Bonjour tout le monde!
I still don’t have internet in my apartment. Now I have to figure out who was the last person who lived here to get internet so the phone company can open the right line. So complicated.
Anyways, what did I do this weekend?
Leeeet’s see. I actually got up to go the big market that is by house on Saturday morning. It was an hour of bliss. I spent almost 20 euros on delicious fruits, vegetables, roast chicken, fresh pasta, jars of olive tapenade, and cookies. It was pretty bad of me to spend that much, but I really didn’t have any food and it was all so fresh and cheap compared to the supermarket which is usually the only place I have time to go to. There is a smaller market everyday in a square near my school, but it is over at one o’clock and that’s when I get out of my class. It is all very sad I know. The markets the markets. Oh man I can’t wait for tomorrow though because a long with the food market on Saturdays there is also a clothes/household/everything else market right next to it on Tuesdays/Thursdays/Saturdays. I’m going to get a leather bag for 20 euros! I am going to miss all of these markets when I go back to the US. We should definitely change our culture to have them.
Speaking of culture, my roommate and I were just talking about a main difference between America and France today. We were sitting at a restaurant/café around 5 pm and we ordered some coffee and although the place serves food it only serves food at the hours for lunch and for dinner, the rest of the day it’s open, but you can only get drinks. This is the same at almost all of the restaurants around Aix and probably true for most of France. I really could not see this flying in America. If you serve food at all you should be able to get it anytime of day. Although I guess America is a country on the go so we don’t have time to either wait around for the dinner or lunch hour or to stick to a routine. We are also a country of convenience and capitalism which is very much not France. If Americans will eat at anytime of the day and a restaurant can make money off of them then it will be done. Also, we want whatever we want when we want it. I’m not bagging on America or anything. I just think the differences are interesting.
Another thing I did this weekend that was pretty exciting is go to this club fair on Sunday. On the big main street in town a bunch of organizations and schools came out and set up booths. It was mostly dance schools, sports schools, political organizations, or music groups. There were a couple of things that were interesting though. There is this one group called “Mind the Cave”, they are a group of foreign students and they invite other foreign students to get together once a week to have dinner and talk and things like that. It’s only 3.50 euro for dinner! They also go on excursions and the like. My roommate and I are thinking about going. Another organization I thought was pretty cool is this organization that matches up foreign students with French families and the families take you out to dinner, teach you stuff, take you on outings and generally be like a host family except you don’t live with them. It’s pretty exciting and I signed up for it because it would be really nice to have a family that would show me aspects of French culture that I would never see living as a student with an American roommate and it’s without the home stay price. So I’m definitely going to do that. Also, there was this relatively cheap group voice class that is 30 euro a month for a once a week class. The teacher seems really nice too. She was telling us about how it’s a group thing to let people get more comfortable with singing first and then if they want to sing out on their own. I’m really excited about this one because even though I switched out of the voice major I really do miss singing all the time and singing with a purpose. It should be fun. Another interesting part of the fair was the Capoiera dancers. Capoiera (which I might be misspelling) is a Brazilian dance that looks like you’re fighting without touching one another. I really want to learn because it looks like fun, but I really don’t want to pay for it. There were also a lot of different schools offering salsa, tango, latin dancing which sounds really fun, but I’m sure I want to pay for it or make that commitment. So I have a lot of different stuff I can do around Aix that isn’t just school. It’s pretty exciting.
After the fair on Sunday my roommate and I decided to explore our neighborhood a little bit more. See Aix is composed of the center, which is the old medieval part, and then a road that circles it and outside that road it’s more like suburbs. My apartment is just on the edge of the center of town about a block away from the main road that goes around the center. We hadn’t really explored anything outside of the center of town yet because most everyone lives in the center and that’s where school is. Well we decided we wanted to find out what else was in Aix and ventured out a little bit. It was really interesting actually and we really liked it because the center of town is really really touristy and outside the center it is pretty chill. We decided that it was such a nice day outside we didn’t want to go back and sit around our apartment and set out to find a park. My roommate molly is pretty magic and she must have been drawn to the park because where I was going to turn down this one street and go back toward the center of town she had us go another way and we found a park! Then we walked down the street right next to it and found it was the street that goes right next to our house! We spent the afternoon there on a blanket watching clouds, listening to music, reading, taking pictures. It was so nice. We were actually so happy at one point we just started spontaneously laughing.
This week I've had the flu and had a fever for about a day, but now I'm all better. Luckily it wasn't the swine flu. The French are freakin out about it. They have signs up everywhere telling you how to deal with a flu, wash your hands, cough into your hand or arm, stay home for a little while. They are also playing it on tv and making it so some public service employees can’t deal with the public anymore so they all don’t get sick. It’s pretty crazy and they are really serious about it. Weird eh? Oh and btw I was just kidding about maybe having the swine flu. I honestly don’t think I have it so no freaking out over there!
Alright I think that is enough for this post.
French word for today: envoyer- to send
Oh this is probably a good thing to add, if anyone wants to send me a letter my address is:
1 bis rue d’Arpille
13100 Aix-en-Provence, France
Please don’t send packages here though because then I will have to go to the post office to get them. If you want to send me a package let me know, I’ll give you an address where you can send them.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Is back in black
Le 9 Septembre, 2009
Bonjour tout le monde! (Good day everyone!)
I know, I know it’s been a while. I still don’t have internet in my apartment though. My roommate and I went to Orange which is the main internet/cell phone/television/everything provider in France and it turns out we needed a lot of things that we didn’t have yet. The main one being this little slip of paper that proves we have a French bank account called an RIB and we can’t get that till everything we need to do to open a French bank account is completed. I had to wait until the bank sent me a letter that I had to sign for to prove that I live where I live. Even though I had brought my lease with my name on it and my signature, apparently that isn’t enough. BUT it came yesterday and I went and signed for it so hopefully tomorrow I can go and get that RIB, a check from the woman who helps out our program (neither of us have any French checks), and then go and get internet. Oh man has this been complicated, even though when we signed the lease our landlord was like “Oh just go to Orange and it will be simple” he obviously was WRONG.
Anyways, that is my excuse for not writing a blog post in a while because I’ve been waiting until I had internet in my own house. I have been using the internet in my friend’s apartment, but that’s not really the time I want to be writing a blog post, you know what I mean?
Alright enough of that talk. On to a new topic, how about my trip to Monaco? Yes that sounds great Marie. Good.
So, last Saturday I went on a trip to Monaco. It was very fortuitous since the week before this trip my roommate and I had been watching the Monaco international circus competition on TV and saying how we needed to go to Monaco. For those of you who don’t know, and shame on you, Monaco is a beautiful, tiny, principality on the French Riviera completely surrounded by France. It is the richest and most densely populated country in the world. Although that was pretty easy for them considering it’s about the size of L.A. County. I went with a group of friends through this man who offers tours to different places to student groups and the like. It was about a 3-4 hour bus ride from Aix to the hill overlooking Monte Carlo. This is where the prince’s palace is and the aquarium and things like that. We walked around and it was very touristy, all souvenir stores and restaurants. The views though were gorgeous, so much so that it was all sort of surreal. You’d walk down a lane and suddenly you would see something like this:
Funny story, while we were standing there looking at this view a seagull flew up and landed right in front of us:
One of my friends is terrified of birds and took one look at this bird and bolted while the rest of us teased her by talking to the bird and taking pictures of it. All the while the seagull just stood there and stared at us. She kept screaming “Stop taunting it! It’s going to attack!” It was pretty hilarious.
We were there for two hours and then got back on the bus to go down the hill to Monte Carlo. Monte Carlo is the place where the Formula 1 race happens and where the super fancy, high roller casino is. Really there is a dress code for the casino and everything. Also, the casino was the first place in Europe I’ve seen where you actually have to be 21 to go in. We strolled down to the beach (which is just as gorgeous as you would think the French Rivera to be) and got something to eat and then half of my friends stayed at the beach while the other half walked up around town looking for the casino. While looking for it we bumped into this church that was so gorgeous it looked like something out of a movie that you never would think existed in real life. Here is an unedited picture I took of it:
After we were in the church for a little while we wandered in the direction we thought the casino was and found it! It’s in what’s called the “casino square” according to my friend who is obsessed with the formula one race so he knows a lot about Monte Carlo. We didn’t try to get in to the big casino because the way we were dressed we knew we wouldn’t get in, but we did go in to the “casino americain” which was just a couple rooms filled with different types of slot machines. It was very Vegas. We were going to play just one slot machine just to so we could say we did, but you had to get tokens and that was just too much work, we didn’t want to play that many slots, so we left.
I did end up buying one thing in Monte Carlo, a fan with a drawing of Grace Kelly on it. Oh yes that is another bit of Monaco history. The American actress Grace Kelly married the prince of Monaco (the prince rules in a principality) and ruled with him for a while until she was killed in a tragic car crash in which the other woman, who was driving and rumored to be the prince’s lover, survived. The people of Monaco love her though.
After the casino it was time to go back to the bus and I slept all the way back. And that was my trip to Monaco!
One weird little tidbit about today, I was walking to and from the post office and I kept seeing all of these teenagers running around wearing trash bags covered in whip cream holding whip cream cans and paper plates. I wonder if it was a special event today or just teenagers being weird.
Another weird thing that I apparently missed on Sunday was a parade of pilgrims marching through the town with their horses. They were still cleaning up after the horses on Monday and man was there a smell.
Oh and if you want to look at pictures of my apartment there are too many to put on here but I will put one up:
And the rest you can see if you have a facebook, here’s the link:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2029070&id=1030800152
Also, an anecdote that shows how nice my landlord is:
So tonight my roommate was doing the dishes when all of a sudden there was this torrent of water gushing out of the cabinet beneath the sink. We had no idea what was going on and looked into the cabinet to see this little open spout pointing upwards out of the main pipe. Water kept spurting out of it and into the cabinet. Now I was wondering what the point was of an open bit to a sink pipe as I was trying to mop up all the water. The weird thing was that it hadn’t happened before and when we tried to run water about a minute later it didn’t happen again. Well we were still like “maybe we should tell the landlord anyway, since it did flood our kitchen a little bit”. Our landlord lives right above us so my roommate and I walked up there and rang the doorbell (which kind of sounded like a cat dying it was strange). My landlord’s wife opened the door and even though we had never met her she was so excited to see us and invited us in enthusiastically. She called her husband out and made us sit down and asked us what was up. As if they didn’t mind if we had just come up to talk to them about nothing in particular. So we told them in broken French with much gesticulating (they don’t speak English really at all) that the sink was broken and spurting water all over the floor. He didn’t understand exactly what was happening because, you know, we both don’t speak each other’s language very well so he came down to look at it. He looked at it and was like “oh ok tomorrow morning at 8:30 I’ll have a plumber over to fix it, don’t worry about the mess I’ll clean it up” all in French of course, but I understand people speaking French better than I speak it myself. Then he asked all worried “is everything else ok?” and we were like “yes of course! This is the only problem we’ve had” and he was so glad it was adorable. Then he asked if we wanted to come up and have something to drink with his wife and we politely refused because we had things to do. And then he invited us to one night come over and he would teach us how to make the French food of the region! Cakes!, he said, Marvelous dishes! And no we would not just eat we would help him cook! Think about it and let him know when we want to come! It was adorable. I can’t wait. I love the French people and their hospitality.
Anyways, that’s enough for now. Hopefully I’ll get to post this tomorrow. I went strolling around the neighborhood today and found this pizzeria/bar place with free internet! It’s just around the corner! I’m excited.
French phrase for today: peut-être. It means “maybe”
UPDATE: I have internet! Well I bought internet and now we have to wait a week for the phone company to open our line, but hey! It's on it's way!
Bonjour tout le monde! (Good day everyone!)
I know, I know it’s been a while. I still don’t have internet in my apartment though. My roommate and I went to Orange which is the main internet/cell phone/television/everything provider in France and it turns out we needed a lot of things that we didn’t have yet. The main one being this little slip of paper that proves we have a French bank account called an RIB and we can’t get that till everything we need to do to open a French bank account is completed. I had to wait until the bank sent me a letter that I had to sign for to prove that I live where I live. Even though I had brought my lease with my name on it and my signature, apparently that isn’t enough. BUT it came yesterday and I went and signed for it so hopefully tomorrow I can go and get that RIB, a check from the woman who helps out our program (neither of us have any French checks), and then go and get internet. Oh man has this been complicated, even though when we signed the lease our landlord was like “Oh just go to Orange and it will be simple” he obviously was WRONG.
Anyways, that is my excuse for not writing a blog post in a while because I’ve been waiting until I had internet in my own house. I have been using the internet in my friend’s apartment, but that’s not really the time I want to be writing a blog post, you know what I mean?
Alright enough of that talk. On to a new topic, how about my trip to Monaco? Yes that sounds great Marie. Good.
So, last Saturday I went on a trip to Monaco. It was very fortuitous since the week before this trip my roommate and I had been watching the Monaco international circus competition on TV and saying how we needed to go to Monaco. For those of you who don’t know, and shame on you, Monaco is a beautiful, tiny, principality on the French Riviera completely surrounded by France. It is the richest and most densely populated country in the world. Although that was pretty easy for them considering it’s about the size of L.A. County. I went with a group of friends through this man who offers tours to different places to student groups and the like. It was about a 3-4 hour bus ride from Aix to the hill overlooking Monte Carlo. This is where the prince’s palace is and the aquarium and things like that. We walked around and it was very touristy, all souvenir stores and restaurants. The views though were gorgeous, so much so that it was all sort of surreal. You’d walk down a lane and suddenly you would see something like this:
Funny story, while we were standing there looking at this view a seagull flew up and landed right in front of us:
One of my friends is terrified of birds and took one look at this bird and bolted while the rest of us teased her by talking to the bird and taking pictures of it. All the while the seagull just stood there and stared at us. She kept screaming “Stop taunting it! It’s going to attack!” It was pretty hilarious.
We were there for two hours and then got back on the bus to go down the hill to Monte Carlo. Monte Carlo is the place where the Formula 1 race happens and where the super fancy, high roller casino is. Really there is a dress code for the casino and everything. Also, the casino was the first place in Europe I’ve seen where you actually have to be 21 to go in. We strolled down to the beach (which is just as gorgeous as you would think the French Rivera to be) and got something to eat and then half of my friends stayed at the beach while the other half walked up around town looking for the casino. While looking for it we bumped into this church that was so gorgeous it looked like something out of a movie that you never would think existed in real life. Here is an unedited picture I took of it:
After we were in the church for a little while we wandered in the direction we thought the casino was and found it! It’s in what’s called the “casino square” according to my friend who is obsessed with the formula one race so he knows a lot about Monte Carlo. We didn’t try to get in to the big casino because the way we were dressed we knew we wouldn’t get in, but we did go in to the “casino americain” which was just a couple rooms filled with different types of slot machines. It was very Vegas. We were going to play just one slot machine just to so we could say we did, but you had to get tokens and that was just too much work, we didn’t want to play that many slots, so we left.
I did end up buying one thing in Monte Carlo, a fan with a drawing of Grace Kelly on it. Oh yes that is another bit of Monaco history. The American actress Grace Kelly married the prince of Monaco (the prince rules in a principality) and ruled with him for a while until she was killed in a tragic car crash in which the other woman, who was driving and rumored to be the prince’s lover, survived. The people of Monaco love her though.
After the casino it was time to go back to the bus and I slept all the way back. And that was my trip to Monaco!
One weird little tidbit about today, I was walking to and from the post office and I kept seeing all of these teenagers running around wearing trash bags covered in whip cream holding whip cream cans and paper plates. I wonder if it was a special event today or just teenagers being weird.
Another weird thing that I apparently missed on Sunday was a parade of pilgrims marching through the town with their horses. They were still cleaning up after the horses on Monday and man was there a smell.
Oh and if you want to look at pictures of my apartment there are too many to put on here but I will put one up:
And the rest you can see if you have a facebook, here’s the link:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2029070&id=1030800152
Also, an anecdote that shows how nice my landlord is:
So tonight my roommate was doing the dishes when all of a sudden there was this torrent of water gushing out of the cabinet beneath the sink. We had no idea what was going on and looked into the cabinet to see this little open spout pointing upwards out of the main pipe. Water kept spurting out of it and into the cabinet. Now I was wondering what the point was of an open bit to a sink pipe as I was trying to mop up all the water. The weird thing was that it hadn’t happened before and when we tried to run water about a minute later it didn’t happen again. Well we were still like “maybe we should tell the landlord anyway, since it did flood our kitchen a little bit”. Our landlord lives right above us so my roommate and I walked up there and rang the doorbell (which kind of sounded like a cat dying it was strange). My landlord’s wife opened the door and even though we had never met her she was so excited to see us and invited us in enthusiastically. She called her husband out and made us sit down and asked us what was up. As if they didn’t mind if we had just come up to talk to them about nothing in particular. So we told them in broken French with much gesticulating (they don’t speak English really at all) that the sink was broken and spurting water all over the floor. He didn’t understand exactly what was happening because, you know, we both don’t speak each other’s language very well so he came down to look at it. He looked at it and was like “oh ok tomorrow morning at 8:30 I’ll have a plumber over to fix it, don’t worry about the mess I’ll clean it up” all in French of course, but I understand people speaking French better than I speak it myself. Then he asked all worried “is everything else ok?” and we were like “yes of course! This is the only problem we’ve had” and he was so glad it was adorable. Then he asked if we wanted to come up and have something to drink with his wife and we politely refused because we had things to do. And then he invited us to one night come over and he would teach us how to make the French food of the region! Cakes!, he said, Marvelous dishes! And no we would not just eat we would help him cook! Think about it and let him know when we want to come! It was adorable. I can’t wait. I love the French people and their hospitality.
Anyways, that’s enough for now. Hopefully I’ll get to post this tomorrow. I went strolling around the neighborhood today and found this pizzeria/bar place with free internet! It’s just around the corner! I’m excited.
French phrase for today: peut-être. It means “maybe”
UPDATE: I have internet! Well I bought internet and now we have to wait a week for the phone company to open our line, but hey! It's on it's way!
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
A quickie
Bonjour tout la monde!
Sorry this is a day late and it's not even going to be a complete post.
School just started yesterday and I've been super busy with that and moving into my new place and such.
Plus I will be without internet for a couple days so you will have to wait even longer for my post.
SORRY!
To make it up to you the next post will arrive with beaucoup de photos. D'accord? Ok?
Oh that will be your french word of the day
D'accord-
Literally means in accordance
is used as "ok"
Au'revoir
Sorry this is a day late and it's not even going to be a complete post.
School just started yesterday and I've been super busy with that and moving into my new place and such.
Plus I will be without internet for a couple days so you will have to wait even longer for my post.
SORRY!
To make it up to you the next post will arrive with beaucoup de photos. D'accord? Ok?
Oh that will be your french word of the day
D'accord-
Literally means in accordance
is used as "ok"
Au'revoir
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