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!

Fall Break<3

I am on the second to last day of what has been an awesome fall break. I flew from Marseille to London Gatwick airport on Friday Nov 27 and got picked up by my mom's cousins, Margret and Chris, who I hadn't seen in a few years. We had wine and dinner and it was great. Then the next morning my cousins drove me to London Heathrow to pick up Mark who was visiting me for the first half of the week! I was soooooooo excited to see him, I was super antsy standing at the gate looking for him to come out. He came out and I gave the biggest hug ever. I would have all-out tackled him but didn't want to draw attention to airport security ;) So we went back to my cousins house and got Mark settled, and then we hit London for the first day. Our cousins told us to take the big red bus tour so that we could get an orientation of where everything was and decide what we want to go back to, so thats what we did (plus come on, you have to take the big double-decker bus when u go to London). The tour took up most of the day and we got to see some of the cool sights in London and made a mental note of what we wanted to go visit later on in the week. when the tour was done we had about an hour left and we found a little park with lots of different kinds of birds on the river, and i took a lot of cool pictures. i was having a blast watching this fearles little kid feed the birds. me and kids. We took the train back from London and our cousins picked us up. We then had some wine and "starters" (appetizers) and then had a pretty big delicious dinner. Mark and I were drunk before dinner started, so that was interesting. but mark spent the whole time talking politics with my cousin Chris, and i'm pretty sure they're in love with each other.

we slept nice and late the next morning cuz Mark was jet-lagged and, lets face it, i always sleep late. we got up, had breakfast, and our cousins dropped us off by Windsor castle, which was gorgeous. we bought tickets just to tour the grounds outside, and i took some great pictures (of course) including one of Mark eating the castle. you'll see it when i put it up haha. i took some pictures of the famous guards who like don't move at all too. we had fun just walking around enjoying the scenery. we also went out to lunch at a Thai restaurant, which I've never been to and Mark insisted I try, and it was really good. since i forgot to set my clock back, we THOUGHT we were running out of time, so i called chris to come pick us up and take us to mass. when we got home we realized we had an hour and everyone made fun of me lol. whatever. we went to 5:30 mass since it was sunday, then had another great dinner. my cousins wanted to watch one of their TV shows and they suggested that we "retire to the study" with our wine. i love the way they talk lol. so we chilled in the living room with our wine for a while and then went to bed. i discovered i dont like port wine at all, its WAY too sweet. but all other wines, bring it on! i love wine. ask mark.

monday my cousins were at work and we could do our own thing, so we slept a little late again and then took the bus to the train station into london. you can buy these travel cards for £12 that are good for trains buses and the metro, which was SO useful cuz we took all 3 everywhere. we went to westminster abbey (where i made an obscene amount of friends references), buckingham palace, big ben, trafalgar square (where you are no longer allowed to feed pigeons, much to my dismay) and walked along the river thames a little bit. it's very pretty and i took some really cool pictures of all the swans that were there. that night we had plans to see Les Miserables which we were SO excited about. we found the theatre and picked up our tickets and then walked around to find a restaurant close by. we found a cute little italian place and had a very classy dinner complete with wine, of course. only problem was after one bottle i was feeling fine, but mark insisted on getting another one, cuz we wanted to sit there for a while but figured we should get something else if we were gonna take up the table for another half hour. again, i love wine, so we got a bottle of rose. i MAY or may not have gotten really drunk. i was having problems concentrating on the show. the show was great though, i really enjoyed it. the music was fantastic and i liked the storyline a lot. brian called me right before the show was about to start, and he was drunk too, so 2 drunk people on the phone is never a good combination. then my phone died. i left it off thinking i would have enough battery to call chris and ask him to come get us at the train station, but it was totally dead. we had an adventure (yes, another one) trying to get their number and use the british pay phones, cuz i didnt know which numbers or codes i needed and it was really confusing. we eventually figured it out thank God and we werent stranded in London. if u ever need to sober me up, make me think i might get lost somewhere, cuz that'll def do it.

tuesday mark was leaving :( so we headed into london again and he checked his bags into a locker-type thing for the day. we went on the london eye, the giant ferris wheel type thing where u can overlook all of london from the top. it was really cool. we also saw kensington palace and walked around kensington gardens for a little bit, and i tried to find the place where my sister had gotten lost when i came here as a kid. then it was time to head back and take mark to the airport so we took a train out to heathrow and got mark on his flight, and i said goodbye to my baby for another 6 weeks :( . we had SO much fun together this week.

the rest of the week was pretty slow, i'm just relaxing cuz hey i'm on vacation :) i'm actually doing all this course registration stuff here while i have internet. yesterday i went into london by myself and walked around the national art gallery. it was pretty cool to look at paintings now that i'm taking an art class, cuz i can appreciate the technique waaay more. dont get me wrong tho, i suck. anyway, today my cousin rachael comes home from college for her fall break, so i'm looking forward to seeing her. and tomorrow i go back to aix! on a painfully expensive flight cuz i waited too long to book it. oops. i am going to be SO BROKE when i get back. it'll be like freshman year all over again, with $1.09 in my bank account lol. o well, it's so worth it.

welcome to europe

so yesterday i went to get lunch at this sandwich place that i love, i go there all the time. this time i got a surprise with my meal. i ordered my sandwich and it was ready quite fast, and they gave me my sandwich, a napkin, and a wetnap packet...or what i thought was a wetnap packet. when i returned with it to the student lounge at the institute i heard someone say "see? she got a condom with her sandwich too!" upon examination i saw that i had received a complimentary condom with my sandwich. ohh it gets better. on the packet it says "on a toujours faim apres l'amour" which means "you're always hungry after love." leave it to france man, this country cracks me up!

my ultimate "crazy france story"

Travel blog 10-17

Ok, I officially have my crazy France story. I don’t think anything is gonna top this.

So this weekend elyse, liz, brian and i decided to climb Mt. Sainte Victoire, which is the famous mountain in Aix that Cezanne used to paint all the time. Its supposed to be a really easy hike, like families do it with their kids and stuff, and a bunch of our friends had done it already and said it was really pretty and a really easy hike. So we showed up to class on Friday in our hiking clothes, and right after class we grabbed lunch, went to Monoprix and bought some snacks to eat at the top, and caught the bus to the bottom of the mountain. We all had about 2 bottles of water each, plus the snacks we had bought, and we were all wearing long-sleeve shirts over tshirts, and pants (or in my case capris) over shorts, so we had layers in case it got cold but we could take them off if it got hot. Anyway we started our hike, and the supposed “blue trail” that everyone kept telling us to take was nowhere to be found. The trail we were on was pretty easy though and it seemed to be heading toward the mountain, so we continued on it. Every time we came to a crossroad though, there were no signs or markers anywhere, which was extremely annoying. So we pretty much guessed, and ended up circling the base of the mountain for like 4 hours, slowly going up but not really getting anywhere. It got to the point where we realized we had to get to the top and find a map so that we could get back down before sunset. We found a cool cave and contemplated what to do, but we couldn’t turn around and go back the way we came because we would have been climbing down in the dark. So we just started climbing up, hoping we’d get to the top quickly and find a map to get down the easy way before dark. We found a brown and a green trail that were leading pretty much directly to the top, but there were some REALLY steep inclines that we should NOT have been climbing, it was really dangerous and I was terrified. Ask the other people I was with, I was tooootally freaking out. We made it and we were all fine, but it took waaay longer than we thought and we got to the top a half hour before sunset. As we were climbing and realizing how long it was taking us, we started coming to the realization that we were going to have to sleep there. That’s when I really started freaking out. When we finally got to the top we called our host parents to tell them where we were. Elyse’s mom laughed at her, brian’s mom was excited for him and told him to have fun, but our mother was like “where are you I will come get you!” and we were like umm, we don’t know exactly…we’ll just spend the night here, see ya tomorrow. Not to mention in the middle of all this my mom called just to say hi and when I told her I couldn’t talk because I was climbing a mountain she could tell something was wrong and called me back once we had decided to sleep there, and basically was totally freaking out all night. We found a spot to sleep before it got totally dark, and i had texted mark in the midst of my breakdown and he called me back once we had gotten settled, so now I had both my parents AND my boyfriend not sleeping all night cuz they were worried about me. Sorry guys.
Anyway, it was officially dark out by this point and it started getting really cold, and we decided we needed to keep walking and find the shelter at the other side of the mountain cuz we would freeze if we stayed outside. We could see the giant cross at the other side of the mountain and we knew that’s where the shelter was, so we walked incredibly slowly, all holding hands to prevent anyone from spraining an ankle or something because it was really dark out. The moon was on the other side of the mountain so our only light was the stars and the lights from the city waay down below. The more we walked toward the cross the further away it seemed to get, and elyse of course made the comment that there was something incredibly symbolic about us walking toward the cross lol. We finally made it there around 11:30pm. Someone previously had made the joke “hey wouldn’t it suck if the cross wasn’t really where the shelter was?” guess what. The cross isn’t really where the shelter is. But there was this TINY little shack, that was basically just a lookout shelter with walls about 2-3 feet high, a concrete floor, a roof, and no windows. So it broke the wind a little bit, enough that it was worth it to sleep there instead of outside, but it was still FREEZING. Brian had brought a jacket and rest of us were just in long sleeves and pants (or capris in my case), so we had the jacket draped over all 4 of us, huddled on a concrete slab at the top of a windy mountain. It was about 40 degrees. It got so cold that we ended up sleeping all on top of each other like hamsters to keep warm. Let’s face it, there’s a bond that the four of us share right now that no one else has haha. We had enough snacks that we never got too hungry, we kept eating but we had to ration it a bit to have enough for the morning hike down the mountain, and we were definitely running low on water. We also had to pee in the bushes twice, thank God elyse had tissues with her for toilet paper. So yea none of us slept at all. At first we started playing never have I ever, and just laughing at ourselves for being in such an absolutely ridiculous situation. Then the colder it got the less funny it got and we all just basically tried to stay warm and watched the sky waiting for the sun to come up.

Finally around 7am it got light enough to start walking down, even though it was still unbearably cold. Walking warmed us up, and we found the REAL shelter (which was like literally 5 minutes from where we were, but we couldn’t see it so we didn’t want to explore in the pitch black). We had enough food and water to get us down the mountain, and we found the infamous “blue trail” that we were supposed to take going up, and took it down. We finally got back to the bus stop at around 10:15am, and waited for the bus to come at 10:55. I called my parents and mark in the meantime to let them know I survived, and when I got home I slept for 6 hours straight. Then I got up and took the best shower I’ve ever taken in my life, and realized that every muscle in my body was screaming at me for hiking non-stop for 9 hours, sleeping on concrete, and then hiking for another 3 hours the next day. I also had a fieldtrip to go to on Saturday, but I obviously didn’t make it and I think I had a pretty good excuse. The professor was just glad I was ok.

So yea that’s my insane story of surviving a night on a cold mountain with no sleeping bag or fire or warm clothes, not to mention very little food and water. We survived on crackers, Pringles, pretzels, sour patch kids, caramel popcorn, and I think liz had strawberry twinkies and an orange. I can no longer say “never have I ever peed in the woods.” Although it wasn’t really the woods it was a mountain but close enough. I survived and it was an interesting experience, but I def wouldn’t do it again, not that way anyway. I am definitely done with dangerous adventures for a while.

yay for the weekend!

This weekend was AWESOME. Friday night we went to a wine and cheese party at our friends house and it was SO much fun. Probably the most fun I’ve had since I’ve been here. I thought it was gonna be like mellow, with a bunch of people sitting around chatting with wine and cheese, but apparently Pamela (the girl who invited us) has a housemate that is studying as part of a different program. So Pamela invited all her friends from IAU and her housemate invited all her friends from her program, and it ended up being huge. Met lots of people and became better friends with people I was sort of acquaintances with so it was pretty cool. Most of the people from the other program left on the early side and us IAU kids played drunk musical chairs which was probably the funniest thing ever. I won the second round! Haha it was great. So by the time we got home it was like 2:15 and we had to get up at 7:30 the next morning. Apparently I’m really bad at evaluating whether I’m sober enough to go to bed and actually get sleep, cuz if I’m still tipsy enough I’ll wake up a million times throughout the night and not get any sleep. I thought I could do it, but I didn’t sleep at alllll. So with about 2 hours total (not continuous) of sleep, I got up and got ready to go to Avignon, hangover and all.
We had a fantastic trip. We did some shopping (found an H&M in France!) and found an indoor market that was pretty cool and very French. Next we saw the “Palais des Papes” (the Popes’ palace) and even did the corny tourist thing with the audio tour haha cuz it was free, but it was pretty interesting. Elyse almost got kicked out a million times for taking pictures inside. That’s an exaggeration cuz no one actually yelled at her but she was making us nervous! Anyway, after that we found a place to eat lunch and had a really good ham & cheese pizza. We then went to the famous “Pont d’Avignon,” the big stone bridge in Avignon that extends across the Rhone river, except part of it was destroyed so it doesn’t actually go all the way across. Theres a famous song that got stuck in our heads allll day, that goes “sur le pont d’avignon, l’on y danse, l’on y danse; sur le pont d’avignon, l’on y danse tout en rond” which means “on the bridge of avignon, there we dance, there we dance, on the bridge of avignon, there we dance all in a circle.” It sounds cuter in french. So of course we had to “danser” on the pont d’avignon. Elyse took pictures. We were def the obnoxious tourists on that bridge, taking pics of us dipping each other and waltzing all over the place. We made up for it though by just sitting on the banks of the Rhone for about 2 hours, just talking and laughing and taking pictures and being French. Elyse gave us a photography lesson too. Her camera is way cooler than mine. So we definitely enjoyed “just being” for a little while.

At that point we had seen all the major touristy things of Avignon, so we decided to just walk around a little bit, looking in cute shops and stuff. I had read somewhere that it’s typical of southern France to have small shrines to Mary above store windows or carved into the walls of buildings up high, and I definitely noticed it in Avignon. Anyone who knows about my Mary obsession knows I found that pretty cool haha. We walked around til we just got exhausted and decided to save some money on dinner by hitting up the French McDonalds. Kind of disappointing cuz my nuggets were on the gross side, but now I can say I ate at McDonalds in France. Anyways, after McDonalds it was time to go catch the shuttle to the TGV station and take the train home. We were really early and it was a good thing cuz we got totally lost trying to find our train, but we eventually found it and we must have been practically the only ones going back in that direction cuz there was no one else on the platform but us, it was kind of creepy. We were sitting against a glass wall and elyse made a comment about how she kept feeling like someone was going to sneak up behind her on the glass or something, and just as she said it this loud noise came on the loudspeaker and scared the CRAP out of all 3 of us. At that time we were at the point that we were cracking up laughing at EVERYTHING, so we were just laying on the cement laughing so hard that we were crying. I guess you had to be there but it was sooo funny. We were exhausted by the time we got home and all 3 of us climbed into bed and went right to sleep. We were going to climb Mt. St. Victoire the next day but we discovered that the buses don’t run on Sundays, and we don’t even know if any buses go there anyway. So we’ll have to plan that one out a little better and do it another day. Well right now I’m going to go meet Elyse at a café and write some postcards. KIT everyone!
<3Cristin

My first month

So I haven’t posted on this in like weeks. Well I’ve officially been here for a month. On one hand it’s like ugh I still have a month and a half to go, that’s a long time til I get to come home, and on the other hand it’s like wow I only have a month and half to enjoy all this while I can! I’m trying to make the most of it, been doing something/going somewhere every weekend and not just sitting around. Last weekend my dad came to visit, so that was fun. I showed him around town, had lunch with elyse in a café and then had a beer with him at another café (yes I had a beer with my dad…it was kinda surreal lol). He got lost getting here and ended up on tiny little streets packed with people who tend not to care that they’re in your way haha, but I got him to a parking garage via cell phone and my map of aix. That night he took me, elyse, and liz out to a really nice dinner that our French professor had recommended, and we all had duck which was really good. But first, my host mother insisted that he come over for “un aperitif” (a pre-dinner drink) before he took us out. We had champagne and my host mother went all out lighting candles and making little hors d’oeurves. It was interesting attempting to translate, even though my host mother speaks pretty good English and was able to communicate with my dad pretty well. Once in a while she wouldn’t understand what my dad was saying and I’d have to translate, or sometimes she would like forget and start speaking French and I’d have to translate for my dad. It was pretty funny. So after drinks we had our dinner, and the four of us made plans to go to Cassis the next day. We had my dad’s rental car, a map of Provence, and ME navigating…..i know, scary. But maps are the one thing i CAN do, so we actually made it there without too much trouble…the exit to cassis was closed so we had to find our own way after that, but my dad handled that. Anyway, cassis is gorgeous, it’s this little fishing village with a really pretty harbor and they’re famous for their seafood and nice beaches. So we found a little tiny beach in a cove-type thing and took our first official swim in the Mediterranean. It was cold. The beaches here are hardly ever sand, they’re mostly rocks, as was this one, so our feet took a beating. My dad of course swam down to the bottom of the ocean to get a huge rock for his “collection,” which he then conveniently left in my backpack and it’s now sitting in my bedroom. Anyway, after we swam and took a whole bunch of pictures, we walked to the other side of town to where the harbor and main city-life was. The port was really cool and we had lunch right next to the water. My dad and I each got a huge pot of “moules frites” (muscles and French fries). They were goooood. My dad had heard of this place where the Mediterranean runs through the mountains, kinda like a fjord or something, and it’s supposed to be really pretty, so we went to the tourism office and got a map and figured out how to get there. We drove up the mountain and had to follow a hiking trail to get to it, but it was sooo pretty. Elyse was being her usual shutterbug self and was climbing on the edge of cliffs trying to get good pictures, making me incredibly nervous. The hike was fun and the view was awesome, and we were exhausted by the end. We drove back to aix and my dad said goodbye and went home. Fun day.

The week following wasn’t terribly exciting. Liz and I went to the market on the main street again, or we intended to anyway, cuz we found a great little store on the way there and ended up spending all our time there instead. I got 3 tops for 10euro and she got a great pair of jeans, so we were pretty satisfied with our shopping. Our host sister, who we were convinced didn’t like us, invited us into the kitchen for some tea and the three of us talked for over an hour. It was a HUGE breakthrough haha it was really cool. She even said that we could go skiing with her and her mother possibly in December. Friday night my host mother’s granddaughter spent the night. She is 6 years old and is sooo cute! She was telling me all the words she knows in English, and the words she’s learning how to spell in French. Liz and I were practicing our French on her and she was telling us what certain things in the house were called in French. I taught her how to play Snood and solitaire on my computer! She was fascinated haha, and I really practiced my French attempting to explain the rules to her. it was really fun, and now guess what babe? I not only want a baby, I want a French baby. Going out friday night was annoying cuz we went out to the bar, then decided to go to another bar, and as I’m halfway through my beer everyone decides to go home. I was like umm what was the point of me buying this if I’m going to enjoy my buzz sitting on my bed watching Friends DVDs?? (which by the way has become my sobering up method lol: a bottle of water, a snack of some kind, and Friends on my laptop). So anyway that was disappointing.
We made plans to go into Marseilles Saturday because there was some sort of big international fair going on, like a huge market with stuff from all over the world. It cost 8euro to get in but our friends had gotten free tickets from their host mother, so we got in for free which was cool. We took the bus to Marseilles and took the incredibly sketchy (and crowded) metro to where the fair was. It was really fun walking around looking at all the different clothing and jewelry from different countries. Elyse and I are contemplating being Egyptian princesses for Halloween lol cuz their costumes are soooo cool. So we spent most of the day touring the fair, eating Italian gelato and French bread and looking at other cool stuff. We came back and had dinner at this crepe place that had the most ridiculously huge crepes I had ever seen. I got this big salad thing with ham and chevre (goat cheese…surprisingly really good) and something called lardons which we think are bacon bits but we’re not sure. Anyway the place specializes in having a crepe for dinner and then another crepe for dessert, but I was so full from my dinner crepe that I got a milkshake instead. It was apricot flavored and it was amaaaaazing, totally worth the 6.60euro I paid for it…yea I’m spending way too much money here. Anyway elyse and liz each got this chocolate covered something that they both really enjoyed.
After that liz and I went to a club with her language partner, Mako. It was SO much fun! The first one we went to was called “Cuba Libre” and it was PACKED. We each got a beer and then hit the dance floor, where everyone was going nuts and singing along, and the DJ was getting everyone involved which was awesome. I love just being in places like that even though I knew hardly any of the music. People were dancing up on the speakers and the tables and everything, it was wild. We thought it was pretty funny that some really popular American songs here are “everybody dance now” and that prince song, you don’t have to be rich to be my girl. The YMCA came on too lol and everybody did the motions. But aside from that it was all French/Spanish music, it was great. Then we went to a different club, where they played a lot of American music and Mako laughed at me cuz of course I knew all the words and was singing along. Some guy tried to dance with me but I grabbed liz’s arm and she saved me haha. that’s why us girls stay together on the dance floor! We had sooo much fun and we didn’t get home til about 2:30. we smelled so strongly of smoke though that even our eyes were burning from it, cuz you’re allowed to smoke in clubs here. Actually you’re pretty much allowed to smoke wherever the hell you want here, whether it’s in someone else’s face or not. A guy was smoking on the dance floor and was drunk and half-dancing half-stumbling around with some girl and he almost burned me with his cigarette like 20 times. I was having so much fun tho the smoke was worth it. So overall a pretty cool weekend. Mark took his LSATs Saturday morning so I was worrying about him all day Saturday haha but he says he thinks he did well. He’s coming to visit me in London for 4 days the last week in October!! Cant wait babe!!
So I’m rapidly wondering where the hell my money is going, but I’m still having so much fun here. It took a few weeks, but I think abroad is def shaping up to be a really good experience. That’s all for now, gotta meet Elyse at the chapel and attempt to follow mass in French!
Miss you all!
<3Cristin