Peregrinations and Ponderings

The End

2008-06-24T03:27:00.004+02:00

Good thing I like being busy, because I have been BUSY. So far, no big culture shocks... I've been pleased to see that people really do smile a lot, and thrilled that prices are so low on this continent. (Worried about gas? Go to Europe and you'll feel fortunate to live in the States!) I've eaten about a dozen dill pickles, done a lot of shopping, and had a wonderful time. It feels so good to be home!

I might come back and post an epilogue, so to speak, but for now, this is The End. The story that was my year abroad has come to a cheerful close, and I hope you enjoyed reading about it!

I'm still a verbose person, so I'm going to be soon starting a new blog. There won't be travel photos, but I still have the occasional adventure! The URL is http://kelculator.blogspot.com, and Here is a link. I should have something posted quite soon.

So there we have it... The End.

-FIN-

Final Departure

2008-06-18T23:19:00.000+02:00

Well, my too-relaxing final ten days in Angers have come to a close, and I'm off to the airport to fly home. I have a habit of going through possible scenarios, so that I'm prepared for any situation. I feel totally prepared for departure, and leaving doesn't intimidate me one bit. But arriving... that still hasn't sunk in yet. I know where I'm meeting my parents, and I know my basic schedule over the next few days, but I'm not prepared for how being home will feel. I'm ready to deal with the physical part of being home, but the mental part? I'm not quite there.

At the end of my exchange year in Russia (2005-2006) I filled out a sort of questionnaire that I'd written, to try to prepare myself for reverse culture shock. When you move to a foreign country, you experience a short honeymoon period where you love everything and everything's interesting, then you fall into culture shock, where you miss everything about home, feel out of place, and can literally get sick from the unease of living in a different cultural context. However, with preparation, culture shock doesn't have to be too bad.
When you go home, you follow the same type of pattern: everything's great for a while, and then you crash into reverse culture shock. It's often worse than culture shock, since you don't expect it. No one thinks that they'll be ill at ease at home, but it happens. After coming back from Russia, I wanted to throttle a grocery store cashier because of the way she bagged our groceries (she put one or two items in each bag, but in Russia I was used to stuffing bags as full as possible, since they cost money too). Reverse culture shock takes you by surprise, and it's a strange thing. It is my theory that the exchange student can prepare him or herself for reverse culture shock by examining their time abroad, trying to anticipate what differences they'll see, and reflecting on their personal culture. So that's what I do.

Questions for the departing study-abroader

As I leave, what am I thinking?
I'm trying to answer the question, "Would I want to live in France again?" I love France for a lot of reasons: I love the history, the way towns feel, I love seeing France. I like the food, although since I have a budget it usually comes from my own kitchen. I really liked singing in the cathedral choir, and I like most of the people I met. However, there's a side of French culture that's somehow dark, and after only a few months it started to grate on me. I miss seeing people talk loudly in the streets. I miss people giving compliments, even to strangers. I miss seeing people wearing ultra-casual clothes. I miss smiling at, and being smiled at by, strangers (the French reaction to a stranger's smile is to wonder what's wrong with their appearance). I miss a lot of things about American culture, and although I got by, I'm not sure if I'd want to "get by" full time.

What did I get out of this year?
I can understand French as well as I understand English, I've learned how to cook a lot of stuff, I've learned a lot about myself and what I want (however cheesy that sounds), and I've gotten very good at filling dead time, thanks to my light course load.

How will life be different at home?
I'll be a lot busier! I was so frustrated by the French university system, since the courses were too easy (although whether this is due to the faults of the system or my own merit, I don't know), there was almost no homework (the system for sure), and almost no extracurricular activities. I couldn't work, I lived off-campus (there is no on-campus option), and social opportunities were limited. At home, I'll be back to my wonderful 30-hour days and sleep-deprived nights, and I can't wait! [Note: when, six months from now, I'm complaining about having a lot of homework and barely enough time for the five choirs I'm in, remind my how happy I should be.]

How am I different as a result of living in a(nother) different culture?
I think that while I was in Russia, most of what I noticed was what was different. Now, I tend to notice why things are different.

How good of a traveler am I?
I'm an excellent traveler. I can navigate airports, train stations, and subway and bus networks without a problem. I can follow a map, if there's good signage and I have some time to study it. However, talented though I may be, I have terrible travel luck. I've had something go wrong on nearly every trip. Thankfully, it's gotten to the point where I find it all hilarious and I somehow look forward to seeing what'll go wrong next! If nothing else, it'll make a good story for the blog :)

Describe France in exactly 25 words.
Centuries of history bring natural pride, but also fear of frightening and confusing change. It takes the heart time to modernize. Lots of bread, wine.

What aspects of France would I like America to adopt?
The French are good at remembering to bring their reusable bags to the grocery store. There are still lots of little, independent stores. There are farmers' markets all year round, not just in the summer (however, the climate easily permits this). People spend a longer time to eat a smaller amount of food, since life isn't as rushed. There's a high speed rail network that's on time 99% of the time (however, the country's smaller and the tickets cost a lot, so there are downsides).

What aspects of America would I like France to adopt?
People are very business minded. When there's a problem, people instantly start seeking a solution. Grocery stores and pharmacies are open on Sundays and at night. Milk is sold in large containers. You can buy sour pickles. People smile at each other a lot, and are more overt with their feelings, which are often very welcoming and warm. Public transportation and cell phones are more reasonably priced. There are lots of comedies and kids' movies made. And don't get me started on the educational system... I would choose America's any day.

What can be done to improve the image of Americans abroad?
I recently saw a commercial for a new morning TV slot of the "best of" American reality TV: the channel was advertising shows like "Elimidate" and "the Bachelorette" as the "best of" American TV! America is built on business, and exporting our media is certainly profitable. However, the rest of the world doesn't realize that a lot of what they're getting is considered junk on our side of the Atlantic. People think that Americans are stupid, egocentric, crass and vulgar. Given the media we share, this isn't surprising. The only European films that become "mainstream" in the States are the artsy type, like American independent films. If we tried to share only the good sides of American culture, maybe the good would be believed.
Another, more difficult problem is the difference in cultures. If Americans go abroad and act like Americans, they won't be received well. Europeans just aren't as open and extroverted in public. If you come to Europe and try to blend into the woodwork and turn on the ultra-polite side of your personality all the time, you're on the right track. Europeans don't realize that Americans are boisterous because of culture rather than rudeness, and Americans don't realize that when they try to be friendly in this way they're making matters worse.

What are the most striking aspects of culture I noticed, both good and bad?
Good: Humor is a lot more intellectual. Getting in a clever, cutting remark is still a respected talent, the sign of a quick mind.
Bad: People are very self-conscious, and it rubs off. After living in France for a while, you really do start to worry more about the way people see you.

What will I miss the most?
Whether people realize it or not, they're a lot more in touch with history here. America is very focused on the future, whereas France is more strongly rooted in the past. Neither's bad, and I won't mind the American mindset, but it's nice to feel a stronger connection to history.

My favorite to figure out: How many miles have I traveled, as the bird flies?
I rounded up by about 75 miles, and got... 25,000 miles. Or about 40,000 kilometers, for any metric readers. Pretty impressive! Of course, I actually covered more distance, since trains and planes don't go in perfectly straight lines. And that's only the big trips.
The cool thing is that, by adding this to the miles traveled during my year in Russia (about 30,000) I figured out that I've traveled as far as the circumference of the earth... more than twice :)

So all in all, am I glad to be heading home?
Yep.

Reassuring

2008-06-17T18:04:00.003+02:00

Well, over the year I collected enough points with my supermarket fidelity card to get a twenty euro gift card. I used it today to get the three liters of milk I'll drink between now (Tuesday evening) and Thursday morning, some more scratchy sponges to scrub the bottoms of all of my pots (because anything that's not immaculate gets deducted from my security deposit), and whatever else I wanted with the rest of the money. That turned out to be:
- watermelon
- nectarines
- Gala apples
- cherries
- fresh figs
- strawberries

I just got all of the really expensive fruits, basically, and my next few meals will be fantastic fruity feasts. Alliterative ones, at that.

I'm on the road for Chicago in 36 hours, and I can't wait. I had a good year, but it ended a while ago... now I'm just killing time.

Goodbyes

2008-06-13T22:45:00.003+02:00

I had a fun day today: slept in, went to a movie, did some errands, went to choir practice. But at the end of choir practice, I had to say goodbye... and that's no fun. I hate goodbyes, because I always cry, and crying's not the most fun thing to do. I am going to miss this choir SO much. The music was good and the singing was good, but the people are incredible: they're the most welcoming, kind group I met in France. This choir is, without a doubt, the one thing I will miss most about France.

I leave in six days. In about 127 hours. I can't wait to get home, but I wish that I could bring France with me.

Final Days in Naples

2008-06-09T22:35:00.003+02:00

Here's a selection of my travel problems so far this year:
• Chicago-Paris: bag got lost; I didn't get it back for three weeks.
• First trip out of Angers: apparently we had the wrong ticket and were traveling illegally, but we talked ourselves out of a few hundred euros worth of fines.
• Lyon and Avignon: I got lost EVERYWHERE.
• Milan: flight back got cancelled, replacement flight was delayed, there weren't any more trains, and I had to stay in a hotel in Nantes for the night. Also missed two classes because of Air France.
• Metz: train was late, missed the next one, got soaked wandering around in the rain in between.
• Hungary: both my flight and Kristen's flight were late.
• Ireland: we missed our stop getting off the bus and had quite a walk to the hostel.
• Portugal: the taxi cost twice as much as it was supposed to.
• Geneva: Switzerland costs five times as much as it should :) I also got lost and had tram mishaps several times.
• Disneyland: our train back was delayed an hour.
• Chiavari: Nothing much went wrong, but the elevator did break (with me and a nun in it) when I was checking into the hotel. They got it fixed within a few minutes.
• Coming back from Naples: Well, something disastrous has to happen almost every time I travel, or this blog would be boring! I found the bus to the airport without mishap, arrived at the airport with a bit more than two hours to spare... and that's where things started to go bad. The flight was supposed to leave at 11:35... and it left at 1:00. It was supposed to get in just before two, but arrived at 3:09. My heart sank very fast when I saw us taxing past Terminal 2, because it takes ten minutes to get from Terminals 1 and 3. We got into the baggage claim at 3:30, my bag came out at 3:40. Trains are often late at the airport, so I decided to hurry anyway and hope for the best... which made me look really suspicious to the customs officer. He stopped me to ask where I was coming from and such, and I said, "Naples, but I live in France, and my train is in two minutes in Terminal 2. I'm hoping it's late!" He seemed reassured that I wasn't creepy, and wished me luck. However, it took five minutes to walk to the train station to take the little train to T2, then I had to wait four minutes, and my train had been on time. Grrrr. For once, I'd been praying that it would be late!
So I went to the ticket office to change my ticket, and only had to pay 15€ for the exchange and the more expensive ticket. Brilliant. I will, of course, arrive in Angers an hour before the next bus, so I'll have to take a taxi. I don't think the 25€ worth of damages is enough for me to write a really angry letter to Eurofly: even if they were willing to reimburse me, I wouldn't have an opportunity to use the inevitable coupon, since they wouldn't send me cash.
Anyway, from my experience it appears that flying from Italy to France is frustrating.

Before the travel misadventures, however, I had a wonderful few days in Naples. There isn't a huge amount to see: once you've gone to the Amalfi Coast and Pompeii, you've got one day of tourism in the city and at most one more day trip. I didn't really want to go to Capri, since it's another set of touristy villages along the beach and cliffs like Amalfi and Cinque Terre, so I just spread out the Naples sights over a fews days, and did a lot of sleeping in and relaxing. [Note: sleeping in, since I had morning sun through the windows and was going to sleep around midnight, meant getting up around 8:30.]
• I went to the Contemporary Art museum, which was hilarious... I love this kind of ridiculousness. They don't allow photography, so I don't have pictures of the four things I would have liked to photograph:
1) Upside-down art: the guy featured in their temporary exhibition (who has a name) liked to paint things upside down. He actually painted them upside down, he didn't just paint them normally and then flip them. I can sort of understand why this would open the mind, since it forces you to think in an unnatural way. There was one of a bird in a tree that was particularly good.
2) A tube of air... hard to describe. There was a square tube made of very reflective glass. Most of it was suspended from the ceiling, but one end went out of the building through a hole in the window. Therefore, there was fresh air coming in through the hole. When you looked at it from the side, you saw the tube, but if you looked into the tube, you suddenly saw nine squares because of how reflective the glass was. It was pretty neat.
3) Another piece was made of fluorescent lights, and spelled out "Five words in five colors." Each word was a different color. That made me chuckle.
4) I actually looked in the gift shop for a picture of my favorite, but couldn't find it. It was along one long wall, and had panes of glass set vertically into a long pile of what looked like dirt. The panes of glass were closely spaced at one end, and got further and further apart as they went. Each had a white fluorescent lightbulb number in the corner representing the distance to the next pane of glass: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34... [The Fibonacci sequence] That made me laugh out loud. I like mathy art.
Naturally, I wouldn't allow any of the "art" in this museum into my house, but I love going to see it.

I took the funicular up to the top of Naples' favorite hill, where St. Elmo's castle offers a great view of the city. You can see very far, and it's colorful and beautiful. The gelateria didn't have any of my favorite flavors though, so I didn't stay on the top of the world for long. I took the funicular down on the other side of the hill, and successfully navigated the way back to my hostel, via gelato.
Here are some pictures from the top:

Here's another of Naples' castles: it has about four. This is the "New Castle," a.k.a. the French Castle, which was built when the French borrowed (my favorite way to say "briefly conquered") Naples. But see, the empire that borrowed Naples was Anjou, which has its heart in Angers. This castle looks quite a bit like my local château.

Sunday, I went to Mass at the cathedral. In Italian, the word duomo, which literally means "dome," has been adopted to mean "cathedral." Naples' cathedral doesn't have a dome, but it's called the Duomo nonetheless. No pictures on the inside, but it was BEAUTIFUL. So beautiful that it deserves all-caps. I walked around for half an hour before Mass, and there's so much to see. There's a chapel on one side, and a little basilica on the other. There are tiny chapels all around the whole cathedral, and the ceiling has some of the most beautiful frescoes I've seen. There are mosaics on the floors, various colors of marble covering the walls, lots of gold... it's lovely. A lot of cathedrals display their treasury as a sort of museum, but this cathedral just has all the fancy stuff packed into the chapel on the side, and most of the relics in a chapel to the side. [Relics are pieces of saints' bodies... in the early Church, people hoped to feel closer to God by keeping relics, since they knew that the souls of these über-holy people were in Heaven. Christians face the challenge of believing in someone without a whole lot of physical evidence, and having something tangible helped them to feel close to God, who can feel so far away.]
The Mass wasn't as impressive as the building it was in... I seem to have chosen the old people's Mass, with a small congregation and no music. I should have gone to the noon one... oh well.
No pictures of the inside of the Duomo, but here are two of the outside. The second is a good representation of Italy: kids playing football (soccer) in front of an impressive landmark.

Now, I'm back in France for a mere ten days, and then I head back home. There are certainly things that I will miss, but I'm looking forward to a return to the fast-paced, busy life I lead in America. It'll be interesting to see how things have changed... and how I've changed. And this last flight will be one last chance for everything to go perfectly!

A few bits and pieces about Naples

2008-06-07T10:52:00.005+02:00

• In the basilica (courthouse) of Pompeii, they painted stone to make fake marble. Ha.

• Naples street vocabulary is a little different: [Note: this section is dripping with sarcasm]
- what I would call "crosswalk" is a place for cars to zoom through, or park
- what I would call "intersection" is the part of the street where pedestrians cross to the other side
- then there's the street art, which are decorative luminescent art installations on many corners which alternately show red, orange and green male stick figures. Since they have no discernable purpose, they must be modern art.

• I haven't seen "Neapolitan" ice cream, but I have tried a few of Naples' specialties. One is pizza: modern pizza is most closely related to Naples' invention. Neapolitan pizza is large and has a very thin, moist crust. You have to eat it with a knife and fork or fold it, since it's too floppy to eat like American pizza. Two pastry classics are babà and sfogliatelle: babà is a sponge cake soaked in rum, and I didn't like it too much-- possibly because I don't like rum :) Sfogliatelle is a filled pastry, and has a vaguely orange flavored paste inside filo-type pastry (the type used in baklava).

• You may have heard about the trash situation in Naples... basically, what happened is that all of the dumps for the Campania region filled. There's only one open dump, and it's not enough. There are several incinerators in construction, but since the mafia has indirect (or even direct) control and the government isn't efficient enough, they're not yet completed. The mafia makes a lot of money from illegal dumping, so they're in no hurry to finish the incinerators. There have been some particularly bad times (like in December) when there was no trash collection and piles of rubbish lay in the streets, but it's not usually that bad: you see more cigarette butts, napkins, and empty cups blowing around than in the average city, and the occasional very full dumpster, but that's the extent of the trash problem. The EU and the Italian government are cracking down on the situation, and there is progress.

• Counterfeits are everywhere, mostly sold by...

• African immigrants. Naples has ferry connections to Tunisia and Morocco, and seems to be a "first destination" for a lot of immigrants. They seem to be trying to integrate and be productive, although the new populations do change the "feel" of the city. One of the reasons people want to go to Europe is to see different, distinct cultures with that old world charm. However, now that they're all becoming more multicultural, it feels more homogenized. Strange paradox, isn't it! (Please don't read any racist or otherwise close-minded tendencies in my comments... I feel that change is inevitable and neither positive nor negative, I just like to try to figure out why that change happens.)

• I've often wondered, over the course of the year, what would happen to the pigeons if nobody dropped cigarette butts on the ground anymore. Can pigeons develop a nicotine dependency? They certainly eat a lot of it...

• Sirens are common, since it's a big city. However, traffic doesn't cede much to ambulances or police cars. Some cars may aim for the edges of the street and slow down, but others will take advantage of the newly open space in front of the ambulance to zoom ahead in traffic. Those lucky cars who are right in front of or behind the siren get to go faster than other traffic. All in all, ambulances and such don't go much faster than the general flow of traffic.

A few of my recent adventures:
• I went to the gelateria which is supposed to have the best gelato, and has won several contests. I actually wasn't very impressed: it was a lot creamier and less refreshing than I like my ice cream... just too heavy for my taste. And most of their flavors had dark chocolate in them, which I avoid.

• I did laundry at the hostel, which was nice because it was convenient. Italy has a nice enough climate that people don't use dryers, so I hung everything out on lines on the balcony to dry. Naturally, it then rained overnight, so my clothes were wetter in the morning than they had been at night.Another girl had the same problem, but she had to leave that morning: the closest laundromat with a dryer was a bus trip plus a ten-minute walk away.

• I went to Naples' best pizzeria with a couple of American girls staying at the hostel, and it was incredible. The crust was the best I've ever had, the toppings were perfect, the sauce was delicious... it was wonderful. I will probably go back today, on my way to the contemporary art museum (I was going to go climb Vesuvius, but for the third day in a row this plan has been put off because of rain).

Napoli, Amalfi, Pompeii...

2008-06-04T23:14:00.007+02:00

Last week I visited lots of places ending with the letter a, and this week it's i. Monday, I woke up unreasonably early to go to the train station, where I embarked on a cramped, though pleasant, eight hour train journey. Surprisingly, there was a direct train from little Chiavari to big Napoli! Naples is in the south, on the Western side of the boot... about at ankle height. I came here knowing very little about the city except that Anjou (the empire that Angers was the heart of) took it over for a while and that it's close to Pompeii-- I'd wanted to visit Pompeii since I was very little! Two good reasons to decided to visit a city, I suppose... an obscure historical fact and proximity to another city.

Honestly, Naples isn't the most beautiful of cities... most people go through it rather than to it. It has a lot of monstrous cement buildings, and most could use a coat of paint. It has a gigantic port, and ports aren't too pretty. There has been a big influx of immigrants, and there's a more obvious level of poverty than in a lot of other cities. But, there are several palaces and castles, a big historic district, a beautiful view of the sea and surrounding volcanoes and mountains, and the food is great. Neapolitans seem to be very welcoming, and there's a lot of fascinating history in the area.

Monday night I was lucky to meet Julia, who is a Canadian with a fascinating job and travel history... she's lived and traveled all over the world, but this is her first trip to Europe. Since both of us are traveling alone, we decided to join forces for the next two days to visit the Amalfi coast and Pompeii. Which brings us to...

Tuesday
Tuesday morning we left bright and early for the port, to get tickets for a ferry to Amalfi. I don't have sea legs (or a sea stomach) so this was an interesting voyage... not the most comfortable way to travel, but certainly beautiful! Rocky islands, sparkling sea, Mount Vesuvius... the views were great. We got to go out onto the back deck of the boat for a while, which was an experience. Incredibly windy, because of how fast the ferry moves, and very salty. Good thing I like salt, because if you spend time near the Mediterranean you taste it in the air and on your lips! Here's a picture of the boat's wake and the mountains:

And here are some more views from the boat:

One of my favorite insignificant things about Europe are the lizards! They're everywhere, although they're very quick and hard to spot. This guy paused long enough for me to get a picture. Lizards are so cute.

We took a bus up the mountain from Amalfi to Ravello, which is another cute town in the area. There is a bright white basilica in the square, which had a lot of these dragon-like creatures in its art... we saw them in several places in the area, but they remain a mystery.

We got pizza in Ravello, since it's close enough to Naples, which is the home of pizza. I got a pizza that had mushrooms, proscuitto, and artichokes. It was so delicious! Apparently, the region grows thornless artichokes, which sounds like a brilliant idea. After lunch, we wanted to hike back down to Amalfi, but it was so hard to find the beginning of the trail! We asked about six people for directions to the top of the trail indicated with the black line on our map, and everyone told us something different. Two people pointed out the top of the red trail, which isn't supposed to be as picturesque... but since we could tell that it existed, we took it. Still great views of the coastal villages, though!

Since Amalfi had a beach and it was hot, we took a few minutes to dip into the sea. It's unbelievably salty! Once you put your head under, you even seem to be breathing salt. But the water was beautifully cold, and once you cool down, the sun is a lot more bearable.
After our swim, we got gelato and tickets for the bus back to Sorrento, which is a beautiful drive all along the coast. It rivals Cinque Terre as the most beautiful place I've been. Such a peaceful place, with a mixture of natural beauty and man-made charm. From Sorrento a short train trip brought us back to Naples... a trip by ferry, bus, feet and train!

Wednesday
Wednesday I had another of those days where I got to visit something I had always dreamed of seeing, but never thought I would see: Pompeii. Pompeii is the most well-known of a handful of cities buried in the 79 AD eruption of Mount Vesuvius, the local volcano. It was buried in pumice stone and ash, trapping plenty of the 20,000 citizens inside the villas, marketplaces, and temples of the city for more than a millenium. Thanks to the ash, the city was still in remarkably good condition once it was discovered and excavated. There are intact frescoes and mosaics, statues, and trinkets that have been discovered, and walking around the gigantic ghost town is fascinating. After you've walked through a few houses, the atriums and gardens and frescoes become a bit of a blur, but the scale and grandeur is amazing. For a city that was destroyed, it's in great shape! Here's a picture of a typical block.

Most of the statues and art have been moved to the archeological museum in Naples, so there are lots of empty plinths. Every so often though, you see something charming:

Looks a lot like me :) Here's the big theater: there's a big one, a small one, and an amphitheater. The public areas in Pompeii are as interesting as the private houses.

But the villas are just as neat! Most have an atrium, which usually had a downward sloping ceiling with a hole in the middle, which filled the little pool with rainwater. Bedrooms and the kitchen would be off to the sides, and a large courtyard was past the atrium. The houses usually were flanked by two stores, which provided the family income and a "day job" for the slaves.

Many of the frescoes are in remarkably good condition:

Here's the forum. The temple of Jupiter was in the middle, which was the most important, if not the biggest, temple.

And here's the view from Pompeii. It's such a beautiful area, as long as nothing's erupting!

Back in Naples, we found some lunch (I got prosciutto and melon, which is a delicious, classic combination) and then went to the archaeological museum. A lot of the frescoes and mosaics at Pompeii are replicas, and the originals are preserved in the museum, along with lots of smaller things that were found on the site. Among these discoveries are a lot of graphic NC-17 type art, which is housed in the "Secret Room," apparently because it used to literally be secret, and you had to apply to the emperor owner if you wanted to see it. The art from Pompeii's brothels made it here, among other things.
This mosaic reminds me of the Nightmare Before Christmas sector of pop culture.

My favorite thing in the museum was a statue of a lion, whose face is just so cheerful looking. It looks like he's grinning, and I find it charming.

This is the museum's 1/100 scale model of Pompeii as it is now: it's accurate even down to tiny frescoes on the minuscule walls! This will perhaps give you an impression of the size of the place... we walked around for four hours, and didn't see all of the places of interest, let alone everything there is!

This fresco may look familiar... it's one of the most famous from Pompeii.

The building that houses the museum is quite impressive. The ceiling of this room is all painted, none of what looks to be sculpted actually is. It makes you do a double take, but then you realize the perspective is a bit off. From the exact center of the room, it looks most convincing.

This pig statue is really cool. I assume that the head and body must be hollow with all of the weight in the back legs, but unfortunately you're only allowed to examine with your eyes in museums.

And here are five (or seven?) statues.

Last week I was glad to have solitude and time/space to think, and this week I'm thrilled to be surrounded by lots of interesting people in the hostel. Traveling alone isn't bad, since you meet people to travel with, like Julia. Everyone's been to interesting places and has stories and recommendations to share, which is so much fun. Last night, an Australian couple who are retired and travel five months out of every year invited me to share their dinner (they'd made a massive pot of pasta and sauce and had more than they would eat) and we chatted for a long time. When I meet people my age, I get ideas for things to do, and when I meet people who have accomplished those things, I get ideas for the kind of person I want to grow into. Active, intelligent, and globe-trotting as much as possible! I have a good start, I think :)

Gelato Everywhere!

2008-06-01T11:54:00.002+02:00

Well, now I've eaten gelato in Milan and Verona (in November), Pisa, Chiavari, Corniglia, Vernazza, Monterosso, and Genoa. And this is only the halfway point of my Italian vacation!

The past few days, I’ve visited several little towns and one city. Friday, it was yet again raining, so I decided not to go to Florence. Instead, I went briefly to Santa Margherita, which is a little town by Portofino, which is a slightly bigger little town. Both are really touristy, so I didn’t want to stay long. I walked around Santa Margherita for about half an hour, admiring the colorful buildings, numerous statues of Columbus (the whole region is very proud of him) and shops that I don’t have enough money to even contemplate going in.
Here’s a picture of the sea. I’m a big fan of the Mediterranean.

Then I went back to Chiavari to change into beachier clothing, since it had gone quickly from “chilly and rainy” to “hot and sunny.” I took the train to Monterosso, the fifth of the five Cinque Terre villages. Naturally, as soon as I arrived, the clouds and rain came back. I decided to have lunch while waiting for the good weather to come back, and picked a small restaurant along the coast. However, it was really disappointing... I ordered lasagne ragu, which is hard to mess up. I’d had the same thing in Chiavari for about half the price, and it was wonderful. Here, it was just about the worst lasagne I’d ever eaten. It was worse than the store brand microwaveable lasagne I buy in France. I also got mushroom soup, which was virtually flavorless, and easily the worst mushroom soup I’d ever had. Luckily the place was cheap!
Walking in the rain is warmer than not walking in the rain, so I ignored the drizzles and went to get gelato. That, at least, was excellent as usual! When the rain slowed down, I walked around the beach and looked at stones. Monterosso has a sandy beach, but there are tons of stones of all sizes, colors, and shapes. What intrigued me most, however, was the large quantity of ceramic fragments, mostly terra cotta type tiles like the ones used for roofs and construction in this part of the continent. Some were as large as a deck of cards, some were barely large enough to tell if they were man-made. I kept one fragment that has two green stripes on it, and a few little pieces of sea glass. I was very tempted by a chunk of mosaic (just white stones in cement like an Italian sidewalk, nothing interesting) but I can’t justify bringing back rocks that weigh about five pounds. I do like rocks though, so walking along the beach was fun.
Saturday, I went to Genoa, which is called Genova in Italian. It’s the hometown of Christopher Columbus, and is a big port town. It has a large historic district (i.e. small streets and old buildings district), Europe’s largest aquarium, and is close to Chiavari. I brought, but didn’t even open, the Italy guide book I borrowed from the library. Genoa’s architecture is pretty neat:

My wandering talents are fairly impressive, since I managed to find the sea and the aquarium, the two things I really wanted to see. I ate lunch at a little restaurant by the waterfront, figuring that it would be a good place to get seafood. I ordered pesto lasagne (pesto was born in Genoa) and calamari, and both were superb. I do prefer meat lasagne, but the pesto was really good.
The coolest outdoor thing I saw in Genoa was a life-size ship, I’m assuming of the style used by Columbus. However, I can’t imagine the explorers needing this many cannon, so I’m guessing it wasn’t a replica of the Santa Maria!

The aquarium was really neat. Smaller than the Shedd, but it had a lot of neat things. It did cost a lot, so I read every single sign to get as much information for my money as possible! I learned that there’s a fish in the antarctic that doesn’t have any hemoglobin in its blood, that aquariums get their sea turtles when they’re confiscated from tourists who illegally exported them, that Nile crocodiles can grow to more than 20 feet long, that Mediterranean crabs have really long legs to allow them to walk in the sand and muck, and that morays are only poisonous if you eat their meat raw. Like all aquariums in the post-Nemo era, any time you see an anemone, you hear a child say, “Look, it’s Nemo’s house!” The Genoa Aquarium had an interesting response though... they had clown fish in other places, but they also had a tank of only fish found in Finding Nemo. It was easily the most crowded area in the place.
Here he is, the movie star himself... sort of...

This sign made me laugh out loud, which I usually try not to do when alone in public in foreign countries. I admire their desire to protect aquatic turtles, but their method seems a bit gruesome... I’d prefer if they returned the turtles to the environment in one piece. (Click on the picture to enlarge it and read the explanation of their methods.)

Amphibian exhibits are always fun, because they’re like playing Where’s Waldo. Find the chameleon in this picture:

They have a tank of sting rays to look at, and a tank of nice rays to... pet! I pet a guitar fish and one particularly friendly ray. Most of them were really antisocial, but one swam back and forth at the edge of the tank for quite a while. Rays’ wings feel strange... the five year old in me says “slimy,” but the geek in me says, “almost like their skin is frictionless.” However, their spine is rough and very solid. Once you pet a ray, you want to stick around to pet it again, because the sensation is so strange.

On the top floor, they have a neat set-up: you can walk over the tops of the tanks, so you can see the seals, dolphins, and sharks from above. I got there just in time to watch the dolphins be fed, do a few tricks, and then have play time. There was one dolphin who liked to punt the ball as high as possible, one who just pushed around a ball, and one who had figured out the most fun way to play: grab the volleyball in mouth, swim down twenty feet of so, then let go and swim up to the surface to watch it rocket out of the water. I do the same thing at the pool, although I usually hold the ball in my hands and don’t swim down more than six feet...
After leaving the aquarium, I looked for the center of the historical center. However, I wasn’t really in the mood for more museums and churches, and all the interesting stuff was at the top of a hill. Yuck. So I just got my day’s gelato, headed back to Chiavari (via Zoagli, by accident... I just climbed around the rocks on the coast while I waited for the next train), and lay on the beach while the sun began to set. I like Italy.
Today (Sunday) I went to Mass, and it was somewhat strange... it was the fastest Mass I’ve ever been to. There was very little music, and the priest and the congregation seemed to be having some sort of competition to see who could get through the prayers first. Instead of getting out, “Let us pray in the words our Savior gave us...” the priest would manage, “Let us pray in the words our Sa...” before the congregation cut in with the Lord’s Prayer. Odd. The Mass was over in forty five minutes.

Pisa Photos, and Hiking in Cinque Terre

2008-05-29T13:59:00.013+02:00

Chiavari and Pisa

(By the way, Chiavari is pronounced key-AH-var-ee) Here are some pictures from my first couple of days:
This is the beach at Chiavari. When I was studying Chinese a couple of years ago, my teacher told me that their ideal of beauty is mountains and water in the same view. I agree!

Here’s the Baptistry (the big round one), Cathedral (rectangular one), and Tower (leaning one) of Pisa. Apparently all of Pisa is leaning, not just the tower: the Baptisty and Cathedral are both leaning about a foot, as are many of the houses. However, the tower’s the most noticeable tilt.

The Catheral is incredibly beautiful, inside and out. Any imaginable type of art, from carving to fresco, can be found. Most churches in Italy have fairly simple facades, just striped with differently colored stones or completely plain. This one, however, is very ornate.

Here’s a self-timer picture of me in front of the tower:

This cracked me up-- a parking lot at one of Chiavari’s high schools:

Cinque Terre

Cinque Terre, which means “Five Lands,” is a collection of little villages along the cliffs of the Mediterranean coast. The five little villages are probably entirely inhabited by the people who cater to tourists and the people who cater to the people who cater to tourists... in short, they’re five of the top ten touristy villages I’ve visited. The most-visited places in Italy are Rome, Florence, Pompeii, Venice, and Cinque Terre (though not necessarily in that order). The real attraction, however, isn’t really the villages: it’s the rocky paths between them. It’s been made into a national park, to control (and charge) the throngs of people who want to hike. In total, there are about six miles of paths, which in rocky, mountainous measurement, translated to six hours of hiking. It becomes a full day when you add in stops in all the villages, and pauses at the beach to soak your sore feet. I hiked three of the four trails, and I concur with the people who had recommended Cinque Terre to me: it was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life. Grueling, but rewarding. The first path goes from Riomaggiore to Manarola, and it is called the Via dell’Amore, the Lovers’ Walk. It’s the easiest: paved in most places, usually flat, and with only a few stairs.
This is the view from the walk. The sea is gorgeous, and mountains are by far my favorite topographical feature, so I was pretty much in heaven.

Here’s Manarola! I didn’t stay for long... I wanted to hike two before lunch.

The second trail goes from Manarola to Corniglia, which is the central town, perched on the top of the cliffs. The walk wasn’t bad, although it took an hour, three times as long as the Lovers’ Walk. I have asthma, but I only had to stop once or twice to calm my breathing... until I got to the end. The end of the trail is a miserable 368 stairs. You do about forty through the trees, and are relieved to see the “end,” but then instead of seeing Corniglia right in front of you, you see seemingly never-ending stairs zigzagging up the hill. I stopped to “enjoy the view,” which is a useful cover for “regain lung power) about ten times. Besides, it had been nearly seven hours since my tiny breakfast, and I was out of water. Luckily, like any discomfort, the memory quickly disappears, and Corniglia charmed the tiredness out of me.

I set off to refill my water bottle at a fountain and find some cheap food. The first place I came across had a Cinque Terre specialty, a mixture of vegetables (notably spinach and potatoes) in a thin crust. I got gelato for dessert before heading back to the trails. Gelato is basically a soft, very rich ice cream. The cones are generally very long and thin, and instead of round scoops, they use a little paddle to put the gelato on the cone. Thus, instead of having your two flavors one on top of the other, they’re side by side. It’s a bit odd, since you get a lot of flavor mixing, but it’s good. My two favorites are chocolate mint and cinnamon.

The path from Corniglia to Vernazza is supposed to be the most beautiful, and it is truly lovely. There are dozens of kinds of wildflowers, trees, and cacti to look at, rocky beaches hundreds of feet below, birds and lizards and butterflies flitting about, and therefore the area around the trail is perfect. The hike itself, however, is torture. Here’s the layout of the trail:
- Hike up about 200 stairs.
- Hike down about 200 stairs.
- Repeat three or four times.
Every time you get optimistic that the end must be near, you turn a corner and see...

...more steps. And since they’re made from loose rocks and dirt, the footing isn’t easy. The view is worth it, though. Here’s one with me in it-- luckily photographs don’t capture smell, because I don’t think I’ve ever been sweatier.

In this one, you can see Corniglia and Manarla, now very distant.

An hour and a half of hiking later, my legs were complaining, my ankle (which has a chronic sprain) was throbbing, and seeing Vernazza brought a sweeping sensation of relief. It sounds unnecessarily poetic, but that’s what it was!

Isn’t it charming? I headed straight for the beach, took off my shoes, and dangled my feet in the water until I felt less dead. Me voilà by the beach and harbor in Vernazza:

Then I climbed around the rocks for a while (there were several colors of granite, some sedimentary rock, and even some porous boulders that looked volcanic), got more gelato, and took a train back to Chiavari. I’ll go to the last town, Monterosso, another day.

Buongiorno, Italia!

2008-05-27T18:54:00.002+02:00

Just a quick post for the moment, to say that I am in Italy! I am staying in a little convent in the town of Chiavari... it is cheaper than most hostels, but I have a private room and private bathroom. The only downside is that there is no internet, which means that I am posting this from an internet café, which means that I am using an Italian keyboard, which means that I can not type an apostrophe and therefore sound unnaturally formal.

Yesterday I had to get up at four to be on the road by six, and after taking a bus, a train, a plane, a bus, and a train, I arrived in Chiavari. It is absolutely wonderful... I had a relaxing afternoon: went to the beach for a few minutes so that I could step into the Mediterranean, got gelato, got a supermarket dinner (chips, milk, and proscuitto... when I am on vacation, I make strange choices for meals) and went to sleep early. The nuns are really sweet, and they run a really professional feeling hotel in their extra rooms. Once they found out that I speak a tiny bit of Italian (though I understand a medium amount) it seems like they have made it their mission to speak Italian to me as much as possible, and they correct my grammar and help me find words. That is exactly what I was hoping for! And I know that they are doing it for my benefit... when I was particularly confused, I found out that one of the nuns speaks nearly perfect French. She just chooses not to, to make me speak Italian. Cool.

Today, I went to Pisa, to see the leaning tower and eat lunch. I have a train pass that allows me to travel basically as much as I want to, so my timing was flexible. Pisa is a relatively big town, and it is quite a walk to the tower. When they were building it, they noticed that it was sinking, and finished it a lot shorter than they had planned. So it is actually a lot less impressive than I thought it would be. However, the complex also has a cathedral and a baptistry, and both of these are spectacular. I went inside the cathedral, since it was cheap (it costs approximately $22 to climb the tower, so I ditched that idea instantly). It is gorgeous inside: such a mixture of types of art. Stained glass, fresco, mosaic, stone work, wood work, metal work, statues... everywhere you look, there is something lovely. I will post pictures once I am working from my own computer!

However, as is always the case with me, perfect travel is impossible. And the mishap of the day was particularly hilarious, because I had somewhat of a premonition of it. After I got pizza for lunch, my train of thought led me to wondering what would happen if one of my shoes broke. I play what-if scenarios in my head all the time, so it was normal. BUT IT DID. My sandal broke. In the cathedral. So I shuffled around until I got outside, and then took off the flip-flops. I had to wander around for about fifteen minutes before I found a place that sold shoes. They had two choices: white sequined flats, and shiny gold sandals of the style that would go great with a toga. I chose the latter, because my feet were ready to fall off from walking on the burning pavement. So now I have a pair of sandals that are about as far from Kel-style as possible. However, I think I will actually be able to get a lot of use out of them.

That is all for now. I will post pictures when possible. The sea, the sky, the architecture, and the weather are all beautiful. The north of Italy is pretty awesome!

Pointless Post with lots of Points

2008-05-21T23:41:00.005+02:00

I'm sure there are other little pointless bits of information that have been bugging you... if you're curious about any other banal details, comment and I'll add to the list!

Little Insignificant Tidbits About Life in France

- At the end of Mass, the priest says "Bon Dimanche à tous" (have a good Sunday) and everybody mutters/whispers their thanks, which sounds like a resounding "sss" throughout the cathedral.

- In French books, the table of contents is at the end.

- Popcorn at the movie theater comes in salty or sweet. Neither is covered in butter.

- Cinnamon and ginger are not frequently used in France.

- The French use the 24-hour clock. It took me about six months to get fully used to it... even though I'd been practicing for months before I arrived, and had to use it in Russia. It's really hard to retrain the way you think about time!

- It's not unusual to see lap dogs on trains.

- The Assumption, All Saints' Day, Ascension Thursday, and Pentecost Monday are national holidays.

- Acetaminophen is called Paracetamol.

- An "ombrelle" is a parasol, and a "parasole" is a beach umbrella. (A "parapluie" is your average rain-blocking umbrella. Very useful in this half of the country!)

- My favorite cereal in the world is sold in France (under the name Trésor, made by Kellogg's) and Russia (by Nestlé) but not in America. They're like solid Chex filled with powdered Nutella... yum.

- Electrical outlets have two small holes.

- A French breakfast has lots of sugar and caffeine (pastries or yoghurt and coffee) but no protein (meat or eggs). People are always surprised when I tell them what I eat for breakfast: eggs, yoghurt, and milk. No coffee, yet I stay awake all day. Amazing.

- Concerts/plays never start earlier than 8:30.

- Movies are released on Wednesday, not on Friday.

- Rain is rarely hard; it's usually a drizzle. Two days ago, I heard thunder for the first time this year.

- Toilets flush in interesting ways: there's usually a knob on top, which either has to be pulled up or pushed down. Sometimes there's a wide button to push. Sometimes the wide button is on the wall. Sometimes there are two buttons, for low-pressure and high-pressure flushes. Sometimes there's a chain to pull. I haven't seen a lever yet.

- Books don't come in hardcover. When books are new (before being released as a pocket paperback) they're a larger sized paperback. It annoys me, since they're not as durable.

- You can't buy a gallon of milk at the grocery store. It doesn't come in bottles that big, since people don't use a lot. The French don't drink milk straight like Americans do.

- Yoghurt comes in those little connected containers, not the larger separate pots like in America.

- A lot of people (me included) use fountain pens or other cartridge pens, and often use erasable ink. The erasability is through a separate pen: one end has a clear eraser, and the other end has a felt tip pen that has non-erasable ink, which can write over the area you've erased. Since the eraser solution is liquid, it makes the spot of paper you've used it on impervious to erasable ink. (Hopefully that comes somewhat close to making sense...)

- Tall buildings aren't very tall in France.

- Temperatures are in Celsius, and weight is in kilograms.

- French adults usually wear rectangular glasses, and kids usually wear very circular glasses.

- The first day of the week is Monday.

- Exam procedure is weird. There are students taking exams for lots of courses in the same room. You're told which desk number to go to, and you fill out an exam form, which has your name and information in a corner which is folded and glued down (like an envelope) so that the graders (who aren't always the professor) don't know whose paper they're reading. You're supplied with scrap paper too. Before the papers are handed out, they tell everyone to empty their pencil cases and put them away, and it's loud as they all do. French students are used to having pencil cases on their desks at all times. (They're trained that way.)

- There are lots of roundabouts and one-way streets.

- Everyone seems to follow the (relatively low) speed limit all the time.

- Band-aids don't come in colors or designs for kids.

- It's cheaper to buy tissues in little packets than in boxes.

- The keys are in different places on French keyboards. You have to press shift to type numbers, since most of those keys are for accented letters.

- There's a stereotype that French women don't shave: and there's a little truth to it, since true French women wax.

- In all my time in France, I've seen one stray cat and no stray dogs.

- French doctors have terrible handwriting too.

- Golden Delicious are the cheapest apples.

- French homes usually aren't air conditioned. They have thick walls, and summer is mild enough that it isn't necessary.

- There are very very few natural blondes in France. I would estimate that about 98% of French people are brunette. And most of these have very straight hair.

- When you call a phone in France, you don't hear a ring like in America. You hear a repeated beep until someone picks up.

- Eggs are brown. (Wikipedia says this is due to species and breed of chicken.)

- Stores (including grocery stores) are closed on Sundays. So are most restaurants.

- There aren't breakfast restaurants. People might go to a café for a pastry and coffee, but that's the extent of restaurant breakfasting.

- In Paris, there are a handful of 24-hour pharmacies. They're not common. When I try to explain why I thought this was strange, French people try to explain why no one would ever need to go to a pharmacy at night. If it's really serious, they can call a doctor. If it's not, it can wait.

- Streets aren't built on a grid system. They're built on a "hey, we could put a street here" system.

- Taxis don't have a taxi light on top. They just have a sign on the side saying that they're taxis.

- The most frequently studied languages in schools are English and German. A far third is Spanish. Nine other languages can be taught, but they're rare.

- In the university system, there's no correspondance between number of credits and number of hours per week.

- You can buy horse meat at the grocery store. It's for people, is just called "Horse" in between the "Pork" and "Beef" sections, and I haven't tried it yet. I've been planning to, but it's hard to drum up the courage.

- The French are very good at remembering to bring their reusable bags to the grocery store. At some stores, you can get the cheap little ones for free, but some stores don't have them. In this case, they sell bags (either disposable or reusable) at check-out.

- Drivers actually slow down when the light turns yellow... sometimes coming to a very fast stop. You're not allowed to cross when the light is yellow.

- Speaking of that yellow light... they're called "orange" here.

- Doorknobs on external doors are usually for decoration. The door only opens with a key, whether it's fully locked or not.

- Most houses have a high wall around them, so that you can't see into the yard. Some just have a high fence. Houses that aren't surrounded by a fence, or those with short fences, are called "American style."

- A lot of people think that the English word "bra" comes from the French "brassiere." However, the French word is soutien gorge, which literally means... "throat support." I think that's hilarious.

- The French, from kids to adults to really old adults, read comic books. They're considered a true art form.

- There's quite a bit of US election coverage in the (national) press, probably because our system is so weird. It's pretty optimistic. Coverage about the French government, though plentiful, isn't so cheerful. The new first lady, however, is quite well-perceived, over all.

- You hear a lot in the press about how the dollar is weak, but that's not entirely true: part of it is the fact that the Euro is having unprecedented inflation-- higher inflation over the course of a month than France had had for a decade, to be precise. It's hitting some people pretty hard, since prices on necessities like food have gone up markedly, but wages are stagnant.

- The "old people" demographic at Mass is pretty strong, but there are plenty of youth, young families, and middle aged people too. At least, it's balanced at the cathedral. Some churches (like the Madeleine, where I went once and was... disturbed... by the music) have a much much younger population, and some (like the Abbey where I go when I remember to wake up in time) have a very old crowd. There, I'm usually the youngest by... forty years or so. There are lots of churches, and because of the way the town grew, they're close together. Each has a unique congregation, because it's easy for people to go where they're comfortable, they don't necessarily have to go to the nearest parish. You hear a lot about empty churches in France, but from my experience, churches are only very empty if you go to Mass before 11 a.m.! Sunday is the day to sleep in.

How did that happen??

2008-05-20T15:40:00.004+02:00

I'm done. Finished my last exam (which wasn't too bad). No more courses, no more tests, no more lack of homework (well, no more official lack of homework... I still don't have any). No more riding the bus to the university. All of a sudden, the end of my exchange year seems particularly imminent.
In six days, I leave for Italy.
I spend two weeks in Italy.
Then I come back to Angers for ten days, during which I do some more Loire valley tourism.
Then I go home.
ALREADY??
It snuck up on me.

So now I'm getting into end of year mode... I closed my bank accounts, I went to the laundromat for what should be the last time (I'll do laundry once in Italy, and wash anything else I need to by hand), I've stopped buying food except for milk, eggs, and fruit, I've put aside some clothes and books to donate, and begun the "big clean" of my apartment. In less than a month, I leave this home and go back to my other home, and that's hard to grasp.

Concert and a Chuckle

2008-05-17T22:19:00.004+02:00

Tonight was my last concert with La Maîtrise de la Cathédrale, the cathedral choir. We did a program of English sacred choral music, and it went quite well. Except for the word "the," the choir pronounces English quite well! We didn't have a very big audience thanks to some scheduling issues, but it was good anyway and they clapped for a long time. Woohoo!

And, since I remembered to take a picture, I have a picture of the page of sheet music that's been cracking me up for the past few months... click on it and see if you can find what I find so funny:

(Don't get it? It's the fact that "diminuendo" is split over two lines, and that the words under "inuendo" could be taken as one. I have a weird sense of humor.)

In other news, I leave in a month. And people keep asking me how I feel about that, which is a really hard question to answer.

Magic

2008-05-15T11:38:00.004+02:00

Monday and Tuesday, Kristen and I decided to forego the traditional castles and cathedrals and go to something with a bit more of a modern, childlike twist... Disneyland Paris. No, I'm not joking. There was even a 40% off deal, so it was cheap. (Comparatively) We got two days in the parks and a night in one of the hotels.
See, when you grow up in suburban Chicago, everyone you know has been to Disneyworld. I knew kids who went every Spring Break. I was usually the only person in my elementary school class who had never been to Disney. So I'd always wanted to go. Kristen loves Disney, and has been to both of the American parks, and wanted to go too. Perfect!

Disneyland was WONDERFUL. People call it things like "the happiest place on earth," and I can understand that. Everywhere you look, there are kids who are completely happy. The place is full of kids, and we saw maybe one or two crying. All the adults were happy too. It's truly magical... every little detail is so perfectly thought out, and it really does make you feel like a kid again. It's a different philosophy to rides, too. It's more about the background than the actual ride; all of the roller coasters are "inside" and most take place in the dark, with special effects. Space Mountain makes it seem like you're going through space, past stars and galaxies. Crush's coaster has lots of fish and feels like the ocean. The Aerosmith rock and roller coaster has stage type lighting and rigging, and loud rock music. The rides are alright, but the experience is incredible.

I surprised myself on several occasions with my reaction to the shows and the costumed characters... the atmosphere seems to bring out the joy and youth in everyone. Plus, the weather was ideal (sunny and mid-70s, not humid at all), the lines were short (the longest we waited for a ride was half an hour for Space Mountain... a lot of the time the only "wait" was the time it took us to walk through the empty lines. The second and third times we went on Space Mountain, the wait was less than five minutes.) and everything was bilingual at the very least. And since I'm a linguist, I had a TON of fun paying attention to the translations, and to what languages were found where.
Space Mountain: (AWESOME roller coaster!)

Our hotel, the Santa Fe, was a surprisingly realistic, though over-the-top, Western style resort hotel. I've stayed in real ones before-- the kind of place where you still change the TV channel with a knob, and where everything from the carpet to the bedspreads is pueblo-colored geometric designs. This hotel had it perfectly. Perhaps the John Wayne billboard over the neon sign was a bit too much... but it was great. They even had evergreens, a fake UFO, and a movie-set-style Western town to complete the atmosphere. Everything was in English and French at the hotel, but they had staff speaking all the other Disneyland languages (Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish).

In general, signage was in English and French-- however, most of the ride names were in English because they're the same ride as in the States, and all of the "exit" and "bathrooms" type signs were in French.

The Lion King show (which had fun costumes and shortened versions of all the songs) was either in English or French-- we went to the English one, and went back for the French one. However, it was pretty disappointing, since the dialogue was in French but all the songs were in English.

The Animagique show was really cool: it was a blacklight show with a lot of the classic songs, and they did some really cool things with puppets. There were animatronics, puppets, full sized costumed characters, marionettes, bubbles, and it was really cool. On a linguistic level, it was interesting, because it was a true mixture: the opening scene between Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse was bilingual, since Mickey spoke French and Donald spoke English. Once Mickey left, Donald himself was bilingual: "J'y vais, here I go!" Most of the songs were in English, but Under the Sea was in French.

The It's a Small World ride was about 75% in English, but sometimes the song was in French. Now that I've been on the ride (twice) I have an actual appreciation for the song, and I mind it a lot less. It's a boat-style travel through the countries of the world, with cute animatronics dancing and singing in traditional costumes or at landmarks. For most of the countries, there's a traditional instrument, and when you go past it, you hear the instrument playing the song.
Here's Paris:

The Pirates of the Carribean ride was all in French, except for the Yo ho yo ho chorus, which was in English.
Here's the pirate ship next to the ride:

There was a neat history-of-animation type show, which had a montage of famous Disney clips (about half in English, a quarter in French, and the rest a mixture of German, Dutch, Italian and Spanish) and a presentation about animation. The presentation, which was a "conversation" between a real live person and an animated Mushu, was in French. All the seats had headphones which could play the translation in the typical handful of European languages.

Some of the rides that had video introductions (Space Mountain and Star Tours, for example) had video with subtitle. Some had English with French subtitles, some had the reverse.

The Tower of Terror had a real live human giving instructions (after a French-only video). The one who explained procedure to our "elevator" did it in French (for me and Kristen... ironic), English (for an English-speaking family), and Spanish (for a really annoying group of teenagers who screamed throughout the entire thing, so that we couldn't hear any of the story). We have no idea how he determined that we spoke French.

The typical roller coaster "Keep your hands and legs inside the car at all times and secure your hats and glasses" was either in French or in English, rarely in both.

The stunt show (which was really cool: car stunt driving, fake fighting, huge balls of fire...) was in English and French, but in the strangest way. There were two hosts, one French-speaking and one English-speaking, and they gave the same information in a conversational style.
"Pour conduire ces voitures, il faut au moins trois mois d'entraînement."
"That's right, you need at least three months of training to drive these cars."
Exact same content, but they made it sound like they were just chatting about it.

The studio tram tour was in English and French, but in an even stranger way. There were two famous actors in the video, one French and one English, but they didn't say quite the same things. Sometimes it was just different jokes, but sometimes they pointed out different things that we were supposed to notice.

My favorite show, however, was Stitch Live. We went once in French, and once in English. It's a real-time show, where the animated Stitch interacts with the audience. There's got to be someone with a lot of controls for what happens on the screen, because they can turn the image upside-down, produce cake out of nowhere, and make Stitch move around anywhere. There's actual interaction with the audience: Stitch asks people's names, takes a picture of a kid and puts it on the screen, has conversations with the audience... it was hilarious. The French show was 100% French, and the English show was 100% English.

And here are some pictures!!
Cinderella is one of my favorite Disney movies:

Being France, there was a shopfront from Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, complete with umbrella and rain.

I was excited to take a picture with Sully:

And Kristen took one with Mike:

Finally, here we are with the ultimate of French Disney characters: Lumière.

l'Abbaye de Fontevraud

2008-05-11T17:41:00.011+02:00

Friday we had the usual travel difficulties (train late, bus missed... bus home didn't come, later bus made us miss our train... normal) but we still had a wonderful time visiting the gigantic Abbey at Fontevraud. The Abbey is the largest monastic complex in Europe, and it's a combination of really neat architecture, really impressive art, and really interesting history. See, once upon a time, there was an order of "religious" folk who lived together, men and women, in humility and virtue. With one quirk: since the men and women were living with each other, they aroused each other in order to practice their restraint. As you can imagine, the local bishops weren't too thrilled with this practice, so they gave the group a lot of land in order to build an abbey where the men and women would have separate quarters. However, they didn't submit to total normality: there was a nun in charge instead of a monk, and the women were allowed to drink twice as much as the men. Several of the abbesses had themselves painted into the frescos, the kitchen has strangely shaped chimneys, and there is a huge network of underground tunnels. It's an awesome place to visit. Here is a rather large collection of photos from our visit to Fontevraud, via Saumur.

Here's the castle in Saumur:

While we sat in the grass by the castle (waiting until we needed to go find the bus stop) I played with the macro setting on my camera. There were daisies, and I thought my purse would make a fun background for a flowery desktop picture.

Then I got this idea-- this is probably my favorite picture that I've taken all year. Daisies in focus, and the castle in the distance.

Fast forward to Fontevraud... here's Kristen at the Abbey. The building with the strange roof is the kitchen.

There were stocks in the herb garden. (The mint was delicious!)

Here's the kitchen from another angle, along with some of France's typical castle/religious building trees. Apparently they cut off the branches to control growth. I just think they look silly. (Though in an endearing sort of way!)

Here's a view of the subterranean tunnels. [Tip: the only successful way to take a picture in a low light setting like this, unless you have a tripod, is to use the night setting and the self timer: just find something that you can set the camera on, and let it take the picture without you touching it.]

A lot of the abbesses looked remarkably similar...

This is the image I see in my head when I think of a monastery or a convent:

One of the more important features of the abbey is its set of frescos. Here's the Last Supper/washing of the feet (and note the very modern nun).

Here's the garden of Gethsemane and Judas' betrayal:

This is the scourging, but it's very difficult to see thanks to the window...

The Crucifixion is the central piece in the room.

The removal of Jesus' body from the cross is likewise cast into shadow from the window.

Here's Jesus' burial.

Here's the Resurrection:

And the Acension cracked me up, since usually you get to see a little more of Jesus in His glory... although his feet are quite nice.

Perfect for today: here's the Pentecost.

And this one depicts the Assumption of Mary.

The church in the complex is enormous, but very little of its original splendor (frescos, stained glass, carvings and statues) remains. There are, however, four rather important tombs. The one on the bottom right in this photo is a rather important one: King Richard the Lionheart, king of Anjou (the region of France of which Angers is the capital) and England. He's the King Richard from the Robin Hood stories.

Here's the outside of the church:

And that, enormous and impressive, is the Abbaye de Fontevraud! (Ah-bay-ee deuh Fohn-tuh-vroh, by the way!)

A few photos and a few words

2008-05-08T17:52:00.007+02:00

So Far:

Tuesday:
- went to buy train tickets
- walked around downtown a little and dropped Kristen off at the castle
- went to take my didactics exam: it went wonderfully, I think! I feel confident about 80-90% of the short answer section, and quite confident about my short essays too.
- went grocery shopping
- I went to choir (we were recording our semester's repertoire) and Kristen journaled
- awesome dinner (steak, brie filled artichokes, lots of fresh veggies with some sort of cheese dip we bought)
- watched a movie

Wednesday
- made crêpes for breakfast
- set off to the Cointreau distillery (Cointreau is made in a suburb of Angers), but couldn't take a tour because you apparently have to reserve.
- went shopping downtown
- ate lunch at a modernish style French restaurant. Kristen got rabbit and a cheese/pineapple dessert, and I got egg rolls and fish with Asian style vegetables. We made a long to-do list for the summer.
- went to my French class, in which we watched a movie.
- went to the movie theater, where we watched a movie: 27 Dresses, which is a really cute romantic comedy. It was dubbed in French.

Thursday
- disappointing beginning: we had gotten our train tickets to go to Chenonceau, which is an awesome castle. But today is a national holiday, and the Sunday schedules were in use instead of the Saturday/vacation day schedule, so there was no bus when we expected there to be one. So we couldn't go to Chenonceau: and when we went to try to change our tickets, we found out that because of construction, we won't be able to reschedule. We weren't the only people to have this problem: on the way back, I warned an elderly couple waiting with their suitcases at the bus stop.
-fun interlude: so we took the bus toward the Lac de Maine (lake by the river Maine), which is a medium-sized lake with a sort of forest preserve around it. On the way there, we saw a market, so we jumped out of the bus and market-shopped for a while. We both got some handmade soap, canvas African-style purses (which are big in France among our demographic), and some olives. Plus a loaf of bread and kiwis. Fun stuff.
- relaxing middle: we then continued to the lake, where we spread out a sheet and lay around in the sun, eating our picnic lunch and watching a movie on my portable DVD player. It was wonderful to be lazy for a while, and the weather was beautiful.
- surprising end: we decided to wander around a bit, and saw this mini-mountain in the middle of the very flat region. Huge rock with a cross on top? Neat!

So we climbed up the hill to get a closer look. There were several paths, and the ones we chose got us there surprisingly quickly.

The view from the top is wonderful: you can see the lake and forests, and in the not-so-distant distance, the towers of the cathedral and the walls of the castle.

Here are Kristen and I at the top of the hill:

I particularly like plants and rocks, and Kristen particularly likes plants and animals, so between us we have very geeky conversations when we wander around. In Europe, a lot of our "what's that?" questions are open-ended, since there are some different species here. I christened this tree a Serengeti-conifer-bonsai, and Kristen said that it's called a Broccoli Christmas tree.

Those are our adventures so far! More to come... tomorrow is a very busy day.

Short Update

2008-05-05T22:54:00.002+02:00

Good things!
I got my Dutch exam back, and by what I can only describe as a miracle, I did outstandingly well on it. I knew I did well on the first page, but I guessed on over 50% of the second page... and got all but two words right. My score on the entire exam was nearly perfect. I'm still surprised about this... I was sick when I took the exam, I didn't know the material too well, I wasn't thinking clearly, and yet I did well? I always ask my guardian angel to keep an eye on me when I have exams, and I guess she did!

And even better, my friend Kristen just arrived today! She's staying with me in Angers for a bit more than a week, and we're doing as much regional tourism as we can while she's here. She's the best travel companion in the world, and I'm thrilled that she's here! So if we have time, we'll both be blogging travel stories and photos. And our choices for destinations are... varied. You'll soon see what I mean :)

And I bought a few books, books that were actually written in French (most of what I read was translated from other languages, since the French don't write much fun literature):
La langue maternelle (Mother Tongue) by Vassilis Alexakis. This was recommended to me by the doctor I saw two weeks ago for my residency card. It's a historical-type mystery adventure revolving around language. Perfect for me.
E=MC², mon amour and its sequel, Pythagore, je t'adore by Patrick Cauvin. He's supposedly one of France's most loved authors, and these books are supposed to be cute and funny. They're some sort of "two kids from different backgrounds meet and fall in love one summer" books, but it's the titles that sold me. "E=MC², my love" and "Pythagorus, I love you" (which rhymes in French) are books that I will surely enjoy!

Deutschland

2008-05-02T17:26:00.008+02:00

I'm still catching up!

So last weekend, my German friend Tobi had his birthday, and he invited all of his friends from Angers to come to Stuttgart for a party and a trip to the (beer-themed) carnival. Four of us were able to find the time and money to do so: Susanna (from Missouri; she had stayed in Stuttgart for Spring Break so was there already), Katie (from Ireland), Michael (from England), and me. Katie and I traveled together, which was really nice. Chatting and homework the whole way.

Tobias and Michaela, his friend who had volunteered to host me, met us at the station. Michaela is really sweet: she's a French major who speaks really good English, and she's about the most welcoming human on the planet. She lives with her boyfriend Patrick (who's also really nice) in a cute apartment close to the center of town. They were really good hosts. We chatted and admired her fish in the afternoon, then cooked a traditional southern German meal for dinner. Imagine giant ravioli stuffed with pork and vegetables: those are sliced and cooked with onions and eggs, it's really good. I'm going to try to make an Americanized version at home, with some sort of fresh ravioli.

In the evening, we went to a relatively swanky bar with a bunch of Tobi's other German friends, including Jenny, who was also in Angers last semester. They had quite an extensive menu, and supposedly cheap cocktails... everything seems ridiculously expensive in European bars though. I got tea and ginger ale. The ginger ale was excellent. It was interesting to see Tobi in his native environment, and it was interesting to try to understand, and attempt to speak, German. I understood a fair amount because it resembles both Dutch and English a little, but my speaking was a disaster. I would think, "Say zwei, you're in Germany..." and then my mouth would go north and end up saying "twee" in Dutch. Half the time I missed "danke" and ended up with "dank u wel," but at least I had the right first syllable...

Saturday, Michaela and I got up relatively early and went downtown to explore a bit. We walked around the weekly flower market, veggie market, and flea market, which was really fun.

I bought a really cheap vintage recorder, which has a different kind of fingering than I know how to do. Fun to experiment with.
Stuttgart has an enormous park in the middle with fountains, an artificial lake, a new castle and an old castle, museums, lots of grass... it's an awesome area. Here's a picture of the new castle:

We spent quite a while walking around and admiring German roofs:

Once we met up with the rest of the group (minus Jenny), we took the metro up to the top of one of the hills, to get ice cream in the supermarket where Jenny works. She was, as we'd expected (hoped?) embarrassed but pleased. Then we went up another hill, and hiked back down through a forest. Stuttgart is in a basin, so it's moderately hilly, but surrounded by mountains all around. There's a lot of variety in any direction you look; it's a beautiful area.

In the early evening, we headed to the frühlingfest (or something like that), which is kind of like a cross between your mental image of Oktoberfest and a carnival. We didn't go on many rides, but walked around for hours before the guys wanted to get beers. I'm not really a carnival person, and I don't like beer, but it was quite an experience nonetheless. The loud, live music was a combination of mediocre American pop classics and German songs, which people sang along to enthusiastically. And for people-watching, it couldn't get any better. After being in France for so long, it amazed me how much Germany looks, and feels, like America. People are louder, and taller, and there are blonds, and they actually dress comfortably. Our cultures are definitely closer than I realized.
Another perk of the day was that I got to see Alex, who was a Rotary Youth Exchange student in Russia the same year as I was. She was somewhere in Siberia too (I don't remember exactly where), but far away from my town of Blagoveschensk. She's a "yo-yo" (on her second exchange) in a town near Stuttgart this year, so she came to the fest to hang out for a while. Exchange students make awesome friends. Here's a picture:

Michaela and I went home pretty early in the evening... you have no idea how glad I was to discover that I was being hosted by an introverted teetotaler who didn't like to stay out all night! So much less awkward for both of us. We watched "Love Story" which is an American romantic tragedy from 1970 that I'd never heard of. It's apparently very well-known in Germany... as well known as "Breakfast at Tiffany's" and the like. Any of you ever hear of it?

Sunday morning, we slept in and then met Susanna and Katie downtown to go to Mass. Katie and I are Catholic, so we understood what was going on during Mass, and Susanna understands a bit of German, so she could follow a bit, and Michaela was lucky enough to understand every word spoken :) There were a few peculiarities, like the fact that the second reading was skipped, and the mystery of "who's the guy giving the homily?!" He was dressed in a suit, so when he went to the pulpit I wondered if we were going to get a budget talk, but then I heard words like angels, and Holy Spirit, and Jesus... he was giving the homily. Katie and I figure that he must have been a deacon, but he was in normal clothes and sat with the congregation, so it was a bit odd. The best part, however, is that Germany does church music right! Not like in France, where you're given the words and do your best... there was a book with sheet music, and consequently everybody sang and did quite well. The Mass parts were sung, but they skipped the Credo. Yet another mystery. Strangest yet, however, was that after the Mass had ended, everybody sat down to listen to the entire organ postlude... then they clapped politely, and got up to leave. In France, people leave during the postlude, and in America, many people dart out as soon as possible, and it's only the hardcore people like my family who stay until the very end. Although, admittedly, if my parents left before the choir was done, I wouldn't have a ride home!

Sunday was a day of going to high places. After lunch, we went up to the Sky Beach to see if there were any seats. It's a brilliant concept, I think: they covered the top level of a parking garage in sand, added lounge chairs, umbrellas, and a boardwalk, and sell expensive drinks at the bar. All the chairs were full though, so our hopes of an afternoon of sunbathing in Germany were dashed. We took the elevator to the top of the tower at the train station, and enjoyed a great view of the city, and the hills. Then we hiked to the top of one of those hills (my asthma didn't enjoy that too much) to get ice cream from Pinguin, which is supposed to be the best ice cream in Stuttgart. Here's a picture of most of us, at the half-way point. From left to right are Tobias, me, Jenny, Michael, Susanna, and Katie. Michaela's behind the camera.

The ice cream was excellent (I got cinnamon and mint), and it seems that the fact is well-known. Check out the line we had to wait in!

We hung out in the park for a while, enjoying the sun and the ice cream. One of the fountains had potable water, which made me really happy. I hate spending money to buy bottled water. Fountains in Germany have a unique feature, as well: I saw countless fountains that had water coming out of animals noses. Like this one:

After walking back down the hill, we headed to the park to hang around for a while. From left to right, Michael, Katie, Jenny, Susanna, Tobias, me, and Michaela.

My last dinner in Germany was as stereotypical as can be: a bratwurst (longer and skinnier than the style we get in the States, but the same taste) and a bretzel. Those taste the same too, although the southern style bretzels (yes, spelled with a B) are somewhat funnily shaped... the top is very puffy, and the twisty part is thin.

Final impression: Germany is like an American feeling in a European city with German as the lingua franca. It's a beautiful country, and I look forward to going back someday... and hopefully, I'll speak a bit more German when I do!

Since then:
- Monday I slept on the way to Paris, and studied Dutch on the way to Angers. I used 53 tissues (I'm allergic to April and May) and got some medicine for my laryngitis. Monday night I had my Dutch exam, which went pretty mediocrely. It's really hard to write an interview with a famous person when you know very little vocabulary!
- Tuesday I used only about 40 tissues, and I worked on a paper for my French class.
- Wednesday I finished the paper, and studied halfheartedly for the exam. The exam went abysmally, and I wish I had had the mental energy to study more... I think the problem is that I had studied backwards. I made sure I understood everything, and came up with mnemonic devices so that I could remember what all the expressions meant. But then for the exam, I was supposed to go from the meaning to the expression, and I drew a blank on about half. Literally half. I guessed creatively for the rest.
- Thursday I spent the day cooking (crêpes, soup, ginger syrup to make ginger ale), studying for my didactics exam (Tuesday), and watching movies. May 1 was a double-whammy national holiday this year, for the Ascension and for May Day. Therefore, there was no bus service whatsoever, which was annoying.
- Today, I cleaned, went grocery shopping, and avoided studying by any means possible. I will get around to it... I plan to study at least ten pages of notes after choir practice tonight.

In the future:
- Saturday and Sunday I have little to do other than study.
- Monday, Kristen arrives!!! She and I are going to be Loire Valley/Brittany tourists for a bit more than a week. And Monday night is the end of year party for Dutch.
- Tuesday, I have the didactics exam, and in the evening my choir is going to record some of our repertoire. (Our concert was canceled due to really bad organization (external problem). France isn't nearly as choir-friendly as America is.)
- Wednesday, Kristen and I will go to French class.
Then... adventures!! We'll keep you informed.

Last Week, in List Form

2008-04-30T18:14:00.004+02:00

Moving forward! Now that I've finished writing about what happened a week and a half ago, I can write about last week's adventures.

Last week I had the lovely privilege of going to Nantes ($10 of train ride away) for a medical visit. The main purpose of this is to determine if people applying for residency have tuberculosis, before they're given permission to stay in France. There are, naturally, a few problems with their system:
1) I'm already here.
2) If I had TB, I would have been spreading it all over Europe for the past... oh... eight months.
3) I already have my residency card.
4) I leave France in a month, Europe in seven weeks. Glad to see that their system allows students to jump through diplomatic hoops in such a timely fashion.

Nevertheless, I decided I should go anyway, just to be a good foreigner. They wanted me to bring a bunch of things:
1) My passport. Check!
2) My temporary residency card. They took that when they gave me the fancy laminated one. Good enough: check!
3) The letter in which they told me all this stuff. Check!
4) My recent chest x-rays. I'd never had any done. No check.
5) My glasses. Check!
6) Records of recent hospitalization. I've never been hospitalized. Check!
7) My immunization records. Uh oh. A few problems here: first, I have only a cheaty form of immunization records, since my files were lost when the doctor's office went bankrupt (or something like that) and we have the dates that we could piece together, plus recent information. I don't have a way of receiving faxes, so my mom e-mailed me the dates and I wrote them down on a piece of paper. Half-hearted "check?"

I had decided to put some faith in my navigational abilities, and take pretty much the last train that would get me to Nantes on time. However, I missed the bus and nearly missed this train. The bus system was in total disarray last week (and is now in only partial disarray) because:
1) They changed all the bus routes in the downtown area.
2) Consequently, all the schedules have changed.
3) The bus drivers are rarely on time anyway.
4) Last week the elementary schools were on vacation, so the Saturday schedules were in effect instead of the weekday schedule.
I knew about numbers one and two, and three is a given, but four was a surprise. So I missed the bus, ended up speed-walking from the bus stop to the train station, and getting to the platform with about one minute to spare.

In Nantes, I got to the medical place with time to spare. I thought I was quite early, since when I got there (half an hour before my 1:30 appointment) there were already several people waiting. But it turned out that they were really really early: as in, one was an hour early and one was two hours early. Asian exchange students are hard core. Seriously, go visit the castle or something, why show up so early?
Anyway, the medical visit followed the following format:
1) Sit in waiting room for one minute.
2) Go talk with doctor. Chat for fifteen minutes or so about travel, language, linguistics, and the cerebral advantages of being multilingual. Recommend books to each other.
3) Talk about medical stuff with the doctor. Confirm that you've been immunized for everything you should have been (he doesn't even need to see the dates, phew!), answer lots of yes/no questions. Get blood pressure taken.
4) Go get a chest x-ray.
5) Go have vision tested and say that you don't need a lecture on safe sex.
6) Get chest x-ray back from doctor, who confirms that you don't have tuberculosis.
7) Collect some official looking documents, then go on your merry way!
It was completely pleasant. I got some great book recommendations, and a souvenir chest x-ray. I'm supposed to keep it just in case I need it, but I'm not exactly sure how this will be practical: you're not supposed to roll them, or fold them, or keep them in a hot place (like my backpack when I'm traveling) or a cold place (like the baggage hold of a plane). And the thing is gigantic, it's about fifteen by twenty inches. I think it would make a cool book cover, if my doctor doesn't want it.

I took an earlier train back to Angers than I'd expected, and had some time to go eat lunch before going to class. After class was the international dinner. Those are always fun! I made samoas, which are the Girl Scout cookie also known as Caramel Delites. They're very easy to make, though it takes a good amount of time.
1) Melt about a pound of chewy caramels in the microwave with about three tablespoons of milk. Stir every thirty seconds or so to keep it from burning or growing feet or something... not sure what would happen. Just stir.
2) Mix in a cup or so of shredded coconut.
3) Using a plastic knife, spread a layer of this mixture on top of relatively thin vanilla cookies. You could make them, or just buy them. (I used relatively small cookies, and made 80.)
4) Melt about three bars of dark chocolate in the microwave.
5) Put spoonfuls of the melted chocolate onto parchment paper, then put a cookie on top. This is an easy way to coat the bottom of the cookie in chocolate without getting really messy-- the alternative is to dip the cookies into the chocolate, but that's tricky and messy and wastes chocolate.
6) Put your leftover chocolate into a piping bag (or a plastic bag with the corner snipped off-- snip only a tiny bit!) and pipe a zig zag of chocolate over the cookies. You may need to melt more chocolate, depending on how many cookies you're making.
7) Let the cookies sit until the chocolate is solid and the caramel feels sticky, but not goopy. It doesn't hurt to leave them overnight before you box them up.
I'd expected to be bringing home leftovers, since I brought 75 cookies to the international dinner (about 40 people there), but they all got eaten.
Since this was the last dinner, there was a raffle, and I won a cookbook! I know it's not something you can have a talent for, but I'm good at raffles. It's a neat cookbook, I'm looking forward to making some of the recipes!

The rest of the week was eventful too, since on Friday I left to go to Germany for the weekend. The tale of that adventure will come soon. With more photos than lists :)
This week has been busy too, but not in the "write about" kind of way. I have some sort of laryngitis/cold/flu/allergies sickness, which has been really annoying. Monday I had my Dutch exam, and it went decently. Today I had my French exam, and it went abysmally. I studied in the wrong direction. At least everyone says they did badly, perhaps my mediocrity was average!

With
1) affection and
2) smiles,
Kel

Egyptian Culture and Stuff

2008-04-28T20:16:00.005+02:00

A guide to Egyptian cultural stuff for the typical Westerner who doesn't know much more than what's in the newspaper:

Arabic:
The kind of Arabic they teach in foreign universities, the kind found in the Koran, is called fusha. It's completely different from the regional dialects, including Egyptian Arabic. They're sort of mutually intelligible. Sort of. You see, the idea is that God (a.k.a. Allah) dictated the Koran to Muhammed, and he dictated it in fusha. Therefore, fusha is God's language, and it's the only form of Arabic that can be written. The dialects are seen as a sort of dirty language, a corrupted form of the divine tongue. It must be horrible to think that your native language is wrong!

Arabic Numbers
It's funny, because we use a set of numerals (0, 1, 2, 3, etc.) that we call "Arabic numerals." But the Arabs use a different set, the Arabic-Indic numerals.

Mosques:
Just like there are churches around every corner in Europe, there are mosques all over the place in Egypt. Most have several domes, and they all have minarets, which are really big towers. The call to prayer happens five times a day, where speakers on the minarets let everyone know that it's time to drop everything and pray. It's really really loud, since the speakers blast from every direction. When we were at the pyramids, quite far away from Cairo and moderately far away from downtown Giza, we could hear it.

Veils:
Most women have their heads covered. And they do get treated a lot better than women who are unveiled! Those who have "hard-core veils" (not the technical term) that cover everything but their eyes, or everything including their eyes, are almost revered. Technically, the veil is supposed to be optional, a personal choice. In practice, rich people may choose not to wear it, but anybody who isn't loaded will cover up.
Lori and I carried scarves (and long-sleeved shirts) so that we could go into mosques if we wanted to, but we were uncovered. Which was a little awkward, even though it was totally natural for us.

Class issues:
You find "classes" like beggars, workers, middle-class folk and rich people in any country. But in Egypt, you marry within your social class, and it plays a bigger role in life than we'd like to think it should.

The Status of Women:
While I was chatting with some of Lori's friends, they explained a bit about the problems with women's rights in Egypt. A woman becomes an adult at 21, but she can't travel (among other things) without her father's permission until she's 25. When she gets married, her husband is her legal guardian, and she has the rights of a child again. At 45, she regains the rights of an adult.
A man can divorce his wife without much problem, but it's a challenge for a woman to divorce her husband, even though she has this right in the Koran. In Egypt, a woman has only been legally allowed to divorce her husband for about five years. However, he'll get custody of the children, and their home, and she has virtually no power to change it.

Weather:
It was quite hot! While I was there, it was around 90°F every day. It did, however, get chilly at night-- into the 70°s, which is enough of a change that it made it seem quite cold. Egypt has a short rainy season in November and December (the beginning of the short winter), and it may rain once or twice the rest of the year. In the desert, it doesn't rain at all.

Prices:
Prices are much lower than in Western (strange term, since Egypt is in the same time zone as Europe) countries. However, this corresponds to much lower wages. Museums meant for Westerners seem reasonably priced, but when you think that a museum ticket could buy ten koshri dinners, that puts it into perspective. There was recently a scandal because bread prices tripled: what seems a pittance by European/American standards became unreachable for poor Egyptians.

Noise:
The day I arrived in Egypt, the New York Times came out with an article about how noisy Cairo is. And every bit of it is true: people really do yell to talk to each other, from a mixture of speaking over the noise and having poorer hearing. Cars really do honk all the time and the call to prayer really is deafening. The normal volume of life in Cairo is like standing fifteen feet away from a freight train... all the time.

Traffic and Horns:
Traffic is fascinating and terrifying. Lane markers, if present, are ignored. A four lane street easily fits six cars across. Even at moderately high speeds, traffic is close to bumper-to-bumper. There seems to be no rule about who gets the right of way: taxis, private cars, buses, bikes, carts pulled by donkeys or horses, and pedestrians all fill the streets and fight to get to their destination. There are few crosswalks, so people dash across the street whenever they see an opportunity.
Horns are the general traffic signal. Since you pass from an infinitesimal distance, cars behind you wouldn't be able to see the signal. Therefore, horns do the job. Two or three honks generally indicates that you're about to change lanes or pass, but it could just warn other drivers that you're going to speed up, or warn a pedestrian of your presence, or serve as a wave for some reason... the list goes on. Single honks seem to be more of a method of letting people know of your presence, even if there's no need to. Most drivers (I am not making this up) honk at regular intervals, just as a matter of course. The short honks are usually about thirty seconds in between, and happen regardless of how many other cars are on the street. Imagine anything you do in a car: turn signal, speed up, slow down, change lanes... everything is accompanied by a honk in Egypt. I wish I were exaggerating, but I'm not.

Dirty?
I asked myself if Cairo is dirty or not, and I'm stuck. It's dirty in a way, because of the desert dust that covers everything. However, the waste control is excellent, and the streets aren't dirty in that sense. The exteriors of buildings are also kept clean. So it's a dirty city, but it's an inherent "dirtiness" that comes from the environment, one that can't really be controlled.

Smoking:
Cairo is a city where, if you see a "no smoking" sign, you'll likely see someone smoking next to it. There are very few non-smoking places, because it seems that all Egyptians smoke about two packs of cigarettes a day. As an Egyptian girl told me, "The city is so polluted, smoking doesn't change anything. At least this way it's my choice to put it in my lungs!" Our taxi drivers often chain smoked as they drove, and some offered us cigarettes.

Where are you from?
I mixed things up: sometimes I told people I was from France, sometimes I said I was from America. People usually reacted positively, especially once I confirmed that I liked Egypt and that it was my first time there. People were happy to have a chance to practice some English (I only found one who spoke French, and he seemed happy as well). The strangest thing, though, is what Egyptian vendors and taxi drivers and tourist police and... well, everyone... seems to think is a very funny joke. They ask you where you're from, and when you say America, they respond, "Welcome to Alaska!" It was barely funny the first time, and I heard it at least five or six times in my short stay. I wonder where it came from!

Sand and Rocks:
Sand is all over the place. And yellow.
Egyptian rocks are incredibly porous. Like a magnification of normal porous rocks, with fist-sized holes throughout the spongy-style rock.

Slaves:
Speaking of rocks, it's not actually certain that the pyramids were built by slaves, as most people think. Anthropologists think that that was a myth perpetuated by the Ancient Greeks. There are workers' cemeteries and records that suggest that the workforce was about half skilled laborers, and half unskilled, but paid, workers.

Money:
I'd mentioned before that you can sort of tell how much money is worth in a country based on how big of coins or how small of bills they have. Switzerland was frightening because coins worth five dollars are pocket change. In Egypt, there are bills worth five cents. That's encouraging. You get a lot more for your money in Egypt.

Gas prices:
I wanted to convert the current gas prices into dollars per gallon, but all the stations we passed had blank signs. They just don't post the prices on their signs, I suppose. Perhaps that means that gas is cheap enough not to care about, but perhaps it's just not usual to advertise the price on a big sign.

Animals:
Stray cats galore, horses and donkeys still used for labor in the city, and a relatively small number of pigeons.

Smells:
Cairo smells like a mixture of things: cigarette smoke, car exhaust, spices from things cooking, body odor since it's hot. Like all smells, once it's been noticed, it seems to disappear. They're not particularly pleasant smells, but they're somehow not unpleasant.

Pyramid Innards
Some people were curious if I went inside a pyramid: I didn't. I'm six feet tall, and the passages are half my height. Crawling around short tunnels packed with tourists didn't seem too appealing. Besides, only a limited number of people are allowed in the Great Pyramid each day, and that's the one that would be most comfortable to walk around in!

A Final Image:
The Egyptian Museum is to your right, a modern building made of rose-colored brick. Behind you is a busy street, full of honking taxis. Street vendors have their wares spread out on blankets on the wide sidewalks: most sell kitchy souvenirs like pyramid statues, but one sells wind-up toys and another sells hair trinkets. Three patches of bright green grass turn this cement area into a sort of oasis. The grass on one patch is short, on one it is long, and the third is in the process of being cut: a man sits in the middle, methodically pulling up handfuls of grass. Behind him, the grass looks neatly trimmed; he slides to his left to continue hand-trimming the lawn. He is halfway done with this patch.

That's Cairo.

Ancient Egypt, Modern Cairo, and Alexandria

2008-04-21T15:30:00.014+02:00

Ancient Egypt

Friday Lori and I got up pretty early and got a taxi to the pyramids at Giza. Giza is surprisingly close to Cairo: it only took about twenty minutes to get there, since the roads are deserted on Friday mornings, when everybody goes to mosque. Here are a bunch of photos of the pyramids!

This is the Great Pyramid. It's really really enormous. Its blocks come up to my waist.

This is the corner of the Great Pyramid, plus the Second Pyramid (it's the one which still has some of the limestone casing left on top) and the Third Pyramid. If you can see an itty bitty pyramid beyond that, that's the fourth.

This picture shows just how close Cairo is to the open desert. You can see, and hear, Cairo to the left, but to the right there's nothing but sand.

Here are the Second and Third pyramids, and the teensy little fourth one.

Here am I on a camel... this one gets a story. When you go to the pyramids, you are frequently ambushed by people trying to sell you things. And you try your best to ignore them or get them to leave you alone. The more successful ones surround you, and present what they're selling as "gifts" so that they can then inform you that you're being rude by refusing. I should have just given in to being rude, but I wasn't forceful enough. So after they wrapped my head in a scarf (twice, because I tried to take it off the first time), they put me on a camel. The camel was sitting down, so I expected to be able to escape easily. But then they made the camel stand up and that plan flew out the window. Riding a camel isn't unlike riding a horse, except that camels are significantly taller. Lori says that camels are more uncomfortable, but my legs are longer so that helped. Once I got down, they of course wanted money. They had techniques for this too: I offered thirty pounds, and they acted insulted. The camel man said that he would give me change from a 100-pound bill (a bit less than $20) but then refused once he had put it into his pocket. I ended up getting ten pounds "change." I was incredibly pissed. And naturally, this bad experience is as vivid in my mind as the good experience of seeing the pyramids. Which makes me even more angry. But it's the past, and can't be changed, and at least I have a picture of me on a camel in front of the Great Pyramid:

The Third Pyramid is still a destination for tourists, but where there were hundreds by the two big ones, there were handfuls by the third. It's still huge, even though it's not as big as the popular ones. Here it is!

And here's the back of the Second Pyramid, miraculously free of tourists:

I made Lori hike to the fourth pyramid with me, since I felt bad for it. It's hardly noticeable from where the tourists are, and it would feel very neglected and left out if it were anthropomorphized. Good thing there's no International Pyramidal Union, or it would probably lose its pyramid status.
Once you get close, you see that there are more pyramids! The fifth is very short (in comparison) and shows more traits of a step-pyramid than the big guys, and the sixth is clearly a step-pyramid. Here are the three poor, neglected pyramids:

This photo is good for size comparison: compare me, approximately six feet tall, with the stones making up the fourth pyramid:

Here's the fourth pyramid and the Cairo skyline:

And here are the four pyramids in the other direction: the big from perspective fourth pyramid, the Third, the Second with its casing, and the Great Pyramid looking deceptively smaller.

Here are Lori and me in front of the pyramids. Woohoo!

And finally, here is the noseless Sphinx, seen here with the Second Pyramid.

Here it is with the two big ones.

I still can't believe I saw the Pyramids... I was really there! I'd dreamt of this since I was little, but never really thought it would happen. But it did! They're amazing.

Modern Cairo

In the afternoon, Lori and I met up with her friend Sarah (the one who isn't her flatmate) and we went to City Stars, which is the rich "suburban" mall. It's air-conditioned, mostly smoke-free, shiny and clean, and enormous: like, as big as Mall of America, not just merely as big as Woodfield. We got ice cream (I congratulate whoever came up with mint cookies and cream ice cream... wow. The best of both worlds.) and walked around the mall for a good, long time. I found a messenger bag to replace my former carry-on, which has been all around the world with me and has the hole and weak spots to prove it. It had gotten to the point where I carry a spare bag just in case my messenger bag dies while I'm en route somewhere, and needed to be replaced. Its replacement is a little bit small, but it's nice, and it was on sale quite cheap. (And I can now add after traveling with it... the lining is terrible quality and already needs to be patched. But that's not too annoying.) We stopped at Starbucks to get Lori some coffee, and I got a mini apple pie, just because I could. Starbucks scales its prices to be closer to Egyptian standards, so it was only two dollars. In America, the only thing you can get for two dollars at Starbucks is... a cup of air, probably.

We ate dinner at a Lebanese restaurant, which was really good. I got orzo soup and "oriental duck," which was excellent. Lori got hummus as usual, and lentil soup. Sarah got pigeons. A lot like a cross between beef and chicken, whereas duck is like a cross between lamb and chicken. (On a side note: when you imagine a cross between a lamb and chicken, do you imagine a lamb with wings like Lori did, or a wooly bird like I do?) We got two desserts to share: Om Ali, which is some sort of dough baked with cream, and Mahalabeya, which is a cool custard type dessert with nuts and dried fruit on top. Both were good, but way too sweet for my taste.

After a bit more wandering, we headed home. Then followed a night of six hours of very restless sleep (my lack of sleep will become a separate story line, don't worry...) and our trip to...

Alexandria!
Saturday we woke up really really early and headed to the train station and thence to Alexandria. We got first class tickets, since they're not much more than second class... and still cheaper than trains in most other countries! The train was pretty nice, and we managed to sleep for part of the 2.5 hour train ride. Once we arrived, we walked a bit away from the train station so that taxi prices would go down, and got a cab to the Catacombs. Recently a donkey fell down a deep hole in Alexandria and discovered the catacombs, which are really awesome. They date from the Roman era, and are a fascinating mixture of Roman, Egyptian, and Greek art and architecture. In most cases, they can't tell who was buried there, but the most impressively carved tomb seems to have been that of a Roman couple. There are very Greek motifs in there, but the most striking things were the statues of Anubis-- the jackal-headed Egyptian god, dressed like a Roman legionary! In some places, there were remnants of frescos on the walls, there were several columns still standing, and lots of empty graves. Mummies didn't last very long in warm, moist Alexandria. The catacombs are also connected to another underground tomb, which has brick arches and other interesting features. The two weren't originally connected, but some grave robbers accidentally linked two tunnels.

Outside the catacombs, you're allowed to take pictures. Here's Lori adding an Egyptian component to the Greek/Roman style tomb:

Our next stop was the fort, which stands on the spot where the Lighthouse/Pharos of Alexandria used to be. It was one of the original seven wonders of the world, but was destroyed several centuries ago. The fort, however, is quite beautiful. And it's on the Mediterranean, which is also really pretty.

We aimed for the entrance to the fort, but missed... and ended up in the fish museum, which has really cheesy dioramas of fish in the Mediterranean. I liked the whale skeleton, and I really liked the expression on the face of this enormous papier mâché fish, pictured here with Lori:

We walked from the fort to the Fish Market, which is a fancy fish restaurant on the shore. We got salad: a bowl of vegetables and some fresh bread to dip in a collection of seven types of hummus and other dips, plus two plates of Egyptian pickles. That alone would have been plenty for a meal, but since we were in fresh-fish land, I got calamari as well. It was fresh and light and delicious. In Egypt, the type of bread you get is a little like pita, though lighter and puffier. It's fun to deflate and delicious.
Here is the fort, seen across a boat filled bit of Mediterranean:

Next stop was the library, which is built on the site of the ancient library, another of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. The library that's standing now is ultra modern, and beautiful. I love books.

There was a rare books section, which was really neat. I particularly liked the display of margins, where they showed some of the most impressive margin-graffiti in their collection. There was also an exhibit on an Egyptian film maker with lots of pictures of costumes he designed, and one on the history of Alexandria, which was interesting in a boring sort of way... interesting, but not enough to want to read labels on pictures. We walked around the literature section for a bit, and were surprised to find quite a bit of what we consider to be "teen crap fiction." However, it was pretty tempting... so Lori picked out a Buffy the Vampire Slayer novel, and I picked a Sweet Valley High book (could it get any worse? No.) and we spent an hour reading, sixth-grade style. Then I spun around the historical Alexandria bit of the museum before we left, which was really neat. They had stuff from all the religions which Egypt has been home to (Egyptian polytheism, Roman and Greek polytheism, Coptic Christianity, Islam), neat statues, and two beautiful mosaics from the original Library of Alexandria. I was amazed at how well everything was preserved: if you picture a Roman statue, you probably don't picture one with all of its limbs and facial features, and your image of a Greek vase probably isn't uncracked and likely doesn't have all of its decoration intact. Egypt must be the ideal environment for keeping things pretty over the millennia.
Here's a neat modern sculpture at the library:

The train back to Cairo was less uneventful than we would have liked... we were fortunate enough to be sitting right behind a family with three crying children. Two of them screamed (literally) for an hour (literally). Their parents weren't handling the situation well, either, which annoyed me. Finally they cried themselves to sleep, and I got about five minutes of sleep.
Back at Lori's apartment, I packed and we chatted with Lori's flatmate Sarah, who has awesome adventures.

At one, my taxi (a fancy metered taxi) arrived to take me to the airport. Traffic was light, so it didn't take long. The driver spoke pretty good English, and we chatted a little. I learned that Egyptians drive through the streets honking for marriages, just like Americans and the French do. The airport isn't bad, but the organization for check-in was horrible. There were only a few desks open, and I was in line for more than an hour. I got through passport control and security just after boarding had started, so I didn't have much time to find 70 pounds worth of stuff to buy in the duty-free shops... I ended up buying four big chocolate bars, which is perfect since chocolate gives me migraines. I got milk chocolate though, so it probably won't be too bad. I met some pretty nice people in the airport and the plane, which was nice. I usually give people the silent treatment, since nine times out of ten I'm seated next to someone who flirts with me or tries to convert me or something. I got almost two hours of sleep on the plane before they cruelly woke us up for a too-sweet carb-filled breakfast that I didn't really want.

I had three hours in the airport in Rome, and it was an uncomfortable three hours. I tried really hard to stay awake for an hour, then tried to find a comfortable position to sleep in for an hour. They have really hard seats with fixed armrests (so no lying down), and really hard floors. I dozed for a while in a corner, but ended up with more cramps than extra energy. Then I dozed in the chairs for a while, and woke up to discover that they'd changed my gate. I hate it when they do that. So I walked to the new gate, which luckily wasn't far away. On this flight, I read the French Sunday newspaper, and then slept for about an hour. So, at this point, we're counting about nine hours of bad sleep over Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I wasn't in too good of shape. After arriving in Paris, I panicked slightly about my bag, but luckily I had just picked the wrong return belt-- there were two flights coming in from Rome, neither of which had my flight number since it was an Air France flight that Alitalia put me on. I got terrible pizza for lunch, then sat around staying awake until I got onto the (late) train. Then I crashed, and slept for two and a half hours. I ate some pasta for dinner at home, then slept for eleven hours... which brings me to today, Monday. I'm functioning slightly better now that I've taken a nap, but I'm still pretty tired.

Tomorrow (or at least quite soon) I'm going to post about non-"stuff we did" topics from Egypt, the more cultural observations. If you have any questions or curiosities, post comments and I'll explain anything you'd like to know! It's a fascinating place.

A-Z of Egyptian Stuff, plus food and shopping!

2008-04-17T11:57:00.008+02:00

Wednesday Lori dropped me off at the Egyptian Museum before she headed off to class.

The museum is enormous, and has only Egyptian stuff. It's not like the British Museum, which has fun things from all over the world: this is a haven for people who like Ancient Egypt and mummies. I had a few hours, so I read all the signs and learned neat things. Once my brain started hazing over from information overload, I played the alphabet game (find interesting things that start with every letter of the alphabet, in alphabetical order-- I usually get stuck at Q, but I finished it this time). Here's an A-Z of the Egyptian Museum.
A is for amulets: there was a whole room full of them! Most showed gods, but some were symbols (like an eye) or animals (like crocodiles).
B is for baboons: people used to keep them as pets. Some people had their baboons mummified with them when they died.
C is for chariots: they're really nifty! The wheels were really far away from the standing thingie though, that surprised me. In movies the wheels are usually pretty tight, but they were really about two feet away on each side.
D is for Daggers: they didn't look like a fun way to die.
E is for Eyes: eyes in Egyptian art are really classy.
F if for finger covers: mummies had a tendency to lose their fingernails, so they would often have little rings or gold fingers put on to keep them intact.
G is for gridlines: sometimes the artists used gridlines for their carving and forgot to get rid of them when the art part was done.
H is for hair: priests wore headdresses covered in really curly hair, some of the mummies were wearing wigs, some had their hair bleached from the chemicals...
I is for Inscriptions: hieroglyphs everywhere! They're really pretty, I think.
J is for jewelry: most was simple beadwork, but there were some substantial breastplates made of brass, and the like. Egyptian rings are often not continuous circles, they have a break so that they can be resized.
K is for kings: I saw lots of dead kings. One of the Ramses was apparently killed by his harem. They think it was poison. One guy was killed in a war, and he has a huge split in his skull.
L is for layers: important people didn't get one single coffin, they got lots.
M is for mummies: I saw lots of those: royal mummies, animal mummies, souvenir-type mummies (from ancient Egyptian tourist traps... see V is for votives), mummies of average rich people...
N is for noses, or the lack thereof: Noses are fragile, and sometimes mummies lost them. Sometimes, they got accidentally knocked off when the mummies were rewrapped.
O is for Osiris: he and Isis were quite important, so he's pictured a lot.
P is for people: there was a room full of little statues of people, kind of like dolls. There were bakers, and butchers, and builders, and other professions. Little vignettes of ancient Egyptian city life.
Q is for queens: I saw several! In the (shrunken but surprisingly well-preserved) flesh.
R is for remnants: there was a room full of bits of parchments, with both texts and pictures. Very pretty stuff.
S is for shoes: they wore flip-flops!!
T is for Tutenkhamun's gold head: it's really shiny. It may seem to be in perfect shape when you look at pictures, but some of the stones are missing on the back.
U is for underworld art: people had copies of the Book of the Dead in their tombs (kind of like manuals for the gods, should they forget where the soul was supposed to go), and special decorated shrouds and stuff.
V is for votives and fake ones: votives were little mummies of animals that tourists could buy to offer to the gods. They'd want to get well-done ones, because apparently, as long as the mummy lasted, your prayer would last. However, lots of the votives sold were fakes: either just a little piece of the animal, or no animal remains at all. Sneaky! However, the votives did obviously last a really long time, so those prayers are in good shape.
W is for wood: lots of the coffins were made of wood, many were in stone of some sort. The wood ones got painted prettily, and the stone ones were usually carved.
X is for x-rays: they find out about how the people died from x-rays, and figure out which votives were real with x-rays. Luckily there was one displayed, otherwise I would have gotten stuck at X!
Y is for yellowed papyrus scrolls: I'm amazed at how well it lasted! They're ancient. And books were all scrolls, so they can display a whole book unrolled across a wall.
Z if for the word "zeal" in the phrase "Overzealous use of this mixture [baking soda and salt which was stuffed into peoples heads to preserve them] caused her cheeks to explode." OK, so this is sort of cheating... but the sentence was just so awesome. If it makes you feel any better, I did see Zillions of tourists, and some Zeroes, and a parking Zone. And zoom lenses.

Outside the museum, you're allowed to take pictures, so here's one of some hieroglyphed columns:

After Lori had another class (I hung out with her friends and had watermelon juice... my new favorite drink) we went out for koshari with her friend Sarah. Koshari is a mixture of little round noodles, little pieces of spaghetti, rice, lentils, fried onions, chickpeas, and tomato sauce. It may not sound appetizing, but somehow it's delicious. I honestly don't like any of the ingredients alone, but together it's good.

We got fitir for dessert, which is fried dough a little like a crêpe, covered in sugar. It was delicious too, although fried dough covered in sugar can't fail to be tasty! The best part of all is that this completely Egyptian meal cost... less than a dollar. Cool.

After dinner, we met up with Lori's flatmate Sarah (yes, another Sarah) and her friend Walid, who's a real Egyptian and is also a man. That's important, because we were heading to the Khan al-Khalili, which is an enormous outdoor market. Having a man with us meant that we wouldn't be harassed and that we wouldn't be cheated, and he could help haggle when necessary. It really was great to have him there, and the market is absolutely amazing. I didn't buy too much: only a scarf (shiny green), some beads, and two pairs of earrings. One is made with lapis and turquoise and looks like lotuses, and the other is really long and dangly and has purple stones. Both are silver. The beads were the biggest purchase by volume: it was smart, because for about ten dollars I got about a hundred dollars' worth of beads (literally). However, this means that my suitcase will have about fifteen pounds of beads in it. So I'm torn between "really intelligent purchase" and "Kel, you're an idiot." Lori bought some shoes, a couple scarves, a dagger for her boyfriend, a tunic, and a talking camel for her Grandma, who likes cheesy souvenirs. Walid and the Sarahs bought some things as well, but I don't really remember what. Here's a picture of the one of the market streets, packed with people and things to buy. I think my camera lens was dusty...

And here's the cutest thing I've seen in a long time: in one of the spice shops, there was a cat asleep in one of the bins with her four kittens:

And here's a really big mosque, with the typical "Allah" in neon.

Egypt is a lot of fun :)

A Day in Geneva and a Day in Cairo!!

2008-04-16T00:19:00.015+02:00

Geneva
Saturday night was an uncomfortable overnight train ride from Angers to Lyon... I woke up every time the train stopped, every time I got uncomfortable, every time it got too hot, every time someone snored... not a good night's sleep. It was somewhat scary too: in Russia, the bunks in sleeper cars at least have a bar. In France, they have a vertical seatbelt type thing connecting to the ceiling about two feet from one end of the bed, which wouldn't do much if you were to fall. I tried to stick close to the wall and keep one hand on the belt, just in case.
The train ride from Lyon to Geneva, however, I was awake. And the view was amazing! I have never seen such a beautiful sunrise. Of course, pictures don't do it justice, but I did my best. Watching the sun rise over the Alps was truly magical.

Geneva itself was an adventure. I managed to find my hotel without mishap, which is amazing considering the fact that I couldn't find the street signs, I was just judging distances based on what Google Maps had shown me the day before. Geneva is ridiculously expensive: I got the cheapest single the internet could find for me, and it was by far the most expensive hotel room I have stayed in (about $130 for one night... ouch). After I checked in, I went to the grocery store in the train station (since everything is closed on Sundays) and got a sandwich, some milk, and a few apples for lunch. I ate in a park, then went to a lovely Mass at the basilica, which is next to the train station. I found it completely by chance, I had been expecting to search all morning for a Catholic church in Calvinist Geneva.

I did end up with two long searches, however. My two "destinations" for the day were the cathedral (which is a protestant cathedral) and the modern art museum, since I like those. And naturally, I got lost on the way to both. The hotel had given me a tiny little map of the city center, which had unlabeled gray shapes for the main attractions. Most of the streets were listed. I aimed in the right direction, but overshot the cathedral. Once I figured that out, I aimed for the museum, and missed. I found one of the large parks it was near, but after searching the entire area, there was no sign of the other park. So I got on a tram (the hotel also gave me a one day transport pass) and headed back towards the cathedral, which I then successfully found! It's at the top of a hill, is big, and looks a lot like a short basilica with cathedral spires on it:

I wanted to climb up to the towers, but the cathedral didn't take credit cards, so I had to find an ATM. That was a huge challenge. The nearest one was, naturally, at the bottom of the hill I'd just climbed. Plus about four blocks. Finally I found one, and I got the minimum amount possible, fifty francs. Fifty dollars. Back up the hill (I really hoped the climb to the towers would be worth it) and I paid for my ticket. I was surprised to get a five franc coin in return: you can tell how much money is worth in different countries by how big their coins go. Having a coin worth five dollars means that everything will be ridiculously expensive. (Whereas, in Egypt, there are bills worth about ten cents. Much more encouraging!)

Anyway, I climbed up the stairs to the towers, and luckily this is far from being the tallest cathedral I've climbed. I was barely winded at the top: it was the views that were breathtaking. Here is an all-in-one shot: you can see the spire of the cathedral, the city of Geneva, Lake Geneva, some Alps, and the famous "Jet d'eau," (Jet of water) which is a 150 meter high jet of water. I don't think it has any purpose whatsoever; it's just artistic.

Here's a picture that shows some taller Alps. I love mountains, they're my favorite type of scenery.

I walked down the other side of the hill from the cathedral, passing by chance the city hall, some old cannon, and a few mosaics. This brought me back to one of the two large parks, and I resolved to try once again to find the modern art. I stopped for a few minutes at a market on a large rocky area that looked like a dead parking lot with a few patches of grass, then set off to look for the second park, which is a block away from the museum. I wandered around for about an hour, got way off the edge of my map, and finally figured out where the second park was... it was the large patch of pavement where the market was. The map showed it as green, which it certainly was not. So frustrating, but at least I was able to find the museum!

"Find the museum." Right. So, I found the street, found the museum in a back alley, and found the entrance. There were signs everywhere pointing me to the fourth floor to get tickets, so I went to the fourth floor. The man at the desk told me that the exhibitions were free that day, and that I had to go down to the ground floor and turn left. No problem. Downstairs, I found the exhibition, and was pointed up a rickety staircase. Where I found about four installations, all freaky rather than humorous... creepy videos and large cushions with fangs and things of that nature. I did like one of the installations, which was a set of huge amps connected to screens. It was interactive, and visitors are allowed to twiddle the knobs to change the color shown on the screen, the pitch played along with it, and the frequency of the color/pitch pulse. There were five screens to play with. I'm not sure if I think that's "art."

There was a photography exhibition too, some really weird murals taken in a time-lapse mosaic type way... I don't fully understand it. When I was leaving, the lady who had given me brochures and explained about the artist asked what I thought, and the best I could come up with was, "It was impressive. Very... um... profound." I'm sure it is, to someone. This was the least impressive modern art museum I've ever been to.

After visiting the museum, I rode a random tram line until I got bored, then rode it back and walked back towards the hotel. I got some food for a hodge-podge dinner at the hotel, then went and watched TV until the early evening, when I went to sleep. After all, I had to get up around five on Monday morning to begin my journey to Egypt!

Italy in the Middle
The Geneva airport had a lot of stores, which was good: I had 23 francs left to spend (I would have lost half of it if I exchanged it for Euros) so I bought a fancy pen and a magnet. The magnet has a Swiss cow on it. My first flight of the day was to Milan, and it wasn't too bad. I had a four hour layover in Milan, which was enjoyable since I had brought Harry Potter with me. I got pizza and gelato for lunch, and even spoke a bit of Italian with people. Examples:
- Pizza con pesto, per favore."
- One slice?
- Si.
- Two eighty, please... thanks.
- Grazie! Ciao.
...
- Voglio un gelato grande menta, per favore.
- Big?
- Si... Signore, non è menta, è melone...
- Oh, sorry, I am stupid. Here is mint, you are right... Two Euros, please.
- Ho cinquanta, scusi.
- It's fine, here's your change.
- Grazie, Ciao.
I spoke Italian with them, they spoke English with me. Go figure.

Cairo, Day 1
The flight to Cairo wasn't bad, although I did feel kind of rude for attempting to ignore the guy sitting next to me, who was the type to bring very little to do, hoping to chat or sleep. I wanted to read the last ten chapters of my book. Luckily, the guy sitting on his other side was talkative, so they occupied each other. I read, slept, and then borrowed the other guy's Dutch newspaper to see what I could understand. He seemed somewhat surprised when I politely asked, "Mag ik uw krant lezen?" even though I'd been speaking French to the guy next to me and English when I got my orange juice. I love days where I get to speak four different languages :)

The airport in Cairo feels like a different world. Lots of women in hijabs and men in long robes, fifty degrees hotter than Switzerland (literally), and Arabic everywhere. Tourists have to buy a visa from one of the banks (before passport control), and it's a simple process that involves little more than standing in lines and handing over ten Euros. They even let you stick the visa in your own passport, which surprised me. Usually visas feel a lot more formal than this does. The customs people only checked men's bags, so I was waved through. I soon met up with Lori, and it was a cheerful reunion: we went to high school together, and although we'd seen each other once or twice since graduating, it had been more than a year since we'd last gotten together. She's studying abroad this semester at the American University Cairo, so she speaks some Arabic and knows Cairo quite well: she's an invaluable guide.

The taxi ride was interesting: Egyptians ignore lane markings, don't use turn signals, and honk extremely frequently. They change lanes by darting into small openings, and honk as a way of warning. It was bizarre. My first impressions were that there are a lot of mosques, lots of sand-colored buildings, and lots of honking. At Lori's apartment, we ordered Chinese food for dinner (don't judge, we're eating Egyptian food on this trip too!) and chatted for a long time.

Cairo, Day 2
Here's a sign that amused me:

Tuesday, we headed out to explore the Old Cairo, a.k.a. Coptic Cairo. It's a neighborhood of twisty streets that are almost like tunnels, full of little Christian churches and chapels, a few graveyards, and a synagogue. The synagogue was beautiful, unlike anything I'd ever seen. (Probably because I'd never been in a synagogue...) Most of the churches had icons rather than decorated walls or stained glass, and it seems like almost all of them were dedicated to Saint George!

One of the most important churches is found in the middle of an impressive looking cemetery. There were lots of large crypts such as this:

This particular church is so important because it is (supposedly) built on the site where the Holy Family lived when they took refuge in Egypt. So assuming that they got the location right, I walked on the same ground where Jesus did when he was a toddler. That's pretty awesome!

One of the, perhaps, lesser-noticed characteristics of this church is the crucifix icon, which shows Jesus over a distinctive skull and crossbones. Lori calls it the "Pirate Jesus." Easy to see why!

Nearby is the enormous Hanging Church, which is a round church dedicated to, surprise surprise, St. George. I saw more icons of St. George today than I'd seen in my entire life, and I've been to England! He really is all over the place. The church is different partially because it's round, rather than rectangular like most churches, and partially because it represents a metamorphosis in style: rather than having only icons for decoration, there are paintings on the wall and some stained glass windows. I'm not sure why it's called the "Hanging Church," though.

Our next stop was an indoor suq (market) which had good quality hand-crafted goods. I bought a pretty mug for myself, and a wooden Egyptian board game for my brother. Lori found some all-natural soaps and rose water, and I almost bought some jewelry but restrained myself. Then we went to the big mosque, which is the biggest mosque in Egypt and the third biggest mosque in the entire world. It's huge!

Lori and I were dressed appropriately: we had long sleeves and ankle-length skirts, and had covered our heads with scarves, but for some reason they still gave us tacky looking green robes to cover ourselves, and they insisted on holding our shoes for us (we'd wanted to carry them so that we wouldn't have to pay them). We agreed to have a guide, who told us about the history of the mosque and pointed out the important parts. Niches like this, along the back wall, are where the action happens.

Here you can see some of the big, open space, the courtyard in the middle, and more of the open space on the other side. A lot of people come for the five daily prayers, but there are always people around just sitting to pray, relax, or read.

In the afternoon, Lori and I went to her university to hang out for a while (and I fell in love with watermelon juice), and I sat around with her friends while she went to Arabic class. Then we both went to her choir practice, and the director let me sing, which was fun. Her choir has twice the enthusiasm of my French university's choir.
For dinner, we wanted to go to a relatively fancy Lebanese restaurant in the neighborhood, called Taboula. It's quite popular, so the earliest reservation we could get was 10:30. To tide us over, we ordered McFlurrys from McDonalds... delivery. Everyone delivers in Cairo. The restaurant was worth the wait, though! We all got hummus, and I ordered a plate of mixed pickles (the picked eggplant, zucchini, and carrots were awesome, the olives were normal, and the cauliflower and garlic were neon pink for some reason). Sara (one of Lori's flatmates) got a chicken dish, and I ordered lamb. There was fresh bread and cheese for everyone. It was a delicious, and incredibly filling, meal.

So that's that, my first day in Cairo! 97°, lots of culture, lots of fun.

Stuff 'n Things

2008-04-12T14:40:00.003+02:00

[Technically, I suppose, that "'n" should be written "'n'" but it would look funny. Not quite as funny as "'n,'" (but perhaps I should have put the comma thusly: "'n',") however.]

So stuff has happened lately. And things, too.
- I made homemade Samoas (those Girl Scout cookies that are covered in caramel and coconut and chocolate... delicious).
- I registered for classes for the Fall semester, and I'm really excited about my schedule. It's going to be a lot of fun.
- I went to a movie (Bienvenue chez les ch'tis) and it was hilarious. My new favorite French movie. I like it when non-American countries make feel good movies with happy endings. And it cracks me up when they then say, "What eez thees! Zee movie 'as airned millions of 'uros! Ay vonder how zis eez possibul..." Duh, you made a movie people could enjoy as well as respect.
- I think I might have dislocated one of my toes... it's happened before: it seems to move badly in the socket until I tug it around a bit, and then it ends up sore and bruised for a couple of days. No idea how, but this is about the third time that it's happened. It's the fourth toe on my right foot, so it's not one of the really important toes either... mystery.
- Natalie (who's from Scotland) bought my bike (since I never ride it and hers got stolen) and we spent a while chatting and it was great fun.
- I marinated a chicken leg in soy sauce and spices, and cooked it, and filled my kitchen with smoke, but it was delicious.
- I went shopping all over downtown looking for a present for Lori, and I found one.
- I bought sunscreen, which was very expensive but came with a free cheapo backpack. It cost about $18 for a small bottle. I'll figure out something to do with the backpack.
- I packed my suitcase.

So why, you may wonder, did I need a present for Lori, sunscreen, and a packed suitcase? Because tonight I'm leaving for Geneva, and Monday I'm flying from the Geneva airport to Cairo to see Lori!!! Today's post was written indoors, with rain and wind and clouds outside. The next one... sun and sand and Egyptians. I'm so excited!

Quavers and Minims and Crotchets... oh my!

2008-04-05T20:25:00.004+02:00

Well, my plan was "do laundry Saturday, it can be put off one more day." But then last night, choir practice was started off with, "If anyone's interested, there's a master class in Nantes tomorrow with a famous English choir director, and we'll carpool if you're interested in coming." Well, of course I was interesting in coming!

Today five of us (me wearing my last clean shirt, of course) set off for Nantes, which is about an hour's drive away. The drive is really pretty, especially since everything's in bloom now. But I was absolutely shocked by how expensive it is to drive in France. Not only is gas more expensive (I converted the 1.35 Euros per liter to $2.16 per liter, which is about $7.50 a gallon!) but the toll was 7.60 Euros! That's more than ten dollars each way. Ridiculous. As we were chatting about driving laws and prices and such, Anne Emmanuelle told me that her drivers' ed is costing about a thousand Euros. $1,600 for drivers' ed?!? That seems crazy to me. But they don't have a "wait until you're 18 and learn from Mom option" like we do in the States. We also shared blonde/Belgian/Russian jokes, which was fun. Do you know why Belgians (apparently) bend over constantly when they do their shopping? They're looking for low prices.

The master class was really fun. The director's name is Ralph Allwood, and he's the director of music at Eton College. He spoke mostly in English, with interpretation when necessary. He spoke about the history of English choral music and composers, and to illustrate it he worked with us on a handful of pieces. The people from our choir sang as well as everyone else, which is good. Especially since they'd practiced the music before and we were sight-reading!

What I the linguist found most interesting though (since the music was a bit below my level) was when he said the word "quaver" in passing, referring to an eighth note. I went up to him afterwards and asked what all the notes were called, since I'd never head this set of names. Here is a note-name guide, in American English, British English (with pronunciation when I think it's necessary), and French (with (pretty much) literal translation):
whole note---breve (breeeve)---ronde (round)
half note---minim---blanche (white)
quarter note---crotchet (crotch-et)---noir (black)
eighth note---quaver---croche (hooked)
sixteenth note---demi-quaver---double croche (double hooked)
Isn't that neat?? He thinks that the American system makes a lot more sense, and I agree. But what fun Scrabble words those are!

In other news, it's going to be impossible for me to write my paper in a mere 500 words. I'm going to try to keep it under 1000 though! However, about 50% of the words in written French are function words (helping verbs, pronouns, and so on) so in a way, I'll be right on target.