"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