Winter Wonderland

Well, I survived the semester more or less successfully and now find myself in the Austrian alps with a fair amount of time on my hands since I’m not much of a skier (and I really don’t have the appropriate outerwear for these kinds of activities – somehow snowpants didn’t make it through my final round of packing cuts…). So while my friends are outside skiing, I’m loving the opportunity to sit inside and type up some blog entries and emails. Granted, I can’t post or send these things just yet – we don’t have wifi here, so this will be a few days old by the time I actually put it up.

We do have just about everything else I could want though – like free breakfast with unlimited hot chocolate :). The hotel is actually really nice, especially because we have the place entirely to ourselves now. And by “ourselves” I mean 32 Notre Dame and St. Mary’s students, as well as one guy’s family. I knew (at least vaguely) the 3 other ND girls and 5 ND guys ahead of time, but I didn’t know any of the St. Mary’s girls, so I’m definitely meeting new people.

To get to the Alps, I used my Eurail Pass. After much debate and calculation, I went with a 1 month Global Pass, which gives me “free” access to train travel in 21 European countries for one month (30 days). I say “free” because 1. I had to pay 535 euro for this rail pass and 2. Sometimes you have to make reservations for trains – overnight and high-speed trains, but thankfully these reservations are usually only 3-4 euro each. So I started my pass on Monday night with a night train from Paris to Munich. That was my first time on a night train and it was definitely an interesting experience. I, being a cheapskate, naturally only paid the 4 euro to reserve a normal seat instead of the like 30 euro or whatever it would have been to reserve a sleeping car. So I was in a compartment of 6 seats – 2 sets of 3 seats facing each other. Of course, I ended up with a middle seat – not exactly ideal for a nearly 12 hour train ride. However, when the train pulled out of the station in Paris, there were only 4 people in my compartment, and soon after we left, the other girl left to go sit with friends in another compartment, so there were only 3 of us, which was excellent. My compartment mates were a French guy my age who studies in Lille and was on his way to visit his girlfriend in Zagreb and a grown Turkish man going to Munich to spend Christmas with his father whom he hadn’t seen for 40 years. The French guy spoke fairly good English and also a little bit of German, but the Turkish guy only knew a few words of English and neither French nor German, which made it basically impossible to include him in conversation and after awhile we gave up entirely.

The French guy and I had a great conversation though – in French and in English. We covered American politics, urban planning, and the history of money among other topics. He described himself as politically left of the French left, which means he was a communist. I wish I had asked him if he identified with a particular party because I just learned about the extreme left in my French politics class. Fun fact: France has 4, yes 4, communist parties; 1 standard Communist Party which is Stalinist, and 3 distinct Trotskyite parties. But anyway, this kid was fairly liberal to say the least, and really like to hear himself talk about all of the things wrong with the world today, so we had a fairly lengthy conversation. One of the things we really argued over was his critique of the American university system as far too expensive. He also very openly scoffed at my copy of the European edition of the Wall Street Journal.

At any rate, our conversation eventually tapered off around 1am and I tried to get some sleep, which went fairly well until we picked up 2 more passengers in my car. A Slovenian man (who was also fluent in German) and his like 6 year old daughter. So we were up to 5 passengers in the 6 passenger car and I had to go back to my middle seat between the Turkish man and the Slovenia man for the rest of the night, so the last 7 hours of the ride were significantly less comfortable than the first 5. We made several stops in the middle of the night, including one really long one during which half of our train split off and continued to Berlin and then Moscow and my half of the train had to wait to join up with another train coming from Amsterdam, but the train from Amsterdam had been delayed because of weather, so we ended up delayed too. We got to Munich about a full hour later than we had been expected too, but fortunately I hadn’t reserved my next train, so I didn’t miss any necessary connections, unlike my new French friend, who had to find a new train to Zagreb…

Figuring out the next leg of my journey was a little confusing. I knew what train I wanted to be on from Munich, but I wasn’t sure if I could just get on to it with just my rail pass and without a ticket. Turns out I could, which I learned fairly easily from a woman in the ticket office. So I went to the train and walked into a second-class car, only to find that all of the seats were marked “RESERVIAT”, which I took to mean they were reserved/people had tickets for those specific seats even though most of them were unoccupied at the time. I walked all the way through all of the cars of the train looking for a seat that didn’t say “Reserviat”, to no avail. So I was like, great, the woman in the ticket office must have misunderstood me, and I really did need to get a ticket/reservation. But there wasn’t enough time for me to go get a ticket and still make that train, which was the latest one I had looked up info for in advance, so I went and tried to ask an older train employee on the platform where I could sit if I didn’t have a reservation. He spoke little English, but I was pretty sure he understood and told me to go to the last car. So I grabbed a seat at the very back, still nervous that I wasn’t allowed to be there. I was also nervous because the stop I was getting off at wasn’t listed as one of the stops for the train (turns out it was just a small town and the train didn’t list all of the stops on the platform, but for awhile I was worried that I might wind up in Bologna since that was the direction of the train listed…).

But I had only been sitting for about two minutes when two guys my age walked into the car, clearly also looking for non-reserved seats. Moreover, one of them was wearing a hat with the Georgetown bulldog on it and the other one had a nalgene covered in stickers in English. So I went ahead and correctly inferred that they were Americans. Turns out they had the same kind of rail pass as me and were also trying to figure out where they could sit, so we bonded over that and figured if we were wrong, we’d at least all be wrong together.

That train took me to the small Austrian town of Wörgl, where I had 45 minutes to enjoy a wonderful kebab sandwich and walk around just the little square area around train station, which was just enough time to realize that everything is cheaper outside of Paris and that if I had waited and just bought a winter coat there, I could have saved like 25 euro… but I’m very happy with my own new coat.

After Wörgl, I got my third and last train that took me to my final destination: Kirchberg in Tirol. There was no one waiting for me since I told them pretty last minute when I’d be getting, so I had to call my own cab (in German), which was an experience. I ended up sharing a cab with this other woman who had been on my train, and after we dropped her off I had to have the cab driver turn around and take me to an ATM because the cab ride was going to cost 16 euro!! By the time we eventually got to my hotel, I understood why it cost 16 euro… the hotel is halfway up a mountain, which is gorgeous, but a little treacherous to get to – icy hairpin turns kind of treacherous….

But I got in, took a wonderful nap and shower and then got to enjoy a dinner cooked for me with friends, so all of the travel was well worth it!

Best Academic Decision Ever

So for my French class we have to give a ten minute oral presentation, but it can be on pretty much anything. I was going to do mine on one of the professor's suggested topics, something on the environment that I would actually find really interesting, but a topic which I would feel compelled to spent a significant amount of time researching. But a girl in my class today gave a presentation on the bicycle because, well, she's from Holland and they love bicycles there. Her presentation and a Brazilian's presentation on the Rio and the 2016 Olympic games have been by far the most interesting ones, so I was like, hmmm, what would be something interesting (and not too research-intensive) that I could do? Something that I, as an American, love and already know a lot about? Answer: sports. duh. Why did I not think of this earlier? So my first thought was to give it on whether or not (and how) the BCS system should be reformed, but then I realized that would be far too complicated to explain. Plus, I love college basketball so much more. So what question could I ask about college basketball? What controversy could I explore? NBA draft rules of course!! Should players be required to go to college before the NBA? Who are the winners and losers of that system? Will the new rules stay in place after the current collective bargaining agreement ends after the 2010-2011 season? So many questions!

And that is how I decided to give a 10 minute oral presentation in French on NBA draft eligibility rules.

Life is good.

However, speaking of academic decisions, I am supposed to register for second semester courses on Friday afternoon, but seeing as they haven't posted the course schedules yet, I'm having kind of a hard time figuring out what to take... The lack of administrative organization here is absolutely baffling sometimes.

First Semester Travels and Visits: A post in pictures

Ok, this post is for those of you who are not facebook users - a brief look at my semester's travels in pictures. Hopefully this gives you a general idea of my adventures until I finally get around to putting together a Picasa album that everyone can see. We begin with my trip to Germany - we stayed in Nuremberg, but took trains into Munich on Friday and Saturday.

Oktoberfest! We made it (with a little help from ND in Innsbruck friends)! From left: AJ, Jim, me, and Meghan. Beer and a pretzel - we covered all the essentials. Prost!

We spent Saturday sightseeing in Munich. This is the Chinescher Turm in the Englischer Garten, which is one of the largest city parks in the world.

Nuremberg was an awesome city to walk around- they rebuilt it in a very traditional German style after the war.

This was a really elaborate fountain in Nuremberg that I'm really glad I insisted on seeing. My fellow travelers had some doubts about how interesting a "Fountain of Marriage" could be, but it was well worth the excursion. It depicted about stages of marriage in larger than life-sized figures. Here I'm standing in front of what is evidently the phase where the wife lets herself go and just gorges on food, much to the husband's dismay, haha.

Trip 2: Barcelona!! I met Heather and Tina for a weekend in Barcelona. This is the Sagrada Familia church in Barcelona and it's probably the craziest piece of architecture I've ever seen. It's been under construction for more than 100 years and it's not even completed yet! The architect, Gaudi, went insane trying to finish it. Fortunately, he had already designed a bunch of really cool buildings all over Barcelona before he became consumed by this one.

Me outside of Sagrada Familia - if you look really closely you can see an entire orchestra of statues around the doorway. They even have a bassoon player! I have to admit, I never thought I would see a statue of someone playing the bassoon.

Here's a view of a lot of the city of Barcelona behind me. It was a very strange city, in my opinion, but I thought hearing the Catalan dialect was really interesting. Catalan Spanish is about as close to French as it is to Castilian Spanish, so I could read all the signs about as well as Heather, who speaks Castilian.

Meghan and I at Sacre Coeur representing Walsh Hall in Paris (wearing our hundredth anniversary shirts). We were also trying to avoid the creepy immigrant men who try to force you buy friendship bracelets by forcibly tying them onto your wrists. I've discovered the key is to not make eye contact - once they've seen the whites of your eyes, you better start saying "non merci" repeatedly and book it in the other direction...

Walshies visiting in Paris! Caroline (Rome), Me, Tina (London), and Meghan. I'm assuming I don't need to clarify the background of this one..
Reunited in London! Misha (London), Me, Tina (London), and Heather (Toledo) in front of Parliament. Two other Notre Dame girls just happened to be on the bridge at the same time, so they took this picture for us.

Antoinette (Dublin), Heather and I in front of Tower Bridge (often mistaken for London Bridge).

Here's me and AJ (Oxford) on the boat cruise on the Thames - you can see Big Ben and Parliament over my shoulder!

Armistice Day

I only had one class last week because all of our Wednesday classes were cancelled in honor of Armistice Day! I took advantage of that by going to the Armistice Day celebrations at the Arc de Triomphe, which were, in a word, bizarre. President Sarkozy took this opportunity to try to demonstrate the strength of Franco-German relations. Thus, the ceremonies were presided over by both Sarkozy and Chancellor Merkel. This would have been unimaginable even a few years ago (I think it makes a huge difference that there are no longer any living veterans of WWI), but still struck me as very strange. There were French and German troops ringing the Arc, and perhaps I underestimate the power of new-found EU-unity, but I would think that that would make the French remember previous times that German troops have marched down the Champs Elysees - and not in such a friendly manner. As Angela Merkel helped Sarkozy light the flame on the tomb of the unknown soldier under the Arc, I couldn't help but think of the fact that that French soldier was probably killed by a German soldier. And odd time and way to celebrate Franco-German unity.

Another strange part of the ceremony for me was how quiet it was. People rarely cheered, most didn't sing the national anthem out loud. I suppose this was a fairly somber occasion, but it still was eerily quiet at times.

Here's the New York Times' coverage of the event: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/12/world/europe/12france.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=sarkozy%20armistice&st=cse

And here are a few of my pictures from the ceremony:

On a somewhat related topic, the EU will be picking its first-ever president next Thursday and the current Prime Minister of Belgium (Herman Van Rompuy) appears to be the front-runner, having the endorsement of Sarkozy and Merkel. I figure this is a great time to be living in a house full of Belgians :)

My Least Favorite French Word

Without a doubt, my least favorite French word (at least this week) is "une grève". It means "a strike" as in a worker's strike, and it's used entirely too frequently in the French language. This week, the workers of the RER B train line went on strike for the second time this fall. The RER B, unfortunately is the closest metro stop (Cite Universitaire is the name of the stop) to where I live. The next closest stop (Porte d'Orleans) is about a 15 minute walk or a 5 minute tram ride (but waiting for the tram usually takes about ten minutes, so they come out about even). The strike started this Monday, but thankfully I've had next to no classes this week, so I wasn't too affected by the strike for the first few days. Apparently the workers are up in arms because there is no longer a change in drivers at Gare du Nord, so now they have to go all the way to Charles de Gaulle (to me it seems like they just made the line more efficient, but apparently that's unacceptable). At any rate, the number of trains running on the line was cut by at least 50%, if not more, for the first few days. This has major consequences seeing as the RER B serves more than 800,000 commuters per day.

That is all merely background information to help set the stage for the tale of my one hour commute to class on Thursday morning. On Thursday mornings I have an 8:00AM class, which is atrocious enough for me, especially now that sunrise is around 7:55AM, but it's only once a week, so it's really not that terrible. Anyway, Wednesday night I checked the website Le Monde (newspaper with only about the 3rd widest circulation in France, but it with probably the largest international distribution) to get an update on the strike and read an article that said the unions were calling off the strike for the next day, so I assumed that meant I could follow my normal routine. So I show up at the RER station at 7:30ish, which is usually plenty of time, only to find out that the strike or "mouvement sociale" had not, in fact, stopped. However, the tv monitor in the station informed me that the next train was coming at 7:39, not too bad. So I decided to stay and wait for that train. Unfortunately, while I was standing there, the time on the monitor kept getting pushed back and pushed back, so by the time the train actually arrived, it was 7:46 - I was definitely going to be late for class...

But as the train pulled up, I realized I had another problem. The train was already bursting full. There was no way for me to cram myself into a car. All of us waiting on the platform just kind of looked at each other and ran back and forth looking for any doorway that had even the tiniest free space. Nothing. So the train left, having gained possibly 5 passengers from our platform (turned out one of those lucky 5 was a girl in my class who recognized me). The next train was scheduled to come in 3 minutes, so I made the admittedly poor choice of waiting for that train, figuring that if it was coming so soon after the other one, it would be less crowded. In hindsight, this was extremely poor logic on my part. It was just as impossibly full. So, at 7:55 I finally gave up on the RER B and ran outside, only to have just missed a tram... At this point, I was strongly considering giving up on going to class, but classes are 2 hours long, I was already awake, and I wanted to go to the library after class, so I waited 5 minutes for a tram, got to the metro at Porte d'Orleans, at which point I still had 10+ metro stops to wait through. I got to class at 7:30, just as the student presentation portion of class ended, which was ideal. I talked to the professor afterward and he was really understanding - basically he said as long as we got there before 9:45, he'd count us as present. What a lovely man.

Thus, "la greve" is not one of my favorite French words at the moment...

I'm off!

Yet again, I am spending my weekend out of the City of Light. Early tomorrow morning, I will board a plane to head off to the land of Shakespeare, Churchill, the Beatles, Sean Connery, Harry Potter... you get the gist, even if you missed the movie reference.

In London, I will be meeting my friends Tina and Misha, who are both studying there for the semester (and both fellow residents of Walsh Hall), as well as friends Heather (Toledo, Spain), Lauren (Madrid), Antoinette (Dublin), AJ (Oxford), plus Meghan and Jim from Paris, not to mention about 150 other Notre Dame students.* What brings us all to London this weekend, you wonder? Why Halloween of course! That wonderfully American tradition that still seems to baffle the rest of the world. Europeans seem to have caught on the the costume idea quite nicely, but most unfortunately the FREE CANDY aspect still eludes them as far as I can tell.

To fill the trick-or-treating void that those of us abroad are feeling right now, the students of the ND London Program (our largest program with about 120 students) have organized a riverboat Halloween party on the Thames for Saturday night. Quite a few of us in other European cities this semester considered this the only motivation we needed to pick this weekend to see the sights of London, so we will all be converging on the city this weekend, probably running into old classmates at Big Ben (this is surprisingly not far-fetched at all - last weekend I ran into groups of Notre Dame and St. Mary's students on the Eiffel Tower purely by coincidence).

For now though, I guess I should return to my looming exposé on environmental inequalities in Gary, Indiana. Since this is an oral presentation, I'm strongly considering giving my French classmates a cultural introduction to Gary either through a rendition of the Music Man song or through a highly inappropriate, but extremely illustrative video clip called "GARY INDIANA murder capitol of the world."

*In a bizarre coincidence, one of my friends from Sciences-Po, Gosia, from Poland, will also be in London this weekend, so I may get to see her too!

It's been a long, long time

Hello faithful followers,

If you still exist, then you are indeed very faithful because I have been absent for quite some time now. My apologies. I promise I will go back and fill you in on my trips to Bavaria and Barcelona, but doing that all at once seems rather daunting. So first, I will fill you in on my most recent exploits, academic and non.

This past weekend I had a wonderful "Notre Dame family" experience. The ND Club of Paris (yes, such a thing exists) sponsored a game watch for the ND-USC game on Saturday night. The club president and his wife brought their "sling box" which allowed us to watch NBC's broadcast of the game exactly as we would have seen it in the states - commercials and all.

As a side note -I realized during the course of the game, that I'll be missing an entire year of US ad campaigns. Granted, that's not something I plan to lose any sleep over, but just something I really hadn't thought about until I noticed that I didn't want to pull my hair out during commercial breaks in the first half because the commercials were all new to me (but man, by the fifth time they showed that Gatorade commercial...).

We were a very respectable group of 14 Notre Dame fans - 4 adults, one 6 year old boy, 8 current students, and one recent grad. It was great to just hang out in a house and watch the game. If the game watch food had been chips, salsa, and coke instead of baguette, cheese, and wine, you could have convinced me we were anywhere in the United States. As for the game itself, well, it was a valiant effort - I'm glad we can say we made it a game. I also can't imagine how frustrated I would have been following that game just with a GameTracker - there were so many reviews and changed calls and whatnot.

Since the game ended at about 1:30am Parisian time, all of us young folks just stayed at this very nice couple's home with makeshift mattresses and padding. They had enough camping gear that all 9 of us had reasonably comfortable places to sleep - but I had been willing to sleep on just a hardwood floor to see that game, so anything else was a bonus. In the morning they made fabulous apple cinnamon pancakes for us and we got to spend some more time with their kids. Peter (the 6 year old) and I learned a lot about transportation that morning, let me tell you. For example, did you know that George Stephenson invented the train? Yeah, neither did I...

And now, I will soon be headed off to the WOS Bar, which I mentioned in an earlier post as the bar where we watched the ND-Michigan game (I'm trying not to pay too much attention to the fact that we've lost the only two games that I've actually been able to watch...). Anyway, I go to the WOS bar nearly every Monday for Pub Quiz night. Pierre, the bartender, asks questions in both French and English for 5 different categories: News/Current Events, Geography, Sports, Music, and General. Questions range from the absurd for all: "How many gallons of milk does the average cow produce in its lifetime" (answers within like a 1,000 gallon range were acceptable); to the absurd for Americans: half of the music questions; to the absurd for Frenchies: "What is the name of the most elite group of colleges in the United States, how many are there, and what are their names?" (we had to help Pierre out with the answer to this one - there was much confusion between Penn State and UPenn).

We have consistently placed third or second, but who knows, tonight could be our night of fame and glory as victors of the WOS Bar Pub Quiz!

Travel Updates!

So, thus far, I've pretty much just stayed in Paris. I had a mini-expedition to Fontainebleau this past weekend to see the chateau that's out there, but it's only a half hour train ride away and still in the same "state" as Paris, which is called Ile-de-France.

That is all about to change.

This Thursday (tomorrow!) I depart for Germany to experience Oktoberfest! I'm going with two friends from Paris, Meghan and Jim, and then we're meeting my friend AJ, who is just starting his year abroad at Oxford. Together, will be staying at the oh so fabulous "Lette'm Sleep Hostel" in Nuremberg. Yes, that is actually how they spell their name... But in all seriousness, it looks like a pretty nice place as far as hostels go. We're staying in Nuremberg because even weeks/months ago when we started looking in to going to Oktoberfest, the hostels in Munich itself were outrageously expensive. So this way, we will get to experience two cities - we'll commute into Munich Friday and Saturday via rail. Fortunately, Bavaria has one of the best (and cheapest) regional train systems in Europe.

Then, next weekend, I will be meeting a bunch of friends in Barcelona! Heather, studying for the semester in Toledo, will be coming down to celebrate her birthday!! My friends Antoinette and Tina will also be there, as well as an entire group of Londoners (well, ND students studying in London, that is).

Finally, I already have plans to spend Halloween weekend in London. It sounds like nearly all of the ND students in Europe this semester are flocking to London to celebrate this holiday, which is generally not understood in most other countries. I only wish it coincided with the ND-USC football game, because I should definitely be able to see our game when I'm in London.

Well, that's all for now - I'm off to enjoy the wonders of having 7 hours of class in one day!

Deep Breaths

I don't think I have ever stared at my computer screen as intensely as I did just now. I swear I nearly went into cardiac arrest waiting for ESPN's GameCast page for the ND-Purdue game to refresh and tell me whether we converted on 4th and goal from the 2 with 29 seconds left when we were down by 4 points.

Tracking the game via GameCast, while better than nothing, is definitely an act in frustration. Basically you can just follow a play-by-play, so you have no idea what's happening with calls, injuries, coaching decisions, and an infinite amount of other intangibles.

And yet, I considered it worthwhile enough to cope with this frustration for 3.5 hours from 2:00 to 5:30am.

I also find myself rather hoarse... ok, don't worry, I wasn't actually yelling at my computer screen like a maniac. (I would never disrupt my Belgian neighbors with such shenanigans). On the contrary, I'm coming down with some kind of cold that has completely wiped out my voice. At first, I was concerned that I might have la grippe A, or, as we Americans call it, the swine flu. So, as is my custom, I searched the web to try to help self-diagnose myself.

I found this website particularly helpful: http://www.doihavetheswineflu.com/

Go Irish, beat Huskies!

General Life Updates

I've been slacking quite a bit on the blogging (as several of you have brought to my attention...) so here's a nice long post of bullet points to bring you up to speed:

• The Welcome Programme - international students had classes for a little over a week in groups of about 15 students. I was the only American in my group (probably because I was, by some error, placed at level 4 of 5 in French and we Americans are not so good with the foreign languages, what with nearly everyone speaking English and all). Anyway, I met some great people through this group - a couple of German girls, an Australian, a Canadian, a Polish girl, a Greek girl raised in London, an Italian boy who studies in Ireland, and the most adorable Chinese girl with Pippi Longstocking-style pigtails, as well as a few others.

• I felt very out of my league in this class - I just didn't have anywhere near the vocabulary of the other students, so I've changed my level of French to 3 for my semester-long course which I think will prove to be a very good decision.

• This was probably the first time I've ever felt exotic as an American. Being "the" American in the class was kind of intimidating but also really cool. Discussions in the class were always very interesting. Hearing a room full of students from all over Europe argue about whether there is a definable "European identity" as a result of the EU was fascinating.

• Almost all of the other students in my class were trilingual, which was part of what intimidates me. They all know their native language, be it Polish or German or Italian, plus French, and then for most of them, their English is about as good as my French - or better. When we would talk about this, they'd say how lucky I am to have it so easy since English is my native language. I tried to convey that I don't entirely agree with that sentiment. Yes, it certainly is much easier for me to converse with a larger number of people - and almost anywhere in the world for that matter. But it also comes with the unhappy consequence of being judged as less intelligent (and to a certain extent, I'd say that's a valid judgement). So I'm intimidated by them, but I'm starting to realize that they're somewhat intimidated by me. They all really want to improve their English, but are very self conscious about speaking it because they think they're terrible when they're not at all. At any rate, I'm very glad I've met this people - they've made my experience here much more interesting already.

On to the real classes, which really started this week:

• Monday 14:45-16:45, Espace Mondial lecture: This is shaping up to be my least favorite course - an opinion which my Polish friend shares. The course is trying to so hard to teach us everything, that it in fact seems as though it will likely teach us nothing. The class is in a huge lecture hall and while the professor is very nice and tries to crack jokes (which I can sometimes even recognize the humor of), two hours is way too long for me to focus enough to understand what he's saying from so far away. I think this Monday I'll sit near the front with a coffee and see how that goes.

• Monday 17:00-19:00, Histoire de l'Environnement XVIIe-XXe siecle: I think this class is going to be great! 1. Almost all of the readings are in English, so I'll at least know what's going on when I get to class, which will make it all that much easier to understand what's going on in class. 2. The professor is relatively young, so he's not yet a jaded snobby French man - always a plus. 3. There are a decent number of other foreign exchange students in the class (probably about 5 out of 22 or so), and the professor is very aware that we exist and may need him to slow down a bit. 4. I am still the only American in this class, which will make it that much easier for me to participate because, let's face it, the US has a very interesting and controversial role in environmental history. I have a feeling that the Russian boy and I will both get called out a fair bit this semester. 5. My expose, 10 minute oral presentation, is on Gary, Indiana. I kid you not. Specifically it's on a book called Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana. I wanted to pick Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation, but someone had already picked it... bummer.

• Wednesday 14:45-15:45, La Vie Politique Francaise d'aujourd'hui Lecture: This lecture is only an hour because prior to coming to class we are expected to watch an hour-long presentation that is posted online. The online lecture is synchronized with a PowerPoint and downloadable documents that appear as they are mentioned by the professor. It's a really cool set-up. This class is entirely exchange students, and the professor really caters to us, which is much appreciated.

• Wednesday 17:00-19:00, Vie Politique, Conference (discussion session/tutorial): Again, given that this class is all exchange students, it seems like it will be manageable. My assignments include a short oral commentary on a political cartoon, an outline of a paper, a paper, and an expose (that lovely 10 minute presentation these Frenchies are so fond of) on "Les altermondialistes en France," which, fortunately, I have until December 16th to learn about...

• Wednesday 19:15 -21:15 (yes I have class until 9:15PM) Espace Mondial Conference (discussion group): Ok, this is the class that has me quaking in metaphorical boots. We did not introduce ourselves. The professor made one reference to there being 4 international students in the class and quickly moved on, speaking rapid French non-stop for two hours. I'd say I understood somewhere between 50 and 60 percent of what he was saying. Unfortunately, it seemed like I was always missing the most crucial part of what he was saying. For example, I understood that he was talking about our using English sources for our assignments, but for the longest time I couldn't figure out if he was in favor of this or against it. He seemed like the kind of Frenchman who might be against English sources, but once he started singing the praises of Foreign Affairs, I deduced that he thought it was a good idea for us to use some sources in English. My other main concern is that a significant portion of our grade for this class is based on maps. And were not just talking "name all the countries of the world" kind of maps - thanks to Sporcle.com, I'll be able to handle that. No, we're talking about creating maps that show "the role of multinational corporations" or "identity tensions in the post-Soviet world"or "the power of China." How do I map those?? Oh goodness. This will definitely be interesting. The good news is I only have to pick two out of ten. The bad news is they all seem equally impossible. Joy.

• Thursday 8:00-10:00 Architecture et Urbanisme: This class is probably going to win out as my favorite class of the semester. The professor is awesome, if slightly deaf. The class is about 50-50 foreigners to Frenchies. My expose is only 5 minutes instead of 10. And the other major assignment for the class consists of taking photographs which demonstrate major architectural principles. So aside from requiring me to get up at like 6:30 in the morning, this class is going to be great!

• Saturday 10:30-12:00, Basketball, Girls Beginner to Intermediate: Yes, you read that right. I have a 2 credit course in basketball. The credits obviously won't transfer for anything, but that suits me because I'll probably miss a decent number of sessions to travel. I have my first class tomorrow morning, so I'll let you know how that goes!

Coming soon to "Life Less Ordinary":

• ... and then I went to the Louvre
• "La Grippe A"
• French Footwear
• Am I in a library or Gringotts?
• My favorite metro advertisements

Get excited!

Laundry Day

Currently (when I wrote this anyway), I am sitting on the floor of our laundry room, which in the somewhat eerie basement of the FBL. It's not quite like Walsh Hall where you can leave items of clothing drying for a week and know they'll still be there (or at least just be in the donation bin if SJ's been through recently), so I'm sitting down here while my clothes wash and taking the opportunity to do some handwritten blogging.

I have some company - Jim happened to be down here too - he's enjoying the riveting read of Strunk & White (mostly because he left his novel in my purse - that's what you get for having other people lug your stuff around for you. A related side note for guys studying abroad - get over yourselves and just invest in the man purse. You'll be so much happier and you'll blend in better.) There's another guy down here too - probably just a few years older than us - I call him "the Whistler." He lives on my floor you see, and is always whistling. At an impressively loud volume, I might add.. His generally cheerful a nature is also demonstrated by his regularly flamboyant choice of pants. Today, he's sporting Hawaiian swimtrunks, which I'll led slide given that it's clearly his laundry day. However, I can find no excuse for the vertically striped rainbow shorts that he was wearing in our kitchen the other night...

Moving on, laundry here is very expensive. Our building gives us a pretty good deal, but that "good deal" is 4euro per washer with free drying - that's about triple what I pay in Walsh :( But, as I said, that's a lower price than all of the street places I've seen and the convenience definitely can't be beat.

Another cultural note on laundry. Dryer sheets do not exist outside of North America. They are not sold in France and no one will have any idea what you are talking about if you try to explain the concept to them. People I've met from Australia are likewise flabbergasted by the concept. Personally, I don't know how these people deal with static cling, but I guess that's just one less expense.

Football, the real kind

Last week I tried to see the ND home opener at a Canadian sports bar, but was thwarted by the inordinate number of "football" matches that were not football at all in the proper sense of the term.

So for this week's game against Michigan, I did my research much more carefully. There can be no mistakes when it comes to the ND-Michigan game.

I found a wonderful website called "Allomatch.com" that keeps track of all of the sports bars in Paris and what they will be showing each night. The bars get reviews based on how consisent they are and I found one showing the ND game with 4 stars, which means they've shown 500+ games with out making a mistake in their schedule. This bar also already indicated that at least 1 Michigan fan will be in attendance... pitty the fool.

Even this was not enough to fully convince me that I would be able to see this game (I was concerned because the bar's website said they had Dance nights on Saturdays), so I contacted them through their website and just received the following email back:

Hi Julie,

the website needs to be updated.

We will be showing Notre-Dame/Michigan this saturday.

See you then!

Wos Bar Team!

And they will indeed see me then, which is very, very soon!!

GO IRISH! BEAT WOLVERINES!!

"Is that a mummy on the bench across the street?" and other musings while wandering Paris

For the past week or so, I've spent a fair amount of time just wandering Paris on foot. I usually start from my school, Sciences Po, in the heart of the 7th arrondissement (district or neighborhood), pick a direction and go. Generally, I'm motivated by a need to find cheap food. The 7th is a gorgeous district, but super expensive. So I frequently walk for 20 minutes to find a place where I can just take a sandwich to go (à emporter).

I've discovered a wonderful hole-in-the wall panini and crepe stand that will probably keep me alive this year. Wedged in between a McDonald's (or simply "MacDo" as the French call it) and an internet cafe, this place, which is so small that I'm not even entirely sure it has a name, offers a panini and a drink for only 3 euro! This is an incredible price for anywhere in Paris, as a panini alone usually costs at least 4 euro. So, when any of you come to visit, expect at least one trip to "my panini place" - there's even a park across the street where we can sit and eat our wonderfully cheap sanwiches.

Once I receive my metro pass, my search for cheap food won't be quite so difficult, but I probably won't get that until the middle of this week at the earliest. The pass for students is called the Carte ImagineR; it gives you unlimited metro/bus/tram access for a year and costs about 300 euro. As expensive as that is, it's definitely my cheapest transportation option, and I've definitely been limiting my trips around the city while I'm still buying paper tickets for individual trips.

That said, I've still managed to see quite a bit of the city on foot, which is much more interesting anyway. Here are a couple of the amusing things I've walked past:

Is that a buckeye? Between this and seeing an OSU fan at the bar for the OSU-USC game, I'm beginning to feel like I never left Ohio...

Or maybe I'm actually in Egypt...

Chalk one more up for the "Fail" column

Soooo..... about the address I just gave you.... it was missing a very important piece. Use this address, please:

601 Fondation Biermans-Lapotre

9A Boulevard Jourdan

Cite Universitaire de Paris

Paris 75014

A Note on the Fonts

I'm sorry that the font changes kind of erratically in the last two post. I can't figure out why it's doing that - I think it has something to do with the fact that I copied and pasted those entries from Word because the internet wasn't working in my room, which unfortunately is a pretty frequent occurance in the FBL.

Success/Failure Ratio

I’m finding that my life abroad can easily be classified into two categories: success and failure. To take the examples from my earlier entry –

• Running away from my disgruntled cleaning lady: failure.

• Having an administrator think I wasn’t a foreign exchange student: success.

Now let’s consider today, shall we?

• Translating a tour of the Marais given in French to a Japanese Sciences-Po exchange student who understood English pretty well but knew not a word of French: success.

• Emailing my parents about money during my second week abroad: failure.

• Navigating a busy French post office to get a money order and send a letter without offending anyone: success.

• Locking my key in my room and having to pay 1 euro to retrieve it: EPIC failure.

Ideally, I’d like my Success/Failure ratio to stay above 1, but really, as long as it it’s above 0, I think I’ll be doing ok

A Tale of Two Fondations

I’ve only been here two weeks and I’ve already had two homes: the Fondation des États-Unis and the Fondation Biermans-Lapôtre. The first one, I’ve already told you about and shown you pictures of. Had I known I would only be staying there three nights, I probably wouldn’t have bothered to put up pictures of it. I also probably wouldn’t have unpacked nearly as much as I did…

When we arrived in France, we were all under the impression that we would just be staying a few nights in the FEU (sidebar - this acronym is kind of funny in French because “feu” is the French word for “fire” so I always have a mental image of flames when I talk about this building). We were originally supposed to move to FBL on September 1st, but we soon learned from a sign on the FBL’s front door (well, main door would be more precise because it’s actually on the side of the building) that it would be closed for continuing renovations until September 17th. This caused momentary panic, as we thought it meant we would be homeless from September 1st to the 17th because we only had reservations in the FEU for the first few nights. After a flurry of emails, we were assured that we would be allowed to stay in the FEU until the 17th.

Turns out all of that was unnecessary because the FBL actually reopened on September 1^st like it was supposed to, so we were told, on the 2^nd, that we could move in on the 2^nd. So after the frenzy of registering for classes, we repacked all of our belongings and moved them over to FBL.

Fortunately the FEU and FBL are right next to each other, so I could lug all 150 pounds of my belongs over in two loads. The fact that FBL has a fully functioning modern elevator was also a major plus, seeing as I now live on the 6^th floor…

So, my permanent address is:

601 Fondation Biermans-Lapôtre

Cité Universitaire de Paris

75014 Paris

So send me things! Just kidding, but if you do send me something and clearly mark your return address, you will most certainly receive at least a postcard from somewhere in Europe!

Here are a bunch of pictures of my new room, which is great! Less color than the last one, but a lot more space.

On the Importance of Verb Tenses

I recieved a note in my room yesterday, which, upon reading quickly, I decided said that my room had been cleaned that day. However, had I been more attentive to the future simple verb tense, or the day's date for that matter, I might have realized that the note was actually alerting me to the fact that my room was going to be cleaned today, September 8th. Sadly, I remained under the rather dense impression that they had already cleaned it but had done a kind of shabby job since I saw no visibile signs of its having been cleaned. I did however read the rest of the note which reminded me to straighten my room for the cleaning crew by making sure that I pick things up from the floor under my bed and desk. But, as I thought the cleaning had already been done, I figured it was unnecessary to do any such straightening until next week when I would be prepared for their cleaning schedule.

Imagine my surprise this morning then, to hear a knock on my door as I was groggily checking my email in my pajamas. And who was there to greet me but a rather surly "femme de chambre"... My French came surprisingly easily for my just-awoken self and I managed to ask if it was possible for her to return later. She made it quite clear that this was not possible - it was now or never, but she would give me a few minutes while she cleaned the room across the hall. So I scurried around my room to get dressed, grab some food to go, pick everything up off my floor and get the heck out of there before she came back. I made it, but didn't really have anywhere to go, because I still needed to shower and check my email before I started doing the things I had planned for the day. So I ended up just down the hall in my floor's kitchen, eating breakfast (bread and nutella, apple sauce, orange juice) and starting to write this blog entry. I'm pretty sure she saw me sitting down there and kiind of glared in my general direction... Hopefully this won't be a repeat occurance, but if cleaning day is always Tuesday, it may be because I don't have class on Tuesday and will probably want to sleep in.

Fortunately, my self confidence is already recovering after taking the serious blow of this mistranslation - a woman in the Administrative office expressed surprise when she saw on my form that I was an exchange student! And that was even after I had spoken several sentances of French!! whoo!