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...