Abe in France

2004-05-21T08:26:00.000-05:00

Much to discuss

I walked home tonight around 1, and it was an interesting walk, taking me through what I believe should be called the Rue des Transvestite Prostitutes. It's not a particularly seedy area during the day, but for some reason, at night, there are a whole bunch of women walking around, or sitting at bus stops (for buses that stopped running hours earlier), wearing rather inappropriate clothing, and I'm pretty sure that not all of those women were born women. Certainly a decent number of the ones I got inadvertently close enough to see (despite keeping my eyes trained squarely on the pavement in front of me) were once of the male persuasion. Cars were stopping everywhere, or slowing down to check out the product, as it were, and it may have been my imagination, but I think at least once a car slowed down to determine whether or not I was, shall we say, on the market. I wasn't wearing a miniskirt and heels or anything, but this should give you an idea of the extent to which everything that moved on that street was for sale.

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The final game of the UEFA Cup Wednesday night was rather interesting. For those of you who don't care about soccer, just skip down to the next section break.

Got rid of the losers? Good. Anyway, the UEFA Cup is basically the second-biggest European club championship, after the Champions League title, and therefore something of a big deal. This match featured Olympique Marseille, whom I detest for reasons I'm not quite clear on, versus Valencia, of Spain. A big-deal match, featuring a big-deal referee, Pierluigi (?) Collina, the completely hairless superstar ref who has his own autobiography and is on the cover of the most popular European soccer video game (Championship Soccer or some other anonymous name), and is generally regarded as one of the best refs working today. This becomes relevant.

So with the score tied at 0-0 in injury time at the end of the first half, the Marseille goalkeeper, Fabien Barthez (also the keeper for the French national team, and a very high-profile figure here) tackles in very nasty fashion a Valencia player as he's just steps away from scoring. As Barthez was the last defender between the Valencia guy and the open net, and the tackle was clearly unclean, and occurred well within the penalty box, the ref had no real choice but to hand out a red card. The rules on this point are, as far as I recall, fairly explicit. The resulting penalty kick put Valencia up 1-0 going right into half time.

Now, a couple of things make this noteworthy. One, it's a championship game, and red cards in championship games are, shall we say, rare. Two, the GOALIE got red-carded, something I don't think I've EVER seen happen. Three, the ref was forced into the completely unenviable position of having to make a call, either way, that would directly affect the outcome of the game (Marseille, who had been doing pretty well up until that point, was shattered, never recovered, and Valencia got a second goal [one which Barthez might well have stopped, by the way], thus sealing the victory, a direct result of Collina's call). So Collina had two choices: give the card to Barthez, thus dropping Marseille to 10 men for a whole half of the game (they actually had to lose two players, since Barthez was ejected, and replaced by another goalkeeper; but since they had to have ten men on the field, they also had to get rid of a midfielder), and basically giving Valencia a goal, or give a yellow card (perhaps the wiser course, since that way Marseille still has all eleven players, but if he's gonna give a card at all, the rules are pretty clear on which one it has to be...).

Anyway, just thought some of you might find it interesting. But enough with the soccer.

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Dad and Ella just recently visited, arriving in Paris on the 4th of May, and leaving on the 17th. I have many pictures, and hope to post them at some point, but since I have all my finals coming up next week (two each on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday), I will be slightly busy and perhaps unable to do so...

They arrived on Tuesday, or perhaps Wednesday, but I wasn't able to get to Paris until that Thursday afternoon. It was a perfectly lovely one too, although the weather was perhaps less than lovely. In fact, it rained, looked like it was going to rain, or was just unpleasant, pretty much the whole time we were in Paris. Not a huge deal, since Paris offers quite a bit of interesting indoor activities, but it's still so much nicer when sunny and warm. Anyway, we basically spent the weekend taking in some museums, as well as whatever sights we were able to access. We saw a movie Friday night (I believe), a Russian movie, and the process of finding a movie to see really made me wistful for spending a few months in Paris and just constantly seeing movies. There are more movies playing in Paris, movies of quality, than anywhere else in the world (I imagine). It's truly amazing.

Saturday night was an experience that one could describe, without hyperbole, as sublime. Pariscope, the listings magazine, told us that there was to be a Mozart concert given by a chamber orchestra and some singers at the Sainte Chapelle that evening. Sainte Chapelle, as we discovered, is not only a breathtakingly beautiful space (small and intimate, built for kings, but with walls that seem to be made of stained glass; there's almost nothing but, and it's an amazing effect that can be described by neither words nor pictures), but it also happens to have some pretty damn fine acoustics. The singers had some fun with this, occasionally launching a few notes to the rather lofty rafters, and watching with all of us in amazement as they floated gently down, ricocheting off the glass as they came. It was an exceedingly neat experience.

That Monday we all came back to Montpellier, where for a change the weather did nothing but cooperate, and while I went to class, they...um...got up late and waited for me to get back (I didn't have much class that week). On Tuesday, after an awesome lunch (chicken with lemon sauce), we met my host family chez moi for aperitifs. Thus began the five hour (I checked my watch) ordeal, as I went from English to French to English to French...over and over and over and over and over and over again, and then some more. I worked my ass off that night, and by the end of it the sweat was pouring off me. It was, in fact, a perfectly lovely night, and the restaurant my host mom picked was amazing (that pork was...it was...it was...oh, I'm not even going to try). But you translate between your native language, and one not so native, for five hours. Whooboy. But it was fantastic exercise, a truly unique experience, and I'm glad I've now done something like it, at least once.

Thursday, again after my classes were finished, we got in the rented minivan and booked it for a town on the Riviera near Cannes, called Vence. We stopped on the way at a town perched on a hill, called Gordes, which has to be one of the most amazing locations I've ever visited. This didn't surprise me much, as we were driving through Provence, which is perhaps the most beautiful country I've ever been in, near or heard tell of. Every vista was amazing, and all for different reasons; after awhile, it became tiring. And after driving through countryside for which the words bucolic and splendour were first combined, we came upon some mountains that needed traversing. At night. In a van. A stick. Despite fears of imminent death, I did fine, but I'd hate to have been Dad, as that could not possibly have been more stressful.

Anyway, we arrived, safe, sound and tired, and the next day, we set out for Cannes and its Film Festival (perhaps you've heard of it?). We didn't get in to see anything, but this was actually rather made up for just by walking around for awhile. It was a really nice day, in a really nice part of the world, overrun by Hollywood hangers-on moving about with an arrogant sense of self-importance completely undeserved. I get the feeling now, looking back on it, that I was up to my ears in the type of people that green-lit Jury Duty, or perhaps the career of Josh Hartnett. These people were DOING LUNCH! On boats owned (or more probably, rented) by production companies no one has ever heard of, or will ever hear of again. People for whom "agent" and "publicist" are desirable future careers, or worse, dream jobs come true (I recognize what some of you might see as "irony" in me, who aspires to one day do similar jobs, though not even for actors but, shudder, for politicians, criticizing these people. But you're wrong. There is no irony here. I win!)

Anyway, Cannes was a trip, but only one day. Vence was neat, though a little too relaxed for my tastes (I relax enough as it is; I need more stimulation, not less). And on the last full day, we went to Nice, saw the Chagall museum, and spent time on the beach, where we were treated to an impromptu air show, just as I happened to have my camera out and taking pictures (the coincidence was amazing, though I really only have one good picture...still, it's good).

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And that was how the last two weeks have gone. I have finals soon, will be finished with them on Thursday, and will be leaving France for the USA the Thursday after that. So, just two weeks left (if not a little bit less...)

2004-04-19T10:17:00.000-05:00

Massive update

I just posted around 100 or so pictures, divided into two groups: those from Barcelona, and those from Tarascon/Beaucaire.

2004-04-14T05:18:00.000-05:00

"Don't go to Beaucaire", said my guidebook in so many words

But go I did. Why? Because I am intrepid. And because I read those words after already having booked the room, and I am too timid, especially in French, to call back a hotel five minutes after I've reserved and cancel. So I went.

Besides, I was going, for Easter weekend, because my host mom recommended it to me. Granted, it wasn't the first name on her list, nor the second, third, fourth or tenth, but she got to it eventually. I wanted someplace rural, with a nice countryside and not too many tourists. Well, figurez-vous that such a place tends not to have a train station (my sole viable means of transport)? Typically, if there's a train station, there's a reason.

Anyway, I went. And, though my guidebook was right in saying that the twin towns of Beaucaire and Tarascon, separated by the Rhone river, are kinda nice and kinda pretty, they're also kinda seedy, it perhaps overstated the seediness of the place. (Like that last sentence? I'm not gonna edit it, cause if it hurt to write it, you damn well better believe I'm gonna share the pain.) Anyway, there definitely are parts of those towns that are best avoided at two in the morning, but there were enough tourists around (just enough, in fact; more, and it would have been too touristy; less, and all the good stuff would have been closed and it would have been a lot shadier) to take care of that problem. And what there is to see in Beaucaire and Tarascon, as you will learn whenever I finally get to posting that batch of pictures, is quite impressive. And by quite impressive, I mean damn fine.

Not enough that both towns have cool castles and churches and views out over the Rhone and over the towns themselves. No, they have to be smack-dab in the middle of Provence, the nicest (in my rather inexperienced opinion) part of France, at least this time of year.

So I got in the first day, and just walked around a bit, finding myself consoled about the seediness by the castle in Tarascon: really cool, well-preserved, and very few tourists for a thing of that size and grandeur. Tourists really can be a problem, as much in themselves as in what comes with hordes of them, and so to find something really cool without many tourists is the best outcome one can hope for in a weekend vacation. I also found that first day a "map" (more later) of a rather cool-seeming route around the area outside of town, slated to take 7 hours or so, which I was totally up for.

Early (for me) Saturday morning, I set out on the route. I followed the map diligently, but as I now know, departed from the route basically...well, to be honest, I'm not sure that I was ever on the route to begin with. The problem was that the "map" was more an advisory marker, as in: "There exists a route that goes to all these places, in this order, and they are in roughly the spatial orientation herein depicted; however, this depiction bears no resemblance to actual landforms and their relative locations". So what I thought was a map telling me to follow the Rhone for 3 hours was, in fact, a map telling me to depart the Rhone immediately and walk away from it for 3 hours.

Good start, that. After finding my way through several privately-owned parcels of land, including a dam/hydro-electric plant, I found myself separated from land on one side by the Rhone, and on the other by a little canal used by the plant to control God only knows what. I walked for at least an hour along this parcel of land, thinking that it would at some point encounter a bridge, or that the canal would end. Looking on a map afterwards, I realized that that canal probably keeps on going for a good hundred more kilometers; thank God, therefore, that there was finally a bridge, to a teensy town called Vallabregues, with not much to see other than a municipal bullfighting arena. That, and a sign pointing me in the direction of the first town slated to be on the route, a good 6 kilometers away.

From here on out, the walk got a lot nicer; I was still not exactly where I wanted to be, but I was in Provence, and not on the banks of the Rhone, a relatively boring part of the world in which to find oneself. Provence, however, is all color and vinyards and cool landscapes and old houses, so even unsure of my location (I wasn't "lost"), I was doing alright.

Eventually I found my way to Boulbon, where I encountered Many Things. First, a really cool ruined castle in the hills directly behind and above the town, which was nothing special, just old and nestled in Provincial hills and therefore cool, but no more. The castle, however, was awesome. I think. I didn't actually go in it, just around it, since there were signs everywhere warning of danger, peril, animals and animal traps, a locked gate (locked since around 1978, if I read the faded sign correctly), and barbed wire. I got the point. I would have loved to check out that castle, but it didn't really seem like a good idea to do so on my own. I kick myself now for not going in anyway, but...

It was in Boulbon, where I still had at least a good four hours of the "route" to go, that I decided to quit the route for good. It wasn't really marked, and I'd been walking for four hours anyway; it was going to take me awhile to get back, who knew how long, and I hadn't seen that part of the route anyway. But at least I knew in which direction I should be going; if I followed the route, that knowledge would be denied me.

The other reason I stayed was that Boulbon was having its boules tournament that day. Boules is petanque is bocci ball is lawn bowling, and a favorite of old southern French men; this promised to be an awesome, in the Biblical sense, spectacle.

It actually turned out kinda lame; just a bunch of old guys standing around playing boules. Interesting for a couple minutes, but...

After that, the story quickly becomes less interesting, at least without pictures. I walked home without incident, checked out the castle in Tarascon, found it to be awesome (all the more so because I would find myself in, for example, the courtyard, completely alone and able to contemplate its thousand-year history in tranquil muted awe), and went to bed. The next day, I chilled and checked out, for several hours, the Beaucaire castle and gardens that surround it, which were really great places in which to chill. A frisbee would have been perfect.

The Beaucaire castle was maybe cooler than that of Tarascon, perhaps because it had seen use (it was begun 7 centuries before Christ): sometime in the 15th century, it was garrisoned by Simon de Montfort, while he was off fighting someone or other. Local boy Raymond VII, returning home and being refused entry by Montfort's men, laid siege, aided by the townspeople. Montfort, returning home and finding his castle under siege by the town, laid siege to the town. Raymond and the town, somehow, won, and is now a big deal in Beaucaire.

2004-04-08T06:26:00.000-05:00

Happy Birthday

To Jake and David, both 21 today, finally. I would email them, instead of posting this, but the campus email system is down for maintenance. So...happy birthday, guys! Go get wasted! Get your first drunk and disorderlies!

2004-04-07T06:49:00.000-05:00

Spanish sejour

There was just something about Barcelona that was so relaxing...It might have been the absolutely perfect weather, in the low 70s and high 60s, mostly sunny with occasional clouds that, if anything, just made the place even more attractive. It might have been the food, which was both awesome and, certainly given its awesomeness, cheap. It might have been the fact that you don't really sit down and eat three main meals a day but you have just a little tapas, whenever you're hungry, which could not possibly suit me better. It might have been the fact that Barcelona is a gorgeous city, full of lush colors of nature and of cityscapes, trees bumping up against old buildings bumping up against the Mediterranean. It might have been the fact that the Sagrada Familia, which I've badly wanted to visit since before I arrived in Europe, was indeed badass. But it was probably the fact that I got up at noon every day, and Mike got up around 2 or 3, and we went to bed around 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 every night.

We arrived on a Friday afternoon, and after taking the metro to a stop near our hostel, we emerged into the sunlight and the Ramblas. The Ramblas is basically a long, daily street fair stretching pretty far inland from the area around the docks, and a huge statue of Christopher Columbus. There are huge masses of tourists and even natives walking up and down it, and sidewalk vendors selling everything they think tourists want to buy. But weirdest of all are the street performers. What's weird isn't that they exist, or even that they do bizarre things (most of them make their living dressing up, painting themselves one color from head to foot, and pretending to be a statue), but that there are so many of them. For however many hundreds of meters the Ramblas stretches, you can find them one after the other, all day, every day.

There were also various cons, the most popular of which was a variation of three-card monte, with a ball moving around under three boxes. I actually spent a lot of time watching it, trying to figure out the scam. What I did notice is that pretty much every time, just before the last move, the person moving the ball around (the dealer?) would, and it always looked accidental but happened with such regularity that I know it couldn't have been, tap one of the boxes with his finger as he was moving everything around, and it would rise a little, exposing the location of the ball. This always happened just before the last move, and as a result, I was able to guess, with around 90-100% accuracy, which box the ball was under. But pretty much every time, someone would step forward, and put money on what was obviously (to me) the wrong box.

Obviously the scam was simply planting a few people in the audience, to intentionally lose but make it look like it could be beaten so easily. The only problem was that there seemed to be so many plants; each time, it would be a different sucker losing his money, so that if they were all plants, they would have to be about 10-15 people and make up half the audience. Which I guess is possible, but it seems like an awful lot of effort...

Another act, that I only saw once but loved, was two "ninjas", one in black and one in white, carring large bats padded with styrofoam. In front of each one was a sign: "5 Euros for black ninja to hit white" and vice-versa. So you'd pay, and one would get this great, gleeful look on his face, while the other would wince, and the former would advance, and would wail on the latter in as comical a fashion as possible. I promise, it was hilarious, because they were such good physical comedians.

Of course, Barcelona is much more than the Ramblas. Which means I'll have to go back, because that's all I saw.

Well, not quite. That first night, Friday, we went walking for a bit, in search of a place to eat. We found it in a rather classy-looking tapas restaurant and bar. We sat down at the bar, waiting for a table to open up, and didn't get up for 2 hours. The tapas kept coming, and could not have tasted better. This experience was topped off by the barmaid who was really nice and, I guess, pretty cute. The tab came out to 34 Euros, about half of what we were expecting, so we gave her a 20 as a tip, in a part of the world in which tipping is unusual.

That night we made for a club she recommended, but kept stopping in to bar after bar after bar, and never made it all the way to the club, which opened around 2-2:30. Jaeger is some strong shit, but I turned in a pretty damn respectable performance. Mike, on the other hand, was redder than a Colonial governor. I just made that last simile up, and I hope you like it. I think it needs some work, though.

Next day, after getting up none too early, we hung out on and around the Ramblas for a bit, but we got up late and had some museums we wanted to hit. The only one we got to, however, was a Dali exhibition, focusing not on his work but on his influences. So there was quite a bit of his weirdness on display, and some of it was odd indeed, but most of it dealt with articles, books, photos of him and his friends.

After some more cafe-sitting, beer-drinking and people-watching, we headed for the cablecar that stretches over the port area and, owing to the relative flatness of Barcelona and the elevation of the cablecar, gives one a fantastic view of all Barcelona laid out at one's feet. So in a sense, I did see all of Barcelona. I'll let the pictures tell that tale, however.

Afterwards, we went back to our hostel, changed, and exchanged small talk at length with two girls who were staying in our room. Both were from London, but one was just working there, having lived in the States since, presumably, the last year or two. None of us really knowing where we were going to go, or what we were going to do, we all went out to another tapas place, not as successful as the last time (slow service, decent food and plentiful but just not the same as before...), and then a bar, after which they turned in (wusses!). Mike and I, however, having in our heads the club recommended by the cute barmaid of the night before, decided to head over there, by taxi.

When we arrived, what we discovered was a club for people more attractive, slightly older and better dressed than us (or at least, me), complete with a "list" and a 20 Euro cover. Right. Back to the hostel (by this point, it's late enough and the alcohol is having its effect).

Sunday was largely spent getting up, figuring out how to get to the Sagrada Familia, doing so, experiencing it and going back to the hostel. When I say "experiencing it", by the way, I include going up the towers. There was just something about them, and I'm really not sure what it was, that kept me in a permanent state of being freaked out. It's not like I normally handle heights with so little problem, but this was especially bad. As the photos testify, however, that is one hell of a church, and one hell of a view, so I guess the anxiety was worth it.

The Sagrada Familia isn't actually done yet, by the way. For some reason that I didn't catch, work on it was abandoned a hundred or so years ago, and is only now being restarted, based on the architect, Antoni Gaudi's plans. It really is an amazing work, even unfinished, and there's so much to see, so much detail and novelty in every corner. It's like no other church I've ever seen, and by this point I've seen many of Europe's best. But don't take my word for it; find pictures of it online somewhere, since mine aren't all that great, and you'll see exactly what I mean.

That night was spent in discussion. Our room was, by now, being shared by a Swede and a Ghanain, and the conversation ranged all over the map, and went on for hours. The most interesting part was probably when we inevitably got around to Iraq. I get the feeling, while I'm in Europe, that there aren't too many people interested in defending it. That is to say, whenever I say, "Well yes, but...", it always seems to me like what I'm saying might actually be genuinely new for the people to whom I'm saying it. Not to imply that I'm so awesome, but just as a comment on the one-sided nature of the debate here, far more one-sided than is the case at home. Even people who did support the war, and who love to argue, as is the case with me, most of the time feel compelled to sit there quietly as someone just goes off about the Occupation, occasionally nodding or throwing in a "yeah" or "bien sur".

One of the oddest things about arguing/debating/conversing with people here about America, as they all want to do (and I am usually only too happy to oblige), is that even if they're saying things I agree with, I have a hard time not arguing with them. Much more so than is the case in the States.

Whenever I hear someone say that they really hate Bush, I always think, "But you do so for the wrong reasons!", or "But you don't know what you're talking about!" Not just when they say it in relation to Iraq, but more often when we're talking about some domestic American issue, like defense spending or corruption or something. It's weird, since I hate him too, and say and think things just as nasty about him, but I suppose I feel like he's the President of MY country, and that means I have the right to criticize him, but you johnny-come-notlys who don't even LIVE in the US don't get to have a say because it's not your country. I don't really know why I think that, but...

In other news, I'm going to be spending Easter weekend in a smallish town called Beaucaire, right across the Rhone river from another smallish town called Tarascon. My host mom suggested it to me, since I wanted someplace nice, natural, old, unpopulated. I was pretty excited about it, until I opened up one of my travel books and found that it had this to say about Beaucaire: "...Beaucaire doesn't necessarily merit making a special effort to visit..." just after it finishes discussing the seediness and crime problems due to high unemployment and unintegrated immigrants. I still trust my host mom way more than whomever wrote this book, of course, but my excitement for the moment is more tempered. So it's gonna be an interesting weekend.

P.S. Pictures are still being uploaded here.

2004-03-31T05:16:00.000-06:00

The French Riviera

Monaco and Nice...outside of Paris, there exist no more celebrated cities in all of France. And rightly so.

The occasion for the trip was the arrival of my brother, Mike, for his spring break. The itinerary: Nice on Friday, where we would be sleeping, with a trip to Monaco at some point, and a return to Montpellier on Monday.

Nice is a nice enough city, at first glance. If that first glance happens to be in the late afternoon/early evening on a brisk March day, "nice enough" is about as superlative as you're going to get. But it's still impressive; we went to the beach and just walked around for a bit. The Mediterranean is no longer an unknown quantity; I've lived by its side for seven months now. There is, however, a difference between taking a bus from a medium-sized college town to a rather smaller resort town in the off-off-season, and strolling along the Promenade des Anglais in the heart of the Riviera, the center of town a frisbee's throw away.

The next day it was off to Monaco. And here, may I simply say that if you haven't been to Monaco, you'll never be able to understand what it's like. By which I mean that it's such a weird place (and not weird in an entirely positive way, either; there's plenty to dislike) that you have to wander around in it for a bit to really get it. But let me try to give a taste.

It is, first of all, beautiful. It's situated on the Mediterranean coast, and a highly attractive part of that coast, to be precise. Mountains behind, water in front as blue as in a Corona commercial, but a thousand times more real. In between...well, frankly, the town itself is kind of ugly, with an infinite number of condo buildings, all seemingly constructed in the 1950s (they all have a very similar look about them). The parts of Monaco where nature intrudes, in a controlled manner, can be breathtaking when not almost artificial seeming. The grass is perfect, the trees exotic and you will never see more shades of green in one place.

Monaco is, second of all, tiny. Mike and I spent one day there, and though we didn't see all there is to see, we saw most of it. And in fact, we passed much of our time in climbing up most of one of the mountains behind the town, which gave spectacular views, and also allowed us to realize that the town of 50,000 permanent residents is, well, kinda small. It stretches along the coast for, I believe, about 2 kilometers, but it really doesn't have a whole lot of depth to it, going what can only be a kilometer inland, if that.

Monaco is, third and perhaps most importantly of all, damn rich. I mean damn rich. Mike-and-I-spent-74-euros-on-lunch rich (it was, granted, an awesome lunch with even awesomer people-watching opportunities, but I don't know that the orange juice, which again was definitely fantastic, was worth 6 euros a glass [the coke was 4.50]). At one point, walking down one of the streets in Monte Carlo by the coast (ok, fine, they're all by the coast), we passed a Mercedes dealership. Neat. Then we passed a Rolls Royce dealership. The one after that was either Ferrari or Bentley, I can't remember, but it's not important, since plenty of those cars were to be found on the streets themselves (along with the aforementioned Rollses and Benzes, and BMWs galore).

We didn't go into the casino, since neither of us really looked like we belonged in such a place, but from the outside it was damn ostentatious, of course. The forecourt contained nothing but cars that would look flashy in a rap video, and everybody walking around was wearing clothes that probably cost more than my family could get by selling me into slavery.

We got back to Nice that night, and spent a relaxing Sunday there, getting up late and just hanging out around the Promenade des Anglais. You know, doing things that people do on vacation. Nothing special. Next week: Barcelona. Oh man...

2004-03-22T06:27:00.000-06:00

Election Night in France

As I'm sure none of you are aware, yesterday (Sunday) saw the first round of elections for the French regions and cantons (the second, run-off round takes place next Sunday). From what I've been able to discern, the cantons are kinda like counties, and the regions like states; therefore, this was the county board and state legislature elections (obviously the parallels aren't exact, since the regions use a parliamentary system). Due to the odd timing structure of French elections, these regionals and the upcoming European parliament elections are due to be the last elections until President in 2007; as a result, the regionals are seen as the opportunity for the French to express their (dis)satisfaction with the government.

Before I get to the results, about which none of you care, a word about the campaigns. That word is, "nonexistent". This is because of the French campaign-finance laws (I learned this in my electoral sociology class, in French, so what I'm about to say may not be accurate [but I'm pretty sure it is]): the raising of money is basically illegal, as is the spending of it. I woulda put a McCain-Feingold joke here, but it's not as easy as you might imagine to be funny about campaign finace reform.

The raising of money isn't entirely illegal, I should qualify: you just can't raise money from corporations, and I think the restrictions on individuals are really comprehensive. The spending of money, however, is pretty much entirely illegal (the thinking was, if we make it illegal to spend money, the parties won't need to sell themselves like whores in order to get the money, which would be illegal anyway!) So no ads, no debates, no phone banks, no "visibility", no posters, no fliers, no events, no fundraisers, no speeches. About the only thing campaigns are allowed to do, besides put up posters of a limited size in certain specially-designated areas, is send the candidate somewhere, and hope a news crew tags along.

So the campaigns themselves weren't terribly interesting. To be honest, I saw no evidence of their existence anywhere, outside of a few posters (and I mean, a few), over the last few days. I imagine there was more to them than just that, but not much more; this should give you some idea, anyway, of what politics in France are like.

Yesterday, then, was the first round of elections. For each region, if no party gets a majority, the parties that got more than 10% move on to the next round, where they can fuse with each other and with parties receiving more than 5%. In the second round, the party that wins the plurality gets an extra 25% of the seats, to ensure that there's a majority in the (regional) parliament. Got all that?

Election day itself was fairly quiet; I was going to go to my host mom's polling place and take some pictures, but I didn't. Maybe I will next week. Participation was ridiculously high (by my standards): something like 63%. This was higher than last time around, in 98, and the first time participation had risen rather than fallen, but not especially high for French regional elections. Imagine 63% participation in an American election where the highest office on the ballot is State Senator, though...

Election night was really the most fun, and very similar to election night in the US. Basically, France 2 (the major public channel, thus the major channel) had a round table with a bunch of politicians, either heads of their lists for various regions and parties, or spokespeople for their parties, to talk about the results as they were coming in, where they would be breathlessly reported, and accompanied by neat, important-sounding music (they were in fact projections, made by Ipsos-Dell [where's Reid?]). The program was on for a couple hours, so they switched off the participants all the time, which got a little confusing and hectic. Every so often, for no discernible reason, a head-of-list of other major political figure would make a speech, which was neither concession nor victory, but...as far as I could tell, basically an excuse to get on national television (imagine how thirsty for coverage these people must be, with zero advertising or publicity of any kind).

Part of the randomness of all this was that even less was decided, at the end of the night, than in a primary. If a party makes it past 10%, they go on. Sure, they might decide to merge with other parties, or...well, that's about all they can do. But the 10% figure, for major parties in no matter which region, is not hard to surpass. For the smaller parties, ok, difficult. But in pretty much every race I saw, the Socialists made it (and usually won, though never with a majority), the UMP and UDF (the two parties of the right), and the FN (National Front, i.e. the Nazis) made it. Occasionally, the UDF wouldn't, but that was about it. So really, this was more like a poll than an election, and the real election will be held next week.

A few words on the results of this poll/election:
1) The left owned; it did a couple points better than the last election, and a few better than the last regional elections (if I recall correctly). The UDF and UMP basically always lost, and were almost always in 3rd and 2nd, respectively. Which is all very good for the left, but the UDF and UMP, having few disagreements between them, can just merge in most of the regions, and pose a significant challenge to the left anyway. So who knows.
2) The FN did better than usual, too, around 15%. This produced the really bizarre phenomenon of the various speakers at the France 2 roundtable routinely saying things like, "Well of course we consider this a tremendous victory, but there remains much work to be done, as long as the FN remains on the ballot". Imagine the Republicans getting mad because the Democrats are even nominating someone!

And that's about it. Mike (my brother) is coming on Thursday, and so we'll be taking off to Nice this weekend. Sweet!

2004-03-19T12:25:00.000-06:00

Aux armes, chercheurs!

I'm writing this in a café, to which I had repaired in an as-yet-unsuccesful attempt to force myself to finish reading a book for class. A few minutes ago, I was very politely not-interrupted by a rather massive protest march of what has to be well over a thousand (well, ok, 750-1000, but I don't know much about crowd-counting) researchers protesting the government's paltry, at best, allocation of funds in their general direction.

Despite the rather impressive turnout, this has to be one of the least impressive protests I've ever witnessed. Even though upwards of several hundred protestors just marched no more than twenty feet from the open front doors of the café, I could barely hear them: what little noise there was (mostly whistles and drums) was pathetically drowned out by the barely-audible radio, playing crappy French and American Top 40.

I've witnessed this phenomenon before in French protests: good turnout, impressive visuals, but nobody moving their lips, no chanting, and almost zero disruption to the lives of others. I was strongly tempted to run out of there and start screaming my head off, since nothing gets people to start getting loud than other people already making fools of themselves (this is something I've noticed through observation, and it was confirmed here: every so often, a few people would start yelling, and the yell would be taken up by more and more people, until finally the demonstrators had some sort of aural presence, however short-lived). I didn't do this, of course, since A) I'm a chickenshit, and B) I don't know any French protest chants ("Que voulons-nous?! Plus de fonds!! Quand les voulons-nous?! Maintenant!!")

I'm also pretty sure that "mouvements sociales" is either the polite or the official term for "strikes" (the common word is "grèves"), since I've now seen it used more than once to refer to a strike, this time on Tuesday's cafeteria menu, explaining why the usual, rather excellent, cafeteria food would not be available.

I think the temperature's around 70 today. Go ahead, hate me. But before you do, go to The Onion, and check out the Rumsfeld article. I cannot begin to describe its genius...

2004-03-13T06:47:00.000-06:00

Trains, rains and soccer games

Clever, huh? ... Well, screw you. I thought so.

Anyway, I've been pretty busy this last week-and-a-half: Eric came to Montpellier, where he spent the weekend, and as soon as he left, my mom arrived, and spent the week. During Eric's trip, we went to (yet another) Montpellier game, this time in the pouring rain and against a team almost as bad as the hosts: the 18 seed visiting the 19 seed, in a 20-team league. Ouch. Montpellier lost, 1-0. I'll talk more about that when I post the pictures...at some point, God knows when.

Mom was here for a week, during which the weather was perfect every day save Friday, where it was kinda crappy and rainy. She had dinner with my host family, which was an extremely awkward affair, full of those long, question-mark-filled pauses, at least until the wine had established itself firmly in our bloodstreams.

The pictures from her trip are here, and though for the most part they include her/us walking around Montpellier, they also include a brief trip to St-Martin-de-Londres, a little medieval town close to the tallest landform in the region, Pic-St-Loup.

---

I'm not sure how big a deal all of this has been in the States, but in Europe, the Madrid train bombings are getting a lot of attention. Firstly, because so many people died (over 200), but also because their perpetrators aren't known with any certainty (and whenever al-Qaeda is even a suspect...), and because, at least in France, they're a rather chilling echo of current events.

The big story recently was the emergence of the terrorist/extortionist/pseudo-anticapitalist group AZF, and the Jerry Bruckheimer-esque series of events that followed.

The story, for those of you who missed it (and I don't think this got much play in the US, so that might be a lot of you), is this: Sometime in January, the President received a letter claiming to be from a newly-formed terrorist group, announcing their existence but not really threatening anything (though doing so in a threatening manner). Nobody paid any attention, since this probably happens several times a week. A few months later, another letter was received, but still no big deal. Then, a third letter, alleging that a number of bombs had been placed at various points on the French rail network, the first of which was marked with an "18" and set to explode in five days, on (March?) 18th. Their GPS coordinates would be provided in exchange for 4 million euros; to contact the group, the government was to place a bizarre classified ad in the newspaper Libération ("To my big wolf...don't take any unnecessary chances...[signed] Suzy. [secret phone number, I think]"). They received the message on a Friday, and pondered and pondered and pondered. By the time they had decided to place the ad, Libé had already gone to bed, and so they had to spend the whole day waiting. They placed the ad, the group contacted them, and as proof, told them where to find the bomb. They found it, tested it, and it worked; it should have gone off on the 18th. I think that after that, they tried to pay off the group, but screwed up somehow, and those are all the details I remember. Kind of anticlimactic, sorry.

2004-03-01T07:22:00.000-06:00

Nul Match
The above is probably one of those cases where, though I think I'm saying something clever in French, I'm really saying something terribly confusing to your average Frenchman. Oh well.

I went to a soccer game Saturday night, Montpellier vs Lille. Montpellier, at third from the bottom, is looking at relegation, and Lille is only a few points ahead of them. So I was looking forward to a good game.

It was about 40 degrees out, maybe a little lower. Dan and I got a little plastered before the game (it was at 8PM), since it was my birthday weekend, and since that's what soccer is all about! Anyway, it made the stadium food taste better. Oh, how I long for a Ballpark or a ballpark hot dog, with ketchup (heresy!) and mustard and relish, and maybe a massive coke...

On the plus side, the stadium was not packed at all, so we were able to get awesome seats, right on the touchline. The game was being played about fifteen feet from our faces, which doesn't really help for getting a clear picture of what's going on, but it's awesome as an experience. Crappiness of the Montpellier side aside, this is still first-division soccer in a major European league. Figo and Beckham these guys ain't, but it's a lot easier and cheaper to watch them (and hear them, right up close).

And it was a fun game. Montpellier got owned, 2-0, and they were lucky to get that 0. No attack to speak of, no development, no midfield, and their Maginot defense can best be described as hapless. They're kind of ugly to watch, but I don't go to the games because I really want to see amazing soccer, I go for the spectacle (so the red card one of their players got helped). If Eric (who graciously and unacknowledgedly put me up in his apartment for a week in London) makes it down this week, we're probably gonna go see Montpellier play Toulouse. I'm gonna need to teach him some things to yell, though, because it's so much more fun when you get into it...

Here's a taste, for the curious:

ALLEZ, ALLEZ ALLEZ ALLEZ!
ALLEZ MONTPEL'!
ALLEZ MES POTES!
L'ARBITRE EST UN ******** (couldn't make it out; "arbitre" means ref)
MERDE, MAIS QU'EST-CE QUE C'EST QUE CA? (shit, what was that?)
MAIS NON, T'ES CON OU QUOI? (no, are you an idiot or what?)
Bien joué mes potes! (well played/good job)
Bon travaille! (good work/good job)

And so on. I was yelling a lot more, but sadly I can't remember most of what I (or others) had to say. I'll try to do better next time.

2004-02-24T06:33:00.000-06:00

I'm legal baby!

Wooo! Today being my 21st birthday, I'm now both kinds of legal! I even made up a song, yesterday, to celebrate:

(to the tune of the chorus of Je n'oublie pas d'où je viens [if that's even the name of that song...])
A partir de d'main,
Ca serait légale
Pour moi d'acheter
Des boissons alcoolisés

Ok, look, you have to know the song to see how that works. And I mean c'mon, it's in french! Extra points!

No? Ok. As for the translation...it's fairly self-evident, I think. (Replace the ' in d'main with an 'e', for those of you going to Babelfish right about now...)

2004-02-23T04:16:00.000-06:00

London

So I voted a little over a week ago. The absentee ballot arrived, and I showed it off to my host family and some of their friends who were visiting, many of whom were Chilean and got a kick out of the ballot being in both Spanish and English. Of course, I showed it to them only before I voted, as to do otherwise would be illegal. Anyway, I just mention it to let y'all know that I voted (although I think I may be getting a second ballot, a more official one, which would be good since I didn't have any judge endorsements and so just voted for whoever's names looked familiar.) Also, there happened to be some delegate candidates whom I knew, Ann Williams and Sarah Alipourian, so for all of you in the 5th CD (which is everybody who lives near me), vote for them.

Right. I also went to London, a trip from which I got back today.

What can I say? It was good, maybe the "best" city I've been to yet. This certainly has something to do with the fact that in England, they speak English. As such, it was the first anglophone country I've been to since leaving the States in September, and relaxing as a result. I also didn't really try to do too much, touristy-wise, and I took few photos. That said, I went to the Tate Modern and the Tower of London, and visited the British Museum, mostly to see the Rosetta Stone and the Reading Room. I also pilgrimaged to the Economist offices, and saw the outside of buildings such as: Parliament/Big Ben/Victoria Tower, Westminster Abbey, 10 Downing St, the MI6 building (it's awesome; it was in a recent Bond flick), Highbury Stadium, St. Paul's and a few others; I passed by innumerable embassies while lost in Westminster, as well as the former houses of Lord Kelvin (you know, the temperature guy), Lord Tennyson and Walter Bagehot (most famous editor of the Economist). I walked down Fleet Street and got lost in SoHo. I stayed in Greenwich (home of the meridian, or is it the mean?).

I also met some family that I'd not met before, relatives that (I'm no genealogist[sp?]) I believe are cousins, but I'm not sure how many removes there are. That was really awesome, actually, since when you think about it, it's not often that one meets family for the first time. Plus, they seemed pretty cool (and fed me without allowing me to pay, which was nice, and a policy to which I lend my wholehearted support). Ideally, I'll go back in May, at which time I'll finally learn what the hell the rules of cricket are. Assuming they don't just make them up as they go along, calvinball-style (now there's a flashback...)

Outside of all that, however, I didn't really do a whole lot. Mostly just relaxed. It was so nice to be in a country where I could speak to anyone in English, and where people spoke to me in a similar, though not wholly identical, language.

Language aside, however, I'm convinced that England is the European country most like the US (that's a compliment, from where I sit, though others say the same thing and mean something different). The food is diverse and ethnic (I had much Indian and oriental Asian cuisine, all of which had been sorely missed on the Continent). There are snacks, and it's eminently possible for one person to get a sit-down meal of decent quality and price at any time of day.

The newspapers are also in Englo=[My host family just yelled for me to come in and tell them how to say "eggs sunnyside-up" in English.] The newspapers are also in English, which is nice, but they're really trashy. The major dailies are, literally, supermarket tabloids, just with celebrity news replacing the alien sightings. The Times, Guardian, Independent and all that are respectable, but you see them much less frequently than you see the Sun. However, when one does finally catch a glimpse of, say, the Guardian, one discovers that it's a pretty respectable paper, and I like it more than most French papers I've encountered. I think it's better at being serious than Le Monde, or rather, just as good (ok, maybe sliiiiiightly inferior), but it's got a lighter side, which is well appreciated. And then there's my favorite outlet of news, the Economist, which owns.

I didn't spend a lot of time in bookstores, since I didn't want to buy any books in English, since they'll inevitably distract me from reading in French, which is my goal, but the little time that I was in places like Waterstone's made me really want to back down.

The tv is awesome. How else to explain the Sunday night lineup that included Futurama, King of the Hill and South Park?

Finally, the beer. Also awesome. I have much love for English beer, but then, I have much love for German, Austrian, Czech beer as well. The best part of the beer is/are the names of the places in which one drinks it, however: The Drawn and Quartered (near the Tower of London) being the most memorable, but by noooooooo means unique, example.

Addendum: While walking around today (Sunday), I noticed a lot of orangeish sand over everything. At first, I attributed it to the construction going on nearby. Then I remembered my host family telling me about how the wind yesterday was from the South, and that that sand was in fact from the Sahara (this is apparently a regular occurence). Which is kinda cool.

2004-02-09T07:28:00.000-06:00

Trivialities, and a stuffy nose

So last weekend sucked, largely because I was pretty sick (as Neal Stephenson would put it, a stupendous badass of a cold that kept me inside and, sometimes, in bed). Time passes slowly when you're sick, slower still when you're sick and have nothing to do. So that was one of the slowest weekends of my life.

I'm going to London next week (well, actually, this Friday). I don't know for sure what I'm going to do there, but I'm beginning to get some ideas that sound enticing. We'll see. At the very least, I'll be seeing Eric, and some family that I've never before met, so that should be cool.

Grades. Ah, grades. I have so far received three, the three for the three university classes I took last semester. Before I tell you what I got, let me explain how the French grading system works: in a way, it's kind of the inverse of ours. Where we use only the top 30%, or so, of our system (you can theoretically get a 10%, for example, but usually you get a 70% or above), the French use only the bottom 70%, and very rarely the top 30%. Since their system works on a 20-point scale, this means that most grades are between a 0 and a 14. Consequently, you can't really say that such-and-such number is equivalent to an A, and so on, but if you get a 14 or higher, you kicked some ass (Their saying is that God gets a 20, and the Professor gets a 19). 10 is, I think, the target grade, and I think it's equivalent to a B; the French aim for a 10, and that's the point around which most grades cluster.

So. What were my grades? A 12, a 5 and an Absent.

The 12, I was content with (it was in the drama-for-drama students course).

The 5 was suspicious, since it was the average of two grades: one, the drama-for-lit students course, which was exactly the same as the previous, same teacher and everything; the other was a lecture on Carmen and the House of Bernarda Alba. This meant that, at best, I got a 10 in one and a 0 in the other, both of which seemed suspect. Long story short, it turned out I was accidentally marked Absent for one half of that course, when I should instead have received an 11. My grade, therefore, was a 10.5, and the lit department was very prompt about changing it (though I have yet to see the final proof that they officially changed the grade).

The Absent...well, that was the history course whose final I believed I bombed, horribly. As it turns out, I got a 10 in that one, too, but I wasn't registered for the course. I was accidentally registered for a different one, but since no one ever told me, I never showed up and consequently received an Absent. I don't know if it'll be as easy to change this one, but it should be possible; after all, it's pretty obvious (to me) that I'm not at fault, and since there's an already-graded final with my name on it for the course that I showed up to every week, I have high hopes.

I hope that all made sense, but it would be fitting if it didn't.

2004-02-04T07:01:00.000-06:00

Pictures...

...are up here. At least, the first half are. The second half...probably some time on Friday. I hope.

2004-02-02T04:44:00.000-06:00

Paris

So this weekend, as we both had time off, I met up in Paris with one of my best friends, Eric, who's studying in London. I last saw a friend from home several months ago, so this was the height of awesomeness; we basically planned to be tourists, as neither of us had been to Paris before, and also make an excursion up to the D-Day beaches, as both of us, but especially him, are World War 2 buffs.

Like I said, I last saw a friend from home several months ago, so we basically spent most of our time together talking about stuff, with scenery changes (the Arc de Triomphe, Champs Elysees, Eiffel Tower [I told you, tourist stuff]) as but a backdrop for conversation.

The first night, he got in at 2300 hours, so we just went back to the hostel, dropped off his stuff, and walked over to Montparnasse. The hostel was in the Latin Quarter, not too far from Montparnasse, but not too close either. We really just spent a couple hours walking and talking, then went back to the room, and stayed up talking till 4 or 5 in the morning, which was a problem as we wanted to get up at like 8:30.

The next day was the major tourist day: in order, we hit Notre Dame (hostel == 200m away from same), the Centre Pompidou, the Palais d'Elysee (the President's quarters), the Champs Elysees (famous, overpriced touristy street where the local Haagen-Dazs outlet charges 8 euros for a milkshake), the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower.

(Sidenote: the Tower was recently lit up all in red to celebrate the state visit of the Chinese President, Hu Jintao. When we went to see it, it was lit the way it usually is, in yellow, but we got there at the perfect hour, when the sky was a deep, rich, full blue, and it looked amazing. I took 42 pictures, because the shutter was staying open forever as a result of the low light level, and I couldn't keep my hand steady enough. I still managed to get a few nice pictures, but...)

(Other sidenote: Also as a result of the visiting Chinese President, the Champs Elysee was decorated with French and Chinese flags on the lampposts. I don't particularly want to get into China policy here, but it was more than a little repulsive to see the two flags next to each other on such a symbolic street, which terminates in the Arc de Triomphe. Obviously it's a good idea to engage China, but it's worth remembering what that flag symbolizes to Tibetans, to Taiwanese, to Falun Gong practitioners, to dissidents and democrats and prisoners...)

So we basically spent that day, a Friday, walking around and seeing things and walking some more and talking some more. I don't want to think about how much we actually did of either, but when we got back to the room that night, our legs were tired and our throats, sore.

Saturday we got up bright and early to take the train to Bayeux, in Normandy, a jumping-off point to see the invasion beaches and cemetery. It was a longish train ride, and on the way we got a lot of mileage out of a pack of cards I have (Hanukkah present; good call on this one, Dad) depicting members of the Bush administration (the "52 most wanted..."), with a blurb about them. We came up with nicknames for about half; the nicknames are given below, mostly because I want to have a record of them. I doubt they'll interest people who are neither me nor Eric, since many are in-jokes revolving around the picture on the card, but probably about half of them are decipherable, with some effort.

Bayeux is an unexpectedly awesome town. I have a feeling, confirmed by my guidebooks, that it's normally really touristy, but this is the off-off-off season, so...it wasn't. And when there aren't many people in town, it's actually really nice: not only is it simply a nice, attractive little place, it has the Bayeux Tapestry, which was amazing (some things are famous for a reason, and I don't think this one is famous enough). The Tapestry was originally conceived to adorn the cathedral in Bayeux, which makes its way onto the list of coolest cathedrals I've ever seen, as well as biggest cathedrals I've ever seen. It's almost 1,000 years old, and when we went down into the crypt of the same age, I at least got somewhat freaked out. There wasn't much that was objectively scary about it, but there was definitely an atmosphere.

The problem with Bayeux is that it's actually still somewhat far away from the sights we had come to see, and since it's the off-season, we had to take a taxi to see the beaches and cemetery, which wasn't cheap. Still...first up was the cemetery, and the pictures actually do a pretty good job of describing it, but it's still really something to see all those white crosses and stars of David, imposing solely on account of their number. Now I know what 10,000 of something looks like...

Omaha beach kind of sucked, to be honest. There's not really much there; it's a beach. Now I suppose I can say I've seen it, but...

The memorial at Point du Hoc was probably the coolest part of the whole trip. It's a former German command and artillery post, right on the Channel, that could hit either Omaha or Utah beaches; it's in a really strategic location, so the Allies knew they had to take it out. The night before D-Day (I believe; right at the beginning, anyway), 225 Rangers literally scaled the cliffs under the Point and, following aerial bombardment, took the post and held it against counterattacks for two days, losing 85 soldiers in the process; only something like 95 were still able to fight by the time reinforcements arrived.

The memorial survives essentially as it was after the fighting; grass has grown over the craters now, but they're still there, and they really hit home to you what it must be like to be in the middle of something like that. Also hitting home: the massive hunks of concrete strewn randomly about the Point, seemingly flung into the air by bombs hitting bunkers. Also hitting home: going into the bunkers that survive, and imagining what it must have been like in such claustrophobic spaces as bombs fell down on you for hours.

We went back to Bayeux, and after looking around for a half-hour, finally found a place to eat. We had tickets for the last train back to Paris, at 7:28, and around 7 or so, I got anxious and so we asked for the check and bolted out, thinking we were probably going to be early anyway, but better safe than sorry. We were pretty far from the station, and it took us about twenty, twenty-five minutes to get there. Around 7:25, we were about two blocks away, when we looked to our right and saw our train pulling into the station. This caused something of a panic, and we sprinted the rest of the way there, me beating Eric into the station and arriving as I heard the conductor blowing his whistle. I barely caught him before he got on and panted to him that there was still someone coming; Eric got on the train roughly twenty seconds before the last ride out of Bayeux pulled away.

We went to bed early that night, as we were both tired (we hadn't been getting much sleep, staying up late and getting up early; plus, my voice was hoarse again). Sunday: the Louvre! Although, let me tell you, it's somewhat underwhelming. Now, no question, it's one of the finest museums in the Western world, but the Mona Lisa is terribly underwhelming (it's the size of a dorm room poster, in a big bulletproof glass box, with a massive throng of tourists crowded around it, taking pictures. Meh.), as is Hammurabbi's code and the Venus de Milo. The cuneiform stuff they have is pretty cool, though, but by far the most impressive piece we saw was the Winged Victory. Not only does it live up to its reputation (2nd most famous piece in the Louvre), but it far exceeds it; we turned a corner, and there it was, and the awesomeness was almost physical. It's just really badass. That's all I can say about it, because no picture I've ever seen has done it justice.

And that's about it for Paris. Later this week, I'll post the pictures. In two weeks: London!

The nicknames:

Those of which I'm most proud:
George Bush: A.W.O.L. (Eric: "I want to make a protest sign that says, 'You can't spell A.W.O.L. without W.'")
John Ashcroft: Freedom
Paul Wolfowitz: Big Board (Supposedly, one of his mentors was a model for Dr. Strangelove)
John Negroponte: Busy (He's our UN Ambassador; this can go in a couple different ways, which is why I like it)

The rest:
Elliot Abrams: Mug-shot
Andrew Marshall: Yoda (To be fair, this one was on the card, but we liked it)
Elaine Chao: Scab
Tom Ridge: Duct Tape
Richard Perle: The Prince of Darkness (Also on the card)
Donald Rumsfeld: Winkle
Alberto Gonzales: Token
George Tenet: Swarthy
Gale Norton: Bulldog
Christie Todd Whitman: Son of Bulldog
Colin Powell: Mighty
Michael Powell: Oreo (I'm not sure how I feel about this one, in retrospect...)
Spencer Abraham: Pretty Boy
Ari Fleischer: Honest
Richard Armitage: Benchpress
Condoleeza Rice: Legs
John Bolton: Michael
Ahmed Chalabi: Electable
Dick Cheney: Big Time (Also on the card)
Karen Hughes: Part-time

2004-01-26T07:12:00.000-06:00

Even more observations

Actually, just one. The Nouvel Observateur this week has a special section, "L'Amerique qu'on aime". It's pretty neat, think I, in that it attempts to tell the other side of our story. In Europe, the American that everyone knows is George Bush, and like him or hate him, that's a pretty narrow spectrum of the country to consider "representative". Anyway, I post here the list of Americans loved by the Nouvel Observateur; make of it what you will. I explain each one because I doubt anyone reading this will recognize all these names, and I don't want to be a jerk and assume which ones are recognizable (within reason...) For my part, I think the list is indicative of the often-terrible, often-excellent taste the French possess:

*Howard Dean (Democratic Presidential candidate)

*Michael Moore (Filmmaker who stopped being funny sometime after Bowling for Columbine, and who stopped being accurate...well, he never started that one)

*Jim Hightower (I hadn't heard of him either; he's apparently some sort of Michael Moore from Texas)

*Barbara Ehrenreich (She of "Nickel and Dimed" and probably other books chronicling the fate of the working class)

*Ralph Nader (Man most responsable for electing George Bush, outside of Al Gore [and Bill Daley and Bill Clinton and...])

*Naomi Klein (Author of "No Logo", an anti-brand book)

*Trey Parker and Matt Stone (In odd company...creators of "South Park")

*Paul Krugman (Princeton economics professor, columnist for NY Times, winner of Clark Medal and totally awesome and probably thinks Naomi Klein has her head up her ass...)

*Elie Pariser (Creator of moveon.org)

*Richard Stallman (Awesome! Founder of the Free Software Foundation, hero to Linux-using, Microsoft-hating computer geeks everywhere)

*Lori Wallach (Antiglobalization activist, who probably thinks Krugman is an idiot)

*Jeremy Rifkin (Some kind of author of "visionary" [read: overhyped by stupid people who use words like "visionary" with a straight face] books)

*Catharine MacKinnon (Feminist author and anti-porn crusader)

*Gayle Rubin (Feminist and pro-porn crusader)

*Alfred Ross (Anti-Christian Right crusader)

*Barry Lynn (Reverend and anti-Christian Right crusader)

*Mitchell Cohen and Michael Walzer (Creators of the [leftist...?] magazine "Dissent")

*John Podesta (!) and Bob Boorstin (Podesta was Clinton's Chief of Staff; Boorstin is vice-president of the liberal think tank Center for American Progress)

*Sean Penn (Actor, figure of mockery and derision by the Right, object of mild embarrassment for the left and, for some reason, beloved by the French)

*Don DeLillo (Author of well-received novels that I've never read and maybe one day will but don't feel too impoverished for not having already done so)

*Chuck Palahniuk (Author of Fight Club and other books people keep telling me to read)

*Jay McInerney (Author of books I've never heard of)

*Bret Easton Ellis (Author of American Psycho; see Chuck Palahniuk entry above)

*Dave Eggers (Author of "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius", seems like a pretentious asshole but is funny as hell anyway)

*Nan Goldin (Photographer)

*R.L. Burnside (Blues musician)

*Ani DiFranco (Estro-rock singer-songwriter)

*Marilyn Manson (I shouldn't have to explain this one)

*Eminem (Or this one)

2004-01-23T11:03:00.000-06:00

More observations

The SNCF (the national train network; imagine an Amtrak that works) was on strike yesterday. Well, actually, according to the Montpellier train station, trains were "perturbed" by a "social movement". Best euphemism ever. Except perhaps for one of the articles on the subject in Libération today (best French newspaper ever, more on why in a moment), which said that the French go on strike so much because it's a way to open a social dialogue (that's a loose translation because the phrase they used, "un moyen de debloquer les rapports sociaux", don't make a whole hell of a lot of sense to me, but I'm pretty sure that's what they were going for).

Anyway, the French do strike a lot; since I've been here, the strikes that I've noticed include: the student strike, the tabac strike, the public-transport strike and the train strike, (I feel like I'm forgetting a few) and apparently this week there was or will be strikes by EDF-GDF (Electricite de France-Gaz de France) and hospitals in Paris (I think just Paris, not sure).

...

Why is Libé the best newspaper in France? Because it's the most fun. Today, for example, it was consecrated to cartoons (the comic book/graphic novel/editorial kinds) to celebrate some upcoming festival of same. They're actually really popular in France, not so much as I believe is the case in Japan, but way more so than in the States, and probably more than in most places in the world. They're pretty omnipresent and pretty respectable (this is the land of Asterix, and close to the land of Tintin). So today in Libé there were no photos to accompany articles, but drawings by (I imagine) prominent cartoonists and artists, mostly topical and mostly not too funny, but cool nonetheless.

That's why Libé is neat, though: it's completely different in style from the rest of the pack, and to be honest it's more laid-back than most major American papers I can think of as well. The first issue I got had a review of a porno movie in it, to cite another example. It's also more engagingly-written than most of the French papers; one of today's articles on the State of the Union and the campaigns began, "You didn't like Bush's first term in office? You're going to hate the second." I think this has something to do with the fact that Libé is targeted at pretty young readers (a travel article a while back listed the best clubs in Zurich), and also that it's young and has no pretentions (cf. the somnolescent Le Monde or the unremarkable Le Figaro). But whatever. Imagine Red Eye, but not terrible, and you have some idea. It's very refreshing.

...

Not to change the subject, but the French, in particular the southern French, particularly in particular old men in the south of France, are really good at bocci ball/boules/petanque/lawn bowling/that game where you throw heavy metal balls at littler balls. There's a massive arched aqueduct going through part of the center of town, and under the arches are a number of sand pits for the game, and there are usually (if it's nice out, which is usually) a bunch of old men playing. I stopped to watch for a bit the other day, and damn...I mean, I guess it just comes with practice, but it's still impressive, especially if you've ever tried to play. I think maybe (I hope maybe) I'll one day work up the courage to just show up and play. But I doubt it. But that would be neat. But I doubt it. But that would be neat...

2004-01-22T03:42:00.000-06:00

Observations

I was watching the news tonight, and there was a report on the newest insanity to emerge from the veil/voile issue. For those who don't live in France and therefore aren't inundated with this thing day after day, the French Republic is in the process of deciding that, in order to defend its sacred principle of laïcité (secularism; I just like tossing French words into my writing every once in a while, because I can), the veil worn by certain Muslim girls is not to be allowed in schools, and in a few years will not be allowed in public places such as post offices. The ban covers all "ostensible religious symbols", but it basically means the veil (but not exclusively; more on this in a bit). Now, despite the fact that I think the decision to wear the veil is, if made independently (i.e. Not a result of intense familial or social pressure), reprehensible (allying oneself with the worst possible traditions of "Islam" [never mind that the Quran never says that the veil must be worn; I'm not a Quranic scholar, obviously], namely the repression of women in Islamic countries), despite the fact that I think the veil is a terribly regressive symbol of, if not ignorance, insensitivity, I think people should be free to make mistakes. Such as, wearing clothing. I mean, like it or not, the veil is a damn veil, and I don't see what pressing or compelling state interest there is in suppressing its wearing. As long as its clear that the State itself isn't endorsing any one religion, citizens of that State should have the right to practice their religion.

But whatever. I was watching the news tonight, and apparently the situation has just gotten even nuttier. Now the Minister of Education, Luc Ferry, has decided that the law requires that people not wear beards to schools, if they are religious in nature. Um. I mean...where to begin? What the hell is a beard that is religious in nature, anyway? I mean, this is just freaking ridiculous.

What interested me about the story, besides its absurdity, was that there were no interviews with people who support Ferry's decision. Not one. There were three or four with people who thought it ridiculous, but no official organ of the State explaining why the decision was necessary. The Fair and Balanced French.

...

I should give up prognosticating. I put money on Dick Gephardt to win Iowa, after all. That didn't happen, and it didn't happen in a most spectacular way. So I really should stop, which is why I say only watch out for Nicholas Sarkozy in the coming months/years. He seems, if not massively popular, well...massively popular? I don't know anybody who admits to liking him, but he's everywhere in France, and he's "only" the Interior Minister. He's way more visible than the Prime Minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin. I can't say why, but you can now consider yourselves informed.

...

Finals. Ah, finals. Les partiels. Les echecs, for me at least (look it up). Granted, I don't actually know how I did on the only non-gimme final I've taken so far, and have only one left. Still...I got owned. If by some miracle I manage to escape alive from that grade, it will not have had much to do with whatever I put down on that piece of paper when I was taking the test. Ah well.

...

Going to Paris in a week to chill with Eric. Might visit D-Day beaches. Might not. We'll see.

2004-01-12T09:52:00.000-06:00

Update
The photos from the trip are up here.

Ok, so the reason it's been so long since last I posted is that I was on a trip, the details of which are given below, and have for the last week or so been studying for and now taking my finals. I had my first one today, and though it's impossible for me to say with any assurance how well or poorly I did, given the number of unknowns involved (i.e. how much leniency the teacher will grant to foreign students, etc), I think I can safely say that I didn't do too well. I'm not going to assign blame, since I'm honestly not too sure where to assign it. It was a class on Vietnam, or rather the twentieth-century history of said country. As well as reading the required material, I polished off the vast majority of Stanley Karnow's history of Vietnam over the weekend, since that was in English and I wasn't too solid on everything that happened. As a result, I acquired a fairly amerocentric view of the war, knowing the most about what happened under Johnson and Nixon et al (and Rusk and McNamara and Kissinger and Acheson and Westmoreland and Cabot Lodge and Taylor and...see? I did study), but not knowing as much about what happened under the French. I didn't think this would be a problem, however, since the prof had told us we'd have our choice of questions, and I assumed a wide enough chronological spread. Of course, no such spread was forthcoming, and both of the questions dealt with the period ending, at the latest, with Dien Bien Phu. One of the questions, the one I answered, dealt with fucking Roosevelt. I'm mad, as you may be able to tell, because had she asked a different set of questions, I would have destroyed that test; as it is, I have no idea how well I did but don't feel good about it. Of course, it probably was my responsibility to prepare for everything, as I thought I did, but I submit that a class dealing with the war in Vietnam from the end of WW2 to 1975, as this purports to, will probably deal at some point with the American involvement, and Roosevelt doesn't count. Whatever. I'm bitter. Pictures of my host family are here.

Departure

I left in a haze of adrenaline and dopamine, my body simultaneously urging itself onward and bedward. I found myself at the train station at 5 in the morning, after having seen, for the first time, the glorious epiphany of the Return of the King, mournful celebration of what can never be and probably never was, stupendously moving culmination for which I had longed for as much as a quarter of my lifetime. I was running on three hours of sleep and whatever my biology could do to keep my eyes open and my mind alert. And in fact I was very alert; even if, from time to time, I yawned and even if, at all times, I yearned for bed, I was alert and awake and intense.

The whole thing was actually rather unfair, as, due to events over which it could never have had any control, the trip was often overshadowed by what had come before and what would come after. Before: a movie whose appearance I had eagerly awaited since probably before, more than three years ago, I learned it was being made. After: finals. And not just any finals; French finals, in French. Not cool.

The funny thing is, in ten or twenty or a hundred years, when I look back on this time in my life, what I will surely remember as one of the coolest things I ever did is the trip itself. The hubris is, while by no means stunning, out of character: 16 days, most of them solo. Four cities, in four countries, that each rival if not easily surpass any other place I have ever been in my entire life. Munich, Prague, Vienna and Florence just happen to be four of the top ten or so cities in Europe by any measuring stick, and the top ten cities in Europe probably qualify among the top twenty cities the world over. Chicago, though I love it dearly, has nothing to compete with what any of these towns have to offer. The Sears Tower? Big. Il Duomo? Big, and covered entirely in marble. The Art Institute? Nice collection of French Impressionists. The Uffizi? Better collection of the people that inspired and even today overshadow the Monets and Lautrecs of which the AI is so proud. The Chicago River? Lotta bridges. The Vltava? Lotta bridges, including the Charles Bridge (not to mention the Arno with its Ponte Vecchio.) The ethnic food of Chicago? Good enough, but created by expats. That of Vienna, Munich or Florence? It's not ethnic, it's home-cookin'. And so on.

But I did not know of any of this when I left, though I certainly knew of it. I will not apologize for that last sentence. When I left, when I got on that first of eight trains, when that first minute of those almost fifty hours on trains rolled by, all I knew was that I was damn tired but that I wasn't likely to be falling asleep any time soon. I regretted my decision not to sleep when, later that day, I had finished two of the three books in English that I'd brought along. I wasn't about to touch the French one - I was too damn tired. And after slogging through a couple pages of Tropic of Cancer, I decided that perhaps sleep was better after all, and maybe if I never woke up I'd be better off, never having to think about that overhyped exercise in proving the author has (had?) a lot more sex than I do.

So...yeah. That's about it. I got on the train, and went to Paris, metroed it across the city and got on another train, and went to Munich. Paris seemed nice enough, but I'm not going to pretend I saw anything worth seeing there, and certainly not enough to form any impression (other than, "it seemed nice").

Munich

The rule of thumb that I developed this trip, after a conversation with a guy I met at my hostel in Prague, was this: if, at some point, I walk out the door of wherever I'm staying, and can go someplace without getting lost, I've been in that city too long. Munich came close to violating this rule, and in less than two days, which I consider a testament to my ability to just not stop walking when there's nothing else to do.

In truth, part of the reason I walked around Munich so much was because it was so profitable: it's a pretty nice town in which to walk around, nice but not overwhelming stuff to see, and there was a Christmas market on, as I imagine was the case in most European cities a few days before Christmas. The Munich market was better than that of Montpellier, which wasn't really hard, since both seemed to view tourists as their target market, and Montpellier simply doesn't draw as many tourists at the end of December; Munich's market, therefore, was bigger, and I had a ton of (though not nearly enough) awesome potato pancakes; I even learned to love 'em with apple sauce. In truth, the Prague market was little better, and probably less picturesque than that of Munich, but what set Prague's apart was the blacksmith on the premises; the smell of the heated metal, and the sound of it banging against the iron, and the sight of it red-hot but cooling down as the smith smacked it with a hammer was really something else. It rolled probably a 4 on its charisma check. (D&D joke; you don't want to get it.)

Aside from the disconcertingly large number of strip joints (then again, I was staying right by the train station), what Munich had going for it above all else was the hostel: clean, comfortable, with a bar on the premises, and I shared a room with cute French Canadian girls. Well, ok, and the glutwein was also nice(spiced, heated wine; oh, so good.) And the food in general, come to think of it. And the beer. Ok, you know what? Munich was cool. I didn't do anything too intensely cultural, I just enjoyed myself, and lived well, and walked around a lot, and thought, "Hey. This is pretty nice."

To be honest, Munich is largely a blur. That's partly because it happened at the beginning of the trip, partly because I didn't do anything that really stuck out (I shoulda taken notes), and partly because I wasn't there long enough.

And soon enough, I was off, to Prague. The ride was nice enough, though it was my first exposure to non-first-world traveling conditions; not that much different from the trains going anywhere else in Europe, but a step down nonetheless. My second reminder was the border guard, semiautomatic slung across his back as he walked through the train, and looking like I had imagined a Czech border guard would look. The German guard, by contrast, was pretty cool, and apparently the Nuremberg-Prague route doesn't see a lot of Americans (I actually find that a little hard to believe, but he seemed genuinely entertained to find an American passport, so who knows)

Prague

Prague can't help being Prague the minute you get off the platform in the train station. By far the ugliest and least-modern train station I have been in Europe, the bizarre orange lighting makes the place seem even more exotic than it sadly isn't. None of the shops that I encountered were, in and of themselves, out of place in any train station in the world; what was striking was their, for lack of a less disdainful word, tackiness. I feel horrible using such a word to describe a country that is, basically, poorer than any other country that I have ever been to in my life (for the record, those countries are: the US, France, Italy, Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic, so it's not like I have a lot to compare with here), and that poverty is basically why Prague is "tacky". In all of these other countries mentioned above, there are any number of good ways to make a living, especially but not exclusively if you have a higher education. The Czech Republic is not, of course, what it once was; nevertheless, it is not yet what France is, or even Italy. As a result, a relatively good way to make money in the Czech Republic and, especially, Prague, is to milk tourists.

This "tackiness" (one could also say overbearing capitalism, but that isn't as concise) is at times pretty hard to withstand; I've never seen more money-changing shops in my life, nor as many souvenir stands, all of them selling exactly the same things. And, sadly or happily, all of this activity seems to be concentrated to the fairly touristy center; sadly, because that's where a lot of the coolest stuff is, but happily because that's not where all of it is, and by putting the worst of Prague right next to the best of Prague, the worst is that much easier to ignore.

Because Prague is an amazing city. I happen to have seen, in the few months that I've been in Europe, some pretty neat stuff: the Dom in Cologne, the Duomo in Turin, the countryside in Provence. And I don't think I'd say that there's any one thing in Prague to rival any of those sights mentioned above. What Prague has going for it is quantity: everywhere you go, at least in the center (which is actually a pretty big place), there's something pretty incredible. After awhile, I stopped taking pictures, because there just wasn't any more point: I'd never be able to record everything beautiful about Prague, but I could really wear myself out in the futile attempt.

The first specific that I want to go into is the food: because of the Koruna's weakness vs. the dollar, or perhaps as a result of some purchasing power parity imbalance, or whatever, prices seem to be lower. I'd go to what I considered to be a pretty nice restaurant, and pay under $10 for what in France would probably have cost at least $15, if not more like $20. I mention this primarily because I think I wound up eating in nicer places in Prague than I did in Munich or Vienna (Florence is a different story, as I will explain later); there's no point in comparing a Viennese greasy spoon to an upscale Prague restaurant (not that I ate in either [I wonder if greasy spoons even exist in Vienna...?])

I need to stop getting diverted; I was talking about the food. Good God, what food! I've had goulash before in Europe, in Cologne, but it's everywhere in Prague, and it's heaven. If you've never had it, it's basically like a beef stew, except for some reason the beef is always really tender, and there are some spices in the stew that give it a really characteristic flavor. I have no idea what they are, but they're awesome. Paired with Czech beer, which is completely amazing, and dirt-cheap (a pint was going for slightly under a dollar in one place I went to), dinner was always good. In fact, I think I should highlight the very high quality of Czech beer; I don't know the first thing about beer, of course, but I do know what I like, and I liked that stuff a lot. It wasn't just bitter carbonated water; it had taste, it was actually good, it was the kind of thing you would want to drink (this is actually an experience I've had with beer across much of Europe, even if I liked Prague's beer better than most; having been exposed, in the US, to -sigh- American beer [and that mostly from kegs], it's also a new experience for me) But the fact that my dollar went far in Prague meant that, from time to time, I found myself in places I wouldn't normally frequent, such as a rather high-quality cafe in the Jewish quarter; the cake they gave me, with fresh fruit and fresh fruit sauce in adornment, was unreal.

But the food, though unexpectedly good, isn't why you go to Prague. I went because, a few years ago, I saw a picture of the Charles Bridge, and knew I wanted to see that city. The Charles Bridge, sadly, is a little disappointing; it's the kind of thing that would be really cool if it just came at you out of nowhere, completely deserted and wind-swept and barren, the statues lining the sides standing watch over emptiness, the kind of art made by sad people in sad times. But no, it's touristy as hell, with Americans swarming over it, and souvenir stands and street (bridge?) musicians and cameras and all that other touristy gaudiness that absolutely destroys the effect.

But if the Charles Bridge disappointed, not much else did. What's left of the Jewish quarter and the Jewish cemetery (pebbles on gravestones several hundred years old) is still pretty moving, although there isn't much left. Aside from the cemetery - raised at least ten feet above the streets around it due to the number of "layers" - and the synagogues - one of which is a good ten feet below street level, a memory of the time Prague was elevated to avoid floods from the river, but nobody wanted to raise the Jewish buildings - there isn't much left. But walk through the cemetery, or the synagogue converted into a memorial for the Prague victims of the Holocaust - featuring 70,000 names that cover the walls of the first floor, and on the second floor, some pretty hard-to-take children's drawings made in the ghetto nearby, before most of the residents were shipped off to death camps - walk through all that, and you'll be pretty wiped out anyway. The golem is supposed to have originated in Prague, and the clay from which he was created is said to be in the attic of one of the synagogues even today, and walking around even the barely-existent Jewish quarter, you don't find this hard to believe. Every once in a while, for the briefest of seconds, you get the sense of being outside time.

I got this sense again the last day I was in Prague, when I climbed the hill on the outskirts of Prague that looks down on much of the city. It had snowed the night before, and there was almost no one around, and the sun was setting and I was on the side of a hill looking out at the whole town and there were trees all around and at one point nuns even and it was absolutely incredible. I got some pretty sweet pictures, too, don't worry.

This story doesn't really fit anywhere in the non-narrative I made up as I went along above, but I want to tell it anyway. It must have been the second day I was in Prague, and I found myself at a crosswalk right across from the Charles Bridge. The light was red, and it had been red for awhile, and there were no cars coming, but no one was crossing. And after a second, I could see why: there were a few cops just across the street, seemingly just waiting for something. "No way," I thought, "this can't be what I think it is." But sure enough, a little bit later, the light still not having changed, some random guy came up and, seeing no cars coming, crossed against the light. And the cops stirred, and went up to him, and they proceeded to get into an argument. Now, to be fair, I have no proof that I had just witnessed a jay-walking trap, but damned if that wasn't the impression I got.

Vienna

Vienna was possibly the city on this trip about which I knew the least, only having seen (and read) The Third Man for any sort of reference. It's a good movie, based on a story by Graham Greene, and starring among others Orson Welles. Taking place directly after the end of the Second World War, it depicts Vienna as a "smashed and dreary city"; if that was the case fifty years ago, Vienna's current state (waltz-like: pretty, but boring) is all the more impressive. In fact, as it is, Vienna isn't that impressive without some sort of context.

Part of this impression is no doubt due to travel fatigue: I'd been on the road for about a week by this point, skipping from hostel to hostel, with no real tether, no anchor to any sort of normal reality, which can be rather exhausting. As soon as I'd figure out how to get around a city, as soon as I'd get used to it, I'd leave. The merits of this strategy can be debated at length, but ultimately it meant that when I got to Vienna, I didn't take many pictures and just kind of laid about.

It's actually a pretty neat city in which to lay about, however. I went to the Central Cafe (Trotsky's favorite, apparently), and a bunch of other cafes, and generally just read the paper and did crosswords and enjoyed the coffee and food. It was at all times a little bizarre, however, since I arrived on Christmas Eve.

That night, having found my hostel and dropped my bags off and walked around a bit, I went to midnight mass at the Dom in the middle of downtown. The Dom is not as impressive as Cologne's, nor the Duomo of Florence; still, all this means is it's the third-coolest church I've ever seen in my life, beating all the others by a mile. It's a big ol' thing, very gothic, very imposing, and it's not so much attractive as it is massive. That's basically about the best word I have for it, even though I think it may also be smaller than the two cathedrals previously mentioned (again, in fairness, the Duomo is the fourth-largest church in the world, according to some guidebook I read). I got to mass a half-hour before the music was supposed to start, meaning I got there around ten. It was cold out, and though there was already a line (largely composed of tourists, to my dismay), it wasn't too big, especially given the size of the Dom. After opening their doors forty-five minutes late, and enduring the stampede to the good seats, I finally sat down. This was good for my legs, not so good for my view, since the church was packed that night, and there were quite a few people standing in front of me. I had to follow the action on one of the closed-circuit plasma-screen monitors they had set up, affixed to the columns in the center of the room. It was a little odd, especially since the setup seemed to be at least a little sophisticated (they had a couple cameras, and cut among them as one would were one producing a normal tv program; I kept wondering if there was a control booth behind the organ or something, with guys saying things like, "Zoom in on Jesus...Camera 3, the Cardinal's out of focus...")

The mass itself was pretty straightforward. You might think I would have found it odd, listening to mass given in German, but if anything I understood this mass a little better than I usually do. This is because the midnight mass I usually attend is given in Polish. Long story. This one, in German though it was, was thoughtfully conducted with respect for the tourists; at one point, one of the speeches was given in Italian (I think), then in French (bad accent), then in English (native speaker from England, I think) by the same guy. Like I said, pretty straightforward.

Apart from going to mass, and lolling about in cafes, the coolest thing I did in Vienna was go to Schonbrunn. Schonbrunn was created for the Austrian royal family, apparently to demonstrate that they possessed large quantities of money. It's pretty damn extravagant, as a result, with much statuary and ornate buildings and fancy shrubbery, not to mention awesome views of Vienna. But I couldn't help thinking, as I walked through the place, that at no point in the history of the United States would we have allowed the State to build such a thing, even for a popular President. But Maria Theresa, or Franz Josef or whomever it was, probably assumed it was their birthright, to spend their summer days in a place like that, paid for by ordinary citizens who could never visit it. The American exception, and I have no idea why that particular thought went through my head, but it did. (Preemptive rebuttal to my socialist comrades: I'm not saying no American can ever build such a thing for themselves, but they would only be suffered to do it if they did so with their own money. With taxpayer money? Hell no. And this isn't a recent phenomenon; I'm positive it was the same way back when Schonbrunn was built, which is the only thing that makes this thought relevant.)

I also endeavored to go to Julius Meinl, but in Europe it appears to be a grocery store more than a cafe; there was a JM in Prague, but it was basically a Jewel. There was a "cafe" in Vienna, but it was basically four tables attached to a grocery store. I think I went to the main JM, too, but I don't speak German, so who knows.

Florence

Hoo-boy. The telling of these tales is going to be a delicate affair, I can promise you. And I'm a little loath to discuss all of them in public. So here goes...

Before I get to Florence itself, though, I'd like to say a few words about the method of transport I used to arrive there: night-train. The night-train, predictably, runs at night, and you have a choice of accomodation: I don't know what the choices are, however, since I've only ever taken a couchette, as advised. And though I suppose a couchette isn't that bad...it's not that good, either. It's either four or six beds in a cabin; in second class, it seems to usually be six. The cabin is small, and on my train, not only were Italians present, they were running the train system. This probably has something to do with the fact that I was going to Italy.

I understand now why it was such a big deal that Mussolini got the trains to run on time.

Anyway, after more effort than really should have been necessary, I found myself on a cramped bed, feeling really cramped, lacking light and space. This situation persisted for several hours, until we arrived in Florence. And that's basically it: on the plus side, you sleep through much of the unpleasantness. On the minus side: the unpleasantness. Just try to imagine what a cabin containing six human beings on two triple-bunk beds is like. It's not too bad, really, but it's not too hot either.

Anyway. Story number one. I was going to Florence in large part because my sister Stacee would be there, with her boyfriend Francesco. Outside of a few vain attempts to call them before getting on the train the night before I arrived, I hadn't really talked about the details much with Stacee. A little, sure, but I was planning on handling it all myself, much as I had the previous week and a half. So my train rolled into Florence at seven in the morning on a Sunday, I got out, and went to my hostel. It wasn't open yet, so I walked around for a bit and eventually grabbed breakfast in a cafe. Portentous of things to come, I caused a disturbance in the cafe when I took an orange Fanta out of the freezer, and then upon sitting down, decided I didn't want it, and so put it back in the freezer. This action caused several minutes of debate, first between me and my server in English, and then between her and some guy behind the counter, in Italian (I knew it was about me because periodically they would point.)

Anyway, I figured I'd call Stacee around noon or one or whatever, letting her sleep in on a Sunday. So, killing time, I left my stuff in a luggage locker, and found an internet cafe. My brother Mike had emailed me, so I replied, and received one in turn (at what must have been three in the morning for him) telling me that Stacee and Franci thought I was flying in at seven AM. I am still unsure why this was the case; all parties involved have shifted the blame to other parties (for my part, the plan had never included me flying anywhere, except at one point to Munich, but certainly never to Florence). After racing back to the train station and buying a calling card, I called the only phone number I had for Francesco, which reached his father, who does not speak English. I do not speak Italian, and I didn't think to ask if he spoke French. I am still unsure as to what he said and what I said; all I know is, he apparently thought my Italian was pretty good. I know, I'm confused too. Thankfully, I think I imparted that I was at the train station, but I'm not really sure.

I start a lot of these paragraphs with "anyway". So I'm standing around the station, trying to call Franci, when a gypsy woman walks up to me and starts to beg. As I do not immediately punch her in the face, she takes me for the easy mark that I am and eventually just takes my phone card. I protest, but am confused, and don't really know what she's doing until she just walks off with my phone card. If I ever go back to Potbelly, and that guy is there playing his guitar, and singing the one song he knows, about a gypsy woman, and how attractive she is or whatever, I'm gonna remove his spleen.

So eventually I am found, several hours after the search began, a search made more difficult as I did not know that I was lost. Anyway. Florence is beautiful, as the pictures will attest. I've already mentioned the Duomo, which aside from being the world's fourth-largest church, is covered entirely in marble. As such, it's rather awesome. You can even climb up the dome, which I didn't do because there was a line; I climbed up the tower right next to it, however, and the view is awesome, in the biblical sense. There's nothing else tall around, and Florence is smack-dab in Tuscany, with red tile roofs and mountains and hot damn, it's pretty.

There's a lot of other neat crap in Florence, but I didn't visit all of it. I didn't get to see the David, which is there, but I did see a life-size replica, which I figure was just as good. I did get to the Uffizi gallery, which aside from having statues of three of the four ninja turtles (missing only Raphael), also has good art. Good art such as paintings by (these are just the ones that I saw): Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Botticelli, Rubens, Brueghel, Giotto, Masaccio, Filippo Lippi (he was my favorite), Bronzino, Durer, Correggio, Titian, El Greco and Tintoretto.

Anyhoo, something else I did in Florence was, in a change of pace, spend time in the company of other people. These people happened to be my sister and her awesome-restaurant-owning boyfriend; I ate well in Florence. Franci seems to be a pretty nice guy, involved in a somewhat turbulent relationship with my sister that often left me, an innocent bystander, panting on the sidelines. Such is love, I suppose, and especially in Italy.

For various reasons having to do with the fact that the weather in Florence, after a week and a half in really cold cities, was awesome, I spent a lot of time walking around. This was pretty cool most of the time, but on New Year's Eve, it was frightening. Florence temporarily turned into Tikrit, as the Italians engaged what must be a penchant for "fireworks". But these weren't the fireworks to which I am accustomed; these seemed to have no purpose other than to make a lot of noise, which they did quite expediently. As in, even though I knew that they were only fireworks, I still feared for my life in more than one instance as I walked through the streets; stuff just kept exploding, and doing so really loud, and sometimes there wouldn't seem to be anyone around to have caused whatever it was to detonate. This was unnerving.

I got unnerved a lot in Florence, like the time I was walking down the street wearing my scarf bearing the colors and insignia of the Montpellier soccer team. These colors happen to be very similar to those of Inter Milan, a major major Italian soccer team, and infinitely better known than Montpellier's. Anyway, I was walking down the street when some random guy comes up to me, grabs the scarf and freaks me out, kisses it and says "bella!" and walks away.

There was also the time I was leaning on a bridge overlooking the Arno, which runs through the town center, and watching some kayakers kayak. At which point, some nice old guy comes up to me and starts chatting, in Italian, without stopping, about what I assume was kayaking since he, too, was looking at the kayakers. He just kept on talking for a couple minutes, said something like "giorno" (have a nice day, in truncated form), and walked away. He may have guessed I had absolutely no idea what he was saying, he may not have. Either way, it's funny. And I bet you didn't think I could use the word "kayak" so many times in one paragraph, did you?

So, there it is, that was my trip. I'm not going to add any editorializing at the end, since my opinion of it keeps changing. Right when I got back, I felt differently about it than I do now, barely a week out. And once these damn finals get done, I'll probably feel another way about it. But, I think I at least got down what I deemed important about each place; I didn't do it event-by-event (then I had breakfast, then I...), since I would have had to take notes, which I clearly didn't, and because I didn't think that would be too interesting anyway. But hopefully I at least was able to convey some sense of what it was like, and if I've done that, good enough.

2003-12-23T13:41:00.000-06:00

Hilarity

There will be much, much more about Munich, Prague, Vienna and Florence (in that order) in...maybe mid-January (I have finals right when I get back). But for now, these two tidbits were too good for me to allow myself to forget:

From an article in L'Express, discussing the possibility of the French Ministry of Justice consulting on French cop tv shows, and lamenting the deleterious effect imported American cop shows are having on the French people's perception of their own system of justice (whew): "French magistrates are fed up with being called 'Your honor' [votre honneur]."

The Museum of Communism in Prague is located in a building, with space right above a McDonald's.

I mean, come on...

2003-12-08T06:59:00.000-06:00

Montpellier by night: go here.

I finished, last night, the third book in the Lord of the Rings series, the Return of the King. This is not in and of itself unusual, nor is the fact that I read it in four days. What is unusual is that it was in French. Five hundred pages, four days, all in French, as were the two books before it, clocking in at seven hundred and six hundred pages respectively (it's odd that the French versions are so much longer than the English...) It's better in English, for the record, especially since they omitted a large part of the appendices from the third book. The appendices are part of what really make the books unique, in my opinion: they contain detailed (really, really detailed) information on the genealogy of several characters, analysis of the written forms of languages used by the different races, some miscellaneous historical information and a few chronologies, and that's just what I can remember of appendices I haven't read for a couple years, nor ever read fully. But the worst travesty comitted by the translators of the books (who on the whole did a pretty decent job, not that I would really be able to notice) is the way they translated the maps. Now, I don't take umbrage at their having done so at all; the placenames are different, sometimes justly so, sometimes not, but anyway, changes they made to the books necessitate changes to the maps.

It's the way they made those changes that's upsetting: they basically lifted all of the nice, handwritten (by Tolkien) placenames, and replaced them with their French equivalents, not handwritten but typeset. It looks absolutely awful. And if you've read the books, you know this is a moderately big deal, since you tend to look at the maps a lot while reading them (hell, I still do, and I'm sure none of you will take offense if I assert that I've probably read the books many more times than any of you, and consequently am more familiar with the story than most of you [which familiarity in large part accounts for how I was able to read them in French in the first place])

I didn't actually sit down and start writing this entry to point out that the maps are ugly, however. Rather, I did it (and with some apprehension) to remark upon something that happened at the end of reading the third book (and has happened at the same point the last two, at least, times that I've read the books.) As I got to the end, one or two scenes in particular moved me to the point that I actually began to let loose a few tears. Now, I don't cry a whole lot when it comes to movies and books: it certainly happens, but it's not especially common. I cried, I think, at the end of Schindler's List, but I don't recall crying at any point during Bambi (though, to be fair, I last saw it when I was probably around three.)

And I think the reason that I cry at the end of these books isn't, as may seem likeliest, because I've just devoted several (tens of?) hours to a labor that draws near its end. I think it has more to do with the fact that, merchandising aside, critical ambivalence aside, popular acclaim notwithstanding, there really is something about the books that goes beyond even "special". To get all the way through them is to, in some way, however slight, be changed by them, and that isn't a very common occurence among even the best of books.

I think part of it has to do also with the extreme sadness of (what I perceive to be) the books' final subject, perhaps their ultimate subject: the necessity, power and inevitable failure of memory. Tolkien didn't think of what he was doing as writing fiction. He thought of it as remembering a world that did exist, but had been, until him, forgotten. The book is filled with instances of characters encountering some slight physical reminder of something that once was beautiful, but had by then disappeared completely and worse, was forgotten forever. And I don't know why, but that resonates with me. Intensely and consistently.

2003-12-02T12:32:00.000-06:00

Thoughts

I was watching the news for a few minutes today, and caught part of a piece on a victim caught in the crossfire of some gang war. Aside from the fact that I didn't know the French had gangs, and aside from the fact that I was even more unaware that these gangs fought each other, what surprised me the most was the way the newscaster presented the information: it was as though this were new, as though there were no crossfires, and people didn't get caught in them, and people didn't die in them. What seems perfectly obvious to me (when gangs fight, innocent people die) is a scary revelation to a France increasingly cognisant of, and concerned by, the problem of violent crime.

The student strike appears finally to be spreading to Montpellier, but it remains to be seen how widely it will be observed. The issues are becoming clearer to me now, and although I don't know if a strike is the appropriate way to react (this is perhaps a uniquely American way of viewing the world: we seem to approve of strikes much less than almost any other country), I'm beginning to believe that the students have some fairly legitimate grievances. The government wants to close smaller universities, establish an American-style hierarchy of school prestige (and quality, I imagine) and raise tuition fees. And although this means bringing the French model more into line with the American, I don't know that I see that as a good thing. There's something pretty significant to be said for keeping tuition as cheap as possible, as long as you don't have to scrimp too far on services. There's also something neat about the equality of schools in France: if you go to a state university, with the possible exception of the Sorbonne (Universit?Paris-XIII, I think), you get the same education you would get anywhere else, and the phrase "Universit?Montpellier-III" carries no more or less weight than "Universit?Paris-III" or any other state-owned university.

It rains way too much here. Every weekend for the past few weeks (at least the last two, and I think the one before that as well), it's rained, despite being sunny all week. Now it looks like rain all this week as well. This is a problem because, while Montpellier is a perfectly enjoyable place in which to walk while dry, while wet it's really annoying. There are puddles everywhere, because French architects seem to disdain function in favor of form. So sidewalks are shaped oddly, with configurations that ensure there will be nearly invisible pools several inches deep whenever it rains. Actually, come to think of it, in general Montpellier seems like it was designed to handle rain, channelling it this way and that, to this drain and that one. So why is it that there seem to be so damn many puddles? And the dog **** everywhere is doubly annoying when it rains. Not to mention the wet dog smell whenever one gets on the tram. Here's another question: in the legislation governing the French welfare state, is there some provision making it profitable to own a dog while homeless? I ask because this would be a hilarious capitalist irony in a country where one of the leading newsweeklies just issued a special issue with the cover: "Marx: Thinker of the third millenium?" The irony would stem from the fact that virtually every (and I do mean virtually every) homeless person I see here has at least one dog. Is there then some way to get a disproportionate amount of money from the State if one owns a dog while homeless? I suspect there is, and I suspect that means the markets (as it were) are pulling one over on the Socialist welfare state, by making homeless dog-owners ubiquitous. (Another, and certainly very plausible, explanation for the dogs might be as companions, but it's quite rare to see one homeless person with their dog; much more common is a group of homeless people with a group of dogs.)

2003-11-27T10:01:00.000-06:00

Happy Thanksgiving, and News

One of the big news stories in France at the moment is the ongoing student strike. It started out at some small town I'd never heard of (which really only means it's not one of the ten largest cities in France), and seems to have spread fairly quickly to a number of other small French towns, even reaching one of the universities in Paris.

I'm not quite sure why they're striking; I think it has to do with the "reforms" being proposed by the Education Minister, which include shutting down the smaller French universities, reforming the tuition system (i.e. raising tuition, but I think by a large amount), and organizing the schools into some sort of hierarchy, so that there are "better" and "worse" schools. This, at any rate, was how my host mom explained it all to me, herself no huge fan of the current government (she swoons for the postal worker/Trotskyite presidential candidate Olivier Besancenot.) It could also be that the students just really dislike the government, and so were just waiting for something to come along to make some noise about. Although this does seem like a pretty good casus belli.

Leaving aside the semantical question of whether or not its even possible for students, as consumers of education, to strike (shouldn't it be a boycott...?), the movement seems to be somewhat restrained, at least in Montpellier. The date for the protest to accompany the strike here keeps getting pushed back on the banners around campus (first, it was Tuesday, then Wednesday and now it's Thursday), and today I did run across a group of about 100 or so students marching and chanting in centre-ville. I don't have any classes today, so I can't tell how widely the strike was observed, but judging by the rather normal-seeming atmosphere on campus when I got lunch, I don't think it was a big thing. (Interesting sidenote: at least on this occasion, there was no picket line, as I had feared, since I've been raised to know better than to cross one. I think everyone just skips class to go to the demonstration.)

In other news, following a visit from Jacques Chirac, Tony Blair was interviewed on French television, in French, about relations between France and Britain. Depressingly, though perhaps not surprisingly given his background, his French was excellent, about as good as mine (though I think my accent is better.) My host family got a big kick out of the whole thing, first finding it pretty funny that I had the same type of accent as Blair, then getting suspicious that he wasn't really speaking in French (it was clearly his voice, at least to me, but the audio was out of synch slightly with the video [tape delay in case of embarrassing misstatements?]), then generally conceding that he acquitted himself very well. My host mom almost spit in disgust when he mentioned that life in Iraq was better now than it was before the war, but even she said at the end that he very successfully charmed the French people.

And that's about it. Happy Thanksgiving!

2003-11-20T07:17:00.000-06:00

Shiver

I'm not quite sure how to describe the experience I had 10 or so minutes ago, so I'll just start in and see where it goes.

There's an English-language bookstore around here, As You Like It, that I patronise from time to time. I don't buy too many books in English (I try to keep them in French), but occasionally, I do. It's a pretty small shop, family-owned and run (a group of British expats, it appears), and I like it a lot, as I do the owner, though until today I hadn't really had much in the way of conversation with him.

I had recently gotten it into my head, as I memorized lines for my acting classes, that it would be neat to memorize some Shakespeare. I had found that I could do it (memorize, and in a foreign language no less), and thought that it was somewhat a shame that I couldn't recite any verse or speech or passage or anything like that. A vestige of an old-world classical education that doesn't seem to me such a bad vestige.

So I went in, and listened to the BBC they were piping in (today there will be some massive anti-Bush protests in London) and got my Shakespeare: Henry V, Richard III, the narrative poems. I went up to pay, and the owner immediately discerned the theme.

"It looks like this is Shakespeare week, eh?"

Just to make small talk, I disclosed the particular reason for my interest.

"So it's not for studies then, is it? Shakespeare for pleasure? I'm very impressed." (I should note that, though this conversation took place 10 minutes ago, I'm roughly paraphrasing what was said, and this exercise is making me very dubious of every memoir I've ever read with extended passages of dialogue not drawn from transcripts.)

So I said something about how I thought it would be nice to have something to quote from memory, the way Russian students can with Pushkin (I read that line in an article a few hours earlier.) He asked me if I'd ever seen Shakespeare performed, and thanks to Mr. Rutstein, and others, I had; I talked for a bit about the minimalist performance of Shakespeare's R & J, and we moved on to movies (I brought up Ian McKellan's Richard III and Kenneth Branagh's Henry V.)

"Say," he said a few moments later, "I'm putting together a gathering in a few weeks. I do it about once a year, [from this point on I'm totally paraphrasing] it's just some people that get together to talk about such things. Writers, some journalists. [He later talked about the British Consul for the area, who was capable of spouting off great big chunks of classical prose, and who would also be in attendance.] You've just earned a place by talking sensibly about Shakespeare. [That wasn't paraphrased.] There'll be about 50 people or so..." and he went on for a bit about details. (We continued the discussion with me pretending to know something about Orwell, and I think I strengthened my case by discussing Down and Out in Paris and London, as opposed to any of his more "popular" works, thus reinforcing the rather inaccurate impression he had of me that I was Someone Who Knows Things.)

So, I've now been invited to a party December 11th, at which there will likely be a great many Persons of Quality (to steal from Neal Stephenson, whose Quicksilver I bought from the same store and which I am enjoying in spite of the guilt I feel for reading something in English), and at which there will likely be bon mots strewed about like bon bons, and there will likely also be clashes of Wits, and of wits. So. Whew. This should be interesting, and I am already intimidated.

2003-11-13T06:45:00.000-06:00

Germany (The pictures are here.)

Germany is a different country. Having visited it, I am now really looking forward to going back, let alone visiting the rest of Eastern Europe. Germany isn't really Eastern in that sense, I suppose (or in any sense...), but it's a lot more Eastern than, say, France or Italy. It just feels different: the language looks and sounds more Eastern, the food, the beer, the architecture, the people...I've not yet been to Poland, but I imagine Warsaw bears more resemblance to Cologne than either of those cities does to Montpellier.

All this is to say that I had just assumed that, since Germany is a Western country, it would feel like other Western countries. The reality appears to be that there are ways of being Western. This was a very pleasant discovery, as shall now be made clear.

I went to Germany for two reasons: Armistice Day, a State holiday, fell on a Tuesday this year, and so the University closed down Monday as well, knowing that no one would come to class. The second reason has to do with the fact that I was able to fly from Montpellier to Frankfurt-Hahn (an airport that bears no geographical relation to Frankfurt, but is in fact in the middle of nowhere) for EUR 36 round-trip. The bus was EUR 15 each way, so it was absurdly cheap and easy to get myself from the south of France to the north of Germany. Why not go?

So go I did (grammar-induced cringe), with Chris and Drew, two of the four people with whom I went to Provence earlier in the semester. We didn't have anything planned, other than rooms reserved in Hahn the first night, and Cologne Saturday, Sunday and Monday nights. We were just going to take it easy and get to know a German city. And if, on the way, we had a gargantuan amount of sauerkraut and meat in wurst form, well, that would be fine, too.

All was pretty uneventful until we got on the bus to go to Cologne Saturday morning. As we drove along, on a perfect day, through two hours of rolling hills and sickeningly picturesque towns tucked in, on and among them, I began revising my opinion of Germany. As in, I didn't really have one before I went, and whatever I had imagined certainly didn't encompass stunningly beautiful countryside. I suppose it should have, but it didn't.

Come we now to Cologne, city on the Rhine. The Rhine is impressive, the city is impressive. But what defines the word "impressive" is the Dom. One of the largest Gothic structures in the world, the Dom is a massive, absolutely massive cathedral that really defies explication. You have to see it to understand how impressive it is, how it absolutely dominates the space that it's in and nearby, how it defines the city in some ways. Imagery of the Dom (a church-like object with two big spires) is everywhere in everything associated with Cologne. It gives the city an identity (it's apparently the most-visited attraction in Germany), and once you see it, you will completely understand. I must have seen it fifty times from fifty different angles over the course of those four days, and never did I see an unimpressive one. The first couple times I saw it, especially the very first, I just stood there. I took some pictures of it, and they came out decently, but pictures cannot convey the sensations sensed when being in its presence.

Needless to say, we spent a good chunk of Saturday taking in the Dom. Our hostel happened to be located quite close by, a minute's walk from the Dom and the train station and all the downtowny goodness. For dinner that night, we decided to check out a beer hall we had seen while walking around. It seemed alright, but we didn't get our hopes up too high. For those of you that have been to the Brauhaus, on Lincoln in Chicago, you have an idea of what it looked like from the outside. As we were to realise, all the beer halls look like that on the outside.

But we had no idea what to expect as we opened the door, noticed that it was full but not packed, and decided to go in. Instantly, we were set upon by a formidable German woman who barked something at us that we didn't understand and led us to a table where people were already sitting. After shouting something else at us, we divined that she was asking us if we wanted anything to drink (this sounds so funny and naive to me now). We somehow communicated that we wanted three beers, as there were three of us. She returned in a moment, carrying the first of what was to be many, many glasses of the local drink, Kölsch.

A sidenote: that night, I had nine glasses of Kölsch, totalling around 2 and a half liters or so. Sunday night, I had, I think, around one and a half liters of beer (some was Guinness) Monday night, I think I had around 2 and a half liters again (much was Guinness, or Guinness and cider) Tuesday morning, and I'll explain, I had a glass of Kölsch. This is, first, to frighten my mother, and second, to explain that people drink a lot of beer in Germany. It's worth pointing out that on none of those nights did I get drunk, thanks partly to spacing out the drinks, and thanks partly to some real damn hearty German food. Plus, it's not about getting drunk. This was all fantastic (often, especially at beer halls, brewed on the premises), fairly cheap (EUR 1.25 for a 20cl glass) beer, meant to augment, not supplant, conversation and conviviality. It's not a race to get wasted.

So we're at this place that reminds me more and more of the Brauhaus, with the menu in semi-English, beers in our hands, and a fear of the waitress. There are old people all around, and the rest of the clientele is nowhere near our age. Precisely none of the patrons look like tourists, and most look like regulars, especially if the waitress' constant mocking of them is any indication. Presently, some of them began to sway and sing some throaty German drinking song. None of this was threatening, though; it was all so comfortable, so cliche-familiar and harmless but so different and so great.

I'm aware I am switching tenses like a madman. Thank you for noticing.

The guy we're sitting next to leans over and asks us, in English (not unlike almost everyone we've met in Germany so far, his English puts our English to shame, let alone our French), where we are from. It comes out, through the course of a very pleasant conversation, that he has been in the States many times (in 40 of them, in fact!), and he gives us some tips: try the local dish, Himmel und Äd (Heaven and Earth, mashed potatoes with apples in them and blood pudding on top); visit a town called Zons (a small, semi-touristy but intriguing town outside of a suburb of Cologne); stick around till Karnival on Tuesday.

He leaves, and is replaced by our dinners: three plates of riesenbratwurst and sauerkraut, and more Kölsch. It was all damn good. After dinner, we walked around for awhile, in the process going to three or four German bars of various stripes. The beer was good, and cheap, everywhere.

Sunday, everything was closed, so we went to the chocolate museum. The chocolate factory and chocolate fountain, along with free samples, were the best parts of an otherwise pretty cool but not too interesting museum. The rest of the day we spent walking up, cable-carring over and walking back down the Rhine, which is gorgeous. That night, we went to a place called Päffgen, another beer hall. But where the first one was a small, hole-in-the-wall type of place, this was an out-and-out hall, devoted to the consumption of beer and food that goes well with beer. The waiters were intimidating, the dishes even more so, and there was again a conspicuous lack of tourists. The sauerkraut, however, was amazing, as was the goulasch, which I hadn't had for a while but now want again. And, of course, the beer was very good. That night, being a Sunday night, not much was open, and even less was patronized, so we wound up in an Irish pub after trying, and failing, to find the nightlife district (which I'm sure would have been really jumping on a Sunday night)

Monday we followed our new friend's advice and got ourselves, by cheap train and cheaper bus, to the small, partially-walled-in town of Zons. I can't tell you much about it other than what I saw, since everything was in German. Touristy, maybe, but not English tourists. It was pretty attractive, but completely quiet; almost nothing was open, and there were very few people walking around. We ambled around town for a bit, and then headed out to the banks of the Rhine, which look out on some really beautiful countryside. We were just sitting there, on the side of a bike path, when we heard someone say "Scheizer!" ("Shit!") A woman in her late 50s/early 60s, riding a large tricycle, had dropped something on the side of the road. Being a gentleman, Chris walked over to pick it up for her, and upon receiving it, she launched into what we assumed was a speech offering thanks and explanation, directed at Chris and conducted entirely in German. As we speak, between us, perhaps fifteen words of German, those of us who were not Chris found this to be extremely hilarious, until she came over to us, as if seeking confirmation that our friend was perhaps mute, or maybe just an idiot. At which point we felt it necessary to explain that we were Americans. She didn't speak English, but she had a little French (remembered from her high school days, it seemed) We proceeded to spend the next half hour in very halting conversation, which she would punctuate every so often by trying to remember how to say "triste" (sad, as in, "Isn't it sad that here you and I are, and we'd like to communicate, and I have so much to tell you, but can't) She seemed incredibly nice, though, and I felt bad that we didn't speak any German. Amusingly, after a while, she became convinced that I spoke German (which I don't, but I knew maybe ten of the fifteen words that we collectively knew, and I'm apparently good at faking the pronunciation) and started conversing with me in rather rapid German about a variety of things. It was at this point that I realized that I might be able to learn the language, since I was almost able to follow her, and occasionally say one or two mind-numbingly basic things myself. I also realized that I really want to learn this language, to please this lady and also because the World Cup is coming to Germany in 2006 but that wouldn't have anything to do with it, would it?

We ate dinner that night at the best place yet, the Brauhaus Sion (which may have been around, in some form or another, since 1164, if I read the menu right [and there's absolutely no reason to believe that I did, since it was in German]) Massive sausages, including one at least two feet long (no exaggeration), awesome mashed potatoes and sublime sauerkraut. Good Kölsch too. That night was spent at another Irish pub, watching Blackburn beat the hell out of Everton. Then we moved on to another pub, that we had read about in a guidebook. It turned out to be awesome: really small and intimate, cozy almost, with a 20s-style Dixieland jazz band. That was the perfect cap to a really neat weekend in Cologne: sitting there in that bar, drinking yet more good Kölsch, listening to music that I actually really started to get into.

The next day was the beginning of Karnival, about which I can tell you nothing, except that people in Cologne use it as an excuse, at least on the first day, to dress up, congregate in the town center, and begin drinking rather early in the morning, with the celebration centered around 11:11 AM, although people start the drinking well before then.

And that's about it. A pretty relaxing weekend in Germany, keeping well away from the tourists for the most part, with handsome dividends as a result. The food was fantastic, the beer was fantastic, the hostel was pretty neat (central, clean for the most part, free Internet), the town was awesome. Really, just solid all around. Hard to do better than that.

2003-11-06T06:09:00.000-06:00

...but not all of them

I feel like maybe I've given short shrift to the French in this space and in my sentiments generally over the past few months (November 1 marking the two-month anniversary of my arrival.) In my rush to criticize the problems that France certainly faces (perhaps a retaliatory rush, being an American in what may be the most reflexively anti-American country of the developed world), I've maybe missed some things. It's true that there are an abnormally large number of homeless people, at least in Montpellier. It's true that I fear crime here more than I do in the US (and justly, as the French crime rate has recently surpassed the American.) It's true that the French media seems monolithically leftist, and that the left in general seems unhealthily dominant.

All of these things are true, but to remark only on them misses something, doesn't tell the whole story, and as a result is unfair. Yes, there are a lot of homeless, but (almost) none of them are begging, and it would seem this is because the State takes care of them. Yes, I fear crime more here, but after all I'm an American, which means I will be visibly not from around here every now and again. And anyway, I'm still way more likely to be shot or probably even stabbed in Chicago than anywhere in France. And yes, the left in France is perhaps too powerful, but is that such a bad thing? In that it stifles political debate, perhaps, but better the left in control than the right, and the leftism of France really makes apparent the conservatism of the States.

All of this was prompted by a rather bizarre sequence of events, the last of which terminated roughly ten minutes ago as I write this. In themselves, they were not particularly noteworthy, and even taken together they are not especially so. Like many of the things that have (or have not...) happened here, they are of interest precisely because they suggest paths not gone down only by the grace of Providence. Which is my convoluted way of saying that tonight was a night of near-misses, whose nearness is with me still in a vaguely unsettled feeling in my stomach.

It all started as I left the movie theater, having seen for the first time, but assuredly not the last, the third and final Matrix movie. By this time it was about 10:30, and I stopped in an internet cafe for an hour, to catch up on things. Things caught up on, I left and went to the bus stop. Here I should explain that the normal bus system in Montpellier, which is extremely comprehensive, stops running somewhere around 8 PM and is replaced by an extremely limited night service, which stops entirely around 1 AM. For reasons that aren't entirely clear to me, I've only been on the night bus a few times; enough to have a sense of how it works, but only a sense. There are, I discovered tonight to the first of my dismays, two busses that run at night, not one. They are both called "Rabelais", and on the back of the bus are each labelled "Rab"; only on the front are they differentiated. As I approached from the back of the busses, and as I was as yet unaware that there were two different routes, I inevitably chose the wrong bus. I got on the one in front, thinking that perhaps the one in back had finished its route early or something like that.

After a few stops of mounting uncertainty, I finally decided I was on the wrong bus, and got off. I was in completely unfamiliar territory, but thankfully the bus stop had a map of the route. As I examined the map, I realised that I had been on the right bus after all. Perplexed, and thankful for the red light at which the bus was currently stopped, I asked the bus driver if he was going to Lycee Mas de Tesse, my stop. Not at all, he replied.

Right. After studying the not-very-complex route map a bit more, I eventually figured out...that there were two routes. I backtracked for awhile, cursing the twisty nature of French streets and longing for the good old grid, when all of a sudden I found myself at a bus stop that appeared to be on the route I was looking for! What was more, I realised that the bus was still running, that I had thought it an hour later than it actually was! Glory be!

A few minutes later arrived my bus. I got on and noticed a girl from one of my acting classes and my lit class; one of two people in the world, in fact, who aren't my host family but who I know live near me. After awkwardly exchanging bisous (the bus was lurching almost as much as I was; it's not as easy as it looks to give those cheek kisses) I sat down behind her. Sadly she was on her cell phone, or we could have had a jolly little chat. But at least I knew now, for sure, that I was on the right bus!

A few stops later she got off, an act which should have set alarm bells ringing but didn't. After that, I was the only one on the bus as it rocketed towards its destination and my suspicion that I missed my stop finally began to grow. Simultaneous with my realisation that I had, in fact, missed my stop, the bus pulled in to its terminus. Now I was in real trouble; the neighborhood wasn't all that good, I didn't have any taxi company phone numbers or even know how to get such a number (what's French 411? I still don't know; I probably should've just held down 0 or something) and what was worst of all, I had no idea how to backtrack along the bus' route.

I should explain that my chief method of getting around Montpellier on foot is by following bus routes that I know go where I need them to. Not the most efficient way, perhaps, but the streets are absolutely impossible to trust, constantly turning and ending as they do, and so the certainty of getting to your destination offered by the bus route is worth the extra time it may take to walk such routes.

So what I ordinarily would have done, no problem, is just follow the route that the bus took, back towards my stop. But, problem: I wasn't exactly sure how it had gotten to where it did. Other problem: it had been a long time since I saw a bus stop, meaning that I'd have to walk far in each direction before hitting a bus stop sign, my golden thread in the labyrinth. Final, worst problem: the only thing I did know for sure was that at some point near the end of the route, the bus had been on what seemed to be highway. Meaning almost impossible to trace the route for sure, especially as there were several onramps to different highways nearby.

Finally, God or Karma had had enough fun with me, and sent Virgil the cabdriver to take me home (again, I just saw the third Matrix movie, which is not without its references to Dante, which alone makes me contemptuous of the shockingly poor critical reception it has received.) I don't know what his real name was, but he was the inspiration for this post, and Virgil seems appropriate. He was taking what he told me later was a regular customer home, and it was clear from the conversation that they were having that they knew each other. Anyway, he saw me wandering on the side of an onramp in what I assumed to be the general direction of home, and stopped as I sheepishly raised my hand in an attempt to flag him down. He told me to get in, took his current customer home, and then proceeded to take me home, not without engaging in very animated but friendly conversation, and after displaying to me how to recognize when the bus is near my stop, so that I don't miss it again. I gave him a 1 euro tip on a 12 euro fare (1 euro being all I had, I wanted to give him more as he really was a human being of seemingly tremendous character and I felt very grateful), and he called me, a few times, a very "brave" american (apparently a 1 euro tip is a good one; I felt bad that was all I had on me.)

So yeah. Like I said, interesting mainly for what didn't happen. And because it allowed me to meet, and get the business card of, a guy who has to be one of the nicest I have met in a long time. I base this mostly on the conversation we had, not herein recounted because I've gone on long enough, but when he gave me the card he emphasized that he was the guy to look for if I ever find myself somewhere without money and needing to get home. Which isn't something I've had many cabbies tell me. Looking back on it, it would have been a good idea to get his name, so that I could call his company and tell them to give him a raise or something. Too bad I didn't think of that at the time...

2003-11-01T18:15:00.000-06:00

Not much has been happening, I've been getting used to life in France. Which means not much exciting to report, though I'm working on my plan for X-mas break. Itinerary so far: Montpellier - Munich, Munich - Prague, Prague - Vienna, Vienna - Florence, Florence - Rome, Rome - Montpellier. All by train. If affordable, awesome...

Pictures of around Montpellier are up here.

French tongue-twisters learned in acting class:

Constantinopolitain, quand te déconstantinopolitaniseras-tu? Je me déconstantinopolitaniserai quand tous les constantinopolitains se seront déconstantinopolitanisés.

Natacha n'attacha pas son chat Pasha qui s'échappa, ce qui fâcha Sacha.

Ton thé t'a t'il ôté ta toux, Didon de Dordogne?

Le fisc fixe exprès chaque taxe fixe excessive exclusivement au luxe et à l'exquis.

Si ceci ce sait ces soins sont sans souccès.

That's all for now...next weekend, Cologne!

2003-10-25T07:19:00.000-05:00

Nothing, extraordinary

So, I know it's been awhile since I last updated, but that's because nothing really interesting has happened. Which is kind of the point, I think; success is when living in a foreign country isn't really a challenge anymore, when you know what's going on and things make sense to you, and you just quietly go about your business. If everything that happened was new and exciting...well, at a certain point, that has to end. One way or another; either everything that used to be new and exciting is now routine and unremarkable, or you just get tired of being surprised. The former is more applicable in my case, which is good; I'm beginning to feel like I don't really stick out here, like I belong or at least like I live here, and am not just some annoying tourist.

It's not entirely true that nothing interesting has happened, however. Besides quietly adjusting to living here, and giving blood once for no particular reason (other than that it's a mitzvah, or at the very least a good idea), I went to a film festival Friday night. Background: Montpellier has, and for the last 25 years has had, a film festival of the Mediterranean. So, they bring in movies (short and long, fiction and documentary, traditional and experimental; it's quite a lineup) from Italy and France and Spain, as well as Israel and Lebanon and parts beyond. Friday night was the opening, with a movie called "Souviens-toi de Moi" (Do you remember me), from Italy (starring, among others, Monica Bellucci; she was the only actor I'd heard of, anyway). A good film; good, not great. See it if it's convenient, but don't go out of your way. Anyway, since it was the opening film of a film festival, they'd brought the director in from Italy to talk about the movie for roughly forty seconds before they showed it. He didn't speak much French, so they brought one of his producers on stage, and announced that the director would speak in English, with the producer translating. And so he began to talk about the film in English, and he began to receive boos from the audience (a packed house, that could probably hold several hundred people, if not a thousand; it is normally used for concerts and opera.) And he didn't receive one or two hecklings; it seemed like the whole theater was booing him. So the producer asked if people would prefer he spoke in Italian or English, and the whole theater (not, of course, yours truly) yelled "Italian!"

Well. Now, the more I reflect on it, the more it seems likely that this was not an expression of some deeply-felt hatred of America. The movie, after all, was in Italian (French subtitles); the director was Italian; Montpellier is not far from Italy. It is probable that a lot of people either were Italian or spoke Italian and wanted to practice. English, they hear everywhere (much to my dismay); Italian, not so much. So they probably didn't mean any harm to the (probably small) number of anglophones in the audience. Nevertheless, I did not feel especially welcomed at that particular moment, and made damn sure I didn't speak English until well outside of the theater. One never knows, after all, and no matter how much Chirac tries to claim otherwise, I definitely get the feeling that resentment of America (and especially American cultural hegemony) is not an uncommonly-felt emotion here. One has only to spend some time in the political section of a French bookstore to realize that maybe, just maybe, all is not quiet on the transatlantic front.

I could write several pages on the ideological content of what seems to be your average French bookstore's current affairs section; so far, I've only read the covers of the books they put out on display (the bookstores here, by and large, don't seem too accomodating of people who just come to read for awhile; there aren't any chairs or anything.) My favorite book title so far has to be "Est-il permis de critiquer l'Israel?" (Is it permitted to criticize Israel?) Now, of course, I haven't actually read this book; maybe it makes some very good points, and maybe its subject has little to do with its title. But that title really says a lot about the state of the left in this country, as far as I can tell (again, caveat: I am about as savvy an observer of political France as I am of, say, New Zealand; which is to say, not very savvy at all.) The left completely dominates here, at least as far as hearts and minds go (hilariously, depressingly tragic recent election results notwithstanding; Chirac and Le Pen did so well because there were so damn many leftist candidates, and even so Jospin didn't lose by much.) So for the most ferocious and consistent of all Israel's critics in the West (and that's saying something) to be putting out books questioning whether or not it is "permitted" to criticize Israel is a little absurd. As is the 35-hour work week, especially as a solution to the unemployment currently plaguing France. Also absurd: the constant French denunciations of American "empire" (in light of, say, Algeria, Cambodia, Viet Nam, the Ivory Coast, as well as parts of the US and Canada, not to mention all the other countries that I forgot or the currently-existing D.O.M.s (Departments Outre-Mer, "Overseas Departments" or "colonies", to use the classical term.)

One of these days, I really should get around to writing that piece. Until then...

2003-10-12T14:32:00.000-05:00

Fontaine de Vaucluse

(All of the photos are now up here.)

It can be difficult to express one's feelings without resorting to hyperbole from time to time, and with memories this tendency can be even more pronounced. A feeling that was experienced can often be so powerfully felt by the recounter of the tale that, in order to convey the full impact of the memory, he must resort to exaggeration. It is with this in mind that I tell you that what I did this weekend was one of the single coolest things I have done in a long time; easily the coolest thing I have done in Europe to date; what, in fact, I came to Europe to do in the first place (though my most extraordinary daydreams were only rough approximations of this reality); and I am positive that I will remember with fondness this trip until the day I die.

I was initially sceptical: the whole thing had been organized at the last minute, by two people I didn't really know that well (they go to my school, but so do thirty thousand other people). It was initially supposed to be the three of us and one other, biking through a part of Provence. I found out about it the afternoon before we were supposed to leave, and agreed to it mainly because I'd wanted to go biking in the French countryside and because I hadn't as yet planned anything for that weekend. As one of the organizers was somewhat pushy, and I felt like I'd been forced into it, I started to resent the whole idea. But I went anyway, and met the two of them at the train station the next afternoon, along with the fourth member of the party, who I knew even less well, and Kate, who had been in my prestage classes and who I had had conversations with from time to time. She joined even later than I, apparently, but none of us really knew any of the others that well; I think two of them are roommates, but maybe not, and anyway we've only been here a little over a month.

The plan was to take a train that day (Friday) to Avignon, connect a half-hour later to another train going to a town called Isle-sur-Sorgue, and from there take a bus to a hostel in our destination, an even smaller town called Fontaine de Vaucluse, about which we'd heard good things. We got on the train at Montpellier, but it wasn't until we pulled into Marseille that we really and truly realized that we'd gotten on the wrong train. We'd been a little suspicious from the beginning, as the cars were marked "Marseille" and not "Avignon", but I remembered from my guidebooks that train cars in Europe are marked with the destination town on them, and so we figured we were ok: we were at the right track, at the right time, and going in the right general direction, i.e. east. Had any of us looked at a map, or been French, we would have realized that Avignon is roughly north-east of Montpellier, and Marseille is a straight shot east; it is unlikely that a town passes through the former on it's way from Montpellier to the latter.

So we got to Marseille, where the first good omen manifested itself: instead of whining and moaning about the whole weekend being thrown out of whack, we started joking about how we were going to get stabbed (Marseille has a reputation, at least among the Americans here, of being the most crime-ridden city in France, and I think that's true). This was a sign of our flexibility, which would be key to the rest of the weekend. Anyway, we got off the train and onto the platform, and lo and behold! there was a train to Avignon, leaving in a few minutes, on the very next track. We explained our situation to the conductor, who quickly gave his ok, especially since the train wasn't too full. An hour and a half later, we were in Avignon, having missed our connecting train to Isle-sur-Sorgue, and it became apparent we were spending the night in Avignon.

So we started going around to hotels, finding almost all of them booked solid (this was a Friday night, around 8, in a tourist city in a very touristy region of France). Undaunted, however, we did some walking, going into hotels we passed on the way to the tourist office, and getting the idea that every bed in the city was occupied. The tourist office had a board with the phone numbers and "vacancy status" (wildly inaccurate) of each of the hotels in Avignon, along with giving the star rating for each location. By phone, it took awhile to find a hotel with any beds available; by chance, however, the shady-looking establishment across the street had room for five people, at slightly better prices. Since, at this point, we'd had our backpacks on for awhile, we jumped at the chance. The rooms were alright, better-looking than the outside of the place, but two stars is as two stars does, and we were not living in the lap of luxury. Which was fine, since we wanted to enjoy the rocking nightlife of what one of our guidebooks called the "joyless city" of Avignon.

The guidebook was quickly proved right, as it became obvious that there really wasn't much to do in Avignon besides eat (very well, actually) and take photos of former papal residences that didn't come out because it was too dark. But we spent the night walking around, sitting, and basically just hanging out, and there ain't nothing wrong with that.

The next morning, we got up bright and early to catch the 7:53 train, which we realised as we were leisurely changing, at 7, was in fact the 7:20 train (trains marked with dots above their listings don't run on Saturdays; those with dots in circles do. Thanks, SNCF.) However, we weren't staying that far from the train station and so, abandoning the hope of eating before training, we walked briskly over and on to the train that would take us to Isle-sur-Sorgue. When we got there, around 8 or so, we found ourselves in a town that, though picturesque, was basically closed. It would open up in about an hour, but that's a long time to kill in a town with nothing open nor much to do. After sitting in a tabac for an hour, we walked over to the tourist office, where we learned that the first bus would be leaving for Fontaine de Vaucluse at 11:15. It being 9 in the morning, and we being in a town with not much more to do now that everything was opening, we opted to walk. The fact that Fontaine was only about 6 km away factored into our decision, and so we headed out.

This was when we all began to sense that things were starting to go very right indeed: it was becoming a beautiful day, cold though it was, and we were all in very high spirits, walking through gorgeous Provincial countryside. We made good time, taking an hour and a half for six km (though I suspect it was slightly more than that) with our backpacks on our shoulders, but it was actually a lot of fun, since good company and good sights combined, though not for the first time, in a highly satisfactory manner. This is one of those times, and there will be more in the telling of this story, where I can really only say that I can tell you what happened, but I can't tell you how it happened, and therein lay the enjoyment of the experience. Drew (who goes to Illinois), Kate, Bill (who also goes to my school) and Chris (who doesn't) were excellent travelling companions, and this story wouldn't be what it is without them.

We got to town, and hiked for probably another km or so, to the auberge (hostel). It was closed, but I'd made reservations that morning by cell phone, and we just wanted to drop our stuff off and change. The owners live right next door, and were very obliging, so in a little while, we were all in shorts, with naught but our cameras on our backs (though one of us, Drew, brought along a smallish backpack). We walked into town and lunched by a very emerald-colored river, and it was only noon; we were again very happy. There were the ruins of a chateau perched above the town, and we had heard that the trail leading to the ruins continued on to the mountains (or very tall hills; look at the pictures and judge for yourself; anyway, they dominated the town). So we headed that way, and found ourselves in what can only be described as some awesome scenery. Basically, from this point on, keep switching back and forth between this and the photos, because that might help give some idea of what we were seeing. Sadly, however, it will be a very small part, since the day was absolutely perfect (warm but not too warm; cool but not too cool), the skies were totally clear, the people were great, the town was great, the scenery and the trail were great, the hostel seemed great, and this was really the first time any of us had done this kind of thing. Drew remarked at the time, and he's being proven extremely right as I write this, that we'd never really be able to explain the awesomeness of this to anyone.

We continued on from the chateau, making for the bizarre rockface that you can see from the pictures I took from the auberge; it looked really bizarre and intriguing, and was fairly high up. There was a path for awhile, but it became clear that the path wasn't going where we wanted it to go, and so at some point, we just left it, and started walking up. For a little bit, we were on a forested part of the range of hills (or very small mountains), but then the trees disappeared, and we were left with rocks.

I'm not really sure that I can keep giving a chronological description of what we did: I don't remember it well enough to do that, and it would basically be along the lines of "and then there were rocks, and we walked on them for awhile, and then there were bushes..."

We rested at what we perceived to be as high up as we could go on the front of the hills, but thought there might be a way to go up around the back, and so made for that. We were proven right, but in order to be so proven, we eventually had to go through, though not for the last time, sadly, bushes whose name I do not know but whose sight is burned into my brain, and whose claws are burned into my legs. The decision to wear shorts, though defensible at the time (and, I think, defensible still) meant that our legs were unprotected from thousands and thousands of small scratches (along with some big ones); at one point, it looked as though my legs were the canvas for a pointillist landscape of Hell.

We rested at the top before deciding to go back down, as we were out of water, hot and scratched. Sadly, the scratching was not about to end, and we had to endure quite a bit more of those bushes before we reached the path (road?) that had been completely cleared of vegetation. It wasn't wide, but wide enough that we knew we were done with those infernal bushes (which hurt more with each drop of sweat that trickled into the valleys of pain they forged with bright green valley-forgers).

We went back to the auberge, played petanque (boules [bocce ball]) until it opened, showered and went to a fantastic dinner. Before that, however, we stopped into the church (that was at least a thousand years old, though I suspect older since it contains the Merovingian sarcophagus of Saint Veran, which dates back to the sixth century) and took Mass, in French, in a cathedral that was over five hundred years old when America was discovered. I should point out that, since the tourist season is thoroughly over, the town of 610 (according to my guidebook, which suggests the most lame parts of the town as highlights) was largely tourist-free, and though it clearly was touristy, we enjoyed many of the fruits of that fact while enduring almost none of the thorns. Anyway, mass in a thousand-year-old church was cool, and dinner was even better (I had the civets de sanglier, or wild boar stew, which was amazingly good). We went back to the auberge and fell into bed, though the conversation didn't fall as quickly. Breakfast the next morning was good, and we spent the early part of the day shopping, until our bus left. And that's really about it. That's the story of one of the best weekends I can ever remember having. Kinda neat, considering that Thursday morning I had no idea what I was going to be doing this weekend, but suspected I'd be going to see a movie or something.

2003-10-10T03:57:00.000-05:00

10-9-03
Turin and Classes

It's been awhile since last I updated this site; this lack of correspondence I attribute to the commencement of classes Monday last. Since the last post, I have been to Turin (Italy now being only the third country I have ever spent time in in my life, after the US and France) and begun classes; tomorrow, I'm going to be going to Provence with a few Americans to spend the weekend (really, Saturday) biking. Should be fun; pictures will be taken. The pictures already taken are here.

Anyway, first Turin, then classes. I picked Turin for my first trip because a friend from high school/college, Frank, is studying there. As it had been awhile since I last saw him, I decided to head over there. This was also my first experience with the European train system; let me just take this time to say that the TGV (Train Grand Vitesse, the French high-speed train) is awesome. Bad-ass, even. It got me from Montpellier to Lyon in under two hours, and then I took a normal train from Lyon to Turin, an equivalent distance but a ride lasting over twice as long. At top speed, the TGV is going around 300km/h (~150mph); at that speed, if an object is close enough to the track, you literally don't see it (this is because your eye refreshes the image it sends to your brain around every 1/30th of a second, and if the object is small enough and close enough, it passes by too fast. I nearly wet my pants when I made this discovery, which was not especially pleasant for the people sitting around me). So the TGV is awesome, the area directly around the Lyon train station is ok, and the train from Lyon to Turin was pretty neat (ask me about the crazy Italian lady when I get back; I want to have some stories to save for my return, and anyway it really wouldn't translate well into text form). I really only realized on the ride back that the train spends most of its time going through mountains and valleys (at least, I thought they were mountains; then again, I live in Chicago, where the slight bump on Lake Shore Drive around 30th or so is about as significant a land formation as there is).

But enough about the trip, and more about Turin. Frank lives in a pensione, which is like a nice hostel, right off of what seemed to me like downtown but may just be a cluster of neat and biggish buildings (one thing about Europe: no skyscrapers). This pensione is actually affiliated with the Politecnico, the university he attends there, and is for the use of international students. As a result, I was the first person in a few months with whom he's spoken casual, American English. Everyone else speaks English, of course, but not that well; as a result, every time he talks with them, he slows down and (this was hilarious to watch, until I started doing it too) adopts some sort of accent, like a kind of weird Italian accent. I guess it just feels weird speaking (to us) non-accented English with someone who isn't really comfortable with the language; I don't know, I can't explain it. But it really is hilarious. Anyway, everyone at the pensione was from a non-English-speaking country; there were mostly Spaniards, some Mexicans and one French guy (Frank's roommate). The international students all bond together, though, and so I wound up hanging out with some of them who live in apartments, among them some Argentines and a guy from Holland. If you've seen l'Auberge Espagnole, this was it.

Anyhoo, the first night, we went to a party at Frank's roommate's girlfriend's apartment, which quickly transformed into us going to a bar called Transilvania. It was what you might expect from a bar like that: real goth, lot of metal (music), lot of fake "Transylvanian" effects (tombstones on the walls for Dukes, etc). It was pretty neat, though. Sadly, when we were done, we had to walk home, which was a pretty long walk. Got to see a lot of Turin, though, and to be honest, I've been walking a lot in Europe, and I'm beginning to like it.

The next day, there was supposed to be a soccer game between the Argentine kids and the Spanish kids, but there were so many people (and the field we were on was so small) that we broke up into four teams that just rotated. My and Frank's team, sadly, did not do so well. But then, I choose to blame it on the sand covering the field, making it impossible to get traction, and Frank's pulled thigh muscle. We woulda owned them otherwise...

That night featured more bar-hopping, this time at some clubs on the River Po. It runs right by Frank's pensione, and on it's bank is where all the clubs are; it's really a neat scene, since there's a river on one side, and on the other, a bunch of kids and music. We kinda club-hopped, since there wasn't any cover and none of the clubs we went to were really that cool. The last one was especially...well, actually, the club itself was really cool. It was in a pretty neat space, lot of graffiti on the walls and exposed brick everywhere (actually, it wasn't nice enough for exposed brick; really, they just never bothered to cover the brick up). The problem was the DJ; he was playing CDs, which kept skipping, which is kinda hard to dance to. And I think he just discovered the magical invention known as the cross-fader, which allows you to play two songs simultaneously, or let the end of one bleed into the beginning of the other. In theory, as I understand it, the songs should have similar rhythms and tempoes, and just be similar overall; when done well, you never know when one song ends and another begins. Sadly, however, this DJ did not quite understand this principle, and so a Village People song would be followed by a fast house song, and the results were really very painful, not to mention confusing.

The next day was, in my opinion, the best. It started with a Juventus game at three in the afternoon, though we got there earlier. First off, Italian stadium food is waaay better than American; panini vs hot dogs? No contest. A good ballpark frank is always appreciated, but there's really something to be said for the outstandingly high quality of Italian lunchmeats, which makes their sandwiches that much better.

The game was at the Stadio dell'Alpi (Stadium of the Alps?), on the outskirts of Turin with an excellent view of the Alps as a backdrop. The stadium itself, however, as you can see from the pictures, is pretty attractive in and of itself (sorry for all the cliches).

Sadly, the match was between Juventus, one of the best teams in the world, and Bologna, a mid-table team from the same league. As we were five games into the season, this meant that the game meant almost nothing. The stadium, accordingly, was far from packed (except for the cheap seats, which double as the supporters sections, and from which all the chants and pyrotechnics originate). Initially, Bologna was actually doing better than Juve, as the latter really didn't look like they cared all that much. Eventually, however, they got a goal off a corner kick, and any momentum Bologna had disappeared altogether, until they managed to get a penalty kick late in the first half (in the goal near us!) Juve eventually responded in the second half, with a penalty kick of their own (again, in the goal near us!) If all this makes the game sound a little routine, that's because it was; it was a great experience, and a lot of fun, but frankly not the best game I've ever seen. Still, there's a lot to be said for being in a real stadium watching a major team doing their thing. (Ask me about the crazy Italian guy; I'd write about him, but this is a lot for one post, and I haven't even gotten to classes yet)

Frank and I capped off the day with a visit to a restaurant called Aperitivo (apparently a chain), whose gimmick is that the food is free. You pay for drinks (though you don't pay much; we got a pretty good bottle of wine for 10EUR), and help yourself to as much (pretty good) food as you want. Later that night, we went to a bar to watch Inter Milan play AC Milan (both teams are among the best in Europe, and both are from Milan, so this is something of a rivalry). It was a pretty fun game to watch, but sadly, Inter was sucking it up, and Inter is Frank's dad's (and therefore Frank's and therefore my) team. They got owned 3-1 and we were glad of the drinks we had to keep us company.

Not much to say about the return trip; it was pretty uneventful, and I was sick, so, shrug.

As for classes, they're going pretty well. The French system is quite different from the American (professors are often quite late, class times and rooms change with or without warning), and since all my classes are in French, note-taking is a lot more difficult. Still, I've been pleasantly surprised by the fact that I can follow what professors say pretty well, and I'm not really lost in any of my classes.

The real surprise is that I'm taking two classes, back to back, that deal with the same subject and are taught by the same teacher. They're both about Greek myths, and rather than classes about the theater, as I had expected, they're a lot more like acting classes (so far, most of the time has been taken up by acting drills). I feel somewhat ambivalent about this, as it could be really cool or really...not so cool. Who knows? I guess I'll find out.

2003-09-30T05:54:00.000-05:00

Much to Discuss

But first, and sorry dad, GO CUBS!!!!!! NL CENTRAL 2003! Nice.

Also, what's with everybody dying? Elia Kazan, whose death has been met with more attention in France than that of, say, Johns Ritter and Cash, but also Althea Gibson, Edward Said, and a bucketload of middling-to-upper-tier celebrities...

But anyway, let's run down the list of topics: Turin, Homestay, Classes.

Turin first, because I just did it; got the tickets (leaving Friday, returning Monday). Just €140, included in that price is the one-time cost of the student discount card that gets me at least 25% off and often 50% off train ticket prices. And I'll be taking the TGV...nice. Might wind up catching a Juventus game while there, which, you know, would be alright. Ok, I guess. Or TOTALLY AWESOME. One of the two.

Second, homestay. I moved in with my host family and their dog yesterday, and initial impressions are positive. I had dinner with them (quiche), and we talked for a bit about Chicago (my hmom has friends who moved there and opened up a pizzeria). They seem like really really nice, warm people, and I spoke more French in those few hours than in most of my days here (as a result, I went to bed fairly early, being really exhausted). I have my own room, quite large, and the place is very French (no dryer, toilet in separate room from sink and shower). My hmom is learning English, and so wants me to transcribe some Tracy Chapman songs she has on a cd, so that she can follow along (I sympathize; it's so much easier to understand a song in another language when you have the words right in front of you). The family is Chilean, but speak French perfectly well, and around the house (though occasionally drop into Spanish). Also, they have cable, so they get CNN International and BBC World. This is a good thing, since living with people with whom you only speak French is a completely different experience from living with Americans, even in France; it feels much more foreign. As a result, even after just one day, I find myself appreciating the little bits of English I come across (I rejoiced today at finding a superb English-language bookstore, run by English people).

Finally, classes. I'm signed up for 6 at the moment, and designed my schedule so that I have no classes on Monday. I'm taking the obligatory phonetics and methodology (how to write papers for French professors) courses, which amount to 5 hours, and am taking four classes at Paul Valery: one general cinema course, one focusing on film noir (and about which I am very excited), one focusing on French drama (apparently, we will act out plays as well as read them) and one history course composed of two sections: a section dealing with Viet Nam from 1945-91, and one dealing with Israël from 1948-93 (I might have the terminating dates wrong). All tolled, that's 17 hours, but we were counseled to take more classes than we wanted, since we can't add to our schedule, but only drop from it.

That's about all for right now; I leave for Turin on Friday to visit Frank, and am very much looking forward to that.

2003-09-29T06:30:00.000-05:00

9-28-03
French Bookstores

I had occasion Friday to notice some of the differences between French and American bookstores, as I spent some time in a few trying to track down Bernard-Henry Levy's Qui a tue Daniel Pearl (Who killed Daniel Pearl); it wasn't that it was hard to find, or that no one had heard of it, but it was sold out everywhere.

So I found myself idling around the Sauramp's politics section, and as Sauramp's seems to be comparable to Barnes and Noble or Borders, and as I've spent a lot of time in the current affairs sections of both of the latter, and most especially as I'm not at all tired yet, I thought I'd make some wild generalisations disguised as "comparisons".

The two most obvious differences are in the size of the philosophy sections of both bookstores (in Sauramp's, the philosophy section is also right next to, and basically blends into, the politics section; hence, relevancy here) and the ideological content of the French current events section versus that of the American sections.

The philosophy section is interesting first because it's so huge; I can't recall either Barnes and Noble or Borders having philosophy sections of any size; the biggest I can think of is roughly half the size of that of Sauramp's, and this Sauramp's is not as large as that Barnes and Noble. The BN section is also much less prominent than the Sauramp's, and relatively isolated. By contrast, as I said, the French philosophy section blends into the political section, perhaps reflecting the French fondness for applied philosophy (the book I was looking for being a good example; it's by a prominent French philosopher known in France by his initials, BHL, and it's about the murder of Daniel Pearl, but also about what it was that created both Pearl and his murderer, what cultures they were produced in, and what worlds they moved in).

The more interesting, or perhaps striking, thing to note was the fact that the current affairs section at Sauramp's was all but exclusively left of left of center (or, what would be left of left of center in the US). The only book by anybody that I knew to be conservative was by Fareed Zakaria (sp?), Newsweek's political editor and a neocon; the book, which I don't think I've heard of (the translations mess with the titles) didn't seem to be his most rightward-leaning book, but I didn't really pay it that much attention. But he was the only right-of-center author I noticed; everyone else was a lefty. The display featured Naomi Klein's No Logo, a few Michael Moore books, and Joseph Stiglitz's Globalization and Its Discontents (among the American authors that I remember). Looking around the section it became apparent that most of the books that dealt with "mondialisation" were in solidarity with Stiglitz, Moore and Klein (there was a big ol' picture of Jose Bove, happily handcuffed, on the cover of another prominently-displayed book that did not obviously appear to disagree with him, and everything else had names revolving around the themes of malfeasance and the IMF). I really would like to do some more complete investigation of this, though, as this comes just from my idle but interested observations while waiting for a clerk to tell me he had no idea where the rest of their copies of the Levy book were.

It's not so much that it's surprising, although it is a little bit, in scope. It's really more disheartening, even for a leftist (although admittedly not one of the most ardent of the bunch). Only the fringiest of the lunatic fringe would deny that the right ever has any valid points to make, and therefore a culture that creates bookstores that only sell books from one half of the political spectrum must not be one that puts a lot of stock in impartiality, fairness, dissent (unless it's from the left, in which case, fine) or intellectual freedom. These are probably generalizations, but you see my point, I hope. It also puts into perspective the "bias" of which the American media is routinely accused, by both sides. The rather petty (if fervent) debates about whether the fact that the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, outside of the editorial pages, lie to one side or another seem that much more petty when compared to the monolith that is the left in this country (recent electoral results excluded).

And I have to say that a leftist monolith isn't necessarily a good thing; there are a lot of depressed-looking, frequently-drunk homeless people on the streets of Montpellier, and the newspapers seem to spend a good deal of time talking about the "rage" of today's youth. There aren't very many cops, at least in the neighborhoods I spend time in, and there isn't a particularly low, or even falling, crime rate (there's graffiti everywhere, for example, and there are a number of neighborhoods in which I don't feel particularly safe - and my gender has it much, much, much easier than others). The universities don't appear to have a lot of money (certainly not compared to the U of I or UIC), though they are free-ish and there don't seem to be the kind of class divisions that keep certain groups of people out of university and certain groups in. The unemployment rate isn't low (9.5% in June, compared with 8.9% in the Euro area and 6.2% in the US at that time) and that number is for France as a whole; I have a feeling, based on what I've read and seen, that that number is a lot higher in Montpellier.

But enough France-bashing. For everything that France seems to do wrong that the US seems to do right, there are at least as many things that the US does wrong that France does right. This is my observation after a month, anyway, and it'll be interesting to see if that changes after 9 more.

2003-09-25T09:20:00.000-05:00

(NOTE: Since it's been awhile since I've posted, I just now made three posts, written at different times. So after this one, there's another one, and then another one, with links to and a discussion of the pictures.

9-24-03
Abe learns a valuable lesson

I've been pretty lucky in my few weeks here so far; nothing really bad has happened to me, and I've had a lot of fun. And if what just happened to me was the worst thing that happens to me this year, I figure I'll be doing pretty well. Nevertheless, what just happened to me wasn't too much fun, and it taught me a few valuable things that I think it's good I learned before too long.

It started when I suggested to a (female; this becomes important later) friend, Kat, that we go to a park I'd heard about, and play some frisbee and soccer. There aren't too many (read: any, so far) grass fields here, for some reason, so I was particularly excited at the prospect. So we head out, and get to the tram station. While waiting there, a couple kids start calling to me about the ball (a pretty nice one that I'm fond of) I have in my hands. All my previous experiences with Montpellierains, including kids, being really neat, I head over. They ask if they can play with the ball until the train comes. They didn't look too bad, I was way older than any one of them (the oldest had to be like 16, and there were only one or two that old), there were a lot of people around, it was daylight, etc, etc. I didn't really give it too much thought (understanding what they were saying to me occupied too much of my attention) and none of my instincts really work here. So I kicked it over to one of them, and they started kicking it around among themselves. The tram arrives, and I ask for it back; of course, I don't get it. At this point, it hasn't really kicked in that my ball was just stolen, and so I ask again and again, very politely but a little firmly. They keep kicking it around, and eventually I start walking around, going up to whichever of them has the ball at the moment. They play a pretty effective game of keep-away, but in my defense I wasn't really trying too hard to get it from them.

After a lot of this (at least, it seemed like a lot), it's becoming increasingly clear that the only way I'm going to get my ball back from these 8 jerks is if I steal it back, so I step it up a bit. I occasionally get really into it, and every so often feel a slight jostle on my backpack. Thank God, I noticed each time, and whirled around, and there would be one of these kids right there, whipping his hand back, with a real innocent look on his face. I was pretty worried by that, because I had no pockets, and so put all my really valuable stuff (wallet with credit cards, tram pass worth 194 Euros, money) in exactly the pocket they kept reaching for. At one point, one of them even succeeded in pulling a letter out of one of the open pockets, but as it had no money or anything of value in it, he gave it back. After a bit, one of them puts it in the air, and I'm in a decent position to grab it. I go up, as does another of them, but he had position on me. Not that it matters, because as soon as I'm in the air, I'm checked in the back pretty firmly by another one, and I go down, scraping myself up a bit in the process (nothing too bad, but it's concrete, so blood is drawn and it definitely hurts). I get up, and as it was obviously intentional, I lose it for a second, and yell at them pretty loud (I can't remember what I yelled, but it was something like "Hey!" I'd like to think it was in French, but I doubt it was) The nearest one all of a sudden gets really pissed (what the hell, by the way? They stole my ball and then sent me into the pavement, and HE's getting offended? Whatever.), puts his cigarette (this is so French...) in his mouth, adopts this really fierce grimace, and picks up this previously-unnoticed and really really large piece of wood, and starts walking over to me, acting like the badass he clearly is not. I back down at this point, because the ball is nice, but it's not worth getting really messed up for. At that point I just walk away, to a different part of the platform, where Kat is waiting. Being a girl, it was probably a really good idea that she didn't get involved, as I doubt that would have made things much better. At any rate, there were a lot of them, so it would have taken more than two people to really make an impact.

There's really quite a lot about this that is very disturbing. Thank God it was broad daylight, and near a bunch of people, or I'm sure much worse would have happened. But all the same, it's not like it wasn't obvious what was going on, and there were a lot of people around; why didn't anyone say anything? What if one of them had taken my wallet? Where were the cops? Where was anyone of any authority? What if I lost something really valuable; would there have been any way at all for me to get it back? Is your average French citizen perfectly content to stand by and watch a petty theft and some physical altercation and not do anything (incidentally, I think that's illegal here, according to the Civilization lecture I had just a few hours before)? I mean, nothing really bad happened. But this incident does not inspire confidence that, were something bad actually to occur, some passerby, or some policeman, or anyone, would jump in.

The worst part, however, was the total and complete humiliation that comes from having your ball stolen by a bunch of kids who are all at least four, and most probably much more, years younger than you are. And to add to that, they were all clearly better at soccer than I was, as they had very little trouble keeping it away from me. The keepaway thing was just salt in the wound. But, again, if this is the worst thing that happens to me this year, I'll be lucky.

ADDENDUM: The above was quite literally written before the adrenaline stopped flowing, about an hour after the incident. Since then, I've come to realize that it actually wasn't a huge deal, and as long as I learn my lesson (don't be an idiot), it doesn't merit much discussion (I kept the post because it's an accurate rendition of what I was feeling right then, as well as an accurate description of what happened). What does merit some discussion, at some point, is the non-uniqueness of the event: pretty much everyone I talked to about it afterwards, ESPECIALLY the girls, has similar or worse stories to tell of these first few weeks here. This is, I believe, because there is essentially no police presence anywhere in the city, so people feel perfectly free to engage in petty crimes and harassment, since there are no repercussions (hence all the graffiti). Which is kind of a shame.

2003-09-25T09:14:00.000-05:00

--UPDATE--
9-22-03
The Mediterranean Comes to Montpellier

Wow. I have never seen it rain as much as it has these last few hours (it's currently 1:40pm). It started sometime around 9, and kept increasing in intensity for three hours; after a bit, heavy lightning and thunder strikes (really close by; I counted four seconds) joined in the fray. The crescendo came around 12:15, when, while sitting in an intensely boring grammar class, a shriek of surprise went up from those closest to the door. At first, I thought a snake or something similar had entered the room, but then I looked down to see water spreading across the floor, and fast. Everyone jumped up on desks, while the teacher urged calm. At one point, the door flew open, and the monsoon outside became the monsoon inside. We proceeded out the door, to meet a wall of water falling from the sky, and one racing down the hill at whose bottom we found ourselves. Thanks to the many dirt/gravel paths on the Paul Valery campus, the water was a uniform, medium-dark tan color, and deep. I couldn't hike and flood my pants enough, and they suffered, though the shoes and socks I had on quickly reached their saturation points, at which no more water could penetrate them because of all the water already present. Oddly enough, soon after we got outside, the rain let up, so that it was only slightly more than a drizzle, though the standing water stood. I went to the cafeteria to get lunch, and watched with anticipation as the lull ended and the rain resumed battering the campus. Saddened by my impending soaking, and elated at the thought of the cancellation of the rest of my classes for the day, I left the building and made for my dorm. I did alright until just a few steps before the front door, when I encountered a puddle. Not having my glasses on, and believing that the puddle was small, I stepped in. My foot went down, and down, and down and did not hit bottom for quite a long time. Sadly, I had no choice but to press on, and as I waded through Lake Michigan I realized that I can't think of a clever way to end this entry.

--UPDATE TO THE UPDATE--
9-23-03

Yesterday I heard, from people whose teachers commented on the rain, that such deluges are apparently normal for Montpellier (and this jives with my observations, which have been that every day I have been here save two, yesterday and one two or three weeks ago, it has been Sunday. When it rains here, it rains.) This raised the obvious question, though, of preparedness; if it's normal for Montpellier to get a foot (or whatever it was, I haven't seen today's papers yet) of rain at a time, why all the flooding? The basement floor of my building (it's a full-fledged floor, though I'm not sure if anyone lives on it) was completely flooded, with the water reaching up almost to the first floor (it flooded some people's first-floor rooms in other buildings, apparently). Ok, fine. It did rain a lot; maybe this is more than usual. But if that's the case, why did it seem as if the campus was totally unprepared? Drains everywhere were clogged and huge lakes were created around them; at 3:30, the university was evacuated. Outside my building, the only attempt being made that I could see to get the water out of the basement was a tiny spout blasting water out, looking completely feeble in comparison with the monsoon it was battling. What's worse, the spout was spraying water directly into the lake that was right next to the stairs leading to a door, with many cracks, that opened onto the basement and was, I suspect, the reason the basement flooded so quickly. So, essentially, the only thing pumping water out of the flooded basement was depositing it right back into said basement. Not really well-thought-out, and not (to me) indicative of a place where this happens a lot.

And yet...and yet. Later that evening, the standing water had largely disappeared (somehow), and this morning there was none to be found, anywhere. Everything seemed to get back to a slightly damper normal. So maybe this isn't as unusual as it certainly seemed yesterday.

I tried to take some pictures, but unfortunately, my camera isn't waterproof and I didn't want to damage it. So, I got some shots, that don't really show you what the rain and its effects looked like at all, but are awesome anyway.

2003-09-25T09:13:00.000-05:00

9-21-03
Today (Sunday) was an odd day, as days go. It played out to a new CD I got, by Orbital (it's awesome, in case you were wondering, but I know you weren't). Anyway, part of today was spent on a mountaintop, part in a centuries-old village, part in a cave, part in a stadium. I'll explain (photos are here).

The pictures that you are seeing come largely from the excursion today, to Saint-Guilhem-le-Desert and La Grotte De Camouse (these spellings may not be accurate, but it's late and I have homework to neglect). S-G-l-D (SG) is the village, containing an abbey that dates to before the beginning of the 9th century (that appears to be the first dated reference to it), and the abbey contains some of the bones of Saint Guilhem, a hero of some or another war between the French and the Sarassins war, though to be honest I'm not quite clear on what he did to deserve beatification. Anyway, the town was also holding a fair that day, an exposition of the agricultural products of the region. So, basically, there were a lot of vendors there, who refused to sell what they had but instead gave it all away, in sample form (I variously had wine, beef stew, olives, cookies and madeleines).

The highlight of the trip to SG, however, was the trip to the top of a mountain (a very very small one, obviously) behind the abbey. In truth, the town is surrounded on as many sides as I could figure by mountains (a mountain range, to be precise), and so after spending some time in the abbey and its awesome courtyard, I set off, with many others, to the top of the mountain. The journey upwards is recounted in the attached photos; the view was the best part. The cross that you can see appeared to be some sort of memorial; on it can be read "1995" and I think someone's name. It doesn't really appear to be above a grave, but (perhaps significantly) the side of the mountain drops off considerably right behind it.

After the mountain and the town came a trip to a largely forgettable cave, where terrible pictures were taken, and then a river, where some people (not, of course, your correspondent) swam. I didn't, partially because of my natural aversion to beaches and swimming in general, but mostly because I was anxiously awaiting the time when we would be herded back onto the buses, because I had tickets to a soccer game between Montpellier and Monaco that started that evening and that I didn't want to miss.

Not much to tell until the arrival at the stadium itself, however, at which point chants and roars of approval could be heard, and appetites (mine and my friend Dan's) were whet. We had really good seats, but since today (as, I suspect, is the case for most gamedays) was no-reserved-seats day, our tickets didn't matter as much as our getting there just before the first half ended. We watched the first half die out from the concourse, and then got seats in the nosebleed section. It was well worth it, though - not only has it been a long time since I've seen a professional game live, it's been a long time (as in, ever) since I've seen one in a country that gives a rat's ass about the sport. It was really cool when the crowd got into it (corner kicks, free kicks), and the crowd wasn't small - the picture gives a bad impression of the size; the Stade Mosson was probably between 3/4 and 4/5 full, and as we got there when the score was 1-1 (Montpellier was heavily favored to lose, slightly less heavily favored to draw), the crowd was definitely into it. Monaco eventually scored, of course, as it became apparent that Montpellier really is a bad team. They just made so many basic, stupid mistakes (I can't tell you how many passes I saw that went to no one in particular; this never happens in a Real Madrid game, I've noticed). So, Montpellier really wasn't very good, and the few chances that they had by and large weren't very convincing (they had one nice cross across the goal mouth, curving out in front of the defender, and the forward just barely mistimed his run, so that he arrived at the same time as the goalkeeper and neither one got a foot on it); all this game really did, besides make me look forward to the next home game, was make me look forward to a game in, say, Turin (Juventus) or Barcelona (Barcelona) or Madrid (Real Madrid) or Amsterdam (Ajax) or Milan (AC and Inter) or London (Arsenal). I'm shivering right now, realising that it is well within the realm of possibility that I will be able to go to some, or all, of those places to see some, or all, of those teams play. Hot damn.

(I'd like to take this opportunity to set up the photo of the game that you may already have seen, or will soon see. It's a corner kick [the guy taking it is mostly obscured by the fan in front of me in white], and you can see the ball curling towards the goal in the middle of the shot, with nothing around it whatsoever. Montpellier wears blue shirts, the brightest orange shorts I've ever seen, and blue socks; Monaco is in red and white shirts, with white shorts and socks. In my much-larger version, I can make out a Monaco player in the middle of the box, closest to the ball, bending his legs at the knees. He's about to dive and head it out of danger. I just thought you might like to know what happens...)

(It's also worth noting that I managed to get all of the players except the Montpellier goalie in the shot, even though I didn't actually look through the viewfinder on this one. That's because I wasn't sure if cameras are allowed in stadia, and if anyone knows whether or not they are, I'd appreciate an advisory. Thanks.)

2003-09-18T13:26:00.000-05:00

My Host Mom Thinks I'm An Idiot

And, I might add, with good reason. Explanation: I called her today, to say hello and introduce myself. So, warmly, she asked me what I thought of Montpellier. I informed her that I found it pretty. I continued, for several excruciating minutes, to confirm my initial appraisal ("oh, c'est vraiment jolie, oui, et...euh...oh oui, extremement [I'm not quite positive that's a word...] jolie...et le temps est jolie [My grammar teachers are cringing right now]...")

She seemed pretty nice, though, and kinda young. Very permissive, also ("You know, I have two daughters, 20 and 21, and one of them is studying at the university; the other isn't really doing well at the moment, so she's taking some time off" - "Oh, I'm sorry to hear that" - "Oh well, you know, when you're young, you have so much time for this sort of thing, c'est pas grave") And the best part about her was that I could understand her - she didn't speak too fast, or with too much of an accent, and this is, after all, taking place on the phone. So, I'll meet her a week from Monday. Till then, she seems pretty nice...and she probably thinks I'm a moron, as must half of Montpellier.

2003-09-15T12:02:00.000-05:00

Canals, Castles and Clothes, Oh my!

I really only put in the canal part above for the alliterative effect; this weekend, we did indeed visit the Canal du Midi, and it was neat enough, but since my camera's batteries died, I couldn't get any pictures. Anyway, it's just a damn canal. I figure if you've seen one...

So began this weekend, with a trip to the Canal du Midi, followed by a jaunt to Carcassonne. Carcassonne, besides being awesome, is a really-well-preserved-and-restored castle/walled city/fortress (I'm sure there are differences between those three things, but I don't know what they are). You can check out the pictures to get an idea of what it was like, but I can tell you that it was really cool. It was also, unfortunately, really touristy (there was a Best Western INSIDE the walls, but on the upside there was a store that sold batteries, hence all the pictures), but there were some really neat views. It didn't really sate my castle-consuming apetite, however, because of the touristyness and I'm not really sure why else. Maybe a trip to the Black Forest is in order...?

Today featured the Foire aux Associations (associations being a really hard word for me to say in French, like retournerons [the first person plural of the future simple of retourner, to return - a useful word to be able to pronounce]). Sadly, even though there was a huge number of clubs on offer, the only ones that really interested me were the ping pong and role-playing clubs (I find myself regressing to my inner nerd a lot here - I checked out first all the computer groups, and am waiting for the next linux users group meeting, as well as fantasizing daily about the final Lord of the Rings and Matrix movies). All the soccer organizations that showed up were competitive teams, and I'd probably get schooled terribly were I to try to join one. I'm gonna check out a practice all the same, but... At least it looked like I could take some of the people that were playing ping-pong, and I have a feeling that group's a lot more laid-back. At some point soon, I plan on asking an Actual French Person where to find pick-up games of soccer, since I'm positive they exist (goals are as ubiquitous here as hoops in the States).

This is all just forestalling the inevitable, however. Those of you that have studied abroad, or lived abroad, knew this was coming. I did, too, but I let my guard down all the same. That's right - it finally came time to do the laundry. It went fine at first, though the washing machine looked like it was struggling for a little bit. Eventually it picked up the pace, to the point where I seriously considered leaving the room for fear of the turbine of clothes rotating insanely fast just a few feet from my face. I figured, this machine was not inspiring confidence just a couple seconds ago, struggling to get the clothes rotating at all; how can it possibly control the inertia of a huge pile of clothes going 500 miles an hour?

That was not to be my downfall, however. No, my downfall came when I made a Stupid American Assumption: namely, that the dryer, which lacked any sort of "Hors Service" sign on it, would work. Hah! Stupid American. This is France - Permanent Member of the Security Council, home of some of the greatest thinkers of our or any time, participant in the Airbus and Concorde projects, aspiring participant in the space race - why in God's name would you assume the dryers work here? And so, of course, it didn't. Which left me with my bedsheet, a pile of sopping wet clothes in the dryer, and no discernable means of either transporting them back to my room or drying them. Solving both of these problems (via clothes hangers, plastic bags and a MacGyveresque helping of Good Ol' Fashioned American Ingenuity, as well as Gratuitous Use of Capital Letters) has left me quite proud of myself, and so I leave you now, to look at my pictures here.

Lord of the Rings translation oddities discovered since last post:
Sackville-Bagginses -> Sacquet(s) de Besace
Also, it's funny to see how they translated the Proudfoots-Proudfeet joke. Roughly one of you knows what I'm talking about, but it's not funny enough to give all the background. I'll show it to you upon my arrival next summer if you really want.

2003-09-12T07:30:00.000-05:00

Travesty!

So today I went out and bought The Lord of the Rings in French (Le Seigneur des Anneaux), thinking that if I was going to be reading a lot, as I am, then it should be in French. And since I wanted to re(re-re-re)read the trilogy before the last movie comes out (on December 17th!!!), maybe I should do it in French...

Anyway, this is actually working out really well; I've read the books enough times in English so that (this is really sick, by the way, but I swear to God it's the truth) I can understand any given sentence in the books, because I remember what it should say. Anyway, point is, I can understand what I'm reading, and I figure it'll help with my French. There is, however, one problem:

They translated the names.

If you didn't just gasp in horror at that statement, I can't explain it to you. But that really is a terrible idea, at least to an anglophone, because...well...let me just give you some samples of the heresy that lies within these sacred and (hitherto) undefiled tomes:

Bilbo Baggins -> Bilbon Sacquet (sac means bag in French)
Frodo Baggins -> Frodon Sacquet
Bag-End -> Cul-de-Sac (!!!!!!!!)
The Gaffer -> l'Ancien (the old, the elder, something along those lines)
Hobbiton -> (Prepare yourselves...) Hobbitebourg
Buckland, Brandybuck -> Pays de Bouc, Brandebouc
Orcs -> Orques

Thankfully, they didn't change every name (Gollum and Gandalf are intact), but I haven't read very far yet, and perhaps even worse horrors lie in store...

2003-09-09T06:47:00.000-05:00

Finally, pictures...

But before I get to those, I should recount the last few days. Saturday, I went to the beach. Which happened to be on the Mediterranean. Which was awesome. It took an hour and a half to get there, my sandals were consuming the flesh of my feet at a pace that threatened to leave me with nothing below the waist after a few short hours, and it wasn't especially warm. But man, oh man...the Mediterranean is awesome! The waves were pretty high, and we were able to go out rather far, and so be attacked by the pounding surf. Totally cool. I feel like I should be writing more about it, but there's not that much to tell that the pictures won't be able to. (Wow, my English is getting weird)

Sunday, we went to Nimes (an old Roman city), Arles (a less-interesting Roman city, with an arena that we were able to enter) and Pont du Gard, a very old, very cool, very huge Roman aqueduct. While at PdG, our last stop, it started to rain. A lot. So much so that French radio was advising people (in French, and eventually even in English) not to go out unless they absolutely had to, and there were some fatal accidents as a result.

That's really about all of interest that's happened over the last few days, but I did manage to take some neat pictures for your enjoyment. The complete gallery is here, but unfortunately I can't link you to specific pictures, much though I'd like to. There are two pictures of a cigarette box, because I found the warning labels extraordinarily amusing (translations provided). Hopefully, it should be self-explanatory. Au revoir!

2003-09-05T12:02:00.000-05:00

Je vais essayer du canard...

This may sound strange, but until last night, I had yet to have anything resembling a "traditional" French dinner (and I still haven't had crépes here, though that may change in a matter of hours). Last night, however, the program took us out to a nice, not-too-expensive place (did you know that the French have no word for "cheap"? Certainly not one in common usage; one says instead "pas trop chère" [not too expensive]). For 8,70€ (roughly $100 given today's exchange rates) I had the salade sicilienne (anchovies, some distant cousin of a green olive, and a sauce of some kind), un magret du canard (a cut of duck, with mushrooms, mashed potatoes, spinach, peas and lettuce) and chocolate mousse for dessert, with (of course) wine to drink. It was all amazingly good; simple, but high, high quality. I wasn't particulary surprised to discover this, but the French are highly aware of the culinary arts. This almost makes up for their ignorance of the bathing arts. Actually, I guess it does entirely, though I'd still prefer to smell less b.o. here.

Yesterday, I spent two hours in a café, doing homework, reading and listening to the band that showed up after an hour and a half. I had to go find the waiter to give me the check, and all I'd ordered was a glass of orange juice (in the states, the glass wouldn't have been finished before the check arrived).

Sunday, we're going on an excursion to Nimes, Pont du Gard (Roman aqueduct) and Arles. Should be fun; pictures should be taken. But now, alas, I have a test to study for.

2003-09-02T04:57:00.000-05:00

Prenez le tram...

Well, here I am. This is going to take a while to type, because the keyboard is a bit different (really different, actually). But that's neither here nor there.

I arrived in France yesterday, at Charles de Gaulle at 7 in the morning, in a terminal that smelled like vomit (not the only one in CdG for which this is true, by the way). Right now, a commercial for Bruce Almighty dubbed in French is playing, so excuse me if I seem somewhat distracted. Waited for a while, got on a plane, came here. Airports are all the same, and the less I think about the eternity I spent in CdG, the better.

Montpellier is one damnfine-looking town. You get a nice introduction to it as you fly in, passing over countryside that resembles a sandbox: ridges, gorges, valleys, hills everywhere. Very green, a lot of vineyards. It has to be fantastic to bike through, and I'm sure I'll find out soon.

At the moment, and for the month, I'm staying in a dorm. The room is a single, and pretty big; I should be getting some pictures up in a few days (I haven't had much time for photography yet, as I just found the internet café). The room does have one feature that makes no sense to me, however, and makes the building look much worse than it is: the window is covered by a hinged...wooden thing, that can be pushed out a bit, but never lets you get much of a view (think of portholes on old wooden ships, covered by hatches). This isn't a big deal, but from the outside, all these windows covered by wooden, chipped boards makes it look like the place is condemned.

Another snide comment on the architecture: there is graffiti everywhere. Combined with the construction that has ripped up most of the campus, the effect is redolent of a Warsaw Pact school. I really mean it; the campus is bleak.

Its bleakness, however, pales in comparison to the gorgeosity of the rest of the town. There's graffiti there, too (less so on the good parts), but man...it has to be seen to be believed. It's not really that there are so many vistas of surpassing beauty, but more that there are just so many really nice-looking parts, especially dowtown. It reminds me of Ravenswood: trees everywhere, incorporated into the setting. It's so hard to describe, but yesterday when I was sitting at a café outside with a friend, having a drink, with a view of a neat old building off the city center, I said that the place really felt like Europe, and he agreed.

How I got to this café, however, is a tale worth telling. I just set out, walking down one street for awhile, not finding anything, then doubling back to try another. After awhile, I went back to the dorm and asked for directions to downtown (where everything is). They sent me through the campus for awhile, then out and down Rue du Docteur PEZET until I got to the tram. Of course, it took awhile to find the tram, and in the process I ran into a guy from the program, Dan, who was going the same way and similarly lost. Eventually we found it, and after watching one pass by, determined that there was no way to pay on the tram itself - you have to buy a ticket from a machine on the platform. Unfortunately, neither of us had Euros with us in coin form (I left mine in my room by accident); the only other thing the machine took was credit cards. After screwing around with that for awhile, however, and basically jamming our cards into the machine, we set off in search of change.

Seeing a place with a big sign saying "Pharmacie", we both thought, "jackpot" and went in, visions of Osco in our heads. That vision disappeared as soon as we went in, however, and came upon a place with medicine lining the walls and no cash register in sight. Socialized health care, you bastard! (The story gets much less interesting from here on in; we went next door, got change, got on the tram and went dowtown, walked around a bit and came back). Pictures really tell the story of the centre-ville, however, and I don't yet have any, so...

2003-08-20T23:24:00.000-05:00

A couple of details, to save for posterity's sake:

I won't give my exact email address, because if I do, it'll get picked up by web-crawling robots that grab people's email addresses off websites, and I don't want to get on any spam lists (this is seriously a concern, by the way, for all you folks working in government who are reading this; I'm not crazy, and only a little drunk [awesome party, by the way; I'm really touched, but you probably could tell]). Anyway, my email address consists of my last name @uiuc.edu

I'll be in a town called Montpellier, roughly 10 minutes, via public transportation, from the Mediterranean. I'll be "studying" at the Universite Paul Valery (accents omitted), and should be getting my own cell phone, should anyone want to call me.

Photos of my adventure should be published at http://abeinfrance.fotopages.com, but never fear: I'll post the good ones here, and link to the rest when I update. This is still the only site you should regularly read, though if you're bored, you might as well check out the other site.

I will be there from August 31 until June 15, roughly (I won't know for sure until I leave, but that's what my ticket says), and if anyone wants to come out and visit me, please, please, please do so. For those of you that can't (again, government salaries), it'll probably suck anyway, and from me to you, I wouldn't bother with it.

Cities that I'd like to visit, based on your suggestions: Prague, London, Sevill(e/a), Istanbul, Florence, Vienna, Edinburgh, Paris.

That's about all for now; go back to work. I promise that I'll post as often and as much as I can as soon as I touch French soil and discover a way to get online; in the meantime, there really isn't much else that I feel like I should post. And so rather than waste the time of people who clearly have better things to do, I think it's best if I bid you all adieu.

2003-08-14T00:08:00.000-05:00

Ordinarily I'd begin a post like this (the inaugural!) with some sort of epigraph: a quote from either someone well-known and literary, like Shakespeare or Joyce or Dante; or else someone lesser-known and literary but with some sort of proto-indie cred, like Graham Greene, or Edmund Wilson. But I don't feel at all like being pretentious right now, and even if I did, it would be rather presumptuous to give an epigraph to a work which has barely been started, and which could go in any direction.

So I thought, instead, I would just jump in, in medias res:

I looked up, as I had so many times before and as I would again and with the same mixture of surprise and joy that I did the first time, at the brick building that housed the décolletage which provided the chief amusement of my time in France.

However, aside from being even more pretentious, not to mention written in the past tense for some reason, I felt this to be stupid, and entirely unworthy of an inaugural post. Especially an inaugural post which is supposed to be explaining that this blog will, over the next year, accumulate the stories, anecdotes, musings and photos which France will provide me.

So I decided to say nothing at all.