my directionally retarded-ness reaches a new level

so as most of you probably know, i have no sense of direction. while my 2am revelation told me that it is the sole reason for my happiness at fairfield (right kristen??) it still gets me into trouble. yesterday it hit a new level. elyse may have told this story already in her blog, but i'm telling my version.

so elyse and i are taking an art class that is about a half hour walk outside of center city Aix. we usually dont mind walking there but we take the bus back cuz by that time we're too tired to walk. usually elyse gets off at the stop near her connection to get home, and i get off at the next stop right near my house. but this time we wanted to go pick up some stuff at Monoprix before we went home, so we decided that since we always catch the bus at the rotund (big circle on the main street of town), that it probably loops right back to that spot, and monoprix is right across the street. so we decided to take it there. it would make logical sense that bus loops back to where the line starts right?? well it doesnt. we turned down the wrong way and were like hmm well its not going the right way, but it must go back to the rotund eventually, so we'll just ride it out. soon we got on the highway and were definitely heading out of the city. at that point if we had gotten off we would have had a loooong walk back to town, so we just kept thinking it would eventually go back. we started seeing countryside, mountains, fields, basically no civilization, but there were still other people on the bus. we hadnt stopped in a while, so finally after about 20 minutes we did. and EVERYONE got off. again, naively, we assumed it must go back.
i did not handle this situation very well. i hate being lost and i hate not knowing where i'm going, and i started getting slightly hysterical, although i was laughing and crying at the same time. regardless, i started panicking and begged elyse to go ask the bus driver if he was going back to town. so finally she got up, asked if he was going back to aix, and he said "no." SHIT!! she asked what we should do to get back and he told us we could get off at the next stop and another bus would come that was going back to town. the next stop didnt come for another 15 minutes, and he stopped and turned the engine off. he told us to get out, and he got out, and soon another bus pulled up. he went over to ask the other bus driver if he was going back to the city, and HE said no!! they were talking really fast in french and i had no idea what was going on, elyse and i were freaking out. after some conversation and stuff, they switched buses, and our same bus driver drove the second bus back to aix. THANK GOD. i dont think he was supposed to, i honestly think he may have made an extra trip for us. maybe. i want to find out that guy's address and send him a bottle of wine or something.
so that was my first truly traumatic experience in aix, and i suppose i survived. lesson learned: never assume that the bus schedule/route makes any logical sense. 2nd lesson learned: angels do exist, sometimes in the form of french bus drivers.

Trip to Nice!

So this past weekend we took a school trip to Nice, which is about an hour south of Aix right on the French Riviera. We had such a great time! We walked all over the town, looking in shops and checking out the views which were unbelievable. It’s all mountains overlooking the Mediterranean, and I took some awesome pictures (of course). We went to the beach but because it was miserable and rainy when we left Aix, none of us predicted the beautiful weather that showed up a few hours later in Nice, therefore none of us had our bathing suits. But we did the rolled up jeans thing and waded in, then of course a wave came and got our jeans wet anyway. The beach is all stones, not sand, so it kinda killed ur feet as you walked around, but it was really pretty. We had a lot of fun.

One of my favorite parts was when we went to the town’s famous ice cream place, Fennochios (no idea how to spell that) which is famous for having pretty much every ice cream flavor you could imagine. Seriously, they put Cold Stone to shame. They had flavors like pepper chocolate, mandarin chocolate, blackberry, white chocolate, fig, rhubarb, cookie, avocado, cactus, pear, apple cinnamon, and they even had flower flavors like rose, violet, lavender, poppy, and jasmine. And yes, they even had BEER flavored ice cream, although I’m pretty sure it would have tasted gross. I had (are you ready?) one scoop of jasmine, and one scoop of cactus. it actually was really good! The cactus was anyway, the jasmine was a little bit overpowering, which I should have guessed because the jasmine flower has a really strong smell. Any kind of flower-flavored ice cream though gives you the weirdest sensation..it’s like you’re smelling it in your mouth, it’s crazy! Elyse had pink grapefruit and poppy, which was really good too. We got crazy flavors cuz we’re in france and it’s time to be adventurous damn it. That’s my theory anyway.

Later that day we went to the Matisse museum, a famous modern/impressionist artist. It was ok I guess, but I definitely learned that I’m not all that into modern art. We then took a bus to the place we were staying, a town just outside of Nice called Cap d’Aie (which means Cape Garlic), in a surprisingly nice youth hostel there. The grounds were gorgeous, right on the mountainside. We took a really short (like literally 45 minutes) trip to Monte Carlo, where we saw the famous Monte Carlo casino, which was pretty ridiculous. Just looking at the jewelry in the stores around that area made me feel poor haha. You had to be dressed nicely, be 21, and have your passport to go in and gamble, so 20-year-old me dressed in jeans stayed outside. We walked around a little, saw a drunk guy get escorted by police which was pretty amusing, and then went back to the hostel. When we got back, the hostel put on a “discotheque” (basically a club) for us in the cafeteria of the place, with wine and dancing and everything. It was sooo much fun. Elyse and I split a bottle of rose wine, killed it in like 30 minutes, then finished the red wine that Liz and Stephanie had bought (which was pretty gross but I was at the point where I didn’t care). I would like to make it known that ELYSE GOT DRUNK FOR THE FIRST TIME. I was sooo excited lol. They played all American music and we danced all night..we had a really great time. Elyse was labeled as an “annoying drunk” by Stephanie, which I found amusing. She also displayed her bra on the shelf when she went to bed, and apparently I was making jokes about it being a limited time only display at a museum and people buying tickets to go see it. Don’t ask.

The next morning we had breakfast, attempted to recover from the night before, saw this greek ampitheatre that was on the property of the hostel which was pretty cool, and then headed off to another town called St. Paul de Vince, also on the Riviera. It’s this little medieval town with a wall built all around the city, completely restored. It was really cute to walk around and the views were amazing. Again, I have lots of pictures. We grabbed lunch at a sandwich shop and ate on the wall overlooking the mountains. Behind us in line were obnoxious Americans who didn’t even TRY to speak French, which has become one of my pet peeves over here. But anyway, we went to another modern art museum, however this one was a little cooler than the Matisse one. Some of the works like moved and stuff with magnetic fields and gears and all that, which was fun to watch. Still, we still got some that were like a square canvas just painted black with a yellow line down the side. Ok, now I can do that. How does that get in a museum?? Baffling. So after the museum and town-touring, we finally returned to Aix, sleeping the entire 2 hour bus ride home. We all had a fantastic time! Check out pics at http://photos.yahoo.com/aixtraordinary

Miss you all!
*Cristin

i love my roomate

i love my roomate! i want it known that my first piece of mail was not from my parents, not from my boyfriend, but from my awesome roomate :) i love you kristen! so that pretty much made my day. elyse and brian and i ate lunch at a cafe in the rain, we kinda squished ourselves under the umbrellas, but brian was on the outside and had to eat with his umbrella zippered into his coat. it was pretty funny. i'm leaving for nice bright and early tomorrow morning, so i'm pretty excited. i'll be taking lots of pictures and posting them! :-* miss u all!

Week 2, here we gooo

So I don’t remember when the last time I posted on this was…I have such limited internet access that I can pretty much post once a week at most. When I have internet I don’t even have time to write this, I write it in word the night before lol and I copy and paste.
Anyway…

I’ve officially been here for almost 2 weeks, and I’m having a great time so far. This past weekend was a lot of fun. Friday night we went out on the town with a bunch of the girls from school. We stopped at a bar and had this thing called a girafe. Some of u might have seen it before, it’s like a giant cylinder of beer that sits in the middle of the table with a tap at the bottom. We split it between 4 people at the table, and we each had plenty haha it was pretty cool. There was another room in the bar we were at where they were playing music and people were dancing, and I TRIED to get people to dance with me and they all just stood awkwardly..they suck lol. Meg I need you!! So we left that place and we went to this Irish pub called O’Shannons (I found that ironic 1 because it’s my little sister’s name and 2 because my first time in an irish pub is in France). Anyway, there we got a few mixed drinks (I know, we totally violated the beer before liquor rule), I had this green apple flavored thing called a Manzana, that according to elyse is so strong that it “tastes like a green apple punched you in the FACE.” Then we saw a bunch of other people from our school so we went over to talk to them, and before you know it a bunch of Swedish guys are buying everyone plates of shots. I mean like trays full of about 20 shots each. It was insane. They were really good flavored ones too, like probably half alcohol and half some flavor liqueur. I had one of each, strawberry peach and apple..they were sooo good. I had some of the giraffe too again, so I was feelin pretty good. It was fun talking to all the Swedish people tho, they spoke English better than French so it was easy to communicate, and we def had fun talking to them. There were a few sketchy ones tho, one guy came up to me and said “if you like France, you drink this.” I was like ummm I’m good thanks. And some other guy told me that American girls don’t drink enough…I was like um look around, everyones hammered!! I didn’t really understand their mentality..i mean obviously they were trying to get all the girls drunk, but wouldn’t it be cheaper to buy for like one or two girls and get them drunk instead of buying for everyone?? Craziness haha.
Anyway, that was Friday night and we had so much fun, so we slept in Saturday and hit up Monoprix (the French equivalent to walmart except more expensive) and got some snacks for home to hold us over for dinner, cuz we’re always starving by 6:00 and we don’t eat dinner til 8:30! Then we walked around town, got pizza (yes they do have pizza here, thank God) and did some window-shopping. Whenever u walk into a shop its considered really rude to not say “bonjour” to the owner, and when you leave, even if u didn’t buy anything, u say “merci, au revoir.” They probably think I’m totally rude cuz I’ve def forgotten to do that a couple times. After our shopping, elyse and I sat in a café for like 3 hours and did some homework. Its really cool, you can buy one thing and sit there for as long as you want. So we got “citron presse” which is lemonade, we think. But its direct translation is “pressed lemon” and that’s pretty much what it is, fresh-squeezed lemon juice in a glass, and they give you sugar and water to kinda make ur own lemonade. So anyways we sat at the café for a while, sketched for our drawing class, etc. nice relaxing rest of the weekend.

My classes are going great, I really like them and I can follow the French ones way more easily than I thought I would. My drawing class is a half hour walk outside the city so elyse and I have been taking the bus there and back. Last time the model was riding the bus with us on the way back which was slightly awkward lol, I was like I just stared at you naked for 3 hours and now ur on my bus…ok. We had a different model today and she was….different. our first model was really skinny and everything, this one…wasn’t. and her boobs were bigger than elyse’s and mine combined. But whatever, we draw what we see lol. Elyse and I are having fun randomly pulling out our sketchbook whenever we’re sitting around in town and drawing whatever “inspires us.” Neither of us are incredibly talented artists haha but we’re not bad.
This weekend we have a trip to Nice planned through the school, so we’re looking forward to that. It’s supposed to rain and it better not. Apparently theres a “discotheque” which means basically club, on the first floor of the hostel we stay in, so we’re pretty excited. I’m having lots of fun but I miss you all sooooo much! Send me mail!!

<3always,
Cristin

my super long first entry, my first week in France

Now that I’ve finally gotten into a routine to get on the internet regularly, I can put up one of these. Don’t worry muppet, I’m abiding by your rule. One per week :-P This one’s gonna be really long cuz I did A LOT in the past week, just to warn you all.

So I’ve been in France for one week now, and I’ve been living in Aix-en-Provence for 5 days. When I first arrived at Charles-de-Gaulle airport in Paris, I was greeted by Elyse’s dad. We then waited for elyse’s flight to come in, and headed off to our hotel. Keep in mind that I took a 6:15 flight, which would get into Paris at about 7am Paris time (1am my time). Since it only went to 1am, I could not for my life sleep on the plane. I’m a night owl and I just wasn’t tired. So I watched the in-flight movie Over the Hedge (so cute) and watched a few episodes of CSI and House which I was pretty excited about. I tried to sleep for the last hour but at that point the cabin lights came back on and they were serving breakfast….at 1 in the morning. Whatever. So I figured I would get to at least nap before elyse and I spent the day in Paris with mr raby, but noooooooo. No sleep for me. We walked ALLL over Paris. We visited the Eiffel tower where I took some great pictures, and then my camera ran out of batteries so I depended on Elyse the shutterbug for the rest. We went to Rue de Bac, the Cathedral dedicated to Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal, and saw the incorruptible body of St. Catherine Laboure which was very cool. Half of you probably don’t know what I mean by incorruptible body or who St. Catherine is but that’s ok. Anyone who knows about my Marian apparition fetish knows how excited I was to go there. We went out to dinner and got back to the hotel around 9 (officially having 36 hours without sleep) and I WOULD have just passed out, but I was waiting for my baby to call…I think I fell asleep a little before I got to talk to him but anyway, ask Mark, I was pretty much beyond comprehension and the conversation only lasted about 10 minutes, mostly because I was incapable of speaking at that point. FINALLY I got to sleep. The next day we walked ALLL over paris again (mr raby looooves to walk!) and we walked through the Louvre and saw some cool paintings and sculptures, like the Mona Lisa and the sculpture of Venus de Milo. We ate lunch in front of Notre Dame where I fed the rest of my bread to the little chicken nugget birds (right babe?) and got attacked by a pigeon…and by attacked I mean it brushed up against my leg and I freaked out. We went into the Paris Opera house, where all the theatre productions (and ballets!) are held in Paris. It’s gorgeous. If that wasn’t enough walking, we also CLIMBED up 300something stairs to the top of the Arc de Triomphe. The view from the top is pretty cool, I have great pictures. We went back to the hotel and rested for a little bit (I passed out on the bed for 45 minutes) and then went out to dinner. I had duck (which is actually soo good) AND foie gras which is liver that you spread on toasted bread. Foie gras wasn’t delicious but it really wasn’t bad at all. Elyse almost burnt down the restaurant with the toaster on our table, that was fun. I also had my first legal glass of wine :) Mr Raby made us order in French so I got to practice a little bit. After dinner we went to see the Eiffel Tower lit up and I took lots of cool pictures of course. We got back to the hotel and I was able to talk to my baby much more coherently this time, and then went to bed.

After 2 days in Paris, mr raby elyse and I started our trek to Aix-en-Provence by car. Elyse and I slept most of the way, and we arrived in a little town called Baune in the afternoon. We walked around, looked at the cathedral there, and had a glass of wine at a café before heading off again. We slept in the car again, and got to the town of Tournus around dinner time. We went out to dinner to a specific place that Mr Raby had been before, and he was determined to have Elyse and I try frog legs. I was EXTREMELY reluctant to do so. I got “gigot d’agneau” which is leg of lamb, and elyse got mussels. I hadn’t had any of the three before. I loved the mussels, the lamb was pretty good, and surprisingly enough, the frog legs seriously tasted like chicken. Mark, you now officially can no longer use your Polish term for “frog-eaters” when talking about the French and say “well you shouldn’t be offended cuz I’m not talking about you” cuz I ate them! Haha. And anyone who comes to a French restaurant with me is being forced to try them as well. They’re actually good. So after our adventurous dining experience, we went back to our hotel, realized we couldn’t get internet even though the hotel said we could which was incredibly disappointing, and went to sleep. Elyse and I stayed up all night talking about how we must be nuts for doing this semester abroad thing lol. So we were a little tired in the morning. Anyway, we started the 3 hour drive to Aix, sleeping halfway, but then Mr Raby made us CALL our host families to tell them when we would be arriving. Ok, I don’t speak enough French to be calling French people on the phone. That was slightly terrifying. But I did it, and I’m pretty sure I butchered the language but the girl on the phone understood me so I guess I did ok. We got to Aix, parked the car in the sketchiest parking garage I’ve ever seen, and walked around a little. We found my address and called to say that I was here and to let me in. we waited for 20 minutes for someone to come downstairs but no one came, and finally Mr Raby called again and found out that IAU had given me the wrong address! I SOOO didn’t need that right then, I was totally freaking out. If Mr Raby hadn’t been with me I might have had a meltdown lol, but I kept it together. We got the right address, and told them we’d come later. We ate lunch, had my first official glass of wine in Aix, and went to Elyse’s house. I’m sure Elyse describes her family and her house in her travel blog so I wont bother, but they’re so cool and her room is awesome. She has internet and I’m soooooo jealous. Totally not cool. She’s like a 25 minute walk from school though and I’m only 10, so I guess it’s what you value more. I think I’d rather have internet.

So we got Elyse settled and then Elyse and Mr Raby came with me to get me settled. My apartment is on the 3rd floor, and my little bedroom is right across the main hall. The apartment itself isn’t tiny but isn’t huge, but it’s very old-fashioned and quaint and very French I guess. The apartment has a little kitchen, a pretty big dining room/living room, 2 little bedrooms for me and the other student living with me, and another big bedroom for Sophie, the 30-year-old daughter of my host mother. My host mother I THINK sleeps on the day bed type thing that’s in the living room, but I seriously don’t even know lol. It’s a little weird. My bedroom has a twin bed that’s a TAD too short for big tall me, a desk in the corner, a big set of shelves opposite my bed, and a tiiiiiiny little closet next to the door. There’s a window next to my desk that overlooks the street, which is cute but it gets noisy at night cuz my house is right in the center of town, and lots of people walk by at night…loudly. Kristen, you’d go nuts lol. My host family consists of Madame Magnan, who is I think in her late 50s or early 60s, and Sophie, who is 30. I also have a housemate named Liz who’s from Massachusetts and goes to Gettysburg College in PA. She’s really cool and we’re def getting to be friends. My host mother is a little strict I guess. She doesn’t want us to take long showers and as most of you know I take showers that are forever long, so that’s something to get used to. She also told us that no one is allowed in our house except us, which I thought was a little weird. She wants us to keep our rooms clean like always, and we’re not supposed to open the shutters of the window even tho I’m dying to have them open and let the breeze come in. So there are some adjustments to make. Her and her daughter are both a little intimidating. It’s def hard going from being in a dorm room and making your own rules and being really casual about everything, to living in someone else’s house with their rules and having to make sure you don’t annoy the hell out of them lol. It’s to be expected in a home-stay I guess, just takes some getting used to.

I have 5 classes, and my first day was yesterday. I have 3 classes that are taught entirely in French: French 313 which is a language class, French Literature, and French Contemporary Civilization. I have two others, an Art History/Literature/Philosophy class (which I’m using to cop out of my visual & performing arts history requirement), and a Painting and Drawing class (which gets me out of my other visual & performing arts requirement). Now keep in mind that I have never drawn or painted before in my LIFE. But it’s a beginners class so I figured I’d try something new. We had our first day today and it was definitely…..interesting. See if you can put two and two together…we drew live models, and I’m in France. Yea, nude. It was a tad awkward. It was a woman tho…don’t worry babe ;) so yea i def suck at drawing, but the professor came over and said I had good lines or something, so I guess that’s good?

Ok so now that I’ve told you all my life story, here’s some info to actually talk to me:
If you want to talk online Tuesdays and Thursdays are the best days. I get out of class at 5 and I go online right afterwards until 7, so that’s 11am-1pm US time. I’m also usually on in the mornings but its like 5am US time so I don’t expect many of you to be up. If you are tho feel free to IM me! And don’t forget about email, facebook messages, and sending me letters! If you want to send me mail address it to:

Cristin Vanderhoof
27 Place de l’Université
13625 Aix-en-Provence, France
Cédex 1

If you want to send a package or something talk to me first cuz there’s all this special stuff you have to do to make sure it gets to me and so that i dont have to pay a ridiculous fee in taxes to pick it up. I miss you all soooooooo much! Please KIT everyone! :-*

<3Cristin

Pictures:
http://photos.yahoo.com/aixtraordinary
http://blogspot.hoofspics.com