Number Two...

of the Two Things I Most Wanted To See In France.

Mont Ste. Michel. Yay!

This was my final voyage while in France-I'm leaving this Friday (July 1) and heading back stateside! I was alone for this trip :-( but it was quite enjoyable. I left from Mulhouse at 4:54 am, had a train change in Strasbourg, and arrived in Rennes at 11:45 am. I got to ride in first class for the train there since it was only 2 euros more expensive. It was nice to have more leg room and an electrical outlet so I could plug in my iPod for the entire ride. Once I got to Rennes, I took the Métro (small enough that it barely qualifies as a subway) to the closest stop to the hostel and got somewhat lost trying to find it since the directions given on the website were not very good. Once I found it, I checked in and then spent the rest of the day walking around Rennes. Not my favorite city that I've visited (that one currently goes to Avignon), but not bad either.

I woke up rather early the next day, ate breakfast, and boarded the Métro again in order to catch the bus to Mont Ste. Michel. The ride was a little over an hour so I just listened to music and attempted to take in the countryside (or sleep. I failed on that count). You can see the Mont from several kilometers away, and it is breathtaking. It's also really big. The Abbey is the part that is most visible, but the lower part of the mountain is narrow streets designed to cater to tourists-lots of shops, museums, and restaurants. You can walk along the ramparts and also, when it isn't surrounded by water, walk out on the sand/mud and rocks to take pictures from below. The view is spectacular; you can see quite a long way along the Normandy coast and beyond. The abbey itself was rather interesting as well, with many different chapels and other rooms for the monks who lived there. I happened to arrive in the main cathedral as Mass was going on so I wasn't able to get as close of a look at that part as I would have liked. Weather-wise, it was very windy and rather cold for most of the day-I had to wear my jacket most of the time which is quite the contrast to Mulhouse at the moment-it actually made it to 93 degrees today (34 degrees Celsius). I caught the bus back to Rennes along with a group of tourists from California.

My trains from Rennes to Mulhouse were pretty uneventful. I had to change in Paris (including the station, which involved taking the Métro there) and in Strasbourg, but I arrived at about 3 o'clock. It was a good trip!

Bruxelles, Part 2

The rest of Bruxelles.

We decided to sleep in a little on Sunday since we were aware that everything opens later on Sunday. We ate our (pitiful) breakfast, then headed out to spend our day walking/metro-ing around the city. Our first stop was the Palais de Justice, but unfortunately for us, all of our pictures were marred by the scaffolding that covered much of the building. Very disappointing. After that, we went to the fine arts museum. We both agreed that it was better to see the religious art from the 15th-18th centuries rather than the modern art, since that is, in general, a phenomenon that neither of us gets. See my post on Colmar for further explanation.

After the art museum, we went to see the outside of the Belgian Royal Palace. Unfortunately there were no tours (very sad, we like palaces), so we took a few photos than continued to the park where we finally found another one of Bruxelles' staple foods-WAFFLES! I had a waffle with pistachio ice cream and Jackie had a waffle literally covered in whipped cream. They were both excellent.

After the wonderful waffles, we went on a search for the buildings of the European Union. This was interesting for me simply because I'm a political science major with a focus on international relations and, well, a lot of international relations goes on in those buildings. It would have been nice to at least get to go inside the buildings, but sadly it was not to be. The visitor's center for the European Parliament isn't set to open until the fall.

We went to see the Cinquantenaire Park, which is primarily known for having a very large building known as Belgium's Arc de Triomphe. Contained in one side of the building is an archaeology museum, which covered everything from Ancient Egypt to the Americas to Islamic art to Chinese art. It was very interesting and took several hours to go through even though many of the artifacts were very similar to those I have seen in other museums.

Our last day, we checked out of the hostel and went to the chocolate museum (samples and a demonstration! yay!) and a brewing museum (wasn't much to see there). Then we ate a quick lunch and I boarded my train for my trip back to Mulhouse!

Bruxelles Part One.

Two blog posts in a month...if it weren't for the four from February this would be a record.

Last weekend was a very fun one. Friday afternoon, I boarded a train from Mulhouse. After six hours and fifteen minutes of varying degrees of annoying seatmates and boredom, I arrived in Bruxelles (Brussels, for all you non-French speakers), Belgium. Sadly, thanks to the Schengen Agreement, this no longer warrants a stamp on my passport. I've gone to Switzerland, Germany, the U.K. (well, Heathrow Airport), and Belgium and not received a single stamp. This depresses me. I want proof of my travels in my passport! Anyway, back to my story-I stepped off the train, went down an escalator, and surprise, surprise! There was Jackie waiting for me! We proceeded to get a little lost in Bruxelles Midi station as we looked for the Metro, but after that we were pretty easily able to find our hostel.

The next morning we got up quite early (earlier than we needed to, as we later found out, since nothing opens before 10 am on weekends in Bruxelles) and attempted to find the Atomium. It wasn't listed on any of our maps except for an arrow pointing in the general direction of the river. We saw several street signs, but nothing to indicate where the Atomium might be. After about an hour of wandering and searching, we decided to find the Comic Strip Museum instead. This we were able to find quite easily, and when we got there, we were a little early so we started looking at various brochures. We found one for the Atomium, and lo and behold-it was in exactly the opposite direction we'd been searching and absolutely no where near the river (hence why it wasn't on the map-it was too far out). Fortunately, it sits on a Metro line so we were able to visit it that afternoon.

What the Atomium is: It is a very large model of an iron crystal. When I say "very large", I mean "magnified 165 billion times and large enough to house elevators and escalators for visitors). It was quite fascinating-being inside an iron crystal, yet reading exhibits about immigration to Brussels. Immediately after exiting the Atomium, we walked across the street to Mini-Europe. Mini-Europe is exactly what it sounds like, a walk through incredibly detailed miniatures of major cities and/or buildings from almost every country in Europe. These models were incredibly detailed-in some cases even having very tiny people and moving parts. Each model had a plaque marking its country as well as a button which when pushed played the country's national anthem.

Food: Moules-frites (mussels and fries, yum!) for lunch and pasta in a random Italian restaurant.
Entertainment of the night: Watching/Listening to the various Maître D's trying to sell tourists on their restaurants by very vocally competing with each other.

More Bruxelles later...

Hi!

I'm not dead, I promise. Really.

Since I posted, I've been to Paris, Avignon, Carcassonne, Freiburg (again), and Basel (two more times).
My parents came to visit, which was really exciting (for them and myself), but it did make me quite homesick. My favorite place was Avignon; I thought it was exciting, historical, and gorgeous. It didn't hurt that the weather was absolutely perfect the two days we spent there. The view of Carcassonne was stunning, our hotel looked right out onto the old city, which is lit up at night. Paris, was, well, Paris. I got to go to Versailles, which was the first of the two places that I absolutely had to see in France.

I'm waiting on the results of my exams at the moment. I know that I passed my Français Langue Étrangère exams very well, but I don't know about the others.

This weekend, I'm meeting up with my friend Jackie from USC in Bruxelles!!!

A Lot Of Stuff

I know I haven’t updated in forever, and I’m sorry. I know, I know, I’m terrible at this whole blogging thing. I keep telling myself I’ll update it, and somehow I never seem to manage it. So here goes…talking about the last 1-¾ months in one long post.

I’ll start with classes, just to get that out of the way. My classes are up and down. I can tell that my FLE class has definitely helped to improve my French-I can catch more of my errors before I make them, and I can better formulate responses to what’s going on around me. My linguistics classes are going fairly well - I understand the material fairly well and my professor is pretty understanding when I don’t. My hardest class by far is my Renaissance Literature class. The professor tends to mumble, to the point at which I truly cannot understand more than a few words here and there of what he is saying. The exam will be very difficult for me not only for that reason but because the format is a type of essay that I haven’t had to do before (and certainly not in French). That is the one thing I am most worried about for the end of the semester. I know that I am taking more credits than USC will give me credit for so even if I don’t do very well on the exam I should be okay with my credits (though no one on either USC nor UHA’s end seems to be able to give me a clear answer as to how my credits will transfer, as individual 3-credit courses or as one large 15-credit course). At this point, all I can do is study my readings, learn as best I can the proper format for the essay, and then do my best on exam day.

Now for the fun stuff - trips. Since I last posted, I have visited Colmar, Strasbourg (3 times), Basel (again), Freiburg, and several mountains. The accounts of these visits are somewhat out of order, so bear with me.

Colmar is a very typical Alsatian town between Mulhouse and Strasbourg. Some of us who weren’t able to go home for the winter break because we live too far away or had to work decided to visit it. As those of you with Facebook (hopefully) saw, the buildings are of the typical Middle Ages design, with many of the ground floors (known as the “rez-de-chausée” in French) now hosting modern stores. We saw the church in the center of town. It was nice, but not the most interesting of the churches I’ve seen since arriving in France. We also visited the Musée d’Unterlinden, which is the art museum and is located inside a former convent. Having seen some of the modern paintings in the museum, I would just like to say: I don’t get it. Some of these paintings I know I could have done, so I have no idea why they are considered art worthy of a museum. It doesn’t make sense to me. I guess that’s why I’ll never be the person who chooses what art gets placed in collections and what doesn’t. We also went to see the history museum, which had an interesting feature on Coptic Egypt, as well as several displays of bugs, including one extremely large Japanese spider that if I ever saw it in real life would cause me to run screaming from the room in terror. All in all, Colmar was a nice town, but I don’t know if I’ll go back unless I decide to take my mom and dad there when they’re here.

I’ve visited Strasbourg three times now, two for enjoyment and one for necessity. The first time was the first Saturday of winter break. Caroline and I went to meet our friend from USC, Michelle, who was arriving in Europe that week. I got to eat my first tarte flambée, and I immediately fell in love (as much as one can fall in love with food). The best way for me to describe tarte flambée to one who was never heard of it is to say that it is essentially a pizza with a very thin crust and no tomato sauce, but it is absolutely fantastic. After we met up with Michelle at the train station, we went to visit the Cathedral. The Cathedral in Strasbourg is, well, amazing. It’s really, really big, so you can see the spire from far away but it is situated such that you can’t see the whole front until you turn onto a specific street and then it completely fills your line of vision. There is a large clock on the inside that turns every hour and has several different forms of measurement. One of the more interesting things to me, as an American, was just to the side of the clock. It was an inscription on the wall near the choir that commemorated the American soldiers in World War II who gave their lives to free Alsace. I found it surprising not that there was a commemorative sign, but that it was on the inside of the Cathedral. I don’t know where I would have expected one to be, but that wasn’t it.

My second visit to Strasbourg was exactly one week later with a few of the exchange students (mostly the same ones as the trip to Colmar). We visited the Cathedral (of course) but the main highlight of this trip was the boat ride on the River Ill. If you have ever been on the bateau-mouche in Paris, this was essentially the same thing. We got on the boat and there was a set of headphones on each seat, which provided running commentary in about eight languages about each site we passed. On the ride, we passed the European Parliament and government buildings, which I had wanted to see but were too far to walk to easily. Other than that, we spent much of the day walking to and from different sites of the city.

My third (and possibly final) visit to Strasbourg was just last week so I could finish the second part of my visa (the titre du séjour). I had to arrive in the morning for the medical exam, which involved an x-ray of my perfectly healthy lungs in order to check for tuberculosis. I then had to wait to talk to a doctor about my medical history so he could sign off that I could stay in France for the duration of my visa. I was glad to see that the whole process only took about an hour and I was able to leave quickly.

I visited Basel for a second time during Carnaval to see the Morganstreich. Morganstreich starts at 4 am, so the exchange students all took the special train at 2:18 am in order to secure a good viewing spot. We then waited until 4, at which time all the lights on the street went out and the colorful lanterns were lit to start the parade. The parade is made up of people dressing up as what appears to be cartoon versions of historical and current figures. There is a lot of piccolo music and drums, and there appears to be no single specified parade route. It was completely different than anything I’ve seen at home, though I must admit that I was too tired by the end to appreciate everything that was happening.

A few weeks ago Karolina and I visited Freiburg, Germany. It is a little more difficult to get to Freiburg if you don’t have a car (which of course, we don’t). We took a bus to Müllheim and then a train to Freiburg. We spent the day walking around parts of the city as well as some of the surrounding hills. I was even able to get Starbucks for the first time since arriving in Europe! I’m planning on heading back to Freiburg on Tuesday to see my friend Naomi from Oakton who is currently studying abroad there, so I will write more about it then.

Ahhhh…the mountains. The Vosges Mountains are very near to Mulhouse, and there are lots of little trains to connect to them. Last weekend, Karolina, Mar, Francesc, Sherif, and I decided to visit Mont Ste. Odile, which is the location of an abbey that dates from the 7^th century. In order to reach the abbey from Mulhouse without a car, one must take the train to a town called Selestat, then take a smaller train to a smaller town called Obernai, then take a bus to an even smaller town called Ottrott, then either take a taxi or hike 763 meters up a mountain. I think everyone reading this knows what we decided to do, and it wasn’t to take the taxi. We randomly met another guy at the bus about our age that is currently doing an internship in Strasbourg, and he ended up climbing up and down the mountain with us. The way up was difficult because…well, we were climbing a mountain. It was definitely worth it, because the view was incredible. We could see quite a few small towns, many of which are known for their wine. The abbey itself was nice, but I personally felt that the view from it was more impressive than the buildings themselves. It was difficult to get to from Mulhouse (just getting to the bottom of the mountain can take almost 3 hours) and VERY tiring, but it was a lot of fun.

WHEW! This has been a very long post that took me over an hour to type up. Note to self: don’t put off blogging, it’ll be painful if you do! The next two weeks are spring break, then there are two more weeks, then its exam time. I’m pretty sure I’ll be taking some solo trips this week, and then next week my parents are coming to visit so I will definitely have more stories to share (if anyone is actually reading this).

Measurements

I was making crêpes this morning and thinking about how the U.S. and the rest of the world use totally different systems to measure, well, everything. Miles/kilometers, cups/grams, gallons/liters, fahrenheit/celsius, dollars/euros/pounds/whatever, etc. It gets somewhat confusing when I look at a measuring cup and have to actually think about how much of something I'm putting in. It gets even more confusing when I have to explain a measurement to someone who isn't familiar with the American system. When it comes to the question, "How far is something in the U.S. from something else?" I usually start trying to explain then end up saying how long it takes to get between the two places. I can do temperatures pretty quickly thanks to chemistry class, but money is difficult because the conversion is never exactly the same. Maybe this is just a problem for me because I suck at math, but it is sometimes really difficult to a figure out the numbers and then to explain them in French! It would be so useful to all use the same system (not that I think that'll ever actually happen).

One Month

So...I've officially been here one month. Wow. It's gone by really fast, but it's been (mostly) great.

Almost had my phone line cut today because the company thought I hadn't sent them my address. When I tried to call their customer service line I couldn't understand more than four words of what the recording was saying so I had to rush downtown before class and take care of it. And that is my adventure of the day.