End of the first semester and everything else I haven't posted about for the past four months. (Part 1, Brussels)

No, I actually haven't been abducted and murdered since my last blog post three months ago, I've just been busy and/or have been one hell of a procrastinator when it comes to updating this.

In case you haven't noticed, as the semester has gone on, I've gone from being kind of irregular about updating my blog to being downright terrible. The last time that I posted something was right before Armistice Day/Veteran's Day weekend in early November, which I took advantage of to take a trip to Madrid. In the mean time, I went on the spur-of-the-moment trip to Porto, Portugal during the week that was officially set aside for studying as the semaine de révision (because what the hell, why not?), took final exams for the first semester (which generally went really well. Better than expected, in fact. But again, I said GENERALLY. More details on that later), spent Christmas and New Year's with friends in Germany with a couple days in Prague for good measure, began courses for the second semester, made fun of all of you poor bastards in the US who have been dealing with a foot or more of snow at times, and took a weekend trip to Brussels a few days ago with some of the other Americans.

Whew. Uh, yeah, I'm really behind. The problem is that there was already so much to tell about Madrid that I didn't feel like writing about right away with finals approaching, and with every following trip or update, it just got a little bit more overwhelming. Good problems to have, I suppose.

First thing's first, let's talk about what's still fresh on my wind. For the second time this winter, I decided to travel NORTH for fun (because I'm clearly not 100% there in the head) and spend the weekend with some of the other Americans in Brussels, the capital of Belgium and center of the European Union.

(For those of you who speak French or know the film Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis, c'est le nord...et en fait, c'est au nord du Nord... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZpkYcIYlDc , here with English subtitles, because I couldn't help but think of the old guy at 0:30)

None of us really knew much about what there actually is to see in Brussels, but since the airfare was cheap (just 20€ for the way there, and only slightly more expensive for the return flight!), we just went for it. As I'll explain later, I ended up in a similar situation to what happened in Porto in that I booked my ticket after everyone else in the group, meaning that the price had gone up quite a bit for the planned departure date and I decided to take advantage of my long weekends to tack on an extra day to my trip and fly out on Thursday instead of Friday. This way, I'd get the benefits of traveling alone for one day (and go see whatever I wanted that the rest of the group might not get around to doing) while still having quality group time/better group rates for the rest of the weekend.

I left sunny, relatively warm Marseille around 2:00 in the afternoon and landed in Charleroi, Belgium, close to 4:00 in a weird mix of fog and snow, since it was right at freezing. GREAT. I then had to take an airport shuttle from Charleroi (in Wallonia, the French-speaking part of Belgium) to the actual city of Brussels which cost almost as much as my actual flight. Occasionally, Ryanair uses more isolated airports instead of the main ones that virtually every other airline uses. Oops.

I've clearly been in Provence for too long, because the French spoken here registers as "normal", even if I still notice strong Marseillais accents, and I apparently spontaneously yelled with actual anger, "JE VAIS DÉFONCER CES PUTAIN DE PARISIENS!!" (I'm going to beat the sh#@ out of those f@%$#!g Parisians) while drinking with several of my French friends last week, much to their amusement - there were not actually any Parisians in our vicinity, fortunately. It's the moments like that that show that you're becoming integrated, not being able to flawlessly order a baguette at the boulangerie or go through a whole jar of Nutella in three days. Ok, maybe...

The reason that I mentioned all of that was that I haven't traveled outside of the southeastern part of France, so I was somewhat surprised when a few of the people I talked to at the Charleroi Airport had accents that sounded like less exaggerated forms of Ch'timi (the accent that they made fun of in the movie I mentioned above) to my untrained ears, even though I shouldn't have been.  I didn't get any pictures of the landscape of Wallonia on the way due to inopportunely placed fences or poles (or just not paying too much attention), but there were a lot of quaint old stone cottage-type houses and old churches scattered in the rolling green hills. Very peaceful looking, although I didn't have the chance to poke around any of it.

I arrived in Brussels later that evening and relaxed in the hostel where I stayed for my first night for a little bit before going out for dinner. The people in my room at the hostel didn't speak any French or much English, apart from one Filipino guy, so being the only American in there was interesting and the people in the hostel lobby were all very much in their own groups, so I ended up just going to grab dinner alone in a friterie with some kickass chicken sandwich (called durum, I believe. I was the only person in the place apart from one table who was not speaking Arabic!), and of course, fries! I walked around the city for awhile, but since it was really cold and I was totally wiped, I went back to the hostel to crash early and save my energy for when the rest of the group would arrive the next day.


The next day, I had to awkwardly tow around my suitcase until the other Americans arrived, and I decided to wander over to the neighborhood of Marolles, a working-class part of town that's albeit undergoing gentrification. I planned to go try some beers in a couple of the estaminets that I'd read or heard about in the area and report back to the crew on my recommendations for what to try later, but I ended up at a flea market (where I sincerely regret not picking up a 1-euro copy of "Les Stroumpfs", the Smurfs) and then, after not finding the place I was looking for, walked into a random bar to warm up where there mostly some older folks drinking beer already at 11:00 in the morning. Fantastic, I'm not going to look like an alcoholic freak!

I plopped down into a seat right next to the heater and got first a normal Jupiler pilsner and then a glass of kriek (cherry in Dutch) lambic, which was interesting but sweet, not really having much of a beer taste at all.

Anyway, this little hole-in-the-wall was kind of a fun little place, because all of the middle-aged and not quite middle-aged, but almost there locals were curious who the newcomer was and where the hell he was from. My accent wasn't as strong as the Spanish woman who had been living in Brussels for awhile, but they could still tell that I wasn't from around there, even though they didn't believe it when I told them I was American. Anyway, we started chatting about a bunch of stuff for about an hour: beers, local politics, etc, half of them all started dancing and singing (this was all before noon) and it was an unexpected nice start to the day. After that, I decided to kill a few hours at the René Magritte Museum, since I really enjoyed the exposition of some of his (seriously) paintings that I got to see in Chicago less than a week before I left America and Brussels was the city that he spent most of his life in. It turns out that, as a student, I could either go to just the Magritte Museum for 2 euros, or hit up three separate art museums for 3 euros, so I opted for the latter one and indulged in the haute culture that I certainly didn't partake in Barcelona or Prague. 

The Magritte Museum in Brussels appeared to be less intent on being responsible for causing small children to have nightmares than the Chicago Art Institute, because some beauties like Le ciel meurtrier (the murderous sky) and Le Viol (the rape) were not present...although this picture doesn't do justice to the actual painting, which is creepily beautiful in person, this is the kind of stuff I'm talking about.

And he claimed that seeing his wife eat a strawberry inspired him to do this. Bullshit. So much bullshit

Instead, I got the chance to browse a lot of things that had to do more with the personal life of Magritte, and some paintings from his constantly reappearing theme of pigeons, in paintings like this, which I technically wasn't supposed to be taking a picture of, so I did it very quickly

And then this one, which I didn't take a picture of, but rather did a Google Image search later.

Afterwards, I visited the Belgian Fin de siècle (End of the Century, so late 1800s and early 1900s) Museum, which was full of interesting art of different styles, as well as the more classical wing of the Belgian Royal Museum of Fine Arts, but at that point, it was time to return to Belgian stereotypes: waffles and beer. After getting a waffle at one of the vans selling probably about 95% of them to tourists, I walked back towards the center of town to see THE icon that Brussels is known for, an elegant statue summing up why the rest of the world has...certained preconceived views of Belgium.

You...you can't be serious. THAT'S IT?!?

There you go fellas. I had that picture that I took blown up nice and big so that you can behold the beauty of Mannekin Pis (Pissing Boy), the statue of a small child holding on to his schlong and pissing into a pool below that is somehow a major tourist attraction in Brussels. And one of the rare objects for which the replicas are often larger than the actual thing. Oy. All I can say is that the confused, disappointed reactions of the other Americans when they saw it the day after I did made the trip more than worth it! As did popping into the estaminet (tavern) that was literally right next to it which I'd read about in a guide book, the Poechenellekelder (Puppet cellar, if I'm not mistaken?). At this point, I knew that I only had a little time before the other Americans arrived, but I decided to try one or two of the local beers in the meantime, and I wasn't disappointed. Even though I figured there would be a lot of tourists there, it seemed like a pretty balanced mix of tourists (the English-speaking ones) and the tables where French or Dutch were spoken. I ordered a nice wheat beer that I forgot the name of, and then decided that, since I had a little more time to kill, I'd get one of the seasonal beers (called Winterkoninkske) and some kip-kap (head cheese), neither of which disappointed. The Winterkoninkske was honestly probably the best dark beer I've ever had...it was rich and, well, dark, with maybe a slight caramel taste, an 8% alcohol content, and not much of a bitter aftertaste.

Since I'm technologically challenged and can't get the two side-by-side on the same line, just pretend they are

And finally, it was time to meet up with the others at the lodging that we'd booked with Air B&B, which turned out to be on the third story of a building relatively far away in the north side of the city above a Dutch-language kindergarten (?) which the six of us had to ourselves for the three nights that we were there. We went out to eat in the neighborhood which we all noticed looked strangely like Chicago (except for the fact that, you know, the signs were in French) and then, after poking around the neighborhood a bit and walking to the Atomium, we tried to find a bar in the area and were all horrified when Maria decided that she HAD to go to the bathroom in some place that was jam-packed with sweaty, dancing old people. We spent what was probably the most awkward three minutes of 2015 so far waiting for her to get out before bolting and running into two more bars that looked similar (lots of dancing old people) and one with suspicious looking hearts in the window and just about all men in there (we didn't take any more time to find out what it was, ahem). Eventually, realizing that most people were probably further downtown or at home, we went and got drinks at a neighborhood bar free of sweaty, dancing old people and went home to get ready for a day exploring Brussels.

On Saturday, we went downtown by hopping on to the back of the city tram (since it's easy to sneak into the back and get a free ride, unlike with the bus), briefly looked around a flea market, and then did a tour of the Museum of Musical Instruments, because why not? It was only two euros for students, and it was actually a really cool place. I won't go too into depth about it, because if I do, I'll never make it to the end of the description of the weekend, but after that, we got some lunch advice from the people working at the museum desk, so we walked down the hill and I got me some stoemp, a rather unimpressive-looking and simple but delicious dish with spiced meatloaf and mashed potatoes with carrot purée.

With more Belgian beer. Shocker.

I then had an idea to keep going along with the beer theme that we would cross town to visit a brewery where traditional Bruxellois gueuze and lambic are produced. The building was so nondescript that we thought it was closed when we got there, but then a flock of tourists with an English-speaking guide approached. We latched on to the group, walked into the brewery with them, and essentially got a tour of almost the entire brewery before a couple people in our group got too close to the guide, who ever so politely (like, "Canadian police officer apologizing for inconveniencing you by pulling you over" politely) reminded us that this tour was only for paying customers. Which means that we got to explore what was left of the brewery ourselves.

Tragically, there's only so much that you can fit into a carry-on bag with Ryanair, so this all had to stay behind.

We then had a couple glasses of the good stuff at the bar and noticed that...uh, gueuze doesn't really taste like what we had in mind for beer. It's interesting, but it's sour and...good, but different. Apparently, you're supposed to drink it like champagne. We tried a couple different varieties while warming up next to the wooden stove. In the future, I'll stick to other beers, but it was cool nonetheless.

After that, we headed back home, because the next morning, there was going to be something which my mother probably hates me for being able to go to: an enormous, touring exhibition of chocolatiers from around the world which just happened to be in Brussels on the same weekend as us - le salon du chocolat. For a pretty small entry fee (8 euros, I think?), we ate more damn chocolate than any of us planned on, in addition to seeing weirder things like people getting chocolate massages or - this was funky - chocolate bath salts. I didn't get a whole lot of pictures here, but I know some of the others in our group did. We sadly missed the (I kid you not) models walking in chocolate dresses, which happened later in the afternoon, but we had consumed way too much suger and wanted to see a little bit of the rest of Brussels before taking off.

We spotted a dude selling escargot from a street vendor after that, had an amazing dinner that we negotiated the price down on (which I could have sworn that I got a picture of, but apparently not), and went out to some bars later on that night before heading back for a couple hours of sleep and trucking it back to the airport in Charleroi. That, by the way, was quite an event in itself, since I had already paid for a return shuttle ticket and refused to waste my money and take a taxi with the others. Since our flight left Charleroi before 7:00 AM, and Charleroi is about an hour south of Brussels, that meant that I had to be on the bus by 4:30 AM if I wanted to give myself enough time at the airport. Problem: Our kindergarten was way on the north side of the city, and public transportation shuts down in the city shortly after midnight during the winter, apart from on Fridays and Saturdays. This meant that at 3:00, I had to start hoofing it to the train station on foot. Fortunately...VERY fortunately...I didn't get lost and the others were willing to carry my suitcase to the airport, so I managed. All while getting one last photo of the serenity of this canal in downtown Brussels at 4:00 AM.

It was a great weekend - hard to believe that it was already a month ago (I started writing this blog post soon after the trip, but never got around to finishing it until now)! I'll try to write about my recent trip to Morocco for you guys before another month passes by. Also coming up before my wallet ends up empty and I decide to do some more low-key stuff here in Provence: Florence (with the International Student's Association at Sciences Po, March 13-16) and Paris (meeting up with German friends for a couple days, March 19-21).

Return to the Fatherland, Gorges du Verdon, and Catalunya!

Bonsoir tout le monde, and good God, it's been awhile since I've posted anything on here. The last several weeks have been pretty eventful and while it would be a lie to say that I didn't have any time to get on here and write a blog post, I just never really got around to doing it. Anyway, during this time, I've made trips to Bavaria, the Gorges du Verdon (a canyon in the Provençal Alps), and Barcelona, in addition to actually having serious school work and starting a weekly dinner language exchange with a local family. I know, shocker, but I'm here for STUDYING abroad.

In any event, more than a month ago (from September 26-29), I finally made my long-anticipated return to Bavaria because of the beer to see some old friends from the high school exchange that I participated in two and a half years ago and...well, this was the second of the three weekends of Oktoberfest, so, uh, that was a thing. I had Monsieur Masson drive me to the airport on Thursday after class and Till picked me up in Munich. We had a movie night at our friend Anna's house after that, since she was moving out the next day for the start of the year at her university in Passau (in southeastern Bavaria), because school starts a solid month later in Germany - meaning that Till and Anna were still on the same period of vacation as when they came to visit in the United States back in July. Jesus Christ.

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

And the next day, of course, it was off to Oktoberfest, after a breakfast of Weißwurst (milk sausage) and wheat beer with Till's family..I was the only one to have beer with breakfast, I should clarify because even in Germany, this is not normal behavior, in spite of what some of you might be inclined to believe. It's kind of funny from an American perspective that a lot of people in Munich wear dirndls and lederhosen to work during these couple weeks because they head to the Theresienwiese right after work. We went to the Theresienwiese (Field of Theresa, literal translation) during the day, which was pretty uneventful, honestly. But I was expecting that; in order to get a table at Oktoberfest, you need to know somebody, be part of a company that's reserved a table (damn commercialism! Stay in America where you belong!), or get there very early in the morning and be prepared to wait for a long time. We did none of these. Till, Kathrin (who we met up with at the train station), and I met up with Chelsea (an American friend and former co-Q instructor at IU) and drank a maß in the beer garden where Till's friend was working, and where there were some French people from Auvergne in funny hats who spoke neither German nor English that asked me how to get people to buy them beer. Bonne chance les gars, when it costs 10 euros a liter I don't think that's happening!

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 opted to save Emelie's dignity and not post the oh so flattering picture of her chomping on the oranges from the sangria.

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!

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!

Settling In

So after arriving in Aix late on the 20th and chilling with the three other guys from the program later that night, it was business for the next couple days, but we got to start exploring more of the town that is going to be our home for the next year and get back into French-speaking mode in the process. The other guys and I started the day on Thursday (the 21st) with quick trip to the closest boulangerie (bakery, for you Anglos) and got a couple pastries for breakfast. Personally, I got my first genuine French pain au chocolat (simple, but so good!), a poulet poireau (small, flaky pastry stuffed with chicken and leeks) and a good old-fashioned baguette. Stuff at the local bakeries is all pretty cheap and high-quality (even though you can also get baguettes at the local supermarket for 20 centimes less, why would you?). So much bread already.I remember reading somewhere that before the French Revolution, the average French peasant ate two pounds of bread per day. TWO POUNDS. And while it's obviously much less now that France is a wealthy, modern country where people can afford to eat a balanced diet, France would still be a living hell to anyone with celiac disease, good God.

At 10:00, our entire group met in front of the Hotel Adagio for a practical tour to find out where some of the essential places in town are. The central landmark in Aix from which the most important streets ray out is a giant fountain called La Rotonde.

One of these main streets is the Cours Mirabeau, a broad avenue lined with tall, graceful platanes (trees which are the European species of sycamore, or so it appears). Before the Revolution, only aristocrats were allowed to walk there. Or sorry, not walk. No, be carried by their servants in litters was more like it. Jesus. Say what you will about the bloodshed that happened afterwards, but the Ancien Régime had to go, and if a few of those arrogant aristocrats had to lose their head to make it happen, so be it. Nowadays, it's a street where a thriving market selling various regional products is held three times a week and one particularly attractive piece of eye candy sells fancy hats. Taking her picture would have been a bit invasive, so just believe me here, folks.

One thing that no one had told us about before we arrived, however, was that the week of our arrival was the 70th anniversary of the Liberation of Provence from Nazi Germany, and that there was a military parade happening on the Cours Mirabeau with American tanks and some American veterans, apparently. I actually had the chance to talk briefly with a French veteran who was a member of the Free French while we were eating lunch on some steps next to La Rotonde. His very strong accent du Midi (southern French accent), rendered harder to understand by the fact that he was an old man who stammered somewhat as he talked and the fact that I had just arrived in France and was speaking English with the other Americans a few seconds earlier, made for a rather short, somewhat confusing exchange, in which he flashed us the impressive array of military medals and I, not really knowing what to say, thanked him for what he had done and said it was nice to meet him. Anyway, here's a picture that I snapped later in the day of a couple of the tanks. Edit: Oops, I didn't realize that I only got the Jeeps in this picture. I've been kind of "écervelé" these last few days and have had to take frequent naps just to feel normal. It's tiring, using a language other than your native one all day when you're not used to it!

At noon, we stopped in at a cell phone store to get some of these modern communication concerns out of the way. Since I'd already had my new iPhone unblocked back in the States and wanted to continue to use it as my phone both because it's, you know, a pretty damn useful device that also doubles as a decent camera, all I had to was pay 10 euros to get a new SIM card and have a few minutes/texts put on my phone until I had a bank account set up from which I could set up a plan. It was a much simpler process than everyone made it out to be, which was a relief.

And as it turned out, our housing situation wasn't as figured out in advance as I thought it was, so we spent the rest of the day looking into housing options, since every additional night that we spent in a hotel was going to cost us big bucks. Beaucoup de fric which we're certainly going to need later, considering that basic food items cost a fortune in Aix, with the exception of bread, cheese, and wine (which is DEFINITELY a basic necessity, don't even try to argue with me otherwise!!). We toured several apartments and visited a few families/individuals who were renting out rooms in their houses and apartments. As far as housing goes, since the program was extremely vague about what our options were, I was under the impression that we would be able to room with other international or French students. And normally this would be the case, but our program arrived in Aix a solid two weeks before the rest of the students looking for apartments would. Hmm. Problematic. I was pretty upset about this because, don't get me wrong guys, but I wanted to be damn sure that I would be in a living arrangement where no English is spoken, and living with other Americans...no. Sorry. I left the country for a reason.

Anyway, moving on. There were fortunately the rented room options, available with or without the board part of room and board. Some of the apartments were pretty legit buildings, and one of the houses in which two students could stay downstairs at a French woman's house with a garden sounded pretty nice as well. I immediately preferred one of the options over the others, though, and my mind was made up after touring their apartment. I ended up picking to stay with a retired couple (Monsieur and Madame Masson) on the fifth floor (in French, quatrième étage, since the ground floor is considered the rez-de-chaussée, the ground floor) of an apartment building in the newer side of town. It's a really comfortable, it doesn't smell like mildew like the buildings that are several centuries old in the Vielle Ville, I have my own balcony, and the Massons have been very welcoming - I can tell that I'm going to like staying here. I'll leave it at that for today, and I'll have to write one more blog entry to catch up and discuss the beginning of classes. But here's a picture of my balcony that I'll leave you with.

Ahhh.

Arrival Time

Whew. It's been a long couple days, but here I am in Aix-en-Provence after a couple unexpectedly exhausting travel days and some really busy days of initial post-arrival business, finally with enough time to write a blog entry after a nice, long nap! Anyway, this is probably going to be a fairly long post discussing my arrival in Aix and not much of what actually happened in the few days after that. I'll be writing another post immediately after this one to talk about more of this eventful first week.

I left Michigan City at around 11:00 on August 19, which already seems like an eternity ago, even though it was in fact, um, less than a week ago. I had to pack everything that I was going to need for the year in one 50 lb suitcase, one carry-on bag, and one extra carry-on item, which meant that I fortunately did NOT have to wear my black trench coat on the plane in August like I originally feared and setting every security sensor in the whole damn airport.  On my first flight (to Toronto) I ended up sitting next to a very attractive Swiss woman who was coming back from vacation in the U.S., and it turns out that she had spent a fair amount of time in Provence, including in Aix itself. We spoke in a mixture of French and English, and then we finished the short flight and I got ready to go my connecting flight in Munich.

And that's where my débutant status as an international traveler became incredibly obvious.

You see, the plane to Toronto was already over an hour late due to storms that were apparently occurring over Michigan, leaving me with slightly under an hour to get to the gate and catch my flight. Fine, easy. Except...this is me we're talking about, guys. I was surprised that we had to fill out a declaration form first (despite the fact that I was obviously doing nothing more than traveling through the Toronto airport and not actually touching Canadian soil), something which I didn't have to do in Germany (where I entered Europe and thus the Schengen Agreement Area, of which France is part) nor in France. You know, the country that I'm actually staying in. Where there was nobody at the customs counter for me to even report to. Nobody.

Anyway, when I asked which door I needed to go through after talking to the customs official (nothing was really clearly marked) he gave me some misleading directions which led to me walking directly past the portly Hispanic man who barely spoke English at the point of no return. Damnit. I actually stopped to ask the guy where to go next, literally as I had taken one step past him. The guy instead started yelling at me, babbling something along the lines of GTFO and go through security again, not my problem.

F#$@.

At this point, "youppi, I'm going to France!" Erik turned into this:

Just subtract the boobs and put on a shirt, you hippie. A Hawaiian shirt, to be exact.

 

Realizing that I know had about a half hour to make it through the last part of customs, go back through security, and make it to my gate, I went into powerdrive mode and went on the longest all-out sprint of my life, while wearing hiking boots and a Hawaiian shirt. I was the guy who was sweating bullets, was damn near bursting into tears, and nearly knocked over a poor old man who didn't hear me yell, "EXCUSE ME, COMING THROUGH!" as I was running full speed over the moving walkways on the way to security. And at that point, I saw how long and slowly moving the security line was and I thought my goose was surely cooked. But fortunately, a German family was right in front of me in line, and when I asked them in a pitiful, quivering voice if they were also flying to Munich, they told me that they weren't, but they seemed to understand the situation that I found myself in, because they told me to go in front of them in the line, and thanks to the infectious kindness of everyone in Canada except for the people actually working at the airport (who were taking their sweet time with everything), I ended up at the front of what was probably a half-hour long security line within a couple minutes. I made it through and, after hearing my name on the last call for boarding on the flight to Munich (which nearly made me void my bowels, good God), a sweaty, panting, and probably rather smelly Erik stumbled onto the plane, which ended up leaving late anyway. If the poor Indian man sitting next to me during the flight ever reads this, I am SO sorry that I had to be that guy. Jesus.

 

But wait! There's more travel drama to come, albeit not of the variety that a sadistic bystander would have found as humorous as my adventures in Toronto. Due to a delay of about 40 minutes in Toronto, I knew that the chances of not making my final connecting flight to Marseille were pretty good. Add to that the fact that I had a minor hang-up at the security checkpoint, and I pretty much knew that I wasn't going to make it. I somehow set off the metal detector in Munich and the agent that was doing the scanning was having some trouble finding what the source of the problem was, so I was treated to a lovely full-service patdown. It turns out that there was a paper clip in my shoe. A GOD DAMN PAPER CLIP. We all found this pretty hilarious, and the agent yelled to one of his colleagues to tell her what just set the metal detector off while we were all laughing our asses off. By the time I made it to the gate, it was already too late. But plenty of other people on my flight had similar problems, and the Lufthansa help desk (where the woman I talked too seemed relieved that there are indeed some Americans who can actually speak German) quickly arranged for me to go on a flight leaving four hours later.

 

As good airports for unexpected four-hour layovers go, Munich would definitely top my list, considering that I speak the language, I could sneak in some beer and currywurst, and I know how to get around the terminal since I'd been here once before. After a couple hours and a couple beers, however, all I wanted to do was get to the Hotel Adagio and crash. So you can only imagine how excited I was to see this at around 5:00 on August 20th.

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This picture was one I quickly snapped from my airplane window of the Calanques (a rugged, wild area of the Mediterranean coast which is immediately next door to Marseille, the second largest city in France) and the southern end of the ville phocéene. It's not a terribly good one, but I was immediately struck by the beauty of the whole landscape (except for the mining areas). I should back to see Marseille and the Calanques pretty soon, but for the time being, I just wanted to get to Aix. I took a taxi into town, was dropped off at the Hotel Adagio and ate some goat cheese sandwiches and apple tarts with the other Americans (who, with the exception of one, all arrived before I did) and started to settle into my room. And finally, when the three other American guys and I found ourselves strolling on one of the narrow, crooked streets filled with smoky bars grouillant de monde (swarming with people) and we found ourselves sharing a bottle of wine and ordering kir and cognac to go with a pizza we were sharing, it sank in. I was in France.

 

 







The Beginnings of a New Life

Salut tout le monde, and welcome to the blog that I'll be writing over the course of the next year to update everyone on my life in Aix-en-Provence, France, and travels throughout Europe and...North Africa, perhaps?

A month from today, I'll be leaving on an Air Canada flight from O'Hare Airport which, after stops in Toronto and Munich, will take me to Marseille, France. Marseille, France's second largest city with a historic reputation as a nonconformist "Anti-Paris", is located on the Mediterranean just 30 kilometers south of Aix. To give you all a visual of where I'll be staying, here's a map showing Aix's location within France.

Because to hell with snow. Except for when I want it. But I'll get to that.

Aix-en-Provence (and that's probably the last time I'll refer to it by its full name instead of "Aix" because Aix-en-Provence is just too damn long of a name when you can just use a three-letter word instead and everyone understands what you're saying anyway) is generally considered to be a well-to-do bourgeois city; low on crime and very pleasing to the eye, but also pretty conservative and um, expensive. We'll see how that last one works out for me as the year goes on. The conservative bourgeois nature of the city, however, is checked by the fact that this city of over 100,000 people is also a major university town. I'll have to wait to see the city for myself before I'll be able to judge anything.

Among other people, painter Paul Cézanne and writer Émile Zola both spent significant parts of their lives in Aix. And it's known as the "City of a Thousand Fountains" because, while there might not be a full 1,000 of them, there is apparently, you know, a whole flopée, des tas, une chiée of them. That last one's "shitton" in French. Even shitton sounds nice in French. Ah.

Anyway, I'll be recording many of my adventures and misadventures (aside from those fueled by too much wine, which we can all agree are not in our best interest to describe at length on the Internet, n'est-ce pas?) during the course of the next year in this blog. And since I won't be calling home every week or communicating much in English while I'm in France (or German-speaking countries, for that matter), this will be a good way to keep everyone posted on what the bloody deuce I'm doing on the other side of the Atlantic. For now, I'll be seeing you in a month, France! I can hardly wait!