25 November, 2009

Thoughts on Thanksgiving...

There is something so strange to me about missing Thanksgiving tomorrow, my first major holiday spent apart from my parents and brother.

I have always loved Thanksgiving, perhaps even more than I love Christmas, because it is less commercial, because it is more genuine. It is a holiday created to give thanks, something I firmly believe in - it is a time when families cross our country to reunite, to break bread, to share their trials and triumphs of the year.

And perhaps I always loved it so much because I have always been such a loved, spoiled individual. Every year, Thanksgiving as a child meant being surrounded by people whom I loved and who I knew loved me. It was about my mother dressing me up in pretty clothes I loved and putting my hair back in huge barrettes and my father making me change out of my tights and into jeans before I ran out to play with all my male cousins.

It is strange to me that these are the things about Thanksgiving that I miss - I pretend that if I were in America this would be the reality of the Holiday. But I know that's not the case. That I am not seven years old anymore, not a little girl, that I would not be romping around in the backyard with my cousins, that my father would not demand I change clothes to do so, that fewer family members would likely make it this year, because as the years have passed our families have evolved. Priorities change. Nuclear families begin to form and grow and disperse. Grandparents grow older and traditions have to change accordingly.

And I cannot help but be saddened by the passage of time, even as I know I am young and it will only get worse as I grow older.

The thing that makes me saddest yet though is that families seem to be under attack in America, and no where is that made more obvious than in how our country treats Thanksgiving.

Take this article in the Times: Food, Kin and Tension. Two cousins have made Thanksgiving Insult BINGO cards, with negativesayings like "That outfit is interesting," that they fill out throughout the meal.

Or this movie, cited as being one of the best to watch on the topic of Thanksgiving: Home for the Holidays in which the characters seem to absolutely despise being together for the majority of the film.

I don't understand how families grow so far apart that Holidays become something that they have to suffer through.

And such attitudes are so completely at odds with the true spirit of Thanksgiving. Perhaps Americans have become too ready to reject blood ties in favor of forming friendships. To say, I don't need my sister's companionship, I can make my own friends and form my own family amongst them.

But as Mary Schmich wrote in her famed 1997 Chicago Tribune article (one of my favorites!):
Get to know your parents. You never know when they'll be gone for good. Be nice to your siblings. They're your best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future.

And I believe that. Friends are wonderful and amazing and I plan on keeping them as long and as best I can. But they aren't family.

All that to say, this Thanksgiving I am grateful for the following:

  • That God is the same everywhere - that He followed me to France.
  • For my wonderful, wonderful family. For my amazing parents and my kick-ass brother. For Jonathan. For Nana and Grandma and Grandpa. For Baba. For Donnie. For Rodney and Tim. For Paul. For Bob. For Barb. For their spouses. For all my other crazy cousins and great-aunts and first-cousins-once removed. I feel so grateful.
  • For my lovely, beautiful life-long friends.
  • For the experience to get to be in France.
  • For Sewanee - the amazing University my parents let me go to that I get to return to soon.
  • For being 20 years old and having so much life behind but mostly ahead of me.
  • For so many other things that I cannot even begin to name all of them, among them woods, music, coffee, the air, gardening, Christmas decorations, hymns, my chickens that I get to meet in a month and how blissfully happy everything makes me on a fairly regular basis.

21 November, 2009

Rainy Night

Sometimes things don't work out the way you planned,

and so this weekend I am in Nantes, not Bilboa, and after getting over my original disappointment, I realized several things:
  1. I only have one month left; time will go by fast enough without passing 20+ hours on a train by myself.
  2. I have a ridiculous amount of work to do between now and leaving.
  3. I have a lot left to see and do in Nantes before leaving.
I bought a notebook and entitled it: Final Month in France = The Final Push.

It is divided up into three sections
-Vocabulary (where I'm writing down all the words I learn and look up)
-Grammar
-Plans and Goals

I've already been using it a lot. I also bought myself two grammar work books, intermediate and advanced, and have started working my way through the exercises. I think it will be really helpful.


Yesterday I somewhat crazily decided to venture out on my own for dinner, toute seule, because I had the hankering for a kabab.

It was raining but the streets seemed flooded by tourists; I heard lots of Arabic and German as I made my way down to the stand next to Place Royale. I bought my kabab, 4 euros, and walked around, trying to find a dry spot out of the Nantaise rain to enjoy it. I finally sat down on the steps of Saint Croix, just as it's deep bells rang the 8 o'clock.

And I felt alone, nearly, pedestrians walking by me, watching me watching them, and wondering if they're thinking I'm homeless. It is a homeless sort of hang out.

Then a few drunks stumbled into the court yard from the main road, and they looked at my stoop in what I perceived to be a territorial way, and so I skiddishly ceded them the stoop and began wandering the twisting streets of the Bouffay.

I found myself outside of the gelatto shop, and went inside and ordered an Inimitable - the best gelatto I've ever had - and found a table by a window and sat and pretended to preoccupy myself with whatever I could find in my purse. I love people watching, but doing so all alone and without any other sort of purpose seemed somehow pathetic to me, and so it was for pretense that I pulled out my journal and started rereading all the entries- all the while trying to take in as much of my surroundings as possible.

To my good fortune, five men walked in: four arabic, one french: one from New York, the others speaking rather hilariously sparse English and decidedly not from America.

They sat down at the table just next to me, and proceeded to talk in such a way that I KNEW they had no clue I could understand them. They were talking louder than anyone else in the shop.

Topics of conversation proceeded as follows:
  • their bowel movements
  • what internet chat sites they'd been on and whether or not they thought they were going to get lucky with a girl anytime soon
  • their bowel movements
  • whether or not the American was depressed about having to get married
  • whether or not people were happier making their own decisions or whether it was best if their decisions were made for them (at this point it becomes clear to me that they are all Engineers. This topic revolved primarily around a description of a TED lecture and was quite interesting)
  • their bowel movements
  • internet chat rooms
And then they left.

It was terribly interesting to listen to, if at times a bit vulgar and raunchy; I kept debating about whether or not I should, at some point, let them know I could understand everything they where saying, but it seemed too late in the conversation to do so, me feeling already quite guilty really for being able to eavesdrop so easily.

I wandered around a bit more. I passed one sad SDF who had nubs for legs and was rocking back and forth and clapping his hands wildly and mumbling some sort of tune for change, and I was too taken aback by his appearance and the whole grotesque display to do anything except increase my pace as I passed him. I passed one friendly bum chatting it up with his potential benefactors as they stood in line at the ATM. I passed an endless amount of cigarette butts, still smoking on the wet sidewalks. I passed a dozen drunks, some singing loudly and out of key, happy despite the rain, others angrily cursing one another as they passed. I passed a million cafes, the clientele looking cheery and warm and completely oblivious to all the madness going on outside.

And then at some point Horace called, so I made my way across town to L'Huberloo, had a quick drink (a pint of Jupiler, pas mal) and then we all headed back to the Bouffay. At some point Hanna called, and we met up with her and her father Tim! who is here for the weekend.

The three of us walked around a bit, we ended up seeing three people fall flat - one a twenty something man who drunkenly ran into a construction barricade, knocking it over and creating a lot of racket, before stumbling three or four feet and falling on his face. His friends came just short of kicking him as he lay there, cursing him and yelling at him to get up before grabbing him and flinging him to his feet. The second was a middle-aged lady wearing high heels on the cobblestoned rode in front of the Passage Pomeray. She seemed to slide a yard or two before coming to a rest; Tim helped her to her feet and she limped off with her two friends. The third was a SDF pandering for change inside a restaurant. He fell down just as he was exiting, and the crowd waited a while as he lay motionless on the ground before two men grabbed him roughly and stood him on his feet before shoving him out of the door. Additionally, a couple on a bicycle rode past us quickly, the boy at the handlebars all the while saying, "No breaks no breaks no breaks," and before he was quite beyond our hearing we heard him yell "NO BREAKS" and then the distinct sound of a crash.

It was, and this is an understatement, a bit of a crazy Nantaise night.

16 November, 2009

Biarritz: Things I loved....

  • The voyage: The train ride was beautiful. A river had over flowed its banks, putting whole orchards of sycamores and fruit trees in a blue, silvery mirror of water. Fields were lost beneath the six inches or so, and the whole landscape was beautiful as a result, seeming almost as though the stone walls and fences of the fields rose up not from the earth but instead out of a meters deep lake.
  • The city: On the edge of the ocean with dramatic bluffs and overlooks and even more dramatic waves. The town has established even more trails than San Sebastian, and Jonathan and I walked along them and ate our various picnic meals and watched the numerous surfers below.
  • The pastries: for breakfast we stopped into a market and ordered two tartlettes - mine was raspberry and Jonathan's was chocolate - and then ate them at another ocean overlook.
  • The chocolate: Biarritz is famous for its candies and so on our last day in town Jonathan and I went to one such chocolaterie, Miremont, and splurged on two chocolate domes - mine filled with mousse de café and his filled with dark chocolate mousee. It was the richest eating experience of my life. Additionally, Miremont was a very beautiful shop with its entire back wall given up to a view of the ocean and the entire interior looking as though it had likely not changed in a hundred years, with old mirrors and arm chairs and wall hangings. It was a very elegant experience to say the least.
  • The ocean. With waves more fierce and pounding than I have ever seen before.
  • Taco Mex: After trying to find an open restaurant for around an hour, Jonathan and I finally stumbled upon this little gem of a place, tucked back in an alley with its neon sign beaming like a beacon of hope. We went inside and were greeted by the nicest French couple I've met so far who spoke to us in a mix of French, Spanish and English. We ordered two fajitas, which arrived, looking desolate, small and all alone on our plates. They cost 9 euros (so roughly 13 dollars) and were so paltry looking it was laughable. Suddenly! Our waitress directed us to a buffet that contained the most appatizing display of Mexican food I have ever seen! Her husband, the chef, preceded to instruct us as to which beans were best with which sauces, what to eat with the the potatoes, which sauce to put on which fajita etc. He even would endearingly say, "Please, for me, put a little more of the green sauce on your corn." Which we did. And it was incredible. The next day it was all we could do to stay away until dinner time, but once 8 o'clock rolled around we found ourselves embarassingly coming back for more. The waitress greeted us with a, "Coming back for more!?" using the cutest French accent I've yet to hear. All together some of the best Mexican food I've ever had. And such a welcome treat.
  • Jonathan: One of my favorite traveling companions. On weekends like this, it almost feels like everything is a date - grocery shopping becomes romantic. I am simply crazy about him, and I'm so glad that at every turn in our lives where we could have suddenly found some way in which we're incompatible - like traveling - we instead figure out we're more compatible than we'd previously thought. So many couples have problems traveling with each other or simply have different ideas of what is important to do and see while traveling. Happily, Jonathan and I seem to have exactly the same concept of what traveling should consist of and divide our time between relaxing lethargically and then feverishly taking in the sights and tourist attractions. It's perfect. Each weekend like this has seemed so much longer than a weekend and I'm so glad to have gotten to see so many beautiful places with him!

12 November, 2009

Nantes Continued: The Yogurt Incident, Pumpkin Cheesecake, Le Petit Nicolas and more...


This past weekend I was quite ready for a break and so rather than going to Paris as I'd previously planned, I decided to stay in Nantes and relax and study for my midterms. And despite the fact that I know Paris would have been wonderful, I know I made the right decision. You can't do it all!

So Friday night I went out with Horance and Hanna for Sushi, which is another food I've just craved since being here. It was a pleasant enough evening; I tried Saki for the first time and found it very good. Coming outside after finishing dinnner, we found that it had started raining, and rather than going with Horace to meet up with other IES folks Hanna and I decided to go back to my apartment and watch a movie.

On the way home, we stopped by a super market and got some great caramel mousse yogurt. Arriving at the house, we said hello to Clotilde and then headed to my room. Which is when we realized we'd need spoons.

So.

This may not seem like any sort of issue at all, but I'm always so unsure of what's normal in such situations. For instance, I've never seen any of them eat anything outside of the kitchen. But we really just wanted to sit in bed and watch tv and eat yogurt. Additionally, I've never seen any of them snacking, and I didn't know how bizarre or not it would be for me at 10 o'clock to be eating yogurt in my room. So the original plan was for me to go sneak spoons out of the kitchen.

And I was scared about it.

Which is why when I ran into Clotilde in the hall I decided to just ask her if I could use two spoons to eat yogurt.

Which is when she started flipping out, in the sweetest way possible.

Saying (in French, of course):

Of course you can have spoons! of course! get some yogurt out of the fridge!

(I tell her me and Hanna bought yogurt)

What?!

You have the right to eat our yogurt! The right! you can eat yogurt anytime! you have the right! go sit in the kitchen and have some yogurt and drink some orange juice or something! are you two idiots? you don't need to buy yogurt!

She was laughing the whole time and so was I and I feel like it was a major turning point, after 2 months of being here, realizing that I can and really should chill out and just relax while I'm at home.

So anyway.

The next day Hanna and I went on a grand adventure to get moules-frites: mussles and fries. There's this little old building in the middle of the Bouffay that sells them that is ALWAYS either closed, full, or available by reservation only. This was our third or fourth attempt to get moules-frites, but it was incredibly worth it.

The building was terribly old and fabulous, very narrow but long, squeezed in between two buildings and obviously from about the 16th century. We sat on the second story and had the room all to ourselves for the first hour. I ordered mussles with cream, and Hanna ordered mussles with some sort of cheese sauce. A minute after ordering, a pound of mussles is placed in front of each of us dripping in delicious sauce. It is accompanied by a bottomless plate of the best fries I've had since being in France. We ate and ate and ate. It was the most satisfying meal of my life, and afterwards I was unbelievably tired. It was incredible.

Walking home, we passed by Clotilde's shop and stopped by. We told her we planned on making pumpkin cheesecake, and she told us that the girl who lived with them before me, Melissa, had left behind some canned pumkin, which is a good thing because you cannot buy canned pumpkin in France. So Clotilde told us how to use the oven and the stove and everything. She also gave us directions on how to get to the Park de Procé.

So going home we called Eliott Le Calvé. He is our new French friend that we met at the Conversation Club. He is very sweet and friendly and terribly in the know about what to do and where to go. He walked us to the park, which was very lovely and nice especially because unlike the Jardin, you're allowed to walk on the grass there.

We walked around there quite a while. The autmn colors are just barely existant, even at this late date, but they were pretty enough. We walked home on a greenway, and then Eliott escorted us to Monoprix to buy grociery supplies.

We had such a hard time finding everything to do with Pumpkin cheesecake. Cream cheese is practically non-existant here and very expensive. We got home and kept running into ingrediants we hadn't thought of that are less commonly used in France. Among them Vanilla and cinnamon. We also ran out of sugar. It turned into a massive undertaking, and the end product was somehow off. It might be the fact that we used a crust Clotilde already had that was not gramcracker. Or maybe it was the wierd consistancy of the cream cheese. Or maybe it was the brand of the pumpkin. Either way, the pie that we poured lots of time and money into ended up tasting kind of funky.

That night, after Clotilde insisted that Hanna and I eat some dinner before heading out for the evening and giving us coupons for the theater, Hanna and I went out again to meet Eliott to go see Le Petit Nicolas. I was a little anticipant as it was the first French movie I've ever watched without having French subtitles to read along with ( I can read French much better than I can understand it when spoken).

But! I am quite pleased to announce that I understood almost everything, other than a sentence or two now and then. I was so glad I went!

And then we took Eliott to meet some IES people at L'Huberloo. I got very animated during the evening talking to Seth about socialism and health care and America in general and was speaking very quickly and loudly. Eliott told me later that "It was great for him to hear because he'd never before heard an American talk in the back of their throat. Like in movies."

So there's that.

The next day all I did was study.

For lunch Clotilde served the Pumpkin cheese cake, which Erwan almost refused to eat, but it was just another one of those growing experiences. Rather than being mortified, as I might have been in the past, I thought the whole thing - them politely not liking the pie and trying their best to get out of eating it without letting me know thats what they were doing - really funny and endearing.

11 November, 2009

Wednesday Night Mexican Party, Jonathan in Nantes, and Avignon!

So Wednesday the 28th of October, Elisa Faison prepared a heavenly Mexican feast for a group of us at her house. It was seriously the best present ever, since I’ve been craving Mexican food since the day after arriving here. French cuisine is still superb, don’t get me wrong, but at times it lacks variety, and Mexican was EXACTLY what I needed. The evening was a lot of fun; Forest’s French brother Benoit and his girlfriend came to the party as well, making it a legitimate French party, and we all had a lot of fun dancing, drinking margaritas, and trying to teach Benoit how to make the “th” sound. To no avail.

Thursday, after helping Elisa clean up her house, Hanna and I headed to the bus station to wait for Jonathan, who ended up arriving around 2:30pm after traveling around 13 or 15 hours. We took him for a walk in le Jardin des Plantes, around the Chateau, into the Cathedral, all of our favorite Nantes haunts. He was obviously impressed.

He came back and got to see our apartments, and then after a while we headed to the Creperie Heb Ken where we continued to impress Jonathan with our knowledge of French cuisine, advising him as to which crepes were best to eat, what kind of cider to get, etc. We also took him to get the best gelato that exists in the world. Then we met up with Horace and headed to the L’Hurluberlu, our neighborhood bar, where we met up with Forest of Sewanee. Jonathan and Forest used to live across the hall from each other Freshman year. Anyway. Talked a bit. Shared a funny moment where Forest realized he’d stepped in dog crap (a frequent occurrence in France.) After an hour or so we parted ways, Jonathan going home with Horace who graciously offered him a place to stay.

The next morning, we got up around 10. Hanna and I bought the boys some pain au chocolate, which we shared before heading to the train station for our 9 hour train ride to Avignon. This ride was a bit stressful, us having no reserved seats. We at times ended up sitting on the floor. All in all though it was pleasantly passed. It is so much more enjoyable to take a train with friends than to take a train alone.

We got in Avignon a little late, checked in to our hotel, which was excellently located but a bit ridiculous (the walls were painted bright, bright bizarre colors and the beds were all CRAZY old and droopy and had cardboard underneath the mattresses in an attempt to add support. Also, Jonathan ended up getting bit by bed bugs, I’ve been informed.)

Then we walked around. Avignon was a little crazy, it being Holiday week, and there were lots of people wandering around drunk. So the first night we didn’t stay out too late.

Our first full day in Avignon, which was actually Halloween, we got up and headed to the Palais des Papes. It was very interesting, incredibly large. I loved best the rooms where they hadn’t added a history exhibit of any sort and it was easier to imagine what it would have looked like when lived in. I find it really amazing all of the different monuments humans have built over time. Then we headed to the Pont d’Avignon. I was so glad to be there – I’ve sung the song my whole life. I got to read all about St. Benezet and how half of the bridge was swept away centuries ago in a large flood. We, of course, all danced on the bridge, finishing with a lovely Charlie Brown style dance.

That night we went to get kabobs for dinner and loaded The Nightmare Before Christmas and It’s The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown, our only Halloween celebration consisted of watching those movies. I was a little homesick, it being the first year I’ve ever failed to dress up, carve a pumpkin, eat chili, and a number of other traditions.

The next day, we spent almost all day at the Jardin des Domes, a garden that sits atop a green hill next to the Pope Palace. It was very beautiful, full of happy French families and swans and a friendly cat. We walked around, and stopped in a church for All Saint’s Day. I bought a candle to light on behalf of the holiday. It’s strange because I was sort of kind of raised Catholic, in my early early years, and I still feel a very strong attachment at times to all of the rituals. Especially when in Europe.

We made sure to go back to the Jardin des Domes to watch the sunset. This is what it looked like:

That night, we had a more expensive meal at a nearby restaurant. It was more expensive but fairly mediocre. We also rode a carousel! Which was wonderful! And then we went to a nice bar called the Red Sky for drinks. Which was fun. Afterwards, we went back to the hotel room and stayed up for most of the night talking. About lots of serious things, like religion and relationships. It was very wonderful, and it felt so nice to have my two besties together.

Then came the long train ride home, this time Hanna and I alone. One of our trains had a weird spazatack climbing up a mountain which was slightly alarming; I would have been more scared if Hanna and I weren’t in such a goofy mood. Anyway, this made us ten minutes late, which caused us to miss our next train, which caused us to have an hour and a half lay over, but as a result we got to take a double decker train the rest of the way to Nantes. Which I enjoyed a lot.

And then.

We were back in Nantes!