December 14th, 2008

Look at the date.
I have been in France for 2 days shy of 4 months. How has that happened?
While there have been times in which I've been frustrated, tired, homesick, people-sick, even the tiniest bit of regretful of my decision to come to France, the time has flown by, and I've realized that I have truly enjoyed my time here and learned and grown so much. The other day, I bought my train ticket to return to Paris to catch my flight back to the United States in January. Already. It's that time.
Last night, Claire and I went to our friend Nathalie's apartment for a French dinner with our mutual friend Simon. They are from the town of Poitiers which is a long 10-hour drive Northwest of Aix-en-Provence. They are both just a year older than us and studying at the Fac, also, but they are studying what is an equivalent of International Studies and language. They both studied abroad last year in German-speaking countries, and are both very proficient in English. The dinner was absolutely amazing! The food was mouth-wateringly tasty. On the menu?
Appetizer: Salad with lardons (bits of pork, kind of like bacon bits but much better quality and tastier) and a mustard-balsamic vinaigrette.
Main dish: Tomates farcies, or tomatoes stuffed with ground beef that has been seasoned with herbes de provence (a blend of rosemary, thyme, marjorum, and other various green herbs)
Dessert: Profiteroles (pastry puffs/cream puffs) with vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce.
But not only was the food amazing, the company, and the conversation were, as well! We talked about everything, ranging from getting to know our hometowns better (Little Rock, AK, Princeton, NJ, Poitiers, France), politics in both the United States and France, languages, food, religion...all sorts of things. We ended up staying for 4.5 hours (!!). It's great when you make friends, but it's even more valuable when you find that you learn from your friends. I've found that while I've learned a lot about art history, cooking, living in a tiny house with 4 other girls, how to ask for a pitcher of water, and how French train tickets work, I've learned an immeasurable amount from Nathalie and Simon. They've taught me about all sorts of little traditions from their hometown, they explained the reasons for and causes and results of all of the youth demonstrations in France in the past 5 years or so, they've taught me how to order peach syrup in a beer, how to say that I'm full without saying that I'm a pregnant animal, and the reason why the politics of the United States is so important to France and how the downfall of Sarkozy makes Obama's presidency exciting but raises doubts among some French people.

So much.

There are some people who would look at my study abroad experience and say that I wasted my time for 5 months, that I didn't take advantage of the French culture, that I didn't go out enough (or at all, rather), that I didn't meet French men, that I spent too much time and effort on classes rather than frolicking about Southern France, that I should have been more liberal with money and traveled around Europe. Even other people on the program think that my approach to study abroad has been silly, that it's ridiculous that I've only been out to one bar, and that I haven't yet been to a nightclub.
But in a month or so, when I'm back in the States, I'm certain that I'll be able to look them directly in the eye with a smile on my face and say that I learned more than I could have ever hoped to learn during my 5 months in France and that I know now that La Princesse de Clèves is every so subtly a book about female empowerment in an oppressive society, that most of the time no one is judging you or making fun of you that it's usually something we make up in our own insecurity, that the "primitivist" movement of art did not just aim to copy ancient art forms but was developed with a theory based on simplification of the form and the attribution of religious signification to the art of sculpture, and that eating beef tartare and escargot is actually quite pleasant.

I'd say that's pretty good :)

La Fête des Lumières

"The Festival of Light" in English.
It is an annual 3-night event in the beautiful city of Lyon, a few hours north of Aix-en-Provence by train. It originated as a festival to celebrate the day of the Annunciation, a Christian holiday, but it has turned into a giant festival of light displays, music, hot food vendors in the streets, in which the entire city of Lyon comes out to play until 1:00 in the morning the next day.
2 of my housemates, 1 of their friends from home who was visiting, and I decided to spend a night in Lyon and see what all of this was about. It was a nice French college student that I met at a Halloween party that I met that told me about this event, something I had never heard of. He told me that it was imperative that I go, and so I took his advice, and looked up at the event. He was right: I had to go. And thank goodness I did.
First of all, the city of Lyon is gorgeous no matter what. It is a mix of big shopping centers and beautiful rococo-style buildings, and gorgeous cathedrals, with a corner of the city that houses its remains from when the Romans had control. We arrived at the Lyon Part-Dieu train station at a little after 1:00pm on Friday and decided to go to the hotel by foot. It took at least an hour, but it was an amazing stroll through the city.
After the sun set, the entire city began to light up. The strings of lights hanging above us in the streets turned on, and the displays and exhibitions began. Street lights covered in red and blue film lighted the path through the festival, washing the city in eerie colors.

There's no way that I can show you everything that I had the pleasure of seeing that night, but I will try to describe it for you. We walked around with 1-euro cups of mulled wine in our hands, stoppping every now and then for a "bretzel", a hot wrap, or a pastry to keep us going through the night and stopped and saw some of the most beautiful things I have ever seen in my entire life. We walked around with our heads tilted up towards the lights, our mouths hanging every so slightly open in awe. We were all children that night. We even rode a massive ferris wheel, something I haven't done in AGES.

But let me show you at least my favorite display/presentation/exhibit of them all. It was titled "On dirait que..." which means "They would say that...". I don't understand the title. But it consisted of a light projection on the front of the Hôtel de Ville, or the City Hall, which is a beautifully ornate, very pristine-looking building located in a big plaza in the center of Lyon. It was lit up with all sorts of colors to depict a giant toy dollhouse belonging to a child giant. It was a small girl who was also projected in her giant-ess form on the wall of the building next to City Hall. The projection showed what happened to the dollhouse as she played with it, with new figures dancing through the house, what happened when she filled it with water, when she splattered it with paint, etc. Here's the sequence, starting with the building in the middle of the day, when we first arrived in Lyon:
ISN'T THAT AMAZING??? It was my favorite part of the night.
The city was gorgeous and the next day, we went up to two cathedrals perched on the other side of the Saône River of Lyon. There are two rivers in Lyon, the Rhône and the Saône. Here is a view of my travel-mates next to the Saône at the end of our night out on the town during the festival, and another picture of me with a view of Lyon from one of the cathedrals, high above the city.
This must've been one of the most memorable experiences of my life. I only wish that you had all been there to share it with me :)

My New Obsession: Art

Perhaps this is a result of the fact that I've voluntarily thrown myself into an intense 3-month crash course on modern art, but I have a new obsession: art. If I have a little extra time or need a break, I'll look for random artists and themes with the term "art" on Google Images to see what comes up and just gaze at the pieces. I have LOVED sitting in class and hearing about how Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain" questioned how we define art in addition to just being really funny (this sculpture consists of a ceramic urinary turned upside down and signed in black ink). I get to learn that Edgar Degas, although a very interesting and revolutionary sculptor, was also a sexist, racist, misogynistic, anti-semitic asshole. I get to learn that Medardo Rosso's sculptures "disappear" if you look at them from the wrong angle or in the wrong light because the way he molded the bronze, the figure is only distinguishable from a certain point of view. SO. FREAKING. COOL.
I have also gotten really into looking at my surroundings a little more carefully to see what I can find. That's what we're supposed to do while we're abroad, aren't we? Slow down, take a deep breath, and absorb everything that we can. Here are some examples of the artwork or beautiful images that I have seen around town and at the Fac:


This coming weekend, Fay, Jacqueline, Jacqueline's friend Alicia, and I are going to Lyon, a big city north of us for its annual Festival of Lights which goes for 3 days straight. Every night, the city lights up with tons of art installations, concerts, activities, and such with the theme of light for those three days. We're going to be spending a night there so we can stay out late and look at everything. That should be fun!

"Bonne Dinde!"

That's how French people express the sentiment of wishing someone a "Happy ThanDinde" means "Good Turkey"...interesting. For our Thanksgiving Day, as it is a holiday that doesn't exist in France, our program hosted a very fancy dinner at the Restaurant Aquabella for all the Wellesley-in-Aixers. It was absolutely delicious and so enjoyable to see everyone on the program especially as we've all kind of gone our separate ways since we've been in Aix.
We had champagne as an apéritif with very very fancy hors d'oeuvres like some sort of salmon mousse on little crackers, little cups of creamy gazpacho, and tomato mozzarella skewers drizzled with balsamic vinegar. Then, for our appetizer, we had a millefeuille (layers) of mozzarella and sundried tomato with a cucumber and lettuce garnish on the side as a sort of salad. Our main dish was dinde à la thanksgiving, meaning turkey with some sort of ksgiving". Although "Bonne pretend stuffing which was actually an assortment of beans and chestnut with a delicious light brown sauce on it. Dessert was a like molten chocolate cake with a praline hazelnut sauce. YUM.
The town of Aix-en-Provence has been decorating the streets for A MONTH now, putting up lights, building little houses along the Cours Mirabeau for the Christmas market, etc., etc. and the lights have finally started getting turned on at night!
It's finally gotten cold here in Aix-en-Provence and so we've pulled out the sweaters, turned up the heat, and gotten in a sort of holiday mood! After our fancy Thanksgiving dinner, the girls of the cabanon and I had our own sort of family Thanksgiving, complete with cooking in pajamas all day, lots of holiday music, and then a fabulous dinner at night and house-decorating! We watched the Thanksgiving episode of Friends and listened to a crazy assortment of Christmas music including the Wellesley College Choir's vespers, Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas is You", the Jackson 5's "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" and Jethro Tull's Christmas album. AWESOME. We've definitely gotten closer as the semester has come along, and it really does feel like we've developed a sort of family here in the cabanon. We have family photos as proof!

Now, we just have the last 3 weeks of class until winter break! I can't believe that I've already been in France long enough that I'm starting to look towards finalizing my travel plans to get home. So bizarre. Sometimes, I feel as though my life has been put on hold while I live in this sort of life experiment in France. We invest all our energy in immersing ourselves into this foreign culture and this new way of living, so that we end up falling out of touch with the outside world. Most of the girls in the program have no idea what has been happening in Mumbai during the past few days. We work so hard to function in a different language, going to class, getting groceries, everything becomes an adventure. And it's all almost over...so strange.

Goodbye

I said bye to my friend Maria yesterday night after practice.

On Wednesday night, my friend Hannah (England), Simon (Germany), Alain (France), and I went over to Maria's apartment to have a goodbye dinner together and we all brought delicious food and just spent 4 hours talking and joking around. It was incredibly good and SO much fun.

She's going back to the Netherlands for a little while, and then she goes home to Colombia for the holidays until she figures out what she's doing next.
It's bizarre to me that I feel so close to someone and that I became such good friends with someone after only having spent the past month and a half with them. AND we spoke almost only in French (although sometimes in English, too, when we felt like it). It's also very bizarre to have to say bye to someone knowing all too well that you might not see her again for a very very very long time, or ever for that matter.

After our ride to practice dropped us off last night around 11:15pm, Maria and I hung onto each other, hugging, for a while. It's really quite difficult to have to let go of someone and force yourself to walk in the opposite direction when you care about them. But I guess already knew that.
Maria put it quite well: "The world is very petit. We'll see each other again."

*sigh*

Tournoi Beach!

This Sunday, for yet another day of my Armistice weekend, I joined my BULF teammates and some other random frisbee players for a day-long beach ultimate tournament at La Plage de la Couronne right on the very edge of Southern France! There are very few sand beaches in the South of France, most of them are rocky, so this was quite the treat! I woke up at 7:00am to get ready and walk to La Rotonde in the center of Aix-en-Provence to meet my ride, a woman named Aliette and a man named Yaria, both from the little town of Pertuis. I had never met them before, but my friend Ivan from BULF set up the ride for me.
Then, I got to enjoy a 40-minute ride through early-morning Provencal landscapes filled with autumnal foliage, little houses whose chimneys had smoke coming out of the tops, all decorated with a light layer of fog left over from the night. When we finally got there, I had the sudden impression that we were in the Carribbean. There were palm trees, the sun was shining brilliantly and the skies above us were the perfect shade of blue. I got out of the car and wandered around and was at first quite disheartened to find out that I wasn't getting to play with BULF, instead, my friend Maria and I were being put on a team with a bunch of ragtag beginniners that Ivan had put together. They were REALLY athletic, REALLY aggressive, REALLY crass men that had crossed over to ultimate from rugby, soccer, and other sports and were playing in their first tournament. Maria and I were the only women...and the best players on the team :)
We started up and our first couple games were rocky. The guys wouldn't listen, they would panic whenever they got the disc, and they would get really aggressive about calls even though they didn't know the rules at all. Then, Maria and I took charge. Maria is probably my best friend on BULF and is in Aix-en-Provence for an internship. She came here from the Netherlands where she was studying for some time, but she is originally from Colombia. She is really good at ultimate, very athletic, very blunt, and basically AWESOME. She and I talk ultimate all the time, and I was incredibly upset to find out last week that this coming Saturday, she is leaving France for good to return home to Colombia. She and I handled for the team and ran our offense and defense, and threw almost all of our points. By the third game, we started to click, and the boys had calmed down, and in the fourth game, we beat Ivan's "A-team" (his other team), in a close match with a final score of 10-9. Overall, we came in 3rd place out of 5 teams, beating Ivan's A-team AND my team, BULF!
Afterwards, Maria and I ran into the ocean to go for a swim, which, shockingly, was still refreshing and wonderful in NOVEMBER. The picture on the left is of me and Maria in our "bathing suits" with my friend Hannah in the middle, a girl my age from Manchester, England who also plays for BULF. Then, all the participants in the tournament sat down at the boardwalk café/bar/restaurant and we all got hot chocolate and beer to talk about the tournament and socialize. During the course of the day, I met SO many different and amazing people!
I found out that Yaria, a French man with bright blue eyes, pale skin, and blonde hair, converted to Islam after a trip to Morocco. He became very interested in Islam and then studied it more and began practicing. He left the tournament at some point to go sit on a rock ledge and pray for about an hour.
I met another American, a young guy from Morristown, NEW JERSEY who is in Nimes teaching English.
I met one guy on my team named Cléri who has anger problems and has been to 4 psychotherapy sessions to help deal with it. What was amazing was that while he started out overly aggressive and boisterous, as he began to understand the rules about Spirit of the Game and good sportsmanship and how important that is in ultimate frisbee, he calmed down and really started to enjoy the game for the game. By the third game, he was shaking people's hands, apologizing for running into people by accident, and participating in the after-game discussions. It really was amazing to see how participating in an activity can help someone learn things outside of the game.
The sun began to set as we sat and chatted it up. Of course, I had to take pictures.

This morning, I got up and discovered that my muscles don't feel like doing any more work. In otherwords, my calves, back, and right arm muscles are really really sore. But it felt SO good to run around outside and be active with a bunch of people I barely knew. That was so much fun! I think it might be just enough to hold me over in terms of happiness until people come to visit me in December :)

Excursion to the Lubéron!

This Saturday, Professor Lydgate took some of us on another amazing daytrip to the beautiful area called Le Lubéron, northeast of Aix-en-Provence. If you've ever seen a postcard or token image of the South of France, this is where those pictures have come from. It was a little bit of a drive, probably about 2.5 or 3 hours in the bus, but I am so incredibly glad that I went.
We began with a visit to the tiny town of Roussillon, nestled on top of a peak in a mountainous area filled with vineyards, bright colors, and tiny villages. Roussillon itself is a tiny tiny tiny village that I'm pretty sure you could do a complete tour of in about an hour and a half. It is most famous for its red, orange, and yellow-colored "ochres", the name given to the rock formations and cliffs that are found on the same peak upon which the town is situated.

We were given a little over an hour to wander around and explore the town for ourselves. A good friend of mine, Jacqueline, who has joined us in the cabanon, and I had a WONDERFUL time strolling around and taking pictures. The town is absolutely adorable, with tiny shops and buildings that echo the colors that compose their natural surroundings. We saw tiny kids running home with loaves of bread, an old man strolling with his hands clasped behind his back who offered to take a picture of us...it was beautiful.

After a ridiculously delicious lunch in a fancy restaurant called Restaurant David which had an amazing view of the valley and mountains surrounding the town, we loaded up the bus again to drive through part of the Lubéron on the way to L'Abbeye de Sénanque. We passed by gorgeous vineyards which were made even more beautiful by the sunshine (which we haven't had here in Aix for about 2 weeks straight), and we drove through the breathtaking town of Gordes, which looks incredibly similar, to me, to that fort in the mountain in the Lord of the Rings II: The Two Towers. SILENCE. I can hear you all laughing at me. You know you loved that movie.
Finally, after driving down frightfully narrow mountain roads in a humongous bus (we chased a little car off the road, it was ridiculous). We arrived in the parking lot outside of the tranquil Abbaye de Sénanque, tucked away in a tiny valley between mountains covered in bright red, orange, and yellow autumn foliage. L'Abbaye de Sénanque is a living Cistercian monastery that once housed 60 monks but now holds only 6. Because it is a Cistercian monastery, all the monks have taken vows of silence and live a very very strict lifestyle. The 24-hour day is divided into 3 equal parts: 8 hours for prayer/study, 8 hours for rest/eating, 8 hours for work which can be working the famous lavender fields or honey farm.
We got to take a tour of the interior of the monastery and see the church, the old bedroom for the monks, their old study, the "Room of the Chapter" where they read one chapter of the teachings of Saint Benoit each day, and the courtyard.

It was absolutely gorgeous and one of the most calming places that I have ever been. If it were possible, I would love to sit in the courtyard and just and write for a couple years...but I'm pretty sure that might bother the monks a little bit.
Then, we loaded back onto the bus and headed back to Aix-en-Provence. We were treated with a beautiful beautiful sunset on the way back.All in all, a PERFECT day in the Lubéron, perfect to lift my spirits after 3 weeks of no ultimate, 2 weeks of nonstop rain, and 1 week of not leaving my house because of the amount of work that I had to do...and will have to do. Oh well :)

"hyphenated American"

This morning, one of my fellow Wellesley-in-Aixers sent me a link to an article in the Washington Post and told me that she thought I might find it interesting.
It was written by an American woman of Korean descent who studied abroad in Scotland in 1992-1993. She recounted an experience she had pertaining to her cultural/national identity. She was asked by her host family to come into her son's class at school and do a presentation about her home country. She naturally prepared a presentation about the United States, its history, its traditions, its government...and was then asked by the family if she could talk about something Korean as a treat for the children. However, the woman, born and raised in the United States, knew barely anything about Korean culture, history, government and had to do background research to create this presentation. Throughout her time abroad, she continued to have experiences such as this one, in which people would ask her "no, where are you really from" and ask her about Korean food, the Korean language...things of which she had no knowledge. She closes the article with a statement about the fact that being Korean and being Korean-American are two very different things.
I guess that hit home for me. I guess? No, I know that it really hit home for me. Before my time in France, I had only been asked about my ethnicity a couple times. But in the past 2.5 months (!! already !!) I have been asked where I'm really from, about Korean food, about Korean culture, about how to say this and how to say that in Korean so many times that I doubt that I could count the number of times on two hands. I started out thinking it was strange, then I began to think it was obnoxious, and then it began to infuriate me. The topic of conversation with anyone from France eventually will always come around to my ethnicity, my nationality, while with my friends (some of whom are not Asian), the conversation moves onto more interesting topics. Now, I guess, it still bothers me, but as for a reaction, for that initial hot rush of blood to the cheeks when I get offended...I can't be bothered.

It is just interesting that for a country that has made extensive research about race illegal because it is considered discriminatory, its people certainly talk about race a whole damn lot.

Here's the link to the article, tell me what you think!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/30/AR2008103003476.html

Loving Madame Barbier

Madame Barbier is the proprietor of our lovely cabanon. She is probably about 5'7" and the slightest bit matronly appearance. She likes to wear big knit sweaters and scarves, and she wears her glasses a little low on her nose and peers over the top when she talks to people. She has curly short brown hair which she just died a little darker and she has a tiny touch of a lisp when she talks. She is also AMAZING.
She is the one who moved us into our home and taught us how to lock down the shutters when Le Mistral blows into town, and she is the one who finally helped us get our heat turn on last night when we were freezing to death and miserable because Provence decided to turn into Antarctica in the span of a half-day. She likes to come over and knock on our kitchen door to tell us really tiny and unnecessary tidbits of information and usually stays to talk for longer than comfortable until the conversation gets so extended that we all realize there are no polite phrases or small-talk subjects to hit.
Yesterday, we found maggots in our rice, which we bought just a few days ago. She said it was fine to eat, our rice. When we asked her how to get rid of the maggots, she said that you cook them. You boil them to death in the pot with the rice and the maggots float up to the top and you scoop them out and then you eat the rice. No big deal, really, girls. And so that's what we did.

I also would love to note that when the tiny little light on our heating system lit up indicating that there was no heat/gas flowing to our radiators, she shouted "CA C'EST GEANT!" which translates to "THAT'S HUGE!" I loved it. I dunno, just the idea of a 50-something year old woman saying "That's huge!" as in "That's huge, dude" makes me smile.

I love Madame Barbier.

A Genève

Right after my last class of the week last Thursday afternoon, I rushed to the train station to catch my train to GENEVA where I would be reunited with my best friend from Wellesley! She was working in Kampala, Uganda and traveling all summer, so I only got to see her for a half-day the entire summer, and that was 3 months ago. So, this was a much-needed reunion. The train ride was very very pleasant, and it was refreshing to pass through areas where autumn seemed to have an effect because here in Provence, it still feels like summer. As much as I love the warm weather, I must say that I miss autumn as it's one of my favorite seasons. The changing colors, the chill in the air, that slightly smoky smell that reminds me of the holiday season...it was all there in Geneva :)
Bisno picked me up from the train station and we took the tram back to her apartment where I eventually got to meet all of her WONDERFUL flatmates and see where she's been living. Over the course of the weekend I got to meet a bunch of lovely young women from Smith and Bryn Mawr and I can tell that I would definitely have been friends with them had I been put in a situation in which I would be with them for a long time. You know, there's just something about women that go to all women's colleges. They are generally quite awesome if I must say so myself.
We kicked off the weekend on my first full day in Geneva with a little tour of La Vieille Ville (old Geneva) led by Bisno. We walked around this beautiful beautiful area with cobblestone streets and architecture that seemed to blend French and German architecture to create its own wonderfully quaint style full of bright colors and wood accents. Finally, we ended up at Saint-Pierre Cathedral, an interesting cathedral from the outside because it is composed of two starkly different architectural styles that resulted from a change in religious leadership. We went inside and then after admiring the interior we decided to o up to the top of the cathedral tower! From the top, we had the most AMAZING views of all of Geneva and we could see out to the Alps and across Lac Leman (Leman Lake). It was breathtaking:

Bisno also took me to Lac Leman to see the famous "Jet d'eau" that is featured in any postcard EVER with images of Geneva.

We used it as a photo opportunity and in the process met a very kind old British man in a wheelchair.
Then, afterwards we walked around some more, did a little bit of shopping, ate lunch at a lovely pizzeria, and then returned back to the apartment. We got to go to a fun birthday dinner and party for one of Bisno's friends who turned 20 on Saturday. For the first time in FOREVER, Bisno and I got to dress up and dance together.
Then, the next day, I got to see the lovely neighboring town of Carouge (which is accessible VERY easily by tram) and we had a really nice brunch with two of Bisno's other friends from her study abroad program. Then, Bisno and I spent a very long time in a Genevan flea market where she bought a silver ring and I bought a nice bag. We each stopped each other from anything more. It was a good system. Throughout the two full days I had in Geneva, I got to see a beautiful park called Le Bastion where old men play chess with HUGE plastic chess pieces on the ground, I got to see where Bisno takes her classes, and I wrote a song with help from Bisno called "A Genève" and it's all in French.

On Sunday, my last partial day in Geneva, Bisno took me to see the United Nations area which is like a separate town of its own, accessible by, again, Geneva's marvelous tram system. It wasn't particularly aesthetically pleasing but it was amazing just to be in that area surrounding by big shiny buildings where important decisions are made.
Then came the hard part. I said "bye" to Bisno and teared up as I was walking through the customs checkpoint and then proceeded to cry silently for the entire first hour of my train ride back to Aix-en-Provence. When I got in touch with Bisno after finally making it back to my house, it turned out that she had been crying for an hour or two, as well. *sigh* It's strange how we suddenly found ourselves in another country in another continent, meeting up in Geneva because it's where one of us lives. Very strange. It was one of those "wow, I'm growing up" or "wow, this is life" moments. Amazing and quite bittersweet.

But the loveliness of this weekend was so worth the inevitable tears and slightly melancholy day after.