old lady status

This is my first blog post as a 21-year-old. Exciting, huh? Not really when you're in a country where you can drink practically since you are born. Anyway, it was a happy birthday thanks to all the love from home and all my new friends here! I like making new year's resolutions on my birthday instead of on the actual new year. This year's? Write something in this blog once a week...except maybe next week when I'm in Morocco and internetless. And hopefully make each post shorter and less rambly. We'll see how this goes.


In the last three weeks, I have experienced French strikes, travelled to Normandy and Mont St Michel, had arguably the best hot chocolate in the world, and gone to a French futbol game to cheer on les Bleus. The night of the soccer game, I was out with my friend Ryanne and some other girls from DU who were visiting from London. It was great to see them and to meet some of them, but by the time Ryanne and I found the metro and I got to the Stade de France, it was halftime. You wouldn't have known it from the roar of the crowd I could hear from the metro station, which was several blocks away. I didn't even have to wonder which way to go to find this place outside of Paris which I had never been to in my life. I just followed the sound of 80,000 cheering fans. Keep in mind, this was only halftime. The second half of the game was very exciting, with France scoring once in the last five minutes and again in the last minute of the game to beat Romania 2-0 and move on in the 2012 Euro Cup qualifiers. A text from my friend Lauren on my way to the stadium summed it up pretty well with something like, "If anyone gives you any trouble,  'allez les bleus!' seems to be a pretty solid line."


The next weekend, I went on an excursion with ISA to Normandy and Mont St Michel. We visited the Memorial de Caen, the American Cemetery, Omaha Beach, and Pointe de Hoc. I never thought I would be so interested in history in my life. I think I learned more about World War II in those few hours than I ever did in any of my history classes. It was so amazing to walk along Omaha Beach and see how serene and beautiful it is today knowing what happened there so many years ago. It looks like any other beach I've ever been to, and it's hard to believe it all connects to the same ocean. I said hi to you all in America on the other side. The next day, we went to Mont St Michel, the famous abbey surrounded by its own kind of ocean--quicksand! It was a lot of stairs but worth it since it's the most visited monument in France after the Eiffel Tower.


The best hot chocolate in the world is at a chocolaterie/boulangerie/salon de thé across the street from the Tuileries called Angelina. It comes from North Africa, and it is the chocolatiest, meltiest hot chocolate you will ever have in your life. Angelina is a beautiful tea room close to the Louvre that feels oh so Parisian. The walls are covered in murals, the ceiling is rimmed with gold, and the tables are the little round kind you see outside cafes all over Paris. I went to Angelina with two friends from one of my classes, British Matt and another Emily from Chicago. We discussed books, movies, and photography (en francais!), all while looking out for celebrities and models, the kinds of people rumored to frequent this place. It was all very classy.


I guess the memory of Angelina has to make up for missing the other very sophisticated and tasteful event I was looking forward to. As I started writing this last night, I was supposed to be all dressed up at the Opera Garnier watching the ballet Paquita. But, in France, ballerinas go on strike too!

i got a blue and red adidas bag and a humungous binder

I've survived the first two weeks of school!...well, the first two DU-like weeks of school with no class on Fridays. The first few days made me think of the line in that Barenaked Ladies song. Though I did not have a blue and red adidas bag, I did have a humungous binder (by French standards anyway). I looove French school supplies! Between the little tiny notebooks with the little tiny lines that are like graph paper only cooler and the left-handed pencils that I found at Monoprix and my first time at a Gilbert Jeune store, one of eight of their stores that surround the St Michel metro stop and are five or six whole floors of books and school supplies, I could not even handle my excitement. And I think my humungous binder is acceptable because it has the drawings that Marie and Jean-Victor Maublanc from my French host family four years ago drew for me on the front and back and I haven't gone to school without it since! 

I like all of my classes--Langue francaise, Francais oral, Phonetique, and France: comment ca fonctionne? However, the one with the craziest professor just happens to be the only one that I have for six hours every week instead of three. She is really energetic and never stands still for more than about two seconds. Her mode of transportation around the classroom has been described as yoga, and I don't know how, but that's actually pretty accurate. When she asks questions, she stares at you, you answer, and she stares at you some more until you say whatever you can to make her move on to the next person. During her class, I was explaining that I don't understand how Parisians have such huge dogs when they live in such tiny apartments. I thought it was a legitimate thing to wonder about. I mean, Paris has some of the biggest dogs I have ever seen in my life, and I worry about them. So after explaining this to her and asking in pretty good French how it is even possible that they survive here, she gave me a blank stare and pretty much said, "It just is. How do you think? They're obviously ok" and stared at me for a while. That was fun. I want a dog in Paris. 

During the same class today, a bunch of old guys came into the room and told us we had to move. I'm not really sure why, but we moved to another room that was on the fourth/top floor of a building with a really narrow staircase. Then we had a break in the middle of class, so I walked around the floor and decided to see what was downstairs. I made it all the way down to the first floor, walked around, and went back up the stairs. I was almost back to the fourth floor when I realized that the stairway I was on was a lot wider than the one that went back to the classroom. I definitely thought this building only had one staircase. I found it eventually, but seriously, it was like a disappearing staircase. I came back into the classroom rather late when everyone else was already back and discussing something important. Clearly, I was the only one who got lost. I didn't know it was possible to lose a flight of stairs.

So I almost flooded the bathroom again...or something. I'm not really sure why, but Madame showed me how to do my laundry like I was going to do it by myself and then she watched me do it and of course I did it wrong. French washing machines have three little compartments for three different kinds of detergent, and I was only using one kind and I put it in the wrong one. Then she pulled out a separate container that you put another kind of detergent in and put in the actual washer. I definitely did not remember that from her demonstration like two days earlier. Also, I did not remember my clothes being this stiff after they air dry in France because no one has dryers. I guess the only other time I did laundry in France, it was hung outside on the clothes line. This time, I hung everything on the drying rack and the next day it was all hung up in different ways. I didn't know there was a right way and a wrong way to hang up laundry.

I'm getting along fine with my current host family, which includes Madame Faure, Victor who is fifteen, and Laurene who is nine. They are all very busy, and I only see them for a little while at dinner every night. They make sure I have everything I need, but they don't talk to me about much else. That is probably a good thing for the sake of my French skills and how much Marie and Jean-Victor made fun of me when I would try to speak it. But I still don't know why I can understand all of my professors, other students, and even French people on the metro, but I can hardly understand a word anyone in my host family says without listening reeeally carefully and usually having them repeat stuff. I guess I will just need to practice! As host families go, I'm pretty sure that they think of me as more of a boarder and less of a member of the family, but that's ok! I'm still getting to know the Faure family, but I'm pretty sure no one can compare to the Maublancs! But I looove how the house always smells like French laundry and there is always a baguette sitting on its own cutting board in the kitchen or the dining room--always. 

I was sad when I found out that there would not be any French students in my classes. But after my first class, which had students from Venezuela, Japan, Canada, South Korea, and the United States, I realized how amazing this school year is going to be. I love hearing how different they all sound when they speak French. They have all learned French so differently than I have, and while it is the same language, it's like learning it all over again. At the same time, I'm also meeting so many amazing Americans. It's funny how I came here thinking about the French people I would meet and then I've met so many people from the United States and even people from DU who I would have never met on campus. 

Last weekend, I went to the Loire Valley with some of my friends from DU and ISA, the study abroad program. It reminded me so much of the Vis (and oh ya, Eastview) trip to France four years ago! We visited the chateaux of Chenonceau and Chambord and a new one--Blois! At Chambord, we rode bikes around the grounds, which led to some Sound of Music singalongs, and we rowed boats in the river/moat around the chateau, which led to me singing the Indiana Jones theme song...? Don't worry it's on video. We had a tour of a winery and got to try lots and lots of wine. Apparently they hire students for the harvesting slash grape sorting for a few weeks in August or September. Courtney and I are doing that next summer...once we find the money for another ticket to France. At Chambord, we tried the famous Chambord liqueur and biscuits/cookies.We also had French bread with goat cheese and pate at the winery...everything tastes better in France.  Even Domino's pizza, which is what I had for dinner with my family tonight. 

I met some French kids in Tours, the town where we stayed for the weekend, and they told me the difference between bon soir, bon soiree, and bonne nuit! Actually, I just remembered that bonsoir is one word too. They told me that you can say either bonsoir or bon soiree most of the time, but bonsoir is more casual or used when you are going to see the person again soon. Bonsoir is more like "Bye," and bon soiree is more like "Bye. Good night. Have a nice life!" Bonne nuit is more for when you are actually going to bed, so I think all those years of "bonne nuit, ma petite!" were right, mom! But of course I will probably still never remember which is right when I actually want to use them, and this doesn't even answer the question of when to stop saying bonjour and start using the night ones. 

Back in Paris, everything is pretty normal...strikes on the metro, terrorist threats at all the touristy places, warnings to Americans not to go anywhere, the usual. I was at the Eiffel Tower the other day, and as I sat there reading a book, I couldn't look up without seeing armed security people going by. If you think of it that way, the touristy spots could actually be the safest. I still haven't figured out the picture thing, but I have some great ones of people under the Eiffel Tower sitting on the benches, reading, talking, but from where I was, it was impossible to get the whole Eiffel Tower without also getting an ugly green trash bag on a pole. I wondered about those, but I learned in class this week that they replaced normal trash cans after a few too many bombs went off inside them. So I guess it's worth it, right? It's still the Eiffel Tower. It's still beautiful. It's still Paris! Whenever it rains or one of my friends here gets a cold or anything at all goes wrong, we just say, "So what? We're in Paris!" So true. 

Happy October! Happy anniversary Mom and Dad! Go Twins!