Le cœur parle sur un vélo...

I don't really get what that means (in a figurative sense) but I sure do like it.

This week has been an exercise in proving to myself that I don't need to buy a bus/tram pass next month. Asides from Monday, when I sat on my ass all day and was rather grumpy, I've been walking/biking everywhere (for the most part) this week. Unfortunately I live really rather far from downtown/IES (about an hour walk, if I walk fast) otherwise I would walk there much more. But biking to IES only takes about 25 minutes, on a fairly indirect trajectory along the Erdre River.

I'm using my host mum's Peugeot Paris (Peugeot is a French car maker that also makes bikes?!), which is white and blue and pretty retro. And also one-speed. This can be a challenge, since Nantes definitely has some rolling hills, but it guarantees a good work out. I've been arriving everywhere rather sweaty and out of breath, and in the morning rather wet, since it's been misting every morning this week.

ALOT of people bike here, because there is are stations throughout the city where you can rent bikes for something like 1 euro a day, and the university also has a bike rental program. So although our program director warned us during orientation that biking is horribly dangerous and we shouldn't do it, I find Nantes to be pretty bike friendly. There are bike lanes on almost every major road and from my experience drivers are pretty nice to bikers, especially in the super confusing roundabouts, which are EVERYWHERE here. I'm planning to make biking my main form of transportation here. Also, except for older commuters, who generally also wear reflective vests, nobody wears helmets here.

Walking has also been nice, because there are so many different ways to get everywhere since no streets are direct here. In my quest for adventure on Wednesday, I decided to try to cut through the center of the city to get home, which seemed like it would be direct. It took me an hour and a half to get home, due to many wrong turns, and I got home sopping wet. But I'm pretty sure I have a new way to walk to and from downtown figured out.

I decided that with the 32 euros I will save by not buying a bus pass, I'm going to try more pastries. Because there is really an infinite number to try.

Anyhoo, I'm supposed to be packing for my impending voyage. I leave at 8 p.m. tonight for Paris. I have until about 5:30 a.m. in Paris (no idea still what I'm going to do with myself in Paris tonight) then my flight to Milan at 8:30 a.m. ish tomorrow morning. I'll be there until Thursday, and then I go back to Paris, where I'll meet up with my friend Katie from IES here. We're going to stay with friends of her parents in Paris until Sunday.

This might sound weird, but I'm a little sad to be leaving for so long. I'm going to miss speaking French and my host family and my friends here! But I'm sure it will be AWESOME.

La Vie est Dur

Today is probably the most stressed out I have been so far in France. I'm going to blame it on the homework. I have spent several hours working on an oral report for my Teaching Internship class. Although the presentation isn't for a few weeks, I have to turn in the report tomorrow. Bother. My subject is "La Formation et Recrutement des Enseignants en France" which is basically teacher education on France. Not a simple subject, especially since the whole system was just completely changed. SoI have worked on that for many an hour today, and still have a huge list of other things to do this week before I leave for ITALY on friday. A thought which is very much keeping me going today.

In addition, it has rained all day here. I came here expecting lots and lots of rain, but this is one of the first times it has rained consistently all day here. It has been unseasonably warm and awesome the last two weeks actually, so I've been forgetting that it's still technically winter. Bother.

So a little weekend recap, since I had yet another fantastic weekend. (Also, I have so much that I want to write about that isn't weekend re

lated! Also bothersome.)

Friday started off quite well, since my friend Katie is awesome and put a baby pain au chocolat in my mailbox in the morning. Best snack EVER. I ate some sauerkraut and

mystery meat at high school while hosting my English conversation hour, part of my teaching internship. The class I was supposed to be teaching at 3 was cancelled due to lack of students (they're all really busy right now), which I was very much okay with because frisbee friday awaited. It was probably about 55-60 degrees out, which also made me happy that I wasn't cooped up inside teaching kids English. After some frisbee-ing/hacky sack-ing/rolling around in the grass, we decided to find a cafe.

I really must spend more time lounging at cafes, as the French do, because it's lovely. Basically every restaurant in the Quartier Bouffay (the semi-touristy old town) turns into a sidewalk cafe in the afternoon, so we sat at a restaurant called "Amour de pomme de terres" (love of potatoes) and I drank a tasty German beer. I taught Katie some Czech, because she's going there for break, and then Stewart taught us some Russian, and then we all started speaking Spanish/Portuguese and I rather felt like my head was going to explode.

I spent my Friday night watching a show about the ocean with my host mumm

y and drinking tea.

I got up early and walked downtown, to the Place Royale (I timed it, and it took exactly an hour) to meet Katie and Stewart. We went to

the Marche Talensac, one of the main markets in Nantes. I bought some carrots, a massive cucumber and some chevre, and we all went in on a 3 euro local bottle of

wine. And Stewart bought the most precious snail-filled things, which mostly just tasted garlicky and buttery with a little chewy snail bits at the bottom. We made a delicious lunch at IES, since that was the nearest kitchen.

Katie and

I lounged at her house in the afternoon, and went on a toothpaste-buying expedition (which turned into a buying more wine expedition as well).

We had dinner at a sushi restaurant (it was Stewart's birthday last week, so we sort of made him choose the restaurant). Noms. We sat in the Place Royale afterwards, drinking our wine on the edge of the fountain, and met a bunch of interesting people. The Place Royale tends to be full of rather weird and drunk people on the weekends, from what I can tell. There was a vagabond sort of guy trying to speak English with us, some guy possibly trying to sell us drugs, and two 17 year old girls who befriended the vagabond. It was all very strange.

Saturday was my first night out really, and quit

e fun. We found some other IES kids eventually and spent most of the night at an Irish Pub. Not exactly an authentic cultural experience, considering we're in France, but it was grand.

Sunday I pumped up the tires on one of the bikes in the shed at my house and rode around for awhile. I played frisbee for a while, then biked downtown and met up with some other people at the Jardin des Plantes. I also had the most amazing and huge pastry, which was like a pain au chocolat, but also with custard and like three times the normal size. And it was so nice and warm out all day! I'm going to try to bike to IES as often as possible, because biking is just so pleasant. And not too scary here, because despite the craziness of French drivers, they're pretty good at watching for bikes.

I've started speaking French most of the time with my friends here, which makes me quite happy. Life is great, although it'll be nice to have a break at the end of the week. A plus tard!

best day in france so far!

it's true. yesterday, saturday february 12th was probably the best day i have had so far in france. too much fun.

however, friday was pretty amazing to

o actually. after grammar class and hanging out at the ie

s center for a while, i went to my teaching internship (more about my teaching internship soon!). probably the best about my internship on friday was th

e hour break i had between teachin

g, which i spent at the jardin des plantes, which is right next to the school. since it's february there's not a whole lot going on plant-wise right now, but there's a lovely selection of water

fowl always roaming around. it was at least 60 degrees and sunny, obviously unseasonably warm and amazing. the sky was also doing some crazy stuff and being really photogenic.

After teaching I went to the park near IES and played frisbee with katie, stewart and sam for awhile. unremarkable except for fact that sam broke the frisbee (huuuge crack) and stewart managed to melt it back together with a lighter.and it works perfectly fine now. i was impressed. i got peer pressured into seeing Black Swan again. it was much less scary the second time (which means it was still pretty damn terrifying) but it was nice to be able to appreciate the finer details of the movie. after an absolutely unremarkable dinner of french fast food, i went home to prepare for getting up super early.

sooo saturday i got up at 6 am to go to mont st. michel and st. malo. we went to st. malo first, which is a precious

little seaside town which is apparently q

uite touristed in the summer. we walked on the ramparts of the town (i didn't really know what ramparts were before. but for everyone else's reference, they are basically a huge wall surrounding an old town.). and then i basically just basked in the sun on the big rocks on the beach for a long while. there's lots of really cool rocks in the water (sea stacks? i wanted to be all geological at th

e beach but my geology memory is going. i did remember the difference between a summer and winter beach though!).

and then we forged on to mont st. michel, the most

visited tourist site in france (and with good reason!). it's the coolest thing to see from the distance, because it's sooo tall and obvious in the flat bretagne landscape. after trekking to the top, we walked around the church and the abbey (it used to be a monastery). the streets around the monastery are filled with touristy bullshit, but very amusing touristy bullshit and things i actually kind of wanted to buy. all i got were some postcards though. madame de pous, our grammar professor, was our chaperone for the day and told us that there is nothing but "les trucs horrible" in the shops (horrible junk). she also told us not to "monter comme les escargots" (climb like snails) on our way to the top of mont st. michel. such a sassypants.

although i guess i didn't do a whole lot, just bei

ng in such pretty places was awesome. also, althou

gh the chateau trip was fun, this was 23843984 times better because now i now have legit friends. and it was beautiful and sunny out all day. the only bad thing was my camera is having major issues and is possibly broken (although i still managed to take a good number of pictures).

with some of the aforementioned friends

jumping on the quicksand! (well, not actually quicksand. but there is quicksand around mont st. michel)

the day concluded with kebabs and ice cream back in nantes. such a win.

today has also been an experience. i went to lunch with my host family at their friends house and ate one of the biggest meals of my life (seems to be a theme here in france). apparently it's quite rude not to finish the food on your plate here, so i have no choice but to eat ridiculous amounts of food when they are served to me. after a fancy salad (greens, grapefruit, radishes, goat cheese and scallops on a skewer tomatoes) there was scallops in sauce with mashed potatoes, then cheese and bread (literally 15 different types of cheese. i only had enough room to try 5). for desert there was both a fruit crumble and raspberry tiramisu. and then coffee. soo good but so much food. i sort of made friends with the family's 8 year old daughter, clementine, when we compared silly bands. she gave me her glow in the dark strawberry silly band as a present. so precious.

now on to studying the passe simple. ewwww.

1 mois en france

As of yesterday I have spent a month in France! It feels like I have been here much longer, but is also a little scary because it means that I'm 1/4 done with study abroad (although not with Europe!). This fact, combined with sitting on a bus for about 5 hours yesterday, as led to some reflection on my study abroad goals overall.

Really there is only one study abroad goal, actually. Fluency in French (or rather, more fluency than I currently have). While I do speak alot of French here, I speak almost nothing but English two days a week (fridays and saturdays when I hang out with other IES kids). No good. It's also interesting to think back on a month ago when we were in Tours for orientation, or even orientation in Nantes, and everyone made a really good effort to speak French all the time. I guess at that time speaking French was all new and exciting. And now the newness of being in France has worn off, and speaking English is just so much more convenient for making friends/having fun in general. But no good. I'm really really going to try to make more of an effort from now on to read/speak more French.

I also have some apathy towards making French friends. Not that I wouldn't like to get to know French people, but I think I'm being realistic in thinking that I'm not going to be able to make French friends in the next three months. As it is I have a hard time making time for IES friends at time. And I do meet alot of French people through conversation club at IES and orchestra and frisbee. I think getting to know people is more important than necessarily hanging out with them outside of set activities. Because after all, I'm leaving Nantes in 3 months.

And now on to my more exciting weekend-ish activities!

Awesome Things (with pictures!)

This weekend was Les Folles Journees, a huge classical festival which is apparently world-renowned. This year's theme was the post-Romantics, so lots of Brahms and Schubert and Mahler and such. I saw an orchestra from the Netherlands perform a Hindemith viola concerto and a Schubert symphony. It was suprisingly enjoyable, especially because the concertmaster danced around in his seat amusingly and had ridiculously short pants. And the music was swell too! It was a baby string orchestra, but there was no conductor, which I found impressive.

Yar be Speculoos, the most amazing spread in existence. It looks rather creepily like peanut butter, but tastes like cinnamony spicy

cookies. There are Speculoos cookies as well, and you can get crunchy Speculoos with cookie chunks in it. I bought a jar on friday and could only make it last until monday. ruh roh.

Frisbee Friday! I had a lovely afternoon with my friends Katie, Jessie, Stewart, Reo and Sam playing frisbee. Getting there was pretty awesome too, because we had to walk through this cute little park along a river, which reminded me of Asia because of all the bamboo (bamboo always makes me think of Asia). The picture is from our tree-climbing detour in the park. Frisbee was soooo much fun, but isn't it always. I got rather unfortunately muddy, and probably looked a little ridiculous with my muddy knees while taking the tram home.

Other things I did this weekend:

-Had one of the first truly inedible meals of my life. I ate dinner on Friday with my friends at university cafeteria (restaurant universitaire, or RU), and it was god awful. I've eaten at several other RU's before, and they've always been decent at least. But this was a plate of mushy ravioli and broccoli that was impressively even worse than Chef Boyardee. I only managed a few bites, which is saying something for me.

-Saw Arrietty, a super precious Miyazaki movie. It was in Japanese with French subtitles, but since it's a kids movie it was easy to understand. Awesomely cute, especially the parts with the fluffy angry kitty. It's about little people that live in an old Japanese country house (based on the Borrowers).

-Went to a market on Saturday, which was overwhelming. So much food and weird fish and cheese and cheap clothes and everything. I took lots of pictures, which people found amusing. I don't think they're used to having tourists there. I also bought some legwarmers for 1.50 euros!

-Cooked Macaroni and Cheese for my host pappies for dinner on Saturday. It turned out quite well, and I think they were quite impressed, even more so since I also made a salad and set the table. I was going to make cookies as well, but as always happens when I cook, it took a much longer time to make than I expected. Afterwards they taught me a French card game and then we played Scrabble! In French! I always managed to think of words, but usually they were pretty short and not many points. Also, I decided that French scrabble is easier because you can conjugate verbs in sooo many different ways and and E's and S's to everything. It was a rather unconventional Saturday night I suppose (hanging out with my host parents?! what?!) but it was grand. If you couldn't tell, I'm a HUGE fan of my host parents.

C'est tout. I have so much more to write about! Life is too busy, but I'm in much better spirits this week. I also have tickets to Milan for break in a few weeks! WAHOOOO!

Classes and Such

I am far too sleepy to think of a creative title for this post. It's been a bit of a rough week so far. Just really busy and I was ridiculously tired on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday even though I slept plenty. I started getting sick yesterday, so I'm working on getting over that ASAP, because being sick on weekends is the worst.

So since tomorrow I'll be done with my second week of class and have my schedule figured out, I thought I'd tell you all a bit about my classes.

Topics in Advanced French Language and Composition:

Out of the four French grammar classes that IES offers, this is the highest one and thus we sort of got to choose what we'll be learning. Since it's the highest level, it was optional, but I realized that I'll probably never study fine points of French grammar on my own and I could definitely stand to review some things (relative pronouns?! the past subjunctive?!). The professor, Madame de Pous, is who I aspire to be someday. She wears bright blue eyeliner every day and lots of purple and has ridiculously spindly legs (which I could do without). She's intimidating but interesting and has a good sense of humor. And she knows everything ever about French. We do some grammar exercises and some vocabulary and culture. Last night we went to a lecture about Poland just to practice listening and such. It was basically a panorama of Polish history and some culture since the beginning of Poland, and although it wasn't very well organized it was super interesting. And since we actually had to take notes, I managed to pay attention for the full hour and a half. As a side note, I learned that croissants are a Polish invention. What?! There's a 3 week long Polish festival in Nantes this month, and I'd rather like to go to more events, especially the pierogi-making class.

Theatre Production:

An odd class. There's only 8 girls in the class, including me, and it is taught by Monsieur Mariel, a typical theatre type. We've spent much of the two classes we've had playing theatre games, which are very complicated when in French, because I'm pretty sure I wouldn't know what to do half the time even if they were in English. We've done a lot of massage, a lot of partner acting activities and a lot do with making sounds and facial expressions. We were just told on tuesday that the play we will be working on from now on, and putting on at the end of the semester, will be created from the works of Albertine Sarrazin

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albertine_Sarrazin

who we will all be playing in different sketches. I think Monsieur Mariel will be basically writing the play himself, or piecing it together from her works, and he said it will probably incorporate dance at some points. It sounds like it shall be very modern and bizarre, but fun. Overall, there's very little work for the class, since everything is in-class, except for one or two weekend rehearsals. And plays are always a hoot.

Teaching Internship:

Obviously, most of the class consists of the internship itself, which is shaping up to be a right shit show. I'll post about that later (after it actually materializes). But the class is good, mostly about ideas for lessons and what our goals should be when teaching. I think it will be very helpful, both for the internship itself and as a good introduction the the profession of teaching. It is also going to require quite a bit of work, as we are supposed to record lesson plans meticulously and make notes as to how classes went, and there's an oral project at some point as well as a final reflection. And I don't get credit for any of it from UPS. Harumph. I'm trying to forget that little detail so that it doesn't affect my work for the class, which I intend to do anyways.

Sociology of Culture:

One of the classes I finally decided on at the University of Nantes, after trying out quite a few last week. There's only 35 students or so in the class, which is fairly small for a college class here, and it's a little more interactive than some (although French students really seem to hate participating in class, so there's often painful silences). I'm the only American in the class, although there's quite a few Erasmus students, which I think the professor likes, since it is about culture after all. So far we haven't really gotten past the sociological theory part of the class, but I think it should be decently interesting, and if nothing else fairly easy to follow.

Spanish:

Also at the University of Nantes, and quite interesting. I'm currently taking 3 consecutive 1-hour classes on Thursday, and just had the last two classes for the first time today. The first class is Expression Orale, which is basically conversation class. It's taught by a young Spaniard (with a fantastic accent) who basically has to struggle to get the Frenchies to say much. And I don't blame them completely, because many of them don't speak Spanish well at all. Today we played a game with numbers, and then played a vocabulary game, and next week we're going to talk about the Geography of Spain (!!!!). Since my Spanish skillz have definitely decreased since coming to France, this shall be quite beneficial.

The other two classes are taught by a different professor. The first hour is Latin American Civilization (basically a rehash of the Colonial Latin America history class I took freshman year) and the other class is A Panorama of Mexican Cinema, which should be interesting. The annoying thing is that the professor continually switched back and forth between French and Spanish, which makes taking notes incredibly difficult. Most of the time I didn't even realize when he changed languages, since I can understand both fine, but it's definitely not going to help me keep the languages separated, which is what I'm having the biggest issue with right now. I'm currently thinking it would be incredibly beneficial for me to spend the summer in Spain.

So there you have it. I'm only taking 5 classes (I'm counting Spanish as one, because although it's technically three different classes, it's only 3 hours total), and not getting credit for one, so academically this semester will not be very beneficial. I'll probably only get to take classes for my major and minors next year. But I'm going to be extremely busy basically all the time, mostly due to my teaching internship and extracurriculars, so its okay.

Bon weekend!