feet. Completely breathtaking, and I don't just say so because the wind up there was so violent I nearly lost my favorite hat. Christophe emerged from the office carrying a box of audioguides, and started passing them out. I've talked about audio tours before, haven't I? How the tourists wander the big landmarks with these enormous red telephone-looking devices at their ears, gazing up down and around, looking mild-to-moderate bizarre? Well now we had the chance to do the same. Reluctantly, I hit “1” and “play.”
Well wasn't it just my lucky day that the audioguide spoke English!? Of course, most of the English spoken here is British English (more later on how the locals refer to “English” and “American” like two different languages.) So the serene, Bristish-accented electronic tour guide began to narrate about olive groves and the stone quarries from which the castle had been built. I lasted about thirty seconds, shoved the horrid device into my bag, and went to watch the catapult demonstration.
“Watch” quickly became “participate in.”
Well I didn't know what he wanted of us when he asked the crowd for volunteers, but I figured that I was over here in France to do things I wouldn't usually do at home, like volunteer for mystery tasks during a catapult demonstration. Kristin, Erica, Rachel and I came up and took the ropes he handed us. “He” is the worker who was running the catapult demonstration, by the way. So our new friend catapult man begins to explain in somewhat accented French what we're supposed to do. Simple enough. When he says tirez, we pull our ropes gently, then he'll say lancez, and then we run because the ropes are going to recoil and we don't want to get hit in the face. We have to try and beat the distance set down by last demonstration's group, which looked pretty pathetic. Considering that this was an enormous catapult, the last group's throw didn't look that impressive. We could beat it no problem.
Of course, let me mention here that I failed to hear a step. Remember how I said “he'll say lancez, and then we run?” Well, what I failed to hear was that there was another step in between those two. He says lancez, we pull with all our weight, and then we run. So for the first two tries, he would say lancez and two of us were pulling, two of us running away without pulling first. Result, the ball literally did not leave the catapult. The arm just tipped over lazily and dropped the ball straight down, making for a throw of about two feet. Realizing that we hadn't understood his French as well as we pretended to, he covered the microphone with his hand and explained in broken English that we were only supposed to run after we'd launched the catapult. In hindsight, this makes perfect sense...
The third time was the charm, and our medicine-ball projectile outdistanced the old group's throw pretty well, and redeemed our reputations a little. Plus, the audience stopped “boo”ing. “Boo”ing is not particularly helpful for the self esteem...There end the adventures of Grace and the Medieval French Weaponry.
Avignon, April 20th, 2008
Did I mention that the second week's faster than the first? The third week puts them both to shame.
I caved in and did some day counting today. I have been away from home for 25 days. Twenty-five days since I've embarked on this incredible journey into second-language-land. And a week since I've gotten my act together and written up a blog entry.
Luckily for me, Sundays are pretty good catch-up days here. All the stores are closed, so there's really nowhere much to go except market in the morning, and then kill time until dinner. Sunday from noon to seven-thirty is free for everything from homework, to blogging, to folding clothes so that my closet no longer looks like I've been throwing things into it from across the room.
In today's case, Danielle's son, daughter-in-law, and grandsons are over for the afternoon. Absolutely none of my business, so I smiled my way through the obligatory round of bonjours and headed upstairs to listen to rock music at unsatisfyingly low volumes.
The rest of the Baux leg of the excursion was as follows:
The shops and cafes are scattered all down the hillside, and we wandered in and out of a few as we made our way back to the meeting place. Just as with drinking nights, I was content to trail along and watch other people spend money. I just bought a couple of postcards, resisted the call of the fifty flavors of caramel in the sweets shop, mooched a cookie off of Rachel...
Okay, so in retrospect, it probably wouldn't have killed me to buy some caramel, but I've still got my postcards!
Nicky, Justin, Caitlin, Kristin, Amanda and I ended up hiding from the wind in a cafe until meet time, and then we walked over to the Cathedral des Images.
...which is going to be quite a task to try and describe...
If I want to use the broadest word possible, I'm going to go ahead and call it a cave. In every definition, the Cathedrale des Images is a cave, but the walls are tall, and flat, and laid out over a dozen different planes. On each of the planes and on most of the floor are projected images, which are set to music. The program changes—for us, it was Van Gogh paintings. So as we turned the first corner into the Cathedrale proper, we found self-portraits staring down at us from every direction.
You know, I'll try to post some pictures, because not even I can begin to describe this place well enough to do it justice.
The walls are immense, of different heights, and it was so dark that we weren't recognizing our own classmates until we were a few steps away. All of the guests were nearly-identical shadowy figures pacing from wall to wall, turning stunned circles and watching our own shadows. I would approach a friend to see that we had stepped into the projector's path, that the brushstrokes of Van Gogh were projected over us. Watching the colors dance across my own hands, I would step back into the shadows and wait for the painting to change, moving from one end of the cave to the other and back more times in that short hour than I could've counted. The downsides to this amazing place were minimal: first of all, being a cave, it was on the chilly side. Second, I was mildly motion sick when over a dozen identical galaxies panned over the walls, turning a solemn circle in unison around me. Motion sickness: standing still, but your mind tricks your body into thinking it's moving. Felt like I was spinning, so I hid under the brim of my hat until the space scene went away and the paintings returned. But that was a small price to pay for what a good half of the group left calling “the best part of the trip so far.”
We were there marveling, trying to piece it all together, all the way through the show from start to finish, and halfway into the second time around. Squinting as we retreated back into warm sunlight, we waited for the final stragglers to come back, and then it was more walking.
We headed up the road (minus Cathy,) for a fantastic view of the place we'd just left at home. Very rarely have I had the opportunity to look at the real-life version of those bright colored photos you see on postcards. But looking up at Les Baux on its cliffside perch, I could've just as easily made a postcard by making a frame of my fingers. Even now the memory seems a little surreal, although that could have something to do with the thick cloud cover and rain hammering down outside as I type this. Couldn't be further from the perfect sunshine, the vibrant color of last Saturday afternoon. Well, let's not speak too soon—it could be further, there could be a blizzard or something, but Danielle assures us that this is about as lousy weather as Avignon in springtime can get. She even jokingly accused us of “bringing the weather with us in our suitcases from Athens.” Apparently this is more rain than the region is used to seeing at this time of year.
After we were done at Baux we went to St. Remy, which is...I need more specific descriptions than “a small town in the south of France,” since this phrase applies to half our excursions, but it's a small town in the south of France, maybe twenty minutes' drive outside Avignon. Also overgeneralized descriptions—pretty and full of small shops. Those two descriptors cover half of the country...
I spent most of my St. Remy time with Cathy, Ian, Jenna, and a couple others (sorry guys, I forget who was there...!) on the steps of some municipal building. We watched the carousel (what is it with all these little French towns having a carousel?) and not much else—free time is usually equal to shopping time, and that involves the spending of money and copious walking. Sometimes we just need an alternative, and that's when you find yourself sitting on the stairs watching French kids tow on their mothers' arms and beg for a ride on the carousel. (Best carousel ever, by the way, featuring a hot air balloon, an elephant that required stairs to ride, and a UFO with a closing dome.) We did hang out in a bookstore for a while, and gazed longingly into a few boulangerie-patisserie windows at the fruit tarts and our familiar friend pain au chocolat.
April 21st, 2008
It's comical to me to see myself leaving off mid-thought like that, when I know that only something like Danielle calling me downstairs for dinner could pull me away from a nice writing session. Apologies again for the delay between entries, while I'm thinking of it. Two hundred and nine pages to read for Resistance this week, and the University was closed for the week, meaning no wireless. Not a fun combination.
Where was I, all the way back at a week ago Satuday?
We didn't do much in St. Remy, that much I remember writing. We headed back to the bus and I dozed off on the way back to Avignon. Then it was dinner with Danielle (dinners are always served at seven thirty, and we are all expected to attend unless we call saying otherwise,) and homework, and sleep. Sometimes you just need a night like that, you know? No matter how fun going out and being social is.
Sunday was pretty much the exact opposite of Saturday.
On Sunday, nobody expected anything of me except Danielle, who expected me to be home for dinner. So after Kristin had headed out to Nimes, after Cathy was at her correspondent's house to help him with his English homework, I got together my book, a notebook, and my French language journal and headed off in search of adventure. But I forgot one thing: I was in southern France, on a Sunday afternoon in April. Meaning that everything was closed, except for the public park.
The weather that day was truly fantastic. The local gang of pigeons certainly seemed to be enjoying itself, as they wandered the cobblestones foraging for abandoned foodstuffs, their necks wobbling with every step. I found a bench that I could stretch out on and spent a few hours being a good student. But as I mentioned in my French journal the other day, even the smallest of things can efficiently distract me. A group of tourists swerving into the park to marvel at the flowers and take pictures of each other grinning in front of the fountain: distracting. The French mother insisting to her children that picking the flowers was forbidden; the children smiling those daring smiles and plucking flowers anyway, setting them adrift in the fountain: distraction. Even just lying on my back looking at the sky was a distraction. I started to watch the tiny airplanes swim lazily by in the sea of cloudless blue above me. I got to thinking about the people in those airplanes, those airplanes that to me seemed so distant as to be practically insubstantial. They must have stories, they must have names, and destinations, these people in the airplanes. After all, it wasn't so long ago that I was a person in an airplane. I realize now that it is a state below common anonymity—folks don't even think “oh look, there's a vehicle carrying dozens of people to a new destination,” they think “look, an airplane.” Even I am guilty as charged. We look at the plane, we don't think about what it carries.
Did anyone look up at my airplane? Did anybody watch it sail by and wonder about the people on board? Did anyone notice it at all? It's funny, this dance of anonymity we humans do, this dance that has a whole world blind to the significance of the 767 that brought me over here to another world. And why should they care? Why should we look up at airplanes and imagine the people inside?
Avignon—April 22nd, 2008
Finally, some contact with home has been established. The University has been closed for over a week, and yesterday was the first time I got a chance to think about getting caught up again. According to Mom, I've been spoiling you folks back home with the previous frequency of my updates. A million apologies, I'd like to be updating every single day but it doesn't work out that way over here, so we'll have to get by on what I can handle during my internet afternoons—Monday, Tuesday, Thursday.
Unfortunately, if I want to keep my head above water with day-to-day events, I'm going to have to hit the fast forward button a little. Hope you don't mind.
A week ago Sunday was my alone day in the park, being contemplative and worldly. I finally got through the hundred-plus pages of reading for Monday, went back to Danielle's for dinner, and since it was Sunday I probably stayed in after dinner and did more homework.
Monday was O'Neill's night, although since the University is on vacation there were no international students around except the Ohio group. We played poker with no money involved, which is basically being dealt a hand of cards, trading in, and then comparing hands for bragging rights. Classes were in one of the university residences that day, in some mystery communal room with a buzzing VCR and florescent light fixtures. History was dull as usual, and Resistance was book discussions for two hours. Then wandering around town for a while, home for dinner, and...wait, I already talked about O'Neill's...
Tuesday, classes. Tuesdays are never particularly remarkable.
Wednesday, the linguistics majors and Kristin went to a cafe, where I had a legitimate lunch, meaning it did not come on a bun, as 95% of my lunches here do.
Thursday was long and uneventful, aside from me doing a TON of walking. Went from Danielle's to class, walked Cathy back to Danielle's, went back to class. Half an hour each way means lots of walking for Grace.
Sorry for the abrupt ending I”ll explain later but hope that'll hold you over until Thursday.
-G