The Latin Life

Ah. So most of the comments I've been making up until now have been about concrete events in Aix-en-Provence that I've experienced and such glorious things as setting up a bank account, finding a place to stay, and classes. Oh, we've had the first two weeks of classes already, right... And by the way, they've gone really well for the most part. But I'll leave descriptions of the classes I've been to so far and my cultural comparisons with American schools for another day.

What about...gee, I don't know..life? How does it feel to be living in France?

In short, fantastic, except for my poor wallet, which has had far more currency go through it then I would care to admit due to the high cost of living and the generally high costs that anyone experiences when having to buy new household items because they now live on the opposite side of the Atlantic. But you, of course, were expecting that answer, because virtually everyone who chooses to study abroad says that they enjoy the experience. But HOW is life different?

Any discussion of my life so far in France, however, should start with one little disclaimer. I have, so far, only experienced one part of the country, Provence, a region which frequently, well, isn't very French. In most aspects of life, Provençal habits are closer to neighboring Italy and Spain than they are to northern France. Many people say that the French have a unique character which is a curious mixture of Celtic froideur (a cool, aloof, toughness) and Latin warmth and love of life which might not always be 100% sincere, but is a hell of a lot more fun. Provence, as the part of France where the Romans first came to Gaul and where a good part of the population has always come from somewhere else, belongs just about entirely to the second category. Our history professor from the last couple weeks, Claude, said that in spite of Marseille's ugly reputation when it comes to race relations, the average Marseillais would have a far easier time living with Arabs from North Africa than with Bretons, the Celtic people from Brittany, in northwest France (a traditionally more seafaring, religious culture where a good number of people still speak the Breton language. And where it rains all the goddamn time), and I can believe it.

For starters, when it comes to the weather, it's a hell of a lot hotter here than in the rest of France. In the middle of the day, then, it only makes sense that you don't feel like moving around a whole lot (although that's starting to change as the weather slowly gets cooler). So, we take our fair share of siestas and often don't get terribly active until later in the day. People also have a way of looking sharp and at ease in what they're wearing - this is a Mediterranean climate, so people are generally dressed pretty casually during the day. But we're also pretty close to Italy both geographically and in mentality, and once you combine that influence with the fact that Aix-en-Provence is a rich city, people generally seem to be pretty conscious about their appearance. This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, but you don't see girls with laughably slutty outfits (you know - women who clearly don't know what their appropriate clothing size is or are about to have an episode of free booby. Anyone who was at Michigan City High School's prom knows what I'm talking about) or guys with shorts or saggy pants going out at night here. Guys wear an ungodly amount of cologne (getting smacked by a cologne vortex when a large group walks by on the street is normal) as well.

There's also apparently a slight problem with the Corsican Mafia here, which our history professor warned us about during our second week here, although he ranted about it in a way that made it sounded conspiracy theory-esque. Nope. I couldn't find the English-language article that I meant to put a link to here (Danielle, Sara, or Shannon, I remember it was of you that found it, post it in the comments section if you're reading this!), so I'll put this one in French from L'Express, a well-known French hebdomadaire (weekly magazine), for you all to struggle through instead. It's entitled "Aix-en-Provence in the grips of the Mafia", and it's from last year. http://www.lexpress.fr/actualite/aix-en-provence-sous-l-emprise-du-milieu_1224847.html And moving on...

People also have a completely different sense of time, much like in nearby Spain. Unless you're getting on a plane or a train, don't count on anything being on time, and definitely don't have the annoying habit that some Americans have of arriving super early to things... you won't piss anyone off, but you'll just spend a longer time waiting. And unlike in America, people won't feel awkward making you wait for them. Appointments and classes usually start a few minutes late (and occasionally quite a bit more than that). Hell, even my German class started almost 15 minutes late yesterday, and that's GERMAN. Once, I was slightly late to my first meeting with the Massons before I moved in, and later, I was seriously late to a friend's house because I was waiting for someone else who ended up not coming with. When I started apologizing profusely, they seemed confused. "What was the big deal?" they thought.

 I don't go to restaurants or get food out very often (and when I do, it's often pizza or ethnic food- Middle Eastern/North African or Vietnamese food is often way cheaper than going to "French" restaurants), but a few words about customer service: you waiter is (usually) not an inconsiderate asshole - there's just not an expectation that they will check on you every few minutes to ask you how your meal is, and you have to ask for your check. The French would see that as being intrusive otherwise. And you need to just take your time and expect to wait a little. RELAX. If not, those workers who are doing their job (while not feeling the need to bend over backwards for the customer) will get annoyed, and then your service will be that much slower. This ain't America, folks. Likewise for other stores. When I went to get my cell phone plan, the guy working at the desk kept having friends coming into the store, and heaven forbid, he wasn't giving his undivided attention to the customer. The job still got done. Imagine that.

Finally, people are more comfortable with being physically close to other people in Provence. I haven't noticed if women do this with each other (not being a woman, there are certain observations that I'm not capable of making), but this is definitely true for guys. At the bars after a few drinks, instead of the brief, somewhat violent bro hug, guys who are friends often put their arms around each other for a little while (high on the backs, folks. This isn't the Marais in Paris). And then, of course, there's the bise, the air-kiss on the cheek thing that Americans all think is weird. It turns out you don't have to know someone well at all for it to be a thing, if the other person is also of student age and the relationship isn't a formal one. Women do it with each other all the time (sometimes blocking the hallway on the way to classes when everyone is trying to move. C'mon people!), and the same can be said for men and women. This sometimes includes with women I've just met and whose name I still haven't really learned yet. And here's the kicker - in spite of what people might have told you (like they told me), it's sometimes done between guys as well, and not just friends who you've known for ages either. It seems like that's not the case elsewhere in France or with people who aren't originally from the region (for a US comparison, when people from other areas come here, it's like a Snowbird moving to Florida. Different cultures within the same country coming into contact), but you can imagine that I was confused as shit when a couple guys I was talking to during Erasmus night at the Woohoo Bar both leaned in for the bise immediately after I introduced myself. We're friends now and I actually went with a couple of their friends on the Mediterranean in a boat belonging to one of them, by the way! Anyway, as far the bise goes, it's generally good advice to just wait until someone else makes the gesture and don't otherwise. It already seems normal after just a couple weeks here.

I also went to some old friends of the Massons and got to have my first 100% legit, 7-course meal (if I remember correctly?) after a couple glasses of absinthe and a few games of pétanque (which got progressively easier as I drank more absinthe. How about that?). The Massons asked me last minute if I wanted to come with, and not wanting to turn down a chance to go out to a house in the country and meet some new people, I came along. Marie-Claire (Madame Masson) apparently hadn't even told her friend that she was bringing a guest, but she knew that I was staying with the Massons and seemed delighted to have an unexpected guest. In the US, bringing an unannounced dinner guest would be considered rude..but this is Provence, and there was PLENTY of food. The main dish was soupe au pistou, a hearty (yet vegetarian) Provençal peasant comfort food standby. Some awesome unidentified appetizers, salad, a fantastic cheese plate with huge hunks of smelly, delicious cheese, homemade tiramisu, Moroccan mint tea and plenty of wine were also part of the meal. It took us..three hours? to eat everything. It was a great time and was definitely one of the best meals I've ever had.

Aside from that, classes have gone well so far. With German finally starting on the 22nd, all of my classes have had at least one session now. This weekend, I also climbed Mont Sainte-Victoire, the mountain just north of Aix that Cézanne loved to paint. I didn't leave until relatively late in the afternoon, and it was still hot when I left, but it was totally worth it. The views of the Provençal countryside were gorgeous, the exercise was refreshing, and I met some cool people at the top. Here's a few pictures from the hike.

And you might notice here that I'm on the summit as the sun is setting. Wonderful picture idea, helped by the fact that some of the Brits, Spaniards, and Americans I met near the top shared a bottle of wine with me unexpectedly at the former monastery just below the Cross of Provence. Bad idea, however, on a practical level, since I wasn't spending the night up there and had to scramble down the mountain to avoid getting trapped in the dark. And sure enough, it was pitch black by the time I reached the parking lot. Kinda freaky. I kept thinking that a wild boar, drug smugglers, or drug-smuggling wild boars were going to leap out of the bushes and attack me. Anyway, I plan to head back here again earlier in the day in the future, both to enjoy the hike again and to try to catch a glimpse of the rare Bonnelli's Eagles which nest on the cliffs on the side of the mountain.

Tomorrow I'm flying to Munich after class to meet up with Till and some other old German friends for a return to the Fatherland and a weekend of this:

Oktoberfestzeit! WOOOOO!! Alright, I'll be posting about this soon enough! Night guys!

La rentrée s'approche!

And just when I promised to finish updating everyone on happenings from the first week...oops. Life happened. It's hard to believe that it's already September 5th and that those of you back in the states have been in school for over a week now. Oy. I'll try to keep this a little more brief than I have been with my other blog posts.

I've been getting used to life in the Masson's apartment for the last couple weeks and getting to know them better, in addition to starting two pré-rentrée (pre-first day of school) classes which are part of the American program and taking advantage of the relatively large amount of free time that we still have before real classes start (on Monday. Gulp) to go out and dabble in the town's bar scene or hang out with some of the other Americans from the program and French people that we either met randomly or were already friends/connections from the past (none that I personally knew, anyway).

Unsuprisingly, it turns out that going out to the bars (which I could only do in the US for a few days before my arrival in France) has been one of the best ways to not only have fun and meet people at a time when all of us are still looking for French and other, non-from our own exchange group friends, but also to be using the most French possible in far more complex situations that going to the boulangerie for a baguette or filling out immigration paperwork. Shortly after my last blog entry, when Aix was still largely without most of its student population, we confusedly stumbled around town trying to find where in town all the action was going on. We opted not to go for the decisively more, um, bourgeois nightclub with the 20 Euro (!!!) cover charge and instead were told that we should try another club on the back in the part of town with the particularly narrow, winding, crowded streets where we had spent our first evening in Aix. Duncan, the guy in our group who heard where we were going, thought that the place was called "Le Squat", and when we stopped a group of three French guys how to get there, they looked seriously confused at first. You see, with all of us being dressed up to go out and us speaking in less-than-perfect French, it would indeed have been rather odd for us to be looking for a building to squat in in one of the richest cities in France on a Friday night. They then realized that we were talking about "Le Scat", which also sounds like a strange place to a native English speaker, but it turned out alright. The French guys decided to come with us, since they were from out of town and not particularly sure where they were going themselves, and it ended up being a pretty fun night, with one of the French guys, Gilles, buying beers for the entire group (there were about ten of us!)

In the time since then, we had our two-week (but three for those not going to Sciences Po) cours intensif, a quick review course that we was a requirement of the American program and was taught at neighboring Aix-Marseille University, and a "France in Perspective" history class, which each took place five and two days a week respectively. The history class was an enjoyable experience where we spent more time making fun of the dumb shit that Americans and French people do that the other side doesn't understand than we did actually talking about history, although we had one marathon two-hour lecture where we got a brief explanation of everything from the Greeks founding Marseille and the Gaulish Wars all the way up to the founding of the Fifth Republic in 1958. However, the class that had before that, from 9:00-1:00 every day of the week was a tiring, often pointless one. Since it was made up exclusively of other American students who are all at very different levels, most of the first week of the class pretty much put me to sleep. Madame Raymond, the professor, generally did a good job dealing with this, in spite of her quirks, and once we got to the second week of the class, I found it far more helpful. That didn't change the fact that I resented it for preventing me and the other students going to Sciences Po from participating in the trips and activities that all of the other international students were going on during our second week of the course, however.

Aix, like I mentioned in previous posts, is on the whole a pretty wealthy, conservative town. The Front National (FN), a far-right political party whose popularity has skyrocketed in the last few years and whose leader, Marine Le Pen, would beat current president François Hollande if an election were held today, (according to a poll I saw while watching the news), is pretty strong in the region and is actually in control of some municipal governments not terribly far from where I am. In fact, one of the very first things I saw on the taxi drive from the airport (located in Marignane, a city in between Aix and Marseille) was an old Marine Le Pen presidential election poster underneath a bridge with "CECI EST NOTRE TERRITOIRE" (This is our territory) scrawled in big black letters on the opposite side. Gulp. There are plenty of reasons for the FN's recent rise in popularity, some of which are pretty legitimate - even I, as someone on the hard left, recognize that.

Why am I bringing this up? Because upon entering Aix-Marseille University, it's pretty hard not to notice that you'd be stepping into enemy territory if you were an FN sympathizer.

I didn't get pictures of most of the more interesting graffiti, but there were political posters and graffiti from movements stretching from the socialist Left Party, which I often sympathize with, and the PCF (French Communist Party, the most moderate and powerful of the parties of the French radical left) to the NPA (New Anticapitalist Party, a mixture of various Marxist sensibilities and the offshoot of an old Trotskyist movement) and Lutte Ouvrière (Worker's Struggle, VERY radical Trotskyist left, almost a sort of political cult, actually), in addition to a variety of revolutionary Marxist, feminist, anti-racist and anti-nationalist organizations. I could tell that the other Americans were a little weirded out by the hammer and sickle signs spray-painted periodically on the walls, even if I wasn't. I really liked the straight out of May 1968 feel that it gave, with political graffiti and slogans like "let's be realistic, do the impossible" in the bathroom stalls, on the walls, and on the nearby bridge across the train tracks. It'll be interesting to see what kind of a presence these movements have in town once all of the students are back in town, especially when protests or strikes break out.

Anyway, aside from the coming insurrection that is apparently about to break out at Aix-Marseille University, the second week of our cours intensif that we had there was more interesting and, I feel, more helpful in getting us ready for classes at French universities than the first one was. We gave presentations and then led a debate on a variety of subjects in the Francophone world  - immigration, abortion, etc. The one that I did, on the politics of minority languages (in this case, Louisiana French), apparently hit close to home for our professor, as she got kind of emotional during the debate - it turns out, she is the first member of her family who doesn't speak Catalan, something which she has always regretted, because members of her family were shamed for speaking it and opted not to teach it to their children. France, for those of you who don't know, does a horrible job at dealing with regional languages and identities; ever since the Revolution, it's basically suppressed the shit out of them.


You should all know by now not to take me seriously when I say, "this is going to be a short post." Ha. Anyway, I've spent much of the last week meeting and getting to know some of the international students at Sciences Po. On Monday of last week, we went to school to take a French placement test and participate in a meet-and-greet. And later that night, participate in a pub crawl...organized by the International Student Association. The day that that happens in the US, hell done gone be freezing over, gaw-lee. The next night, it was Erasmus night at another bar, and we all stood out in the narrow streets near the bar, getting to know each other better, meeting some French people who were probably wondering what in the deuce was going on, and having a few laughs until 2:00 in the morning. And some of the Irish girls thought I was actually French because of my accent. Score! :P

Apart from that, we visited Marseille on Saturday and mainly just saw some of the touristy sites in town, but I can tell that I'm definitely going to be coming back once I have some French friends who can show me around some of the areas of the city off the beaten path. We had lunch at a Middle-Eastern restaurant in the Vieux Port (because although I was willing to shell out more oseille in order to finally try my first bouillabaisse in Marseille, the other Americans weren't) where I actually ended up with a pretty awesome meal for 5 euros, and I got to drink some of Nicole's peach beer that she insisted she couldn't finish, which was awesome. On top of that, the Algerian woman who was running the place appeared genuinely excited that we were a bunch of international students and kept giving us free stuff, and she scolded me when she noticed that I had gone to the bathroom to fill up my water bottle instead of asking her for some that was already cold, which she gave to me for free as well. Afterwards, I got the chance to swim in the Mediterranean for the second weekend in a row, this time at the beach in Marseille.

Notre-Dame de la Garde Basilica, Marseille

And finally, today, on Sunday the 8th, Emma, Maria, and I went to what we thought was the Festival of Calissons, the traditional cookie of Aix. We were told that the calissons were blessed and then given out to people nearby at 10:30 in front of Aix's main cathedral, la Cathédrale de Saint-Sauveur, and since we saw a large group of older people dressed in traditional costumes carrying a sign written in Provençal, we figured we were right. Except one confusion led to another and the three of us ended up going into the church for mass. When only Maria is Catholic and Emma and I were pretty much wondering what the hell we were doing there. Oops. Well, it was an interesting experience. The church was actually pretty crowded, but the vast majority of the fidèles were older folks - kind of a symptom of the moribund state of Christianity in Europe. The sermon was pretty free of dogma and actually something I appreciated as an agnostic leftist, in which the priest cited a book that had come out recently to discuss our needs as social beings to fight the individualism that is the "mal de notre société" and remind us that we find happiness in our relations with others, and not on our own. He also subtly slipped in a wise crack about the already controversial book written by François Hollande's former mistress which came out last week, "Merci pour ce moment" (Thanks for this moment).

Afterwards, I stopped in at a wine shop to pick up a bottle of Château Paradis, a local white wine, and grabbed some vegetables at the market before going to the Associations Fair on the Cours Mirabeau. Since religion doesn't have much of a place in modern France, people often dedicate their Sundays to various clubs and organizations. I stopped in at a few stands, notably the Algerianist Society (where I talked with a Pied-Noir woman about some of the research that I'd done on French Algeria for the postcolonial discourse class I took last semester at IU and got contact information in case I need to ask questions about it in the future), a few different environmental organizations, including a birding group which organizes group trips to certain sites, and ATTAC, an alter-globalization organization which has recently been active in protesting against the Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (a nasty little treaty with all sorts of consequences for both sides of the Atlantic that the American media certainly hasn't been talking about much). Translation for folks back home, it's a political organization, one with which I share a lot of values, but also the kind that I need to keep in mind for studying for potential International Studies research topics further down the line.

Whew. Well, classes start tomorrow at Sciences Po, and I'd better get to bed. I'll get back on here to discuss how la rentrée and class selection (unlike in America, not everything is set in stone yet, even now!) are going, keeping in mind the fact that Oktoberfest is on the horizon and I need to figure out a way to get to Munich pronto. Bonsoir tout le monde!