Pictures!!

Une Week-End Parisienne the weekend I went to visit Alex in Paris

Ma Vie en France I added some pictures from the Elephant Outing

That's about all there is at the moment...after this weekend there'll be more to tell - I'm going to Barcelona for fall break!! One of the (many) things I love about Europe...Prof Zonza told us not to try to get ahold of him this week since he'll "be in Italy" and now I'm off to Barcelona for the weekend...it's so weird!

a +!

some people drink their problems away

Me, I dance them away and wake up very sore the next morning =D
I'm gonna miss the Havana Café when I leave Nantes!

welcome to the inside of my head (good luck...!)

Okay...I officially enjoy saturdays that AREN'T packed full of things to do. It gives me time to breathe and do things like sleep and homework and updating my blog and enjoying Nantes. What a concept, n'est pas?

Okay. Speaking of homework, I feel like I should prolly let you all know what my courses are like! Some of them are fantastic, some of them are mediocre, and one of them is admittedly horrendous.

I've got my three litt courses at the fac - Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Les Fables de la Fontaine, and La Princesse de Clèves. Les Liaisons Dangereuses is by far my favorite course of the semester - mostly because of the prof! M Zonza is one of (if not THE!) best professor I've ever had! He's one of those profs that you can tell is incredibly intelligent, but he's so approachable and personable and FUNNY. He was reading out loud in class one day and I'm pretty sure he's been an actor in a previous life. When reading a passage by Cécile, and incredibly infantile and idiotic 15 year old girl, M Zonza actually used a high-pitched, little girl voice! He had the whole class in stitches, it was fantastic!! He's also the prof for Les Fables de la Fontaine, so he makes that class bearable too...the text is harder to get through, though. Les Liaisons is 18th century, les Fables 17th; it's amazing the difference one century can make! La Princesse de Clèves, however...that one's 17th century as well, but it's at 8 in the morning and Mme Redot isn't NEARLY as engaging as M Zonza. La Princesse is the horrendous one...I dread tuesday mornings. but I'm pretty sure it'll count for a women's studies credit, and I need 2 of those while I'm here.

My 3 courses at IES are all pretty good...grammar is grammar, there's nothing terribly exciting to tell for that course - I just hope it'll help! French Writers and Foreign Nations is fun...though the litt courses at the fac make it seems très...facile =D (very easy). The prof is a cute old man who asks every ten minutes "avez-vous des questions, s'il vous plaît?" (do you have any questions, please?). It kind of reminds me of the regularity of my highschool chorus teacher's "Some annoucements!" at the end of every chorus period! The last class is France and the Atlantic World (16th-18th centuries) which is good because I've never taken a French history class. The one thing in that class that drives me nuts is when my classmates laugh every time our prof tries to say an english name/phrase. Granted, he has a VERY thick accent and I won't lie, it is entertaining - but I feel bad for him...our FRENCH accents sounded that bad at one point...I'd've given up forever if a native french speaker laughed at me every time I tried.

Other than school, life is...life is pretty good. I had a rough spot of homesickness yesterday since Cabaret opened at Wooster and I wasn't there to see my girls perform...plus I was exhausted from a really long week. It was just one of those realizations that I'm not going to be home for 8 more weeks and won't be at Wooster for another 10 months. But my girls and I are going out dancing tonight and I've had a nice relaxed day, so that's helping. but I also realized some of the things I miss about the states (and this is not counting the people, otherwise you'd be here for hours reading the world's longest post):
-dryers. only for some things, like hoodies or towels. they're just not nearly as comfy when they're line dried
-milk. the milk here is demi-écremée...half cream. so basically, it's half and half. basically, I haven't had milk since I was in the states =D
-classes being done by 4pm at the latest. having class from 5.30-6.30 is...not so much fun
-(and here's my incredibly nerdy one) the academic environment at Wooster. Most all of my classes here are lecture classes...I miss discussion classes. I miss Wooster's writing-intensive, critical-analysis atmosphere. I went to a conférence (public lecture) on "société d'hyperconsommation et l'individualisme" (society of hyper-consumerism and individualism) on tuesday and it was so the kind of lecture Wooster would have held...and then for my FWFN midterm I actually had FUN writing the essay. Granted, you should never let a women's studies major write about "la condition féminine"...she'll start writing about feminist discourse. I kid you not, I really did. I hope prof Millany's ready for that paper...it was DEFINITELY a women's studies paper!
-(my other nerdy one) women's studies courses in particular. they just don't exist here, and I never realized how much I really do enjoy those courses at home and how much they energize me...

and I'm done being a nerd now =D

I think I'm going to go read some Dangerous Liaisons...it's such a good book! (...and such a scandalous book!)

à+!

We'll always have Paris

Let's be honest, I still haven't recovered from last weekend in Paris! But it was an incredible weekend all the same =D

at a glance:
Friday: dinner, hanging out with Alex and Meghan, watching the Eiffel Tower sparkle, hanging out in the apartement
Saturday: Montmartre, Place de la Concorde, Jardin des Tuileries, Louvre, attempted Musée D'Orsay, Friends, crazy night at the apartements
Sleep-deprived Sunday: church, Arc de Triomphe, Eiffel Tower (sorta), more Friends, come back to Nantes

Okay. Friday night was absolutely FANTASTIC. I got to see two of my favorite Wooster girls and do the whole hyperventalating-I'm-really-in-Paris gawking tourist thing. The best part was when Alex and I were waiting for Meghan by one of the metro stops on the Champs
Elysées; I decided I should probably actually go to the street and look up and down it...it's kind of an iconic street! I went to the street and looked to the left and thought to myself "oh how neat, there's a really big ferris wheel there. that's cool" I looked to the right and nearly jumped out of my skin/fell over and thought "HOLY SHIT THATS THE ARC DE TROIMPHE!!!" I started dancing around and laughing like an idiot...I couldn't help it, it was amazing...and HUGE. I guess I never realized how big it was in real life =D Meeks found us and when she and her friend Kevin found out that it was my first time in Paris, she decided she wanted to see my reaction to the Eiffel Tower =D It was...pretty much amazing, I'm not gonna lie. Because it was nighttime, it was all lit up...and then every hour on the hour it sparkles. Literally SPARKLES with hundreds of flashing lights...all I could think of was how mum found a journal I kept for class in 5th grade that talked about how the attraction I would most like to see is the Eiffel Tower...my dream finally came true and I won't lie, I almost cried/squealed when I saw it =D

Afterwards we went and hung out with Alex's IES friends...and bounced balloons back and forth like little kids for about an hour =D ...we're entirely too easily entertained!

Saturday was a day of random "what should we do now?" We started in Montmartre and sat by the Sacre-Coeur eating lunch...it's a gorgeous building. I remember in highschool I used to sit in Mme Zadin's class and stare at a poster of Sacre-Coeur after finishing quizzes and classwork...it's so much better in person =D We went to Place du Tertre (?) which is pretty much the artist's square...people have their artwork up for sale and work on new pieces right there. It's what I picture whenever I think of artistic bohemian Montmartre...and it was even more meaningful for me because of my Junior IS last semester on Suzanne Valadon =) We attempted to go to Musée d’Orsay, but it was closing early because of the transportation strikes, so we went to Place de la Concorde/Jardin des Tuileries/walked around the (outside of) the Louvre instead. I enjoyed it very much...the art and architeture (I know I say that a lot, but I just can't get over it!) was so...amazing. We decided we were tired from our late night and full day, so we went back to Alex's house to watch Friends...'cause that's how we hang out at Wooster, why not do the same in France? after a while we went back to the apartments to hang out with even more of her friends...and that was the most bizarre night EVER. I'd say the 7 bottles of wine they consumed helped out just a bit...though Alex was sure to assure me (and I believe her) that her friends are NOT usually that...intoxicated =D the only bad thing was that it resulted in getting to bed at 4.30...and then having to get up about 4.5 hours later for church =P

Needless to say, we were both extremely tired on Sunday. After church (at which I saw ANOTHER wooster person - I had forgotten Anna was in Paris too!) we went to L'Arc de Triomphe, which is even BIGGER when you're standing under it! we got then went to the Eiffel Tower and got in line to go up to the top...but realized we didn't quite have enough time, so we're going to do that on thursday before catching our flight to Barcelona for fall break (yes, I'm going to Barcelona for the weekend. I love europe!) we watched another episode of Friends before I got my train back to Nantes (which was stopped for a while, resulting in my not getting home until quarter of midnight. yikes, I was tired).

all in all, it was a pretty fantastic weekend =D

hopefully there will be another post today/tommorrow about my life in Nantes...travel entries are fun, but I want to get some of what's in my head (scary thought, I know) and what's going on in my *real* life into this blog. that stuff usually goes into my journal...I'm pretty sure I've already written about 160 pages since coming to France. I've finished one journal and started another...and it hasn't even been two months!

lunchtime and then tango - à+!

As promised: the weekend I realized I could never pass for a true French woman

(aka my chateau weekend. Kind of feels like forever ago by now, but that's beside the point.)

The first chateau was Serrant...a rather "small" chateau, even though there was a HUGE kitchen and dozens of rooms. And being the nerdy bookwork that I am, I nearly fell over when the tour guide brought us into the library. There were literally THOUSANDS of books in that room...12,000 in fact. There were the original copies of Les Fables de La Fontaine, of the encyclopedias that Napolean wrote after his travels...bookcases that were literally 16 shelves high, floor to ceiling. There were even the ladders to get to the top shelves. I had a completely Disney Belle moment when I saw that library...definitely ready to move into that castle!

After Serrant we went to Azay-le-Rideau. The neat thing about Azay-le-Rideau was that it was built on this little pond/lake thing...so it was almost completely surrounded by water! The intricacies of the architecture of all these castles completely boggles my mind! People just don't take the time to construct buildings like that any more...after I wandered around the castle (and saw a painting of a man that looked JUST like the villian in Ever After!) a couple of us walked around the grounds...and I found a tree to climb! Not as good as my Thinking Tree in Princeton (long story...) but it was fun all the same!

Villandry was the last chateau on Saturday, though we didn't go in - just wandered around the gardens. They were pretty impressive gardens, though! Perfectly manicured and maintained to the point of Art...and there were grapes growing in the vineyards. I gotta say, I love french grapes. They're so good...especially when pulled straight off the vine!

We stayed in Tours that night...following literally in les pas de maman (mum's footsteps) thirty years later...she studied/lived in Tours when she was in college! Watched the (depressing) rugby match that ended France's participation in the World Cup. I had so wanted France to make it to the finals...Nantes would have been INSANE for that game! ah well.

Sunday started with Amboise, the castle at which DaVinci spent the last 3 years of his life...I got a picture of his tomb! exciting, I know. My favorite part of Amboise was the Red Room. Red is my current favorite-color-of-the-moment and I walked into a room to see nothing but red. Red walls, chairs, bed, carpet...it was amazing! speaking of the beds...they're short. They're big, in the sense of being wide, but they're SHORT. i don't think even I'd be comfortable in them.

The title of this blog comes from our trip to my favorite castle, Chenonceau. Before we explored the castle, my girls and I had a pique-nique (so much more fun to write en français!) and had a ton of fun chatting and laughing like idiots. And it was during this pique-nique, grâce à (thanks to) the dirty looks of the french families around us, that I realized I could never actually convince the world that I was a french woman. I could perfect the language, the body and the look all I wanted, but my cover would be blown as soon as someone made me laugh. The french tend to laugh very discreetly and quietly behind their hands. I tend to throw my head back and laugh until my sides hurt and I'm nearly crying. Thus I'll either have to come back to the states...or live as a misfit for the rest of my life, as mum put it =)

Chenonceau itself was absolutely gorgeous...built first by Diane de Poitiers, the favored mistress of Henry II. but then...once Henry II died, his wife, Catherine de Medicis, kicked the mistress out of the castle and finished building it HER way. The result? a very amusing looking castle with two very distinct styles! but the castle is built literally into the Loire river like a bridge...it's so pretty...

and now I need to actually go do some work. I'll write about my fabulous weekend in Paris...sometime later!

à bientôt!

Time? What is this time you speak of...?

So I was hoping to get a good-sized entry up about the chateaux trip...looks like that might have to wait a little while. I'm so unbelievably swamped right now I just haven't had time. With a grammar midterm tomorrow, 4 books I'm working on reading, and 3-4 papers looming over my head (due early in november), life is chaotic. oh and that whole I'm going to Paris TOMORROW to see alex and meghan!! thus...pictures will have to tell my story until I have time to write it. The following are facebook albums, but everyone can see them.

Shopping for my future home?

The Magnificence of Michel et Malo

a+...hopefully my life will settle down soon!

La Revanche d'Al Gore?

I opened my copy of Metro, my morning newspaper that I grab as I'm getting off the tram and seen the headline (I apologize in advance for awkward phrasing born of spot-translation) "His Nobel Prize is a repudiation for George Bush: The Revenge of Al Gore." Said article quoted the Washington Post saying that "the inaction on climate change is one of the principal failures [of Bush]. Sadly, there was no european perspective in the article - it was more reporting on the events and attitudes of America.

Personally...I'm thrilled that Gore won the Nobel. I know a lot of people don't buy the whole "global warming" thing, or chalk up the current ecology to part of the natural cycle of the earth. Personally, global warming/climate change/whatever you want to call it isn't the real issue. The real issue is how the actions of people are impacting the environment. I would love to see this start something big. It's impossible for any one person to change the fate of the environment. Sure, Gore did a pretty good job at raising awareness -and controversy. It'd be easy to say that it's because he has money/power/influence that he can change things...but think about it for a minute - he can only plant the ideas. People need to then man up, as Kristen would say, and take responsibility and action.

I've noticed some interesting differences here in France in terms of being environment-friendly. there's the public transportation, for one, though I recognize it's because I'm living in a big city. The constantly changing rolling billboards are another...but there are smaller differences, too. We don't have a dryer in my family -everything is line-dried. But more than that, there's a huge difference in how energy/electricity is used. In the States, we hate darkness. Lights are turned on and left on, even in empty rooms. Tvs are left running to create "background noise," or radios are constantly playing. I feel like here electricity is used when it's needed. Lights are turned on as late in the day as possible, and they're only on if they're being USED. I'm trying to be more conscious about this - maybe I can't save the world, but if I'm more careful about energy use and maybe I can convince one person (who convinces one person who convinces one person who convinces one person...) to be concious...THAT is when change is possible. just...think about it.

Oh and there's something else here that makes my green heart happy. Monoprix, which is sort of like a superTarget, is where a lot of us IES students to go get our groceries. I was so confused the first time I got groceries there...in the states, they bag everything for you as they scan it. Here...they don't bag it for you. In fact, they don't bag it at all! People bring their own (fabric, not plastic) bags to carry home their groceries. I have since found the few bags Monoprix does provide (a great boon for those of us foreigners who didn't bring grocery-toting bags!) -large, heavy-duty plastic bags that are intended to be REUSED. I love it. I absolutely LOVE it.

Today is Blog Action Day. (http://blogactionday.org) Thousands of people all over the world are choosing to use their blogs as a way to create change. I know perfectly well that there are people in the states, in france, in england, in scotland (even in italy!) who are reading this blog. People who know me are well aware that environmentalism is important to me. We are called to be stewards of the earth, to protect it and "live simply, so that others may simply live." When I realized that today was Blog Action Day and that the topic was the environment...how could I not add my voice to the other 15,000+ voices? we live in a time of mass-communication...I'm just glad it's finally being put to good use =D

the weekend, by the way, was amazing. I'm working on going through the 8 pages I wrote in my journal from saturday-sunday and organizing it into a huge post - but I don't think that'll be ready till tuesday or wednesday.

à + - and think green thoughts!

Les étudiants français sont folles (crazy)!

Time for another interesting-observations-about-france entry. Take the most serious, perfectionnistic, crazy-intense student you know in the States. Multiply that by ten.

Said student won't even hold a candle to the average french student!

It's always amusing for me to sit in a class at the fac...I'm sitting there scrambling to follow anything, get anything on the paper to remember later what the professor said. I'm thinking only of writing frantically key words and names and dates (ps, the dates are hard. I hate hearing numbers in french, I get so caught up in trying to translate the numbers that I miss the importance of the date!). It's entertaining to see my notes after said courses- the grammar is horrible, but that's beside the point. They're scattered and in no particular logical sequence - just whatever concepts and words I managed to understand.

Now lets look at the average french students. Said students will probably have in front of them a pencil case full of pens and pencils. Me, I'm used to having my one blue pen and using it for everything I write. These french students have minimum two different colored pens, but they usually average about 4 colors. Not only do they use all these different colored pens to properly categorize and organize their notes, but they also use White-Out. To take NOTES! I have actually seen these students whip out their White-Out pen, fix something on their papers and carry on without missing a beat! The White-Out isn't even the worst of it, though. They all have RULERS! because of course, heaven forbid that the line you draw under the title of your notes be even the slightest bit crooked!

...they're absolutely insane =D

this weekend is the Chateaux de la Loire trip...I can't wait to see Chenonceau in person! and then the weekend after that I get to go to Paris to see my Alex and my Meghan!!! Granted, I'll get there assuming that the grève de SNCF (SNCF (train) strike) announced for next thursday in Nantes doesn't interfere...Mme de Pous, my grammar professor, promised to keep us updated.

à + !

Allez bleu!

What a weekend...

friday was salsa dancing at Havana Café, which was insanely fun. I was dripping in sweat after about an hour...the piste de danse (dance floor) was so crowed you almost couldn't MOVE, let alone dance! I danced with a couple different people...it was actually kind of funny because no sooner would I break away from one guy and rejoin my girlfriends than another guy would grab my hand and pull me back into the crowd! I had so much fun dancing...my muscles were actually SORE the next day, but it was so worth it. We also managed to find a 70s-80s discothèque after the Havana Café, which was fun too...but I infinitely preferred the salsa dancing.

Saturday was some shopping in the afternoon and the evening...the evening was an experience, to say the least. I met up with the girls I went salsa dancing with to watch the rugby game in the centre ville (downtown area). We wandered from Bouffay to Commerce, trying to figure out which of the grand ecrans (big -and I mean BIG- screen tvs) we wanted to watch the game. We finally settled on the Commerce one and sat in the middle of this HUGE crowd gathered in front of the screen. I wouldn't be surprised if there was environs (approximately) a thousand people there...no joke. It was insane. France wasn't supposed to win the match against New Zealand...NZ is supposedly REALLY good. but...ALLEZ BLEU et VIVEZ LA FRANCE! We totally won! The entire city went NUTS, people were honking their car horns till at LEAST 1h00...it was so exciting. granted, I'll be the first to admit that I hardly understand (okay, don't at all understand) rugby, but it was still exciting to be a part of such a huge event.

oh and à propos de (referring to) Babar...I misunderstood when that little IES excursion is...it's this coming friday, not last friday. whoops!

à plus tard!

"feu d'artifice de pierre, dentelle de granit, chef-d'oeuvre d'architecture colossale et délicate."

yes, I realize that is an excessively long title, but there's a reason. It's a passage from Guy de Maupassant's La Légende du Mont Saint Michel, and it really fits quite perfectly. "fireworks of stone, lace of granite, a huge and delicate masterpiece of architecture." Our trip there really was amazing...Mont Saint Michel is absolutely phenomenal. The construction spanned 3 centuries and you can tell...it's COLLOSAL and breathtaking. I can't imagine the amount of time and effort that must have gone into the contruction of this abbey; the detail carved into the stone is unreal. Not to mention the sheer size - it's huge! And of course, because I'm a broadway baby through and through, I had such an urge to burst out into Phantom of the Opera as I was walking down these old stone staircases...but I refrained from doing so, don't worry! After Mont Saint Michel we went to St. Malo, which was a fortified medieval city, complete with the surrounding wall and ramparts and such. We walked around the city on the wall...and then went wading in the ocean. During the last week of september. It was pretty much fantastic! The water was si froid (so cold) but it was so crystal clear and refreshing that we didn't care. And the sand...the sand actually glittered, it was so gorgeous. The bus ride back to Nantes was spent in one of those contentedly dreamy dazes of "I just had the perfect day in Europe..."

This past week, as plenty evident by the lack of updates, has been so chaotic! well, not so much chaotic as exhausting. All of my classes have started proprement (properly/really) at the fac, so I have my hands full warding off panic attacks nearly every day! well, not any more, but when the classes started I was convinced I was going to have to do an explication du texte en haut voix -an oral explanation of the text - in front of classes full of French people! The thought of standing up in front of a bunch of native french speakers and trying to analyze 17th and 18th century French literature - complete with reading the passage aloud - was enough to terrify me into giving up! happily that's some sort of requirement for the french students for their examens or something...I didn't really understand it, but all I know is that I'm for some reason exempt from it. Which makes me very happy. and much less panicky.

Right now, though...it's time for my annual start-of-the-school-year maladie (sickness). yep, it's my turn to have the head cold that's been racing through IES for the past couple of weeks. Speaking in french 24/7 should be fun with a stuffy nose!

but I don't really care because I'm going to ride Babar tomorrow afternoon and then go salsa dancing in the evening!
à+!