Lourdes

I survived travelling all alone to Lourdes! I was pretty proud of myself. I took 3 trains there, totalling 8 hours (not including the hour long wait inbetween each connection). I got into Lourdes at about 4pm, walked around took some pictures until Elyse's camera (which was falling apart to begin with, in my defense) broke. Then I bought a disposable camera at a Tabac for like 10euro which was way overpriced in my opinion. at least it had a flash. i walked through centre ville and then went to my hotel around 5. i checked in, spoke some horrible french but got my point across lol, and went up to my room. then i realized i had the entire night to do absolutely nothing because it was getting dark out so i didnt want to walk around alone, so i was stuck in the hotel. i had brought hw with me but didn't feel like doing it, so i watched 7th heaven in french, tried to take a shower and realized there was no hot water, and then ate dinner at the hotel restaurant. it was REALLY good and only 9euro for a giant pot of soup and a pork meal. i didnt know if i was supposed to tip or not so i left a euro, but the waitress came running after me and gave it to me so i guess not lol. the hot water came back on so i took a nice loooong shower (which are virtually impossible in my host mothers house: tres vite! tres vite!), put on my pajamas and chilled out the rest of the evening. i found the french version of america's funniest home videos. whether u understand the language or not, people falling and hurting themselves is always funny. then i watched some svu re-runs and understood them better than i expected. mark called me at like 1am and we talked til 2 when i decided i needed to go to bed cuz i was getting up early to see all the sites the next day.

so looking like a complete and utter tourist i checked out of the hotel, got out my map and walked to the shrine i wanted to see. there was a huge church at first so i took pictures of the outside and went in to check it out, which was gorgeous. u could also climb to the top and there was a small basillica up there, and when i went in mass was just starting so i stayed. after mass i went around the back of the church to where the grotto was, which is the big thing to see. this is where Mary appeared to St. Burnadette 18 times in the 1850s, and i'm pretty sure it's where the rosary was initiated too. i know i'm a huge catholic nerd but it was very cool! the place where Mary told Burnadette to drink the water and wash with it was there and covered with a glass plate, so that was cool too. (there was no water there at the time, so Burnadette scratched the ground where Mary told her the water would be and uncovered a hidden spring). i walked along the Gave (the river there) and it was really pretty, and just chilled out by some rocks for a while. in the words of elyse, i just "be'd" for a while. i walked around centre ville for a little while longer which was pretty, but almost everything was closed cuz it was sunday and nothing's open on sundays in france. i had lunch at a cute little cafe, and then headed up to the train station and caught the 2:00 train back to aix. with the length of the train rides and connection layovers i didnt get back til 10:30pm. i recognize it was ALOT of travelling for one little thing but it was pretty cool and i've been wanting to see it foreverrr.

only 16 days til i come home, 13 days left in aix! craziness, but i cant wait :-D

oops i dropped the ball...

so i've been REALLY bad about updating this thing. haven't done so for about a month now. wooops. so not THAT much has happened since then, but i have gone on a few pretty cool trips and had some pretty fun moments here in aix.

the weekend after break i went to Dublin with Elyse and Stephanie, which was really cool. we went to Trinity College to see the Book of Kells, which is this decorative version of the Bible that monks used to copy before they had printing presses, really beautifully artistically done with all kinds of symbols and calligraphy and stuff, pretty cool. We hit a bunch of pubs the first night we got there, and got turned away from some cuz they were freakin 21 to enter. i was like umm ok aren't we still in europe?? but it was still fun, i had guinness for the first time and actually liked it, it's a little heavy tho, and we played never have i ever in the bar haha that was fun. some irish guy was playing guitar and singing wonderwall i was like hey! american music! we saw st patrick's cathedral which was really pretty but the inside was closed for graduation services. who graduates in november?? there was another really pretty church i think it was called christ's church, and there was this gospel choir inside that was SOOO good i took a video of them. the church was gorgeous too. it was also a RANDOM trip for two reasons. one, i ran into my cousins that i stayed with in london on the street. it was really funny. THEN we were walking down grafton street, one of the big pub/shopping areas, and there was this huge crowd that we had to shove thru to the other side, and when we got out we asked what the big deal was and some security guard said "paris hilton." so i got on elyse's shoulders to check it out and there she was! lol it was so random. we got pictures, look at elyse's facebook album. we dont even like her, but we got pictures. i bought an ireland shirt i was pretty excited about. AND probably the best part of the trip was our tour of the guinness factory, with a free pint of guinness at the end and a view of dublin at the top. it was really cool to see how it was made and they told you exactly how ur supposed to taste a guinness, and it actually works. very fun trip indeed!!

so the following weeks were relatively uneventful. thanksgiving came and went and we did not have turkey and i missed it terribly. there was a thanksgiving lunch on wednesday thru my program, and we had mashed potatoes and green beans and some form of dark meat that was not turkey, but it was good. so that was fun. then thursday night my host mother told us we could each invite a friend to thanksgiving dinner at our house, and she cooked us this amazing meal. she didnt stay, she went to have dinner at a friends house, but she made us this awesome meal and liz and i were the hostesses lol. brian and elyse came over and elyse brought champagne, and our host mother had already left us a bottle of champagne and a bottle of red wine. we finished all 3 lol. the best part was that brian opened the bottle of champagne the wrong way and it exploded EVERYWHERE. it was sooooo funny. so when we opened the second bottle, we brought it into the shower so that it wouldnt spill all over the living room again, and we have that on video tape lol. watching the video is only really funny if u were there i guess, but we were dying. the cork hit the ceiling both times and the champagne like shot all over. we had a pretty drunk thanksgiving. we decided after dinner that brian teaching us how to swing dance would be a GREAT idea, and all the spinning turned out to be not so great an idea lol we were pretty dizzy. elyse ate 3 slices of apple pie. just thought i'd throw that in there. that was the second time this semester that elyse was most definitely drunk. it was also cool when my family called me to wish me a happy thanksgiving and elyse was laughing and giggling like a retard in the background while i was trying to play it cool lol. to sober up that night i tried to watch every friends thanksgiving episode i had lol. theres one for every season. i only made it to season 5 before i fell asleep. anyway, it was fun.

the weekend afterwards liz and i stayed in aix, and we went out both friday and saturday night and had some fun. friday was "pub notre dame" night with kir royales and wine. that was fun, the owners a little nuts tho. and the french guys were making fun of my accent, cuz i speak french like SUCH an american, its sad. then saturday night was sangria night, which was SO much fun. i had never had sangria before and it is GOOD. we had some interesting topics come up in conversation, probably stuff we shouldnt have been talking about in public at all but chances are the people around us couldnt follow. u never know tho, a lot of people speak english here pretty well. anyway that was a fun weekend, and the week afterwards we didnt do much except watch countless episodes of grey's anatomy (which liz has me completely hooked on). in the meantime both my camera AND computer broke. technology hates me. so thats been kind of stressful. not having my computer means i have to go to an internet cafe or use the schools limited number of computers when i want to go online, and its been killing me not to have my camera these days, i love pictures.

the next weekend was 24 hour rome!! liz and i wanted to go to venice for the weekend, but the trains were booked. so we decided to go to rome instead cuz we could fly there direct from marseille. however liz had a class friday morning that she couldnt skip, and the ryan air flights were only in the mornings. so this was our plan. we leave saturday morning and come home sunday morning. rome in 24 hours baby. so thats what we did! we got into the airport at 8am, we took a shuttle into center city and started sight-seeing immediately, back packs and all. first we went to the colosseum which was realllllllly cool. we went on a really boring tour tho but we got a free ticket to the palantine out of it. there were these roman soldiers walking around in front of it and i got my picture taken with one. another one came up behind me and put his plastic sword to my neck and scared the CRAP out of me. i jumped and yelled "jesus!" and he said "are you a friend of jesus?" and i was like "No!" and he let me go. then i felt bad cuz i kind of denied jesus, but honestly, i wasnt even listening to his question lol. he could have asked if i was a female and i would have been like no! just let me go! i hate when people scare me like that lol. so after the colosseum we ate lunch at this pizza place with a view of the colosseum, and had some good italian pizza. then we made our way to the palantine, and through the roman forum which was freakin awesome. it was like a giant park practically, just with tons of roman statues and pillars and temples and stuff. it was everywhere. i wanted to run up the steps of one of the temples SOOOO BAD but liz held me back. shes no fun. i probably would have gotten arrested so its a good thing she did. after the forum we walked up to see the pantheon, which was cool and theres a basillica inside which i did not know. that was pretty. then we walked a little further to see the fountain di traveri?? i cannot for the life of me remember the name of it. but it was realllly pretty. and we threw a coin over our shoulder into the fountain like ur supposed to do, i think its supposed to ensure ur future return to rome. and i def wanna go back. after the fountain we went to St Peter's Square, where the Pope addresses the public. that was pretty cool, i took a picture of the window that the Pope stands in to address the people. we also walked into St Peter's Basillica, which was very pretty and very cool. liz took a video in there i think. we didnt get to go inside the vatican cuz we couldnt figure out how. we also wanted to see the sistine chapel but it apparently closes at 1:30 in the afternoon, which wasnt cool since we got there at like 5. but all in all we power-walked and saw pretty much everything we wanted to see. we were pretty proud of ourselves. next comes the adventure of finding our hotel. to make a long story short we got extremely lost in the sidestreets of Rome after dark trying to find this thing, and when we finally did our feet were ready to fall off. we dropped off our stuff, found somewhere to eat, had a good italian pasta dish with some good italian wine and a tasty dessert, and then walked home and were in bed by 9:30. we were exhausted, and we had to get up at 4:30 the next morning to take a train, metro, and bus to the airport. well when we walked to the train station we found out the train wasnt running on sunday. sooo we walked back and had to ask the receptionist guy who spoke NO english to call us a taxi. we were panicked cuz we'd heard all kinds of stories about european cabs charging a ridiculous amount and screwing u over, and we didnt have that much money. but it ended up being only 30euro, which was just about the same if we had done the train/metro/bus thing and far less hassle. it worked out great. we also thought there was a homeless guy laying in the street while we were waiting for our taxi and we started freaking out and wouldnt leave the top of the driveway of the hotel, but then we got closer and realized it was a plastic bag and we felt dumb lol. leave it to us. we caught our flight home, watched an episode of grey's and took a looong nap. 24 hour rome was a grand success.

ok so now i've pretty much caught up on everything thats been going on. tomorrow i leave for lourdes, a small french town in the pyrenees mountains on the border of spain. it's where mary appeared to st burnadette and anyone who knows my obsession with Mary, particularly Marian apparitions, knows how excited i must be about this. i'm going by myself, and its an 8 hour train ride each way so i'm staying over night in a hotel i booked online. i really hope i dont get ridiculously lost, i purposely booked a hotel near the train station so i'd be able to find it without a problem. i'm gonna need lots of maps and directions haha but i think i can do it. pray for me. this is my last weekend here to travel, cuz next weekend is the weekend before finals, the weekend after that is the end of finals and then i go to paris for a few days and fly out of paris home! 17 days til i'm back in the US baby!! i love it here but i'm so excited to be going home, i miss it terribly. counting down!