Spring Breakkkk (a little late)

My failure to be short and sweet :

Paris: Arrive at Montparnasse among over-excited, vacation-expectant children. My Latin Quarter abode, the Young and Happy Hostel, is along a cute street of delicious late-night food and gift-giving bakeries (a little paper bag of chouquettes). My capital “I” Irish roommate teaches me how to put fake tanner on her back after almost fainting when she heard I'd never used the stuff before. Erin and her daddy give me a lovely introduction to Paris, involving lots of strolling (we're perfecting the art), expresso breaks and views of Le Tour Eiffel itself. After Daddy Ryan leaves, Erin and I spend hours in Pére Lachaise eating cookies and talking about boys and then make our way to the Champs Elysee as the sun goes down and the city lights up.

Lyon: Hostel on hill kicks a$$ despite secret 7 euro charge for HI membership. We eventually get over this massive act of deception and marvel happily at the view of Lyon from the hostel's garden veranda. We discover France's best 3.50 E sandwiches stuffed with seasoned meat and on seedy bread, and proceed to eat one a day until we leave. We sit by the river (one of the city's two) in the sun with the Lyonnaise youth and watch rollerbladers pop in and out of the skatepark bowls [show complete with interludes of small children on scooters without helmets, eeek]. We meet a lovely friend, Krysia, and walk around the greco-roman ruins and Lyon's equivalent of Central Park. The park would be beautiful and refreshing and lovely (it seems that the average French park involves far too much tan gravelly stuff and weirdly trimmed trees), but the beauty is eclipsed by our mad hunt for bathrooms. We worry about humanity as mother pulls almost-urinating child away from thickly treed area into long line for filthy toilets. Finally, my elusive love life + dependably good and cheap French wine leads to our positing about an underworld war waged against us. This blabbering leads us to Prium, a new friend who rolls beautifully with our epic tale and takes us out on the town with his friends to dance all night to a reggae jam band. We <3 Lyon.

Geneva: The evil powers step up their game and refuse us a hostel because Erin is without her passport. Sophie, a friend from Reed who is living in Geneva, comes to our rescue. We get a dinner of cheese, bread, meat and olives to eat on the docks of Lake Geneva and Sophie makes us a bed on her bedroom floor. Thank you Sophie!! In the morning, Evil poses as the SNCF website and directs us to a train station that doesn't really exist. We fight back by buying over 10 euros of train snacks. Our success is marked by the absence of the usual boarder control at the station and we make it back into France successfully!! 

 

Chambéry: Sweet valley town in the mountains with lovely weather, good vibes and Erin's friend Katie who gives us a great wandery tour and a blow-up mattress. We even go clubbing and then out for a real Sunday morning brunch, my first in France.

Aix-en-Provence: Temporary home to three American boys, good friends of Erin's good friend, who take us in for a couple of nights. Bizarrely, two of these boys live in an incredibly nice, adult apartment and are teaching fellows at an American art school. Whhhattt? Yes, it's true. The story of the Minstrel Provencal wind is also true, so despite the sun, we shivered and after a good walk around the charming, colorful city we spent much of the day inside a café. In Aix (pronounced Ex) we also ate the most delicious fruit/nut bread in existence, I am sure.

And 30 minutes west of Marseille we find THIS! Cassis, you kind of blew our minds.

Cassis: Somehow we stumbled upon this Southern France paradise. Were we actually in Italy? Or in a dream? After a bus ride with a strange group of strangers who were far too eager to have us over for cous cous dinner, we arrived at our hostel in awe. Yes, this giant, spacious house with a pool, gardens, a grand view of the Mediterranean and hotel-comfy beds was actually a hostel. As I had a nasty sore-throat and we were both a bit weary, we renamed the place “Rehab” and spent two days eating well, sleeping loads, and hiking in the Calanques. The rehab image was helped by the controlling but nice hostel-mum, who gawked at the fact that I was going hiking in regular boots: “It might be a little...catastrophhhhhe.” Shaking her head, she lent us a flowered children's back-pack, and we were on our way. Our hike was seriously gorgeous and without catastrophe. Cassis was so pretty it was almost eerie. Why were there no tourists?? Who lives here??

Montpelier: On the way home we stop and hang out with our friend Kelliiii. She studied abroad in Montpelier and pines after it often, for she now lives in an itsy-bitsy town near Erin. We are kind of exhausted, as it is the end of our trip, but instead of napping we sit outside a burger shop and people watch while drinking multiple tiny expressos and eating fries. We then go out and meet a depressing, uninteresting American boy band who don't seem to be having much fun at all despite EuroTour. They try to describe their music and we don't understand. When they eventually play in the basement of the bar, it kind of hurts our ears. We stay in funny, very smelly youth hostel. In the breakfast area, to which Erin and I trot in our socks and Pj’s, I pass off the torch of clumsiness and Erin spills milk all over the kitchen. This is just the beginning to her clutsy downfall (I'm somewhat to blame). Sorry love! We spend our final saturday walking around Montpelier. It is a really lovely town, especially on a sunny morning.

xoxo

More soon!

On y go: Nantes

I met my friend Clémence in January when she responded to my search for a language exchange buddy on the La Rochelle couchsurfing group. She's a student at the university here, was a French assistant in England last year and is really into BD, or French/Belgian graphic novels, which I've also grown to love. We got lucky because we get along really well and have plenty to chat about. Last weekend she was sweet enough to take me along with her to Nantes, a city about 2 hours north of La Rochelle where her sister Adele lives.

Our covoiturage was really pleasant, and once arriving in the city we had time to wander around the market, which was bigger, cheaper, more diverse and better smelling than La Rochelle's. After a trip through the market as well as HM we met up with Adele, her boyfriend, and Clémence's good friend Pauline who lives in Rennes and was visiting for the day. We got lunch and then took shelter from the freeze in a cute cafe that was hung with bright watercolor portraits of quirky looking people and a chandelier made from old green glass wine bottles.

Then Pauline, Clémence and I set off on what became a three hour tour of the city. Though I felt much like a block of ice as we walked, the sun was out and the city looked winter gorgeous. The river was afloat with sheets of ice and leftover snow clung in patches. Our wandering took us along the Sèvre and the île de Nantes which houses the Machines. I haven't read him, so I don't totally understand the connection, but Jules Vernes grew up in Nantes and the Machines—steam punky mechanical animals, trees and a carousel—are rendered after his stories. We only saw one, but it was pretty impressive: a life-size elephant made from wood and metal, intricate and in motion! It's trunk waved and it walked around. Trop cool.

To get to Adele's apartment we took the tram and then a naturey walk along another river (three rivers cross through the city). We had a really lovely night watching Sex and the City, eating Croque Monsieur (toasted ham and cheese with an egg on top) and giggling. Pauline and Clemènce are really silly friends who make lots of noises and might be even more obsessed with food than I am. This was fun to be around, as were the two sisters. It's kind of exhausting speaking French all the time, and because of this I tend to zone out sometimes and just watch people interact. It's funny how you can miss cozy, family-like atmospheres and relationships and satisfy the lack just by being around them.

The whole weekend, especially our lazy sunday in Adele's cozy apartment, had a similar comforting effect as going for dinner at a real house with a real family when you are a college freshman living in a dorm room. Really nice.

This week it has finally warmed up and is doing what February does in Portland: fake spring. I can't complain. Thanks to Pauline and her smartphone for the pretty photos and to Clemence for the great weekend!

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Snowdaze

I'm sitting in the university library and there is an old man sitting next to me in a huge fur hat reading a newspaper with a magnifying glass. In other words, France is still incredibly French. Groups of elderly men still stop and watch the commercial boats lift things out of the port and people still light and smoke cigarettea while pedaling along on their bikes. And this week an inch or so of snow stopped everything and gave students the guilt-free excuse to get out of school for most of the week.

Last week I wrote about grayness, but since then things have changedddd. White cold has taken over.

I've never ridden my bike in the snow before or seen snow by the sea, but it's all quite cute, as was the energy at Valin, where parents couldn't be bothered to send their kids and the ones who did come to class easily talked me into holding a little conversation hour instead of giving them mock exams.

Between reading and snow and nights out with friends, I've realized lately how weirdly high my quality of life is here. The French are also growing on me exponentially, probably due to my growing comfort with the language and knowing what I want and where I want to go at the market and the boulangerie. Thankfully it doesn't seem like I'm the type to make problems or anxieties when I'm lacking in them (usually). So that means that when my life is relaxed, just exciting enough, pleasant on a daily basis and full of lovely people, I'm plain happy as a cat. Though I would be happier if I actually had a cat, obviously.

 

Oh January...

In Spain we sat in parks and made lists of good decisions and encounters that created such lovely momentum throughout our trip. We rode along on the wave of newness and freedom that traveling always seems to create. Then I returned to La Rochelle and January showed it's slow, gray self. Last Wednesday I visited Jayne and Chloe in Rochefort, their stagnant little town with its mechanical industry and three naval academies. We walked to the Charente and sat on the edge of a big concrete dock, marveling at all the gray: the murky water below our concrete block, the misting sky, the muddy fields of grass and the stone houses.

January always seems to be a sleepy month, and this one follows suit. So it goes. This weekend we did everything we could to shake up our blahs. Erin came on Friday and we ran along Rompsay canal and then went hungry to the Friday evening market, all lit up and jolie. We made curry and watched too much Freaks and Geeks. Dotan, Elise and Jayney came to visit and we drank kir (crème de cassis + white wine). The air warmed up for some reasons and we wandered around the port and the beach. And when the hour came we walked across town to a trippy tribal-electro concert and danced and played and danced some more. Mission accomplished, blahs subdued.

Maybe it's not a good idea to go to an artsy French film hungover and incredibly tired, but I made it work Sunday night. I went to Le Coursive with my friend Clémence and her mom to see Tomboy, a 2011 film by Celine Sciamma. The film patiently follows Lourds, a stick thin young girl, as she explores her gender in a new neighborhood. The story begins with the family's move to some fairytale place in the suburbs of Paris, where packs of kids play in the river and run through tall, green woods. Initially the pace seems too slow, many focused shots of Laure examining her androgynous body, playing with her little sister, laying in her mother's arms. As these scenes steadily build the family's relationships, especially that of Laure and her sister, Laure becomes “Michaël” in the eyes of the neighborhood kids. The film is impressively true to a child's experience of exploration and confusion. The cinematography captures the blues and greens of a lazy summer, a calm setting for a potentially unsettling transformation.  The softness of it all enforces the idea that this transformation, however complicated, comes naturally to Laure. The ending is surprisingly sweet and realistically inconclusive. Check it out.

xoxo 

Our love affair with Madrid

We never quite figured out what made us fall in love with Madrid. We hadn't heard much about it before we landed there, a fate secured by cheap airfare. One night we met up with some fun people from couchsurfing and worked through a handful of bars in the colorful Malasaña neighborhood, ending up at an illegal bar [meaning open all night and accessible by unmarked doorbell] in the sketch-bohemian neighborhood. Early in the night two of the guys, a long-haired, film geek pair from Venezuela, divulged their obsession with London. “Why do you like it so much?” we asked repeatedly. All they could do is shake their heads wide-eyed and say again and again, “It's just London. London. Londonnn.” At the time we figured it was because they met some sexy ladies there, but when we left for Barcelona after 5 days in Madrid, our feelings were similarly giddy and inconclusive, and were most likely caused by the great people that we met there.

It's also hard to separate my impressions of the city from the travel-induced excitement and freedom that overtook us. I know I am living abroad, so I should feel this daily, but there is something about uprooting yourself and falling into an easy pace that makes you especially perceptive and brings you in contact with new people, things and flavors at every turn. The amiability and color of Spain, despite many people's open crankiness at the CRISIS, only enhanced this.

After the first couple of days in Madrid I noted in my journal that the city, however solid and uncomplicated in layout, seemed to shift under me. I felt unable to create a coherent picture of it in my head and my experiences floated around ungrounded. After three nights we decided to change hostels to get another viewpoint from the hipper, more artsy area of Madrid. Minutes after arriving in the new Malasaña hostel, a single floor, tight knit space, I started making sense of things. And loving what I found. We walked in the door and Leon, the desk guy, rearranged the furniture so we could both sit around his little table. He was cheerful, very English and very sweet, and told us he would make Christmas dinner for everybody (Spain celebrates on Christmas eve). That evening we tried to get to a couchsurfing christmas dinner, but only made it half way before the metro started closing. We ran giggling through the station and caught the last train back to the hostel. Because it was Christmas eve we picked up a bottle of Absolut and I made a killer fruit salad. We stayed up until 6 in the morning playing cards and talking with the silly hostel crowd in the kitchen (the best place for late night conversation, in my opinion).

The next morning we tromped around in the sunshine with our new found BFF, Karim, a reggae party planner from Lyon living in Madrid, watched a man make giant bubbles over the pond of the egyptian Templo de Bod and took a cable car over the piney slope of Casa de Campo. We ended our night in the hostel kitchen again after eating our real Christmas dinner at a delicious Indian place that was cheap enough for us to stuff ourselves uncomfortably.

Tapas, tapas, tapas!

We also did many things besides walk aimlessly and hang out in hostels:

• Exhausted ourselves in the spacious, confusing concrete of the Reina Sofia museum of modern art. The idea of getting lost while viewing abstract, theorhetical art sounds more meaningful than it actually was. The museum was full of interesting multimedia pieces, but there was something lacking in the curration. Afterwards we went to El Brillantes traditional diner across the square and ate bocadillo de calimari (baguette sandwiches) which lived up to their reputation as the best in the city. So good.
• Ate tapas every couple of hours, it seemed, almost every evening. Our first were at 100 Montaditos, a Madrid McDonalds we were told afterwards, but sooo cheap and yummy to foreigners and young drunks. And everything was a euro on Wednesdays. We also went to the traditional tapas streets a couple of times and ate our spanish tortillas and pan con tomate under heat lamps. This was perfect for our main Madrillian pastime: people watching. Our best tapas experience was with our Couchsurfing crew at La Blanca Paloma in Malasaña where we paid 4 euros for a pint and our table began overflowing with little plates of crispy meat and fries, papas bravas, fish croquettes, other meat and potato things, and a fried egg for each of us, dashed in paprika. Drinks + Dinner. Yesssss.
  
  
• Visited the Prado, a museum that claims to hold more masterpieces that any other museum in Europe (or something like that). Despite our preference for modern art, we immediately enjoyed the atmosphere of the Prado more than the Sofía. Each painting was accompanied by a description in multiple languages and the progression of the rooms made so much more sense. There was interesting connections, too, between some of the paintings and the Prado itself. My favorites were the giant Bosch panel paintings and Goya's enigmatic “black paintings,” which were done when he was exiled to Bordeaux. 
• Ate churros con chocolate at the infamous Chocolatería San Ginés. Mmmmmm.
• Went to a late night flamenco show with our first hostel, which was surprisingly intimate and entirely un-hostel-like. It was in a brick basement bar, painted in lit oranges and pinks. The dancer was passionate and even more interesting was the idea that the dance was improvised, the singer directing the dancer and vice-versa when they got feisty.

Street art; Dali in the Reina Sofía

Barcelona soon, xoxo.

Braving the Storm: some sappy holiday parables

The lights had to brave the storm, too. The Christmas disco ball in the marché was a'swinging.

It has been a strange week. A storm hit La Rochelle and pushed everyone indoors. I like to translate the French word tempête into Tempest (capital T), because it better describes the dramatic weather that has rushed down upon La Rochelle. If you walk out in the streets the wind seems to come from all directions, whipping around, often with extreme gusts of rain. On Thursday night, Erin came to La Rochelle for a last minute visit, and we ducked from café to bar to restaurant, in the periods when the rain stopped briefly. We wandered into the right bars though, and ended up spending the evening with a hilarious group of friends, including one whose father owned the bar.

I don't know if I've mentioned that since my little incident with le bus, I've lost my head a little. I feel fine physically, but am always a step behind myself. Last weekend I left my cellphone in the covoiturage and it still hasn't arrived in the mail. I forget things more than often. I seem to keep getting colds. My computer had a scrape with hard drive failure. Yesterday I boarded the wrong train and thought I was en route to Paris (luckily I ended up in La Rochelle). The storm didn't help, often turning me into a drowned rat. It did, however, make it seem like the world was with me in my chaotic state.

These recent bouts of misfortune have made me doubt myself a little. Everything was going so well before. I wondered if there were things I wasn't doing that had brought it upon me. Should I have tried harder to salvage my sour housing situation a couple of weeks ago? Should I work harder to please everyone? Should I not stay in French cafés and use the internet for as long as I do? This last one shows how silly anxiety can be sometimes. However silly they may be, these doubts kept me from falling back asleep when the wind woke me up in the night midweek.

I realized towards the end of the week, though, that I need to stop counting my little misfortunes. I am happy, strangely not upset or even emotional about missing Christmas with my family at home. The miracle workers at the Apple store spent an hour repairing and updating my Macbook, while letting me play on the sample computers. I got my broken bike back from the shop, and suddenly even the wheel-powered lights work. I no longer have to ride around without brakes, relying on the hard soles of my sneakers (don't worry, I walked down any slopes and always wear my helmet despite the fact that strangers laugh at me for it). A pair of funny biochemistry professors for whom I record English voice-over for their video lessons (I am an honorary member of their “Dream Team”) invited me over for brunch tomorrow. Katia and I had a happy, tension-less conversation at school, assuring me that she doesn't hold a grudge. Even though Erin and I got seriously soaked as we bent against the wind to walk to the station on Friday morning, only to see that the trains were delayed because of a fallen tree, we both got where we were going, and I even met a couple of other assistants at my final visa appointment.

And last night, another parable-like experience reminded me that my luck always balances out for the better. I rode my bike through the wind to stand under the Grosse Horloge (the big port clock) and wait for the group of assistants who were supposed to meet there to go for “au revoir” drinks before the holidays. I soon realized if they had decided to stay in because of the weather, I would have no idea, still missing my phone and internet. Another girl was waiting too, and after I heard her speak in English to some passersby I asked if she was also waiting for the assistants. She said no, that she was waiting for someone else, but that she was an American studying abroad. She invited me to come for drinks with them if the others didn't show. Because it was cold out, I soon accepted, and had drinks in the cozy Irish pub with the girl Kimberly and her French friend, Matt. They turned out to be really fun and welcoming and though Kim heads back to the states today, I'm sure I will see Matt again.

If I would have had my phone, I probably would have ended up back at home. The storm passed in the night, and today the sun has returned. I met Charlie for tea at the literary, Left Bank c. 1920's-esque Café de la Paix before she flew home for the holidays, and made myself a lovely lunch with veggies and fresh bread from the marché. I even got a very special package in from the post office.

I suppose my luck can only be so bad, living in beautiful La Rochelle in an apartment that I love and going to Spain for Christmas in three days! Xoxoxo. 

Dotin' on Dotan ('s hospitality)

There is something strange and exciting about intense weather. Last night the wind was so strong I thought it was a train. This morning it began to pour and the rain blew around in waves. Everyone is soaked, their cheeks red from rushing through the water. It's kind of funny. A prof offers me a ride home, and we run through the rain to his car, hopping over puddles, clutching our bags. I run from his car to my door and a guy holds the door open for me so I won't have to fumble with my keys. I thank him, my bangs dripping. This rain also forces french sounds out of me, usually “ouuf,” sigh.

This weekend, however, we got lucky. Erin and I traveled from Saintes to Niort to Melle and back, which involved a bit of waiting and wandering here and there, and it seemed only to pour once we got in a car and stop before we got out. Watching rain from a backseat is pretty pleasing. Also pleasing was our experience with covoiturage, an internet-based ridesharing forum that everyone from hippy to business man seems to use in Europe. Our ride from Saintes to Niort was with a cute 20-something photographer who had a little dog, Flex, in the back seat giving us love the hour long ride. The ride back to Niort from Melle was in a big white bus/truck/camper with an extra license plate reading FUCK G8 and dried roses hanging from the rearview mirror. Jeremie, the driver, had a little cat that accompanied him and curled up in his lap the whole ride.

The drizzle was also particularly becoming in Melle, which is a hilly village in the middle of the countryside, surrounded by green and views of overlapping french roofs. Erin and I met Dotan, an intelligent, wholesome guy from BC, on the first training day and have wanted to visit him and his French girlfriend Elise since then. Unsurprisingly, they turned out to be top-notch hosts. Erin and I felt like we were on a vacation in the countryside staying in a cozy bed and breakfast, never mind that our bed was in Dotan's livingroom/diningroom/bedroom. Together they made us delicious risotto with mushrooms and chorizo and treated us to glasses of Pastiche (an anise-y liquor that turns cloudy white when you add water) and another aperitif from the other side of France that tastes like trees and flowers. It is made by monks with 170 (I think) different herbs and flowers collected from the region.

After dinner, a couple rounds of hearts and some vin chaud, we went down the local bar. It says something about Melle that one of the town's two pubs is collectively-run association, often hosting concerts and brewing their own beer. They were out of house beer, but we tried some other microbrew that was delicious. Since I arrived, I've been pretty smitten with the Belgian wheat beers like Leffe, but this reminded me of the complex, yummy microbrews that the NW and apparently certain small French towns are spoiled with. We also admired the life-size paper maché trumpeting man that hangs above the counter, which made me miss Portland quirk a little less.

In the morning Dotan solidified our high rating of their appartment B&B by serving us hot espresso and crepes. Because the crepes had milk in them, he made me two perfect fried eggs. And I'm not just being flowery, Erin can vouch that these were some good lookin' eggs. Warm and happy we went walking all over Melle. Dotan took us through the countryside, down little paths, into beautiful stone cathedrals and through two old clothes-washing pools. The landscape is different from La Rochelle, and I welcomed the autumn colors, the taller trees and the rolling hills. It rained lightly, but we agreed that it was quite fitting for our cozy little vacation. Xoxo, and thanks again to Dotan and Elise.