In any event, more than a month ago (from September 26-29), I finally made my long-anticipated return to Bavaria
Anway, I also saw our friend Sophia for the first time since the exchange that night. We chilled for most of the next day, Till and I enjoyed cigars together in the woods right near his house, and we went to a friend's house that night, where a decent amount of drinking (thanks for remembering that Kloster Scheyern is one of my favorite beers!) while playing the German version of Kings led to this photo with the Barack Obama cutout in the corner
We went home and then to the local club that night, where we met up with Franzi, an old exchange friend, and I ran into several other old familiar faces. A few old friends/acquaintances (granted, not very close ones, or I would have specifically let them know I was coming and/or someone would have told them about me being there) who didn't know that I was back in Pfaffenhofen for the first time in nearly three years reacted like they were seeing a ghost. Oktoberfest, after all, was more of just a general excuse to get to come back, and it felt great to feel at home again and speak in German for the entire weekend, aside from with Till.
On the following weekend (which was still quite a long time ago - October 5th), several of us Americans opted to use our one free chance to take a tour with a local tour company called Découvertes de Provence to the Gorges du Verdon, a canyon region in the foothills of the Alps. As someone who is generally skeptical of organized tours, I was pleasantly surprised. Georges, our tour guide and a native of La Ciotat, an old Provençal fishing village just southeast of Marseille, took us to three separate places: a market town that we stopped at early in the morning where I swear the food at the market was cheap and awesome but whose name I can't remember for the life of me, the actual canyon, and the quaint foothill village of Moustiers-Sainte-Marie.
First, of course, there was the stop at the market, which we were all glad to make since none of us had thought to plan ahead for lunchtime. This is the kind of place where everything looks too good and I end up spending too much money, but alas, I had some pizza for breakfast, bought a quart of paella which I intended to share with a friend (but ended up eating by myself. Oops. Such a shame!), a couple different cheeses, and some pastries. The vendors selling roast chickens, quail, Guinea fowl ("pintade" is something which I can't imagine seeing in the US, but while not commonplace, is something that I've seen several times here. Still haven't tried it yet!), and paella bubbling in enormous pans gave off fantastic smells, and I made it pretty obvious that I wasn't a local when I stuck a baguette in my backpack and had this picture taken of me.
"Yer not from round these parts, are yew?"
The French Antenna, courtesy of photographer Duncan Brown (who I was supposed to share the paella with)
It was in this village that, upon realizing that I needed to go to the bathroom, I had my first encounter with the famous European pop-a-squat "toilets". The ones that look like this:
Wait, I'm supposed to shit in THAT? On second thought, I can hold it.
I would have used it too, except their was also no toilet paper. Damn it, France. Your health care system actually works and you're brilliant enough to subsidize your wine production, but you can't provide a decent public toilet. Tsk tsk. I'm disappointed in you.
We then moved to Lac de Sainte-Croix, a lake formed by a dam which is just outside of the formidable slopes that form the "Grand Canyon of France". Once there, most of us opted to rent a paddle boat and travel up the canyon, because hell, we were there! As touristy as it sounds to rent a paddle boat, the views were gorgeous and it was completely worth it. I ended up with several other Americans who were also studying in Aix in our "crew" of five. Here's one picture that I took inside the gorge
We were a bit early for fall foliage, but a few trees were turning yellow already. We then took a bus drive on a road at the rim of the canyon - the road was shockingly well hidden from below, as those of us on the boats had no idea it was there. After riding on the road for awhile, we turned around and headed for the tiny village of Moustiers-Sainte-Marie, voted one of the most beautiful villages in France.
There is a beautiful old church perched on top of the village and a spring with "holy water" that I was thankful to run into because I'd run out of water ages ago. I got a few postcards and some lavendar ice cream, but nothing much of note. We drove through the lavendar fields (which aren't blooming this time of year) on the way back to Aix. All in all, it was a day well spent.
Whew. I also had a major presentation in my media and society class in which I talked about French and foreign media coverage of the political crisis in France's main conservative party and polls for the 2017 presidential elections (which are already a thing, because France) as part of a larger group presentation with French students. It was a bit nervewracking being one of two foreigners in the group of five and the only one who spoke more about technical material from French sources to French natives who are all knowledgeable about the same topics, but I did fine and actually spoke really quickly, while cracking a few jokes that seemed to keep the class interested. Aside from classes and travel, there's been one other new development as well. For about the past month, I've been doing a family exchange program on Monday nights which entails me going to speak to someone in the family in English for about an hour and then eating dinner with the family afterwards and obviously speaking in French, because having one person who speaks English in the house is already quite an accomplishment in France (France and the U.S. really should get along better, with their general obliviousness to foreigners and, heaven forbid, foreign languages). I started doing this for both financial/culinary reasons (a free multi-course meal a week with wine for a student who is otherwise eating lots of pasta and cheap foodstuffs, and wine) and the fact that I thought it would be kind of cool to have a younger host brother sort of arrangement.
As always, I was a little nervous the first week. The family member who I talk to in English is Nicolas, a 13 year-old who is, well, going through that dreadful middle school phase that parents don't know how to deal with, He's a cool guy, even if he's a bit unsure about his English and we rarely seem to have the same interests or things that we want to talk about out, and he's already gotten a lot better in just a couple weeks of practice, in my opinion. The parents, who also have a 19 year-old son in college who did the exact same thing as Nico a few years ago, are really chill, and we hit it off right away. They also don't fit the stereotypical Aixois profile of "dad is a lawyer, mom stays at home, and they're both distantly related to some sort of medieval royalty." Alright, I bullshit the last part, but it was a totally different feel from the get-go. Jean-Luc is a worker at a nearby helicopter factory and Isabelle is a comedian (How cool is that!) who now works with children's theatre. They live in a small but very nice house in the hills just outside of Aix. They offered me a glass of pastis right away and Isabelle was making some fantastic smelling pork dish in the background while I chatted with Nico.
In what is the EXACT opposite of a beginning to a dinner table conversation in America, the very first thing that they asked me was, "So, Erik, what's your opinion of François Hollande?" BOOM. Politics from square one (Hollande is the French president, for those of you who don't know). This is, of course, not just a way to find out about your political affiliation (which the French are very interested in) and see if they have stumbled upon someone who supported George Bush (SCANDALE!!!), but also a way to get an idea of what your personality and arguing skills are like. If you respond, "I'm not interested in politics," to avoid offending anyone, the person who asked the question might think that you are uninteresting, selfish ("You don't care about your society? But...why?"), or even stupid, according to our history professor during our cours intensif, who warned us that this is actually a fairly typical French thing to do. Knowing this was a test, I didn't hold back and started dishing it out. I called him a traitor to all of the French people who elected him, and started picking apart aspects of his foreign policy and the disastrous, misguided makeover of the economic policies of the French Socialist Party from an obvious hard-left point of view- all of this without having any idea what the people across the table from me were thinking, except for the fact that 13 year-old Nicolas was confused as shit.
Having layed it all out there, I was pleased to find out that I fortunately hadn't pulled the equivalent of singing the Internationale to a crowd of Front National supporters - both of them were wholeheartedly in the same left-wing opposition camp as myself. Jean-Louis is a fairly-ranking union member at his factory for Force Ouvrière, a break-away organization from the CGT (France's largest trade union which, while no longer officially affiliated with the PCF, is still pretty close to it). Needless to say, they're pretty much on the opposite end of the political spectrum from the Massons (Monsieur Masson was even a soldier in the Algerian War, and is a quirky, intellectual right-winger.. even if we don't agree on much, it's very interesting to get a discussion going since we're both pretty informed). We started talking about our hometowns (very important to the French, I should add, since they were, as a whole, an agricultural people until World War II), French and American cinema, traveling, and especially politics. As the meal went on and more wine became involved, the educated political discussion turned more into a "let's see who can sling more poop at the current prime minister, who we all enjoy complaining about", and I somehow brought up a French linguistics course that I took in the US where the book mentioned the former leader of the French Communist Party, Georges Marchais. Marchais, to put it lightly, was not an eloquent public speaker, and he is well known by older generations for his embarrassing gaffes that put George Bush to shame, in addition to an extremely combattive attitude towards journalists. We both proceeded to joke about Bush and Marchais for the rest of the night. Jean-Louis and Isabelle both came from old Communist families where this guy was on the TV all the time back in the 1980s, and the fact that an American actually knew who the hell he was tickled them to no end. Last week, they were in Venise, but every week since then, I've gotten a great dinner and developed some cool bonds with a new French family outside of my normal circle of friends here in Aix.
FINALLY. Last part of the post. I also took a long weekend trip to Barcelona with four other international friends at the beginning of October. And because this post is already too long, I won't go into depth about it. But even just as a tourist, it was a fascinating three days that we spent there with amazing paella, cheap tapas and beer with a friend of a friend, days at the beach, attempting to communicate in a language that I can't speak (which went surprisingly well even with non-English or French speakers, I should add, since Spanish is reasonably close to French. I could understand them...while they had a lot of difficulty understanding me!), the human warmth of Spain that only people who have been there know how to describe, and an amount of sangria consumption that I didn't think was humanely possible during our night out with the Brazilians who we met at our hostel, during which we went to a chill local bar where we met more of the natives and a group of Colombian students who fortunately spoke English. Which was made all the better by the fact that the people at the table behind us left at least half of a 5-liter container of sangria behind and never came back. Needless to say, much merriment was had, as our group drank the whole damn thing, in addition to what we'd already had before stumbling upon this gift from the gods.
I liked it so much, in fact, that I opted to sign up for Science Po's International Student Association's trip to Madrid this weekend (taking advantage of the French Holiday of Armistice Day on Tuesday) to try Spain again. Estoy muy entusiasmado y tan listo como siempre! I'm really excited and ready as ever to make the trip and bond mostly with French students who I, apart from a few of them, don't know that well yet.
My apologies again for the extremely late post, to those who have been following me, life has been busy!
As always, I was a little nervous the first week. The family member who I talk to in English is Nicolas, a 13 year-old who is, well, going through that dreadful middle school phase that parents don't know how to deal with, He's a cool guy, even if he's a bit unsure about his English and we rarely seem to have the same interests or things that we want to talk about out, and he's already gotten a lot better in just a couple weeks of practice, in my opinion. The parents, who also have a 19 year-old son in college who did the exact same thing as Nico a few years ago, are really chill, and we hit it off right away. They also don't fit the stereotypical Aixois profile of "dad is a lawyer, mom stays at home, and they're both distantly related to some sort of medieval royalty." Alright, I bullshit the last part, but it was a totally different feel from the get-go. Jean-Luc is a worker at a nearby helicopter factory and Isabelle is a comedian (How cool is that!) who now works with children's theatre. They live in a small but very nice house in the hills just outside of Aix. They offered me a glass of pastis right away and Isabelle was making some fantastic smelling pork dish in the background while I chatted with Nico.
In what is the EXACT opposite of a beginning to a dinner table conversation in America, the very first thing that they asked me was, "So, Erik, what's your opinion of François Hollande?" BOOM. Politics from square one (Hollande is the French president, for those of you who don't know). This is, of course, not just a way to find out about your political affiliation (which the French are very interested in) and see if they have stumbled upon someone who supported George Bush (SCANDALE!!!), but also a way to get an idea of what your personality and arguing skills are like. If you respond, "I'm not interested in politics," to avoid offending anyone, the person who asked the question might think that you are uninteresting, selfish ("You don't care about your society? But...why?"), or even stupid, according to our history professor during our cours intensif, who warned us that this is actually a fairly typical French thing to do. Knowing this was a test, I didn't hold back and started dishing it out. I called him a traitor to all of the French people who elected him, and started picking apart aspects of his foreign policy and the disastrous, misguided makeover of the economic policies of the French Socialist Party from an obvious hard-left point of view- all of this without having any idea what the people across the table from me were thinking, except for the fact that 13 year-old Nicolas was confused as shit.
Having layed it all out there, I was pleased to find out that I fortunately hadn't pulled the equivalent of singing the Internationale to a crowd of Front National supporters - both of them were wholeheartedly in the same left-wing opposition camp as myself. Jean-Louis is a fairly-ranking union member at his factory for Force Ouvrière, a break-away organization from the CGT (France's largest trade union which, while no longer officially affiliated with the PCF, is still pretty close to it). Needless to say, they're pretty much on the opposite end of the political spectrum from the Massons (Monsieur Masson was even a soldier in the Algerian War, and is a quirky, intellectual right-winger.. even if we don't agree on much, it's very interesting to get a discussion going since we're both pretty informed). We started talking about our hometowns (very important to the French, I should add, since they were, as a whole, an agricultural people until World War II), French and American cinema, traveling, and especially politics. As the meal went on and more wine became involved, the educated political discussion turned more into a "let's see who can sling more poop at the current prime minister, who we all enjoy complaining about", and I somehow brought up a French linguistics course that I took in the US where the book mentioned the former leader of the French Communist Party, Georges Marchais. Marchais, to put it lightly, was not an eloquent public speaker, and he is well known by older generations for his embarrassing gaffes that put George Bush to shame, in addition to an extremely combattive attitude towards journalists. We both proceeded to joke about Bush and Marchais for the rest of the night. Jean-Louis and Isabelle both came from old Communist families where this guy was on the TV all the time back in the 1980s, and the fact that an American actually knew who the hell he was tickled them to no end. Last week, they were in Venise, but every week since then, I've gotten a great dinner and developed some cool bonds with a new French family outside of my normal circle of friends here in Aix.
I opted to save Emelie's dignity and not post the oh so flattering picture of her chomping on the oranges from the sangria.
My apologies again for the extremely late post, to those who have been following me, life has been busy!
