A Very French Thanksgiving

Well then. One big family holiday down, and one to go. It's tough to not be home during this season, that's for sure.

Thanksgiving morning I headed to my early translation class, which has a grand total of six Dickinson students in it. We greeted each other in our usual American solidarity, somehow even more solidified through the sharing of what I consider to be the best idea America has ever had: Thanksgiving. It was a bittersweet greeting. We were happy to be spending Thanksgiving together in our little band of merry foreigners, but it was a less-than-unspoken agreement that, if we could, we would all be on the first plane home.

Thanksgiving is an interesting holiday... it's celebrated by almost all Americans in basically the same way, but everyone puts their own little twist on it. For me, Thanksgiving consists of the Macy's day parade, one of my relative's houses in New Jersey, more family than I realized I had, more food than we could possibly consume, and the mayhem of everyone talking and laughing over each other. And, it lasts for days. Time ceases to exist; we do little more than talk, cook, eat, and clean up and sleep afterwards. Of course, there's never work or school to think about.

Not the case in Toulouse. First I had class, then I had my internship. Class went decently, though the professor was in a really foul mood. My internship went as it usually does... the usual excitement that comes from making things up as I go along, given that I really have no idea what has qualified me to teach a room full of students.

After my internship, I was planning on doing an hour's worth of private English tutoring that I had rescheduled from the day before, since the metro had shut down for some reason, and I had no way to get there. As luck would have it, I got one stop down the metro line, and the metro closed again, suit un accident (following an accident). I was stranded, with no useful buses or a map around to speak of. It was dark, the area wasn't the greatest, I had to make it home to change for Thanksgiving dinner at the Dickinson Center, and I was completely lost. Complètement perdue.

I somehow managed to find my way home, forty minutes later, using the maps on the bus station routes, which don't have street names marked. I was heckled the whole way, of course, and was in a total panic, but I made it home. I have to admit, I was more than a little proud of myself. I have the worst sense of direction in the world, but I made it home. I changed quickly into a skirt, threw a little makeup on, and ran (literally) to the bus station.

The familiar Thanksgiving smells wafted from the beautiful Dickinson center; I could see everyone sitting in the common area in the basement, sipping on glasses of champagne and talking. It was packed.

Maybe Thanksgiving wouldn't be that different in France.

I ran in, dropped off my coat, was almost immediately handed a glass of champagne, and was welcomed by my friends and the Dickinson staff. We moved upstairs, treated ourselves to the Thanksgiving buffet of wonderful food. We spoke in a mix of English (since it is, of course, an American holiday) and French; it was hilariously bizarre to listen to some of the Dickinson staff speak English for the first time, despite two out of the three being native Americans. We talked about families, friends, Thanksgiving traditions... and of course laughed when the French that were among us were baffled by the amount of food that was served all at once as opposed to the elegant system of courses that they are so used to.

I can't imagine having done Thanksgiving in France any other way.

So, for all of you back home:
I love and miss you. I hope your Thanksgiving was wonderful, and that you enjoyed watching the parade on TV and spending time with your families. You're lucky.

(Picture from the 2009 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade)

It's Not Easy Bein' Green- Andrew Bird

Andrew Bird sang It's Not Easy Bein' Green at his Paris show this past April in French (I know. He's awesome.) It seemed an appropriate caption to this picture. Click on the link above to download, and enjoy.

Bryn.

Forgot to add this to the last post...

... view of the Eiffel Tower from our hotel room.

Be we in Paris or in Lansing, nothing matters when we're dancing.

Ahh...

The long-awaited blog entry…

Sorry it has taken me so long to get writing on this thing again. I was pretty much going nonstop for about three weeks straight. It went something like this: insane amount of work, London, food poisoning, Paris, and even more work.

London was, as you might imagine, fantastic. I love London, and have very fond memories of the last time I was there, about eight years ago, with my family. Ever since we visited I wanted to study abroad in London… somehow along the way my plans got switched to Toulouse. (Actually, I know exactly how THAT happened. I had a five minute, in-passing conversation with Professor Laurent, who within that time convinced me both to major in French and to study in Toulouse. Apparently I am very easily persuaded.) Now it’s really no question that I adore Toulouse, and have had a wonderful time here so far. But going to London was really hard. It’s so much closer to home than France, and yet there are still these minor details that aren’t quite right that just make you miss home that much more. Little things, like that fact that they drive on the wrong side of the road.

The hostel we stayed in was definitely really hostel-y… I was really creeped out after the first night, when Kim and I got in at around two in the morning, and went straight into the room in the dark. I knew there were people sleeping around me, but I hadn’t met them, hadn’t seen their faces… I got about 45 minutes of sleep that night. But, the rest of the vacation went without a single hitch. I won’t go into the details, since I have so much more to talk about, but my favorite part was when we took a stroll through Hyde Park. I remember doing that with my family… the park was just as beautiful this time around, especially in the fall. It was so nice to see nature, despite the fact that I was still stuck in a city. I have a cheesy theory that people forget who they are when they’re taken away from nature for too long. So here's what is probably my favorite picture from the trip:

As for the rest of my pictures from London, if you're interested... click here.

Okay. So we got back from London early on Tuesday morning. I had started feeling sick the night before, but thought it was just nervousness about missing my flight back to Toulouse. A few hours later I realized I had food poisoning. I spent the whole day on my bathroom floor, feeling like death. The next morning we were leaving for Paris, which was a six hour train ride away. I felt too gross to pack... or, more accurately, throw my things back into the backpack I had already been living out of for five days. So I waited until the morning, when I had to get up at 5am. It was at that time that I realized that I had left my favorite white winter hat in the hostel in London. Needless to say, I'm still disappointed about that.

Paris was lovely. I have to admit I didn't really like it the first time I went there with my family... there were a couple of incidents that pretty much made me dislike France as a whole... I'm really glad I gave it another chance. My favorite part of this vacation is tied between the Balanchine ballet we saw at the Opera Garnier (beautiful costumes by Christian Lacroix, and, of course, beautiful dancing), our visit to Sacré-Coeur (absolutely gorgeous basilica on the top of a mountain... Andrea jokingly called it my Andrew Bird pilgrimage because of this video (start at 1 minute)... and she was only partially correct), and the visit to the Hameau of Marie-Antoinette at Versailles (So. Gorgeous.) I'll have to put a few favorite pictures up for this...

Balanchine Ballet

I think you already know what this is.

Andrea and me on the Seine... very cold.

Versailles

For more pictures from Paris, click here.

Well that's all of the travels that I needed to catch you up on. For right now, I am just extremely busy... I started an internship helping teach an English class at a French middle school. It's SO much fun, and though it's incredibly exhausting, I really love it. I'm also tutoring privately for a couple of students as well... that starts this Friday. Eesh, my time is going so quickly here. I have two months left, to the day. Hard to believe.

Well for now I'm going to get started on my lesson planning for tomorrow. I'm exhausted and I somehow managed to get an awful ear infection... potential doctor's visit tomorrow? I guess we'll see. I promise I'll get back into posting more often. I enjoy writing this blog so much more than I thought I would... I'm considering keeping it when I go home, but transforming it into more of a music/movies/culture blog. Thoughts?

bryn.

London Calling.

So, I'm off to London tonight! Sorry I haven't been updating... my computer had been acting weird, and yesterday it finally imploded. I took it to the apple store in downtown Toulouse, had an interesting discussion in French with the guy who works there (seriously. you try doing computer talk in a foreign language), and discovered that the hard drive needs to be replaced. Which is only interesting since I had to have it replaced four months ago. Like I've said before, like clockwork, something goes wrong every four months with the stupid thing. Luckily I have AppleCare. (My friend Daniel once told me that those things aren't supposed to be a deal, but a rip off; god knows two new hard drives later mine has definitely been a deal... thanks mom). As for now, I'm trying not to think about all the work I have to do before I leave tonight... eesh.

So anyway. London tonight and Paris on Wednesday. Next time we talk I'll be a world traveller with a computer that has been gutted and replaced from the inside out.

A la prochaine.
-b.

Our aspirations are wrapped up in books.

Bonjour, tout le monde. (I've always found it a little funny how the French say "everyone"... it's "all the world"... haha. Over exaggerate much?)

So I hope everyone is doing well. I got sick with a stomach bug a few days ago, but I am feeling much better now, and thought I'd write another blog entry. I'm going to try for at least two a week, even though I really doubt all that many people read this. For my own sake I think it's good to keep at least my parents updated, plus it's good to write things down to have for future reference.

As of right now, I am busier than you could possibly imagine. I have to write out a resumé and a cover letter in order to do this internship at a high school in town... I would be helping out teaching an English class. This seems like a really cool opportunity, and I'm really looking forward to it, I just didn't realize we'd have to have our stuff together quite so early. We were literally given the information on Friday and apparently it was expected... yesterday. Eesh. Of course, in typical French fashion I didn't find this out until today.

I have resigned myself to the general confusion that is my existence in a foreign country.

So, my plan for the evening is as follows: dinner with Marie-Claude, clean room, pack bag for tomorrow, make tea, sit down and write my resumé and cover letter, and finally put resumé and cover letter through antidote (genius French grammar-checking software... would not have survived this long without it).

...we'll see how much of it actually gets done. I have succumbed to French time... a.k.a. I take forever to do things that are of very little importance. Like eating. I don't think I'm capable of taking a meal in under and hour and a half anymore. Or sleeping. I definitely get at least 7 hours of sleep a night (at home I was lucky if it I got 5). Okay, well I guess it could be argued that eating and sleeping are of great importance, but not in proportion to how much time they take. You get my point.

Oh, classes. I promised I would talk about those, didn't I? I suppose I don't have too much to say about them. I am taking six classes here. That would be an absurd number in the states, but most of the classes here are only half credits, which is unbelievably frustrating when you're trying to make a schedule upon arrival in a foreign land. The classes I am taking are: Art History, Architecture of Toulouse, Methodology (a required Dickinson course that is less like a class and more like an enormous waste of my mortal life), French Political History of the 20th Century, Geography of France (which is less about terrain and more about people), and French/English Translation (the dark horse... it actually has turned out to be really fun so far).

Classes are good... somewhat different than I expected, given that I was told I'd be able to sit in the back of a large lecture hall and hide, never letting anyone know I was foreign (which, frankly, would be a luxury in my opinion). Unfortunately, I decided to take most of my classes at L'Institut Catholique de Toulouse, where most classes are only 30 to 40 students (larger than Dickinson, but incredibly small by France's public university standards). I have exposés (oral presentations) in all but one of my classes (the political history class, which is at L'Institut des Etudes Politiques de Toulouse, in which I can happily hide and quietly take notes). My geography class is more interactive than some classes I have had at Dickinson (all of the class talks all the time... and 85% of the time it's NOT personal conversations... haha).

Things are just generally different in classes here. First of all, syllubi don't exist. Plans? Never. Secondly, the bibliography they give you ranges from one full page to five full pages; books and articles abound. I haven't really figured out what use they are... I think they're given to us in case we are confused or we want supplementary readings, but if I'm being entirely honest, I'm pretty much constantly confused and given that I'm not really sure of the location of the library in either of the schools I am attending, I highly doubt I'm ever going to actually look at them. My mère d'accueil told me that the good students go straight from class to the library to check out the best books... I guess I'm not a good student.

Thirdly, we don't really have homework, per se. We have some little bits of homework for translation (which, I think, is a given), and methodology, being designed to consume as much of my time with the maximum amount of worthless busywork, has some things as well, but on the whole we basically just sit in class and take notes. I'm really worried that at the end of the semester I'm going to be buried under more work than I am capable of digging myself out of, but I guess there's nothing I can do about that now. The good news is, all I have to do is pass. The grades here aren't factored into my GPA given the cruel French grading system. Basically, it's a 20 point scale, and if you get a 12 it's really really good. Grades 17 through 20 are never assigned, and 13-16 are probably reserved for the natives. Only France would create a system in which foreigners don't have a chance of succeeding.

Well that's all I have to say for now. Oh! Except that Kim and I just bought tickets to London for the weekend after this one! I'm so excited. We'll be in London that weekend, and then spend the following weekend in Paris. Just, you know, a little jaunt around the globe. I cannot wait.

À très bientôt!

bryn.

What a reckless choice of words.

Hello all. So remember that nice dinner with a couple friends I was planning? The one that was supposed to make me feel better, to help me relax? Never in my life have my best laid plans gone quite so awry. I think my blog posts must have some special jinxing power. Noted.

We weren't able to have dinner at my house, because my mère d'accueil didn't really want people around after she had spent a long day at work. So, instead, we decided to do it at Andrea's house. I wanted to take a shot at the recipe for chili that my mom sent me... Andrea and I set about doing the shopping and then met up with Ramsay back at the house. It was all looking good, we found all the ingredients we needed, despite the language barrier difficulties that come along with shopping off of an American recipe in a French grocery store.

So. We're about ten minutes into cooking when a bunch of Andrea's host brother's friends come filtering in... rounds of bises (the emblematic French cheek kisses) and Franglais (French/English) conversations were quick to follow (it always shocks me how fantastically almost all of the French speak English, despite their inevitably fervent insistence that it isn't true... I suspect the vast majority of the French population speak far better English than I do French). We were having a little bit of difficulty with the recipe, given that the measurements were all American, and the small but significant detail that there were no measuring cups or spoons in any conceivable location. I guesstimated away, figuring it wouldn't matter all that much if I really screwed things up, we could always trash it and go out somewhere to find something better to eat.

Teaches me to assume. It right around the time that I made that brilliant executive decision when the French guys started asking about what I was cooking... when we replied "chili" they clarified: "chili con carne" (sidebar: has anyone ever heard of a chili that wasn't con carne??). I started to get anxious... being guys they were going to want some, which was fine given that we had enough to feed a small army, I just had no idea how it was going to turn out... I mean I had just poured three coffee mugs of water in, going with Andrea when she said it had to be about equal to the three cups the recipe called for. (For the record, it was a good call on her part. Ten points.)

Well, the evening basically devolved from there, in the best of senses. The chili, if I do say so myself, turned out fantastic... there was enough to feed us and probably about six or seven of her host brother's friends... we had good laughs and conversations with wonderfully ridiculous people we had never met before... and we got to practice our French (kind of... given my recent state of culture shock I had basically been boycotting the language all week... why are Andrea and Ramsay so good at it?!??!). I ended up spending the night at Andrea's since I missed the last metro home... three quarters of the way through the night sharing her twin bed, I discovered a trundle bed underneath (genius, I know). In the morning, we got up and thoroughly cleaned the kitchen, ate a nice breakfast, shared some music and good conversation. It was a wonderful Saturday morning.

Don't you love when things like that happen? Everything went exactly opposite than I would have wanted, though now I wouldn't have it any other way.

Well, I have to go, don't want to be late for dinner (though it would be very French of me). I promise I will write soon about life and classes... but for now let me enjoy my weekend. À la prochaine.

bryn.

Culture Shock's a Pain.

In the words of a friend:

"I hate the shutters here. Shutters are supposed to be purely decorative."


I've got a bad case of the culture shock bug... hit a real low today and basically spent all day in bed. Everything's fine, it's all emotional, I'm just a giant sack of stress right now. Kind of got hit with the fact that it's going to be a long time before I'm stateside, and the idea of being this uncomfortable for that long is overwhelming, to say the least.

Leave some well wishes, I miss you all. Am currently planning a little family dinner tomorrow with some close friends to cheer me up. Comfort food and conversation, a time-honored remedy.

For now, music is a great help, it's my connection to home. Speaking of, how beautiful is this woman's voice?



Will write more soon, I know I promised to talk about classes, etc. I will do that. Maybe tomorrow. But goodnight, for now.

bryn.

Mountain Climbing, Wine Tasting, and Fairy Tale Villages

This past weekend we went on the second Dickinson excursion. This time, we visited two of the most beautiful towns I have ever seen: Conques and Cordes-sur-Ciel.

They were so gorgeous, seriously, I felt like I was living Beauty and the Beast. See?




I took about a million pictures, although they were all entirely incapable of showing just how beautiful these towns actually are. I have another facebook album (separate from the others that I have been plugging in the past two posts) that you can see if you click here. It's entirely devoted to the many pictures I took over the weekend, although it's not all of them. It's a good thing I took my computer along so that I could upload pictures off of my camera as I went, otherwise I wouldn't have had space.



Conques, the first village we visited, had a beautiful church (pictured above) with sparrows flying all around the towers... in some of my pictures you can see them, there had to have been hundreds. We arrived and had some free time to grab a pastry before taking a long hike up a mountain (which was harder, I think, than either Roquefixade or Montségur). We had a picnic
at the top, with a view of the city and it's surrounding mountains... absolutely phenomenal view, as I'm sure you would imagine.

(Conques)

After we left Conques, we headed to Cordes-sur-Ciel, a city located on the top of a very high mountain, with a steep cobblestone path which we had to climb up carrying all of our bags. Of course, given that we had just climbed a massive mountain, I was not pleased. But, at the top, it was totally worth it. I had my own hotel, beautiful hotel room with my own bathroom (most importantly, a shower). I took the longest and probably the nicest shower I have ever taken in my life... I was sore and tired and sweaty and I really didn't want to do anything but stand under the water for the rest of my life. Getting out was painful, and getting dressed and going to dinner was equally difficult.

But, it was definitely worth it. Dinner was delicious, we started with salade and quiche, followed by guinea fowl (basically small chicken), followed by chocolate hazelnut deliciousness. We also drank a regional specialty: violet liqueur mixed with white wine. It was really good... very sweet. After a long meal and lots of laughs, I collapsed into bed, and fell quickly asleep.

The following day, our resident tour guide, Monsieur Crema, took us around the town and told us all about its history. Just like Cordes, Conques-sur-Ciel was gorgeous... old, stone buildings with large windows, ivy and flowers covering almost every surface... I never wanted to leave.

After a nice lunch, we just barely had enough time for a quick trip to the Museum of Sugar Art... everything was made out of sugar! Incredible, don't you think?? Afterwards, we headed back down the mountain... it was so steep that the way down was equally difficult. When we finally got down, we got back on the bus, and headed off to the winery, where we had a wine tasting of les vins de Gaillac. The winery was located on a beautiful plot of land in a town called L'Isle-sur-Tarn, because it is located just on the bank of the Tarn river. In this case, the Tarn actually ran through the winery's back yard.

The owner showed us around the beautiful winery, as well as a little bit of the surrounding land. The building has always been in his family, although not always under the same name, as sometimes there were no male heirs to take it. He seemed incredibly proud of what he did, while still seeming to really enjoy the opportunity to share his work with us. He said the main thing he wanted to have us learn was that nature played a huge role in what he did... no matter how well his job was done, it all depended on how generous nature wanted to be. We got to taste the white, rosée, and red Gaillac wines he made, and had a good time being taught how to properly taste wine... starting with looking at the color, smelling the wine and naming the smells, and then, finally, tasting it so that it touches many different senses. It was an interesting look into something that comprises such a huge part of French life and culture.

(Château Lastours winery)

That's about everything... it was another extremely successful Dickinson excursion, I had a really fantastic time. I'm sorry if this post is a little more vague... I have a lot of work to do for this upcoming week, but this blog has been nagging me for quite some time. Hope you enjoy these three posts in rapid succession... I'll be sure to write soon about classes, etc., just let me finish off this week. Leave a comment, let me know you're reading, it'll make me more obliged to keep up.

À toute à l'heure!
Bryna

Life to do list #42: Spontaneous European Vacation

Check.

So. Mediterranean beach vacation anyone?


We decided to go gallivanting off to a town in southern France (Agde) along the Mediterranean sea a grand total of one day beforehand. Jarrod found a cottage for six that wound up only costing 22 Euros apiece, so we ended up taking twelve people (filling up two cottages). It's a funny story, actually, it was a mere hours after we bought the tickets and booked the cabins that someone rustled up this little gem... as it happens, Agde is the naturist capital of Europe. So... we headed off with backpacks and a hope that we wouldn't see too many naked people. Or at least that we wouldn't see more than your average number of naked people on a French beach.

Turns out we needn't have worried. The entire weekend was a resounding success, from start to finish. Example:

1. Get to train station and have to stand in absurdly long line in order to pick up an already purchased ticket. Would have missed the train, but it was delayed.

2. Due to the delayed train, we missed our connection (sidebar: is that word used when trains are involved???), but we arrived exactly two minutes before a second train left for Agde and managed to get ALL of us on it and accounted for (all of us coming from different cars on the first train) within that time.

3. Arrived in Agde, myself and three others took off to find a grocery store for supplies to make a nice family dinner, only to find ourselves in the only store three minutes before it closed. We managed to find everything we needed (pasta, sauce, and baguettes for dinner; coffee, yogurt, milk and cereal for breakfast) at a cost of only 5 Euros per person.

4. Managed to call a taxi after leaving the grocery store. This was only a success because we actually called two taxis because the first one said it would take fifteen minutes, and we didn't want to wait that long, so we called a second without considering the awkward possibility that the two might arrive at the same time. They didn't.

5. Had a wonderful family dinner in an adorable and quite comfortable cabin with 11 other friends.



6. Slept in a little, then made our way to the beach, a lovely hour long walk along a nice bike path. Fresh air galore.

7. Met up on the beach, then headed to lunch, where we found cheap Moules et frites (Mussels and french fries), Agde's specialty. It was a little cloudy when we first got there, but by the time we had finished our leisurely lunch, it was sunny and beautiful.



8. Spent all day relaxing on the beach, looking out at the Mediterranean, with no fully naked people in sight.


9. Stopped for crepes, and then meandered back to the cabins and jumped directly into the enormous pool.

10. Took a relaxing shower, and then had a second family dinner, equally delicious and enjoyable, followed by exhausted sleep.

11. Had a nice morning walk into town after having successfully cleaned the cabins ourselves and gotten back the deposit. We were closer to the train station than we thought, so we didn't have to pay for another taxi, and we got to do some shopping in the central market before having a wonderful lunch.



12. Headed to the train station, and found that we can all just hop on an earlier train that goes straight back to Toulouse, as opposed to having to transfer in Narbonne.

13. Spent the ride back enjoying the scenery and sharing music with Andrea.

14. Arrived safely home in Toulouse and discover that it has been raining there all weekend.

Now really, who could ask for anything more?

(More pictures, if you're interested.)

Bryna

Mountain Climbing in the Pyrénées

Hello all! Sorry it has been so long since my last update, but due to the extreme demand for new posts (aka the occasional question from my mom and Michelle) I'm going to do at least two new ones now instead of working on my intercultural journal. Turns out I'm just as good at procrastinating in Europe as I am in the good old US of A.

This first post, as the name so clearly describes, is going to be about my trip to the Pyrénées with the Dickinson Center. I'm going to do more than one post because I don't want everything I need to write to get jumbled. Alright. Onto the mountain climbing.

So on Tuesday, September 7 the entire Dickinson en France group got up very early to catch a bus to Pays Cathare... a region of France in the Pyrénées where the Cathares lived when they were being hunted down by the Christians. They believed in Dualism... the existence of a God of good (heaven and man's soul) and a God of evil (the body and earth's material things). Once the Christians heard about it, they were none too pleased, and essentially decided to start a crusade to hunt down the Cathares, and either have them renounce their religion or be burned alive. As a result, the Cathares took to the mountains to hide from the crusaders.

On this trip we visited two ruins of châteaux in which the Cathares hid: Roquefixade and Montségur. Roquefixade, as shown in the picture above, was the smaller of the two mountains we climbed, and has been there since 1034. Can you believe that? The age of everything in Europe is absolutely astounding to me. I feel like nothing we are currently constructing will be in existence a thousand years from now.


Anyway, the bus stopped in the town at the base of the mountain (picture above). It was an adorable little place, I think someone told me that only 50 people live there today, although I'm sure the town gets tons of foot traffic from all the avid expeditioners. The going up was definitely not easy, and at times somewhat treacherous, given the tiny gravel on the steep parts of the trail. I was made painfully aware of the age of my tennis shoes; the soles have been worn slick and offer little to no traction. Once we got to the top, there was a little bit of actual rock climbing involved to get to the ruins of the châteaux, which was fun. I kind of like scaling rocks, as long as they're not too high. It is, however, a miracle that I didn't kill myself on this excursion... mountain climbing is generally no the best idea for people as clumsy as I am.

(Commencement of the actual rock climbing... the people on the ruins are other Dickinson students)

(View from the top... the picture never does it justice.)

After we made our way down the mountain and refilled our waterbottles, we hopped back on the bus and headed off to Montségur. We had lunch at the base of the town, outdoors, all organic food... the most enormous and delicious peice of quiche I have ever seen and then subsequently eaten in my life. It was nice and relaxing, although we were all stuffed and ready to go take a nap right around the time that we had to do more hiking.

(This is where we started. The path straight ahead is actually perilously steep, although you can't tell from the picture.)

Montségur was an interesting place because it was actually the last of the Cathares' strongholds. It's name actually comes from words that mean "secure mountain", which is clear even in English. This is probably because the mountain was much, much higher. It's difficult to tell from the picture above, but it was a lot steeper, too. I had a tough time... I'm not really much of an outdoorsy girl, and though I do love the mountains, I don't really make a habit of scaling them every chance I get. I wouldn't have missed the view for the world, though.

(View from the top.)

After we made our way back down the mountain, we hopped in the bus again and headed off to a little town called Vals, where we visited a church that was quite literally built inside a rock. Although the church was added onto in many different time periods, it's believed that people first started worshiping there in 2000 B.C. Crazy. The church was beautiful, and, as a bonus, we were all able to cool off inside the cool rock after having been sweating all day.

(Church at Vals.)

Well, that's all for now. Needless to say it was an incredible trip, albeit entirely exhausting. I hope my summary was concise enough... it's hard when there's so many pictures I want to show. Here's a link to my facebook album with all of my pictures... and I mean all of them. There are more pictures of my house, life in Toulouse, this trip as well as my more recent vacation (which should be the subject of my next blog post)... you name it. So, check it out, and leave a comment here to let me know what you think.

And, as always, thanks for reading.

Bryna

Alright, let's try for a coherent one this time.

Sorry for the last post... I had a lot of information to dispense, and as I mentioned, living abroad can be somewhat exhausting. I appreciate the fact that so maybe people have actually taken the time to look at this blog... it really means a lot to me to be able to share this experience with the people I care about.


So today, we spent some class time walking around the Basilique de Saint Sernin; a basilica dedicated to the first bishop of Toulouse, who was martyred. It's absolutely stunning, as you can see from the picture I took and put at the top of this entry. My favorite part inside is the feet of a destroyed statue of St Christopher that are fused into one of the pillars inside the church (pictured above). People go there to pray to St Christopher for safe travels home, and touch these feet that have now been rubbed smooth as a result. My favorite ritual involving this feet, though for some reason it died after WWII, was that when children began to take their first steps, the parents would bring them to walk around this pillar for the same reason... a safe journey to wherever life may take you.

After we looked around in the basilica and its museum, I decided to go off on my own for a while, and walked around Toulouse. It was probably the best thing I've done since I've been here. I love getting myself lost, and then finding my way... walking down streets and people watching.



Toulouse is a gorgeous city. I was able to see the Place du Capitole almost entirely covered with bright red poppies... an advertisement for some sort of perfume, I think. Needless to say it was beautiful. There is a street where branching off of the Place du Capitole heading towards the Place Esquilrot, where I was literally hit by a car a couple days ago. No worries, it was a funny sort of hit by a car... in a slapstick sorta way... I'm fine, my left arm is just a little sore.
Place Esquilrot is probably the busiest part of Toulouse... I looked around for a while, saw a sign in the window of a store that made me laugh ("les prix fous!"-- literally, crazy prices!), and spent a little time looking at the cell phones in an electronics store (I really need to get one, for safety's sake, but I can't bring myself to spend that much money... phones are really expensive here, and I am terrified that I am going to run out of money).

One of my favorite things to do here is to find the back streets that twist and turn, usually just located a street or two over from the large boulevards (left). They are beautiful and oddly silent considering the bustle of town life happening only a street or two away. It's very surreal.

I then headed to Place Wilson (named after Woodrow Wilson), where many a hilarious sight awaited me. So apparently today was the day for hazing the University students, which the French seem to take very seriously. All over town there were groups of students dressed up as robots, spacemen (covered in tin foil, of course), gladiators, cavemen... you name it. They were forming human blockades in the busiest part of town (Place Esquirol), stage fighting (those dressed as gladiators, naturally), and generally just singing in loud voices. It was shocking to me, the fact that everyone seemed not to mind when these kids slowed down traffic or generally disturbed the peace. They stopped to watch, laughed along, it was surprisingly good-natured fun. At the underclassmens' expense, of course.

When I arrived at Place Wilson, there was a large crowd standing around the fountain. I walked up, and there were a bunch of students playing games in the water (more hazing, of course). It was absolutely hilarious. They were chanting, climbing the statue in the center, racing to see who can do a lap inside the fountain the fastest, holding hands between each others' legs and walking a lap... honestly it looked like fun. I was in a crowd, so I couldn't get great pictures, but...


Why don't we do this kind of stuff in America??? We need some good rituals.

Bryna

Okay...

I really didn't want to fall into this blogging trend, but since there have been a lot of people asking about how France is going, I thought I'd go ahead and start this thing so that I wouldn't have to constantly repeat the same things to everyone. Not that I don't want to be in contact with everyone, it's just that I'd rather get my talking done in one fell swoop, and move right on to hearing your comments.

So. I have a little less than a week that I need to catch most of you up on. Let's see. The plane ride was a typical plane ride. I was tired. I never sleep on airplanes, and it kills me whenever I have to travel long distances. Eventually, I made it to the house of my famille d'accueil (or host family, which in my case is just one woman named Marie-Claude, who has a 30 year old son who no longer lives with her, although she lives literally right next door to her parents). I wasn't able to sleep because Marie-Claude wanted to take me to her friend's birthday party, so I only had time to take a relatively quick bubble bath (the bubbles were ever-so-thoughtfully provided by Marie-Claude) and get ready again. Let me tell you, hot water has never felt so good.

My room is quite pretty. It's up in the attic (quite common for France), the walls are all yellow, and it's kind of like a studio apartment, in that there's a tub, sink, and bathroom without there being any sort of divide or separation. I also have this really great floor-length window with those awesome European shutters... it's fantastic. What was even more fantastic was that directly outside that window there is a bar/cafe across the street where once a month there are tango lessons. So, I finally arrived in Toulouse, I get up to my very French-looking room, and this great live tango music is floating through a gorgeous window where I am sitting and taking the most wonderful bubble bath.

I have never felt so much like I was in a movie in my life. (I hope those pictures are enough... I have more if anyone's interested. The first is directly to my right when I walk in the door, the second is my bed, and the third is zoomed in a little closer to my left when I walk in the door... check out the great window.)

Right now, I am doing orientation at the Dickinson Center in Toulouse, which was described to me by Marie-Claude as a "short walk" from our home. In reality, it's thirty minutes long, but I guess that's short to the French. To me, it's somewhat annoying, because I'm so used to living on campus and being able to walk eight minutes maximum to each class. I'm incredibly spoiled. But, the walk here is along the pretty Canal du Midi, which is nice despite all the bikers that fly along and nearly kill me every morning.

My orientation classes are going decently, although it's simply exhausting to be constantly surrounded by a foreign language. By eight o'clock every night, I'm totally ready to go to bed. However here, they eat at 10 at night. Which I kind of knew before I came, but when I'm already really tired, and the last time I ate was at noon, it can be more than a little frustrating. But Marie-Claude is an excellent cook, and a great conversationalist, so I enjoy eating dinners with her.

The only problem is she doesn't stop feeding me. I feel rude refusing perfectly good food, so my stomach feels like it's going to explode at the end of dinner each night. We eat a full meal, but then there's a cheese course, and after that there's fruit and yogurt (the yogurt here, by the way, is amazing)... I keep trying to remember to look up the word for "full".

As for classes at the actual Université de Toulouse... I had my meeting with Madame Toux (head of Dickinson en Toulouse) today, and she made me feel significantly less overwhelmed. It looks like I'll be taking some great history, art history, and international relations courses at l'Institut Catholique de Toulouse (ICT), and l'Institut des Etudes Politiques (IEP). I'm looking forward to it.

All right I think that's all for now... next time I'll be a little more specific, and hopefully a little more interesting, as I've covered all the basics. Feel free to comment, make sure to keep checking back.

Bryna