27 March 2008

Lessons from Brest: Easter Week-end

Brest. City of...uh...industry and some other stuff.

Americans love to hear about this city because, obviously, it sounds like "breast." They hear it and just start convulsing with laughter. Oh, the immaturity.



So Brest was our first official weekend away from Rennes. Sophia's the one who decided to go there, or at least, she's the one who brought it up. We just felt like we needed to get away somewhere, and Brest seemed as good a place as any. Somehow in the workings of things I ended up as the person planning where we were going to stay.



The group consisted of me, Sophia, Sarah, Collin, and Mark. Jessica would have come along but one of her best friends, who is studying in Vienna, had come to visit. We had a three-day weekend because of Easter, but since Jess was leaving to go back "home" on sunday, Jessica just stayed with her Saturday and Sunday and then hung out in Saint Grégoire on Monday.



Lesson #1: Don't let Michelle plan things alone.

Brest has three hostels listed between hostelworld.com, hostelbookers.com, and google.fr. I found the cheapest one, which said that breakfast was probably included, they had linens, and said that they were a kilometer from centre ville. I told the other peeps to look at it. They "did" and then told me that sure, it was fine, book it. I did.



Lesson #2: When the French seem to politely turn their nose up at something, it really means that said thing is horrid and not worth your time. However, none of them will come straight out and say that you're wasting your time. This is the one thing that gets me...they don't really tell you that it's better to do something else. They just half smile and tell you to have fun.



Lesson #3: Find the right bus route.

After I got the ok from people and booked the hostel, I looked at the bus system of Brest. Not too bad, they had a fantastic map to play with, although I couldn't find any prices anywhere. I stuck in the address of the hostel and it popped out bus line number 3 as being the closest. Hahahaha...the train to get there was fine. It was a little crowded just until we hit Morlaix, but then it cleared up and we were able to actually sit next to one another. When we got into town I discovered that no one else had looked at a map. They all turned around; looked at me, and told me to lead the way. I hesitated for a little bit and they all freaked out. "You mean you don't know the address? Tell me you at least have the address!" Mark said.



"Of course I have the address. We just need to get to Hôtel de Ville to catch the bus," I replied, and started walking. Somehow we got where the buses were and found the 3, got on and settled in for the ride. And by settled I mean, we stood on the side of the bus, expecting to be on it for maybe 5 minutes. Uh....fifteen minutes later...we got off the bus and looked around. I almost see a sign in my head that said "WELCOME TO SUBURBIA". There were nothing but houses in sight. We looked around and I started laughing. Nothing. And, of course, it was raining. Like real rain, not colorado rain that starts and lasts for four minutes and then is gone.

We headed up the hill. Yes, the hill. We headed up the hill and on the way up the hill I looked at an address that was to my left. 109. And what was the adresse of the hostel? 253. I started laughing again. Mark and Collin looked at me sideways, trying to figure out why in the world i was laughing in the middle of nowhere, in the rain. I managed to gasp out the thing with the adresses, but surprise surprise the boys didn't think it was as funny as i did. Sophia and Sarah were just smirking, mostly laughing at my pain.

It took 20 minutes to walk to the hostel, which, of course, wasn't a hostel at all. It was a hotel chain not much unlike Holiday Inn Express on steroids to make it uglier. Finally we got to the top of the hill and to the hotel, which involved crossing a highway. Yes, highway. Why this place was on a hostel website I have no idea.

I think I spent the better part of an hour just laughing hysterically. My friends laughed along with me but were too tired to actually kill me, luckily. I'm grateful for their restraint.

Lesson #4: Grocery stores don't hand out free bags, but if you say little enough, the French think you're French

That afternoon we left the hotel after being there for about an hour. We walked straight (as straight as possible not knowing where it was) to the grocery store, where we spent a really good amount of time trying to figure out what we wanted to have for food for the next couple days. Not only was it Easter weekend, but France shuts down on Sundays. There is literally maybe one or two stores in each city that are actually open. The fun part was trying to find a bag to put our four baguettes, four rounds of cheese, jar of nutella, and bag of oranges in. The French don't believe in wasting as much plastic as Americans do. Most of them have vinyl/cloth/thick plastic bags that they use for years to put their groceries in. So we wandered around the store, which was kinda like a super target, for a long time just trying to find something we could buy to put our stuff in. Of course when we got up to the caisse we figured out that all you have to do is ask them for a better bag and they'll just give it too you...

Saturday night we found a restaurant that wasn't too horribly expensive and everyone but Mark and Sophia had pizza stuff. Sophia had...uh...meat? It was probably meat, anyway. Mark ate gambas--monster size shrimp. Afterwards we went to see Femmes de l'Ombre, a French film about WWII. It was pretty good. We were kinda freaking out that they would confiscate and burn our bag of food that had to last us until monday morning, but in the end the guy just grabbed it from Collin right after he tore his ticket and put it behind the counter. When the movie was over we walked back to get the bag, but no one was there. Collin retrieved it and we just headed out again.

Once outside Sophia got nominated to call the taxi service. After a couple calls that went totally awry (ladies yelling in french, telling her taxis don't run after midnight...what?) she was able to get a guy that had room for five people, and we only spent 13 euro on the ride back to the rooms. We watched TV and then slept.

Sunday was the day that we walked for two hours to get to the aquarium. That was an...adventure. Buses only run once an hour on Sundays, which is fine, it's just that we needed to use three buses to get to the acquarium. We got the first one just fine, but overshot the bus stop for the next one, so we walked in what was probably the right direction until we discovered that it wasn't any more, so we turned and got to the right spot, but we were going to have to wait for the next bus for about half an hour, so we decided to just keep walking. Finally we ran into a stop for the bus that directly services the aquarium, and discovered that the next bus would be in only ten minutes. Twenty minutes later we were at the acquarium, and we hadn't there for six minutes before it started raining. We ran for cover and spent the next couple hours looking at French fish, which we discovered are exactly like American fish. They just don't speak English, how about that?

I personally loved the seals. One was super bored and chased his tale the entire ten minutes i was watching the tank, and another was chasing a rock up and down in the water. He would go down to the bottom, find a pebble, and push it up to the surface with his nose. Then he'd toss it up in the air, and when it went back down he'd chase it to the floor of the tank to bring it back up again. Some animals should be allowed to be bored, if only for the amusement of everybody else.

After the fishiness we did something. I don't really remember. Ended up eating at a really horrible fast food place because it was open. Got insulted by the chick working the counter. The people in front of us, by some crazy coincidence, were American. They ordered in English. So this girl, hearing my English accent when I ordered, decided that when she asked me if I wanted something to drink she was going to have to not only say it in English, but use hand motions at the same time. I answered her in French. Then I ate my nasty panini. I swear it had velveeta in it, oh my gosh I wanted to throw the sandwich on the counter and then throw up. But I didn't.

On Monday we headed to the castle, because, well; it's a castle, and who wouldn't want to see a castle? Our train was leaving at like 2, and of course when we got to the castle's main entrance we discovered that it wasn't going to open until an hour before our train left. So we walked to the train station, about three hours early, and discovered that since we couldn't take an earlier train, we would have to just hang out there for the hours before it was time to leave. We found ourselves in a restaurant, wasting time. Mark and Collin ordered food and we girls got drinks so the people didn't hate us, and the four others played a card game for four peeps while i watched and laughed at them.

When it was finally time to leave we raced out to the train and grabbed our seats. That was fun at first because there were five of us and chairs in trains operate in fours...good thing I had stuff to do. But then Mark came over and talked to me and it was fun. When we all got home Sophia and I headed off to République for our bus, hoping that we'd catch it at the right moment. If we didn't, we could take the 2 up most of the way and then walk the rest...ugh

Lesson#5: When your gut tells you to go to Sainte Anne, go to Saint Anne

We got up the stairs at République and started walking over to our stop. There was a bus in front of our stop, but going the wrong way. We took our time. The bus moved, and we saw a bus on the other side of the street. I walked a little faster. It started driving away. I started laughing hysterically. It was our bus, of course. We had missed it by literally one minute. The two of us walked over to the stop for the 2 and looked at the times. It would be there in half an hour. I was fine with waiting, but Sophia stood still for a couple minutes before giving in to her inner tired person and calling her mère and asking if she could come and get us (Sophia lives in the same district as I do).

When I finally got home I went to my room and fell asleep for an hour before showing up in the living room and saying hi to virginie and all the lovely French people who were there.

And that was Easter weekend. Haha... sorry it took so long to actually tell you about it!

26 March 2008

teachers, smeachers

so apparently i haven't been on here in a while to update things.
i guess that's what happens when your wifi crashes and you can't get to the computer every single night to do things. it's super weird to not have constant access to the internet. it's not that i really really really need it every single night, but it would be nice once in a while to be able to sit on my bed and to write my blog. i miss my bed.

no, i'm not going to use capital letters right now. i'm too lazy. that's what happens when it's been raining all day and it's 22h34 and all you really want to do is go to bed. you get lazy.

classes here are fine. as i've told some of you, one of my profs is dumb. i'm sure i've used other adjectives, but i haven't used 'dumb' yet, so i thought i'd give it a try. her name is madame cieslarczyk and she's a doctor, apparently, and i'm sure that she's a really nice lady. but when i'm around my friends i call her the demon lady, because she sure does love to make our lives about as much fun as getting stuck in an iron maiden.

today, for instance, she was telling us all that we needed to go see the movie "bienvenue chez les ch'tis". i've already seen the movie, i loved it and thought it was hilarious. i even understood pretty much every single word of it. so we're in class, and she says: "even though you're only in niveau seuil, you might be able to profit from seeing the film."

ok. seuil is the middle level. like i said a while ago, it's almost advanced, but not quite. it doesn't mean that we're stupid. julia and i looked at one another in disbelief just after this repugnance came out of her mouth. even though? why, thank you. i now understand and appreciate exactly how much confidence you have in me and each of my classmates. from there we went on to write down clichés that we had of the french before coming here. abby and julia and i wrote down the typical ideas: everyone smokes and eats bread and cheese and drinks wine and wears black and hates americans. dur. the fun part was when we had to explain to her that these clichés were in no way our own...what teacher doesn't understand "these aren't our thoughts but the things that a lot of americans think"? and what teacher who says that she's been teaching international students for over 10 years doesn't know what chinese watercolor painting is? everyone knows what that is! everyone! and she even has a lsdjflsijf doctorate! a doctorate! what!?!?

so that's enough of that. my other classes are just fine. i've met the two most amazing teachers in the universe. one is monsieur blanchet, my prof for oral expression. he speaks french, english, chinese, german, and a little spanish i think. he makes us work for things, but he helps us to work for them. he doesn't treat us like children. the other prof is madame noury. she's been teaching at CIREFE (council...uh international...blah blah étudiants) for FOREVER. the first day she told us that she is the princess of CIREFE. we love her. she spent ten minutes of one of our classes explaining the different uses of 'bof'. it's pretty much not really a word, but she made it seem like it was. unfortunately, in order to understand everything that happened you kinda need to speak french. suffice it to say she had us rolling in our seats with laughter with all the references she was making to french stereotypes. she makes us work too. she makes us work a lot. and she didn't tell us the first day, like SOME teachers did, that she was going to go easier on us because we were international students and maybe 'deserved' a break. nope.

the first day she stood up in front of us, explained the french system, and told us to get used to it. i like it. no nonsense, demands respect. gets the job done. why can't i have noury three days a week? not fair...or perhaps it is.

today i started making vocab lists. i need to get more words in my head and i decided that the best way to do that is to start just writing everything down; and to look up words that are all in the same families so that when i learn one word i also learn about fifteen others. i started the first list while i was hanging with collin in a café after classes. i finish by 15h30 every single day, which is nice, but all the rest of my friends have classes until 17h30ish every day...ugh. well, not everyone, but there's usually at least one of us who's off pretending to learn.

which reminds me, i need to tell you about brest. not breast. brest.
uh...i'm gonna do it later. i know, i know...but i'm so tired...and tomorrow is wake-up-with-the-highschoolers day. that means i have class at 8h15 and i have to ride the bus into centre ville with a vehicle full of high schoolers. so much fun. you know, you know that you're american when you get into a bus of lycéens and they're all younger than you, and also are all dressed better than you. so sad. i even have my new frenchie trench. no good. it's must have something to do with only wearing black otherwise...

haha. of all the stereotypes, the whole wearing black thing is the most true.
classy, though. i think i'm going to buy some more.

11 March 2008

i love le mardi

Dear Readers,

I love Tuesdays. Tuesday accidentally became mine and Jessica's dessert day, I don't really know why. The first week of classes, we found that we both ended at the same time, and we went to the grocery store at the other end of campus and bought chocolate. The next week, we went to the grocery store again, but this time we bought pre-made crêpes and nutella, which we ate with coffee (hers) and tea (mine). It was magnificent, and every week since then, we've gone and made ourselves happy (also a little guilty) every mardi after class.

Today we went to our favorite boulangerie/pâtisserie. C'est La Fournée St. Michel. "Le art de faire bon et de faire bien, au quotidien." The art to do good and to do well, like always. They make the most beautiful double chocolate chip cookies my mouth has ever seen, not even lying. Although today I got a chocolate éclair, Jessica got a religieuse, Ian got a cookie, Mark got nothing, and we went to a café and had our treats. Lovely. Sooooo lovely.

After that the four of us went on a walk. This means I said, "Hey, let's go down there" and an hour later we were finally on the metro going back to St. Anne and our buses. An HOUR of walking. That's not too bad. I loved it. We walked almost directly south, and then veared east, away from things. We almost made it to the outskirts, I think. I love Rennes. I'm hitting myself for having left my camera at home. I just never know when I'm going to end up balader-ing, or when I'm just going to go home from class.

Did you know that the French don't capitalize their days of the week? It's kinda cool. And also, with names that we would usually capitalize all the way through, such as 'National Assembly', they only capitalize the first word, like with 'Assemblée national'. Interesting.

Today at dinner my mère asked me what kind of generalisations me and my friends have made about the French. I told her closed doors, chicken and rabbits with the heads still on, and eating everything with a knife and fork. She loves knowing what silly things Americans think of the French. On the other hand, it led to a FANTASTIC conversation with both mes parents, and we talked for a long time about different cultures, the difference between French and American work ethics, and some other things. For once I finally felt like I was expressing myself well, and not just utterly failing at life.

Today Mark bought some noodles (why in the world do I keep typing that as 'noddles'? every single time, I swear, I can't handle it anymore!) from Rennes' version of fast food and the lady tried to serve him in English and he got really angry. It may have been mine and Jessica's fault because we yelled at him in English from outside. He did answer in French, though. Mes parents and I talked about that too, how you never know if the person is being condescending, if they're trying to help, or if they just want to practice their mad English skills.

I've discovered that I can't spell in English anymore. I want to say that this is a good thing, but I'm not so sure. Condescending just suddenly had too many 'i's. Poo.

Haha that reminds me. During one of the breaks today (one every hour) I went into the caféteria at Cirefe to eat a banana and talk to people about vacation and while I was there Abby and Julia had some fun with my notebook.
When I got back I sat down; didn't even notice that it was closed, and started listening. Acouple minutes later, when the teacher said something I thought was interesting, I pulled over my notebook to write something down. And there, on the bottom of the page, in huge majuscule latters, was the word POOP.

Yes, what mature people I know. Of course I started laughing to myself. Who wouldn't? It's like, required. Someone mentions poo, you laugh, it's that simple. But I was in the middle of class. NO laughing. Plus, if you laugh, then the teacher asks you to share with the class, and there was no way in a purple and green polka dot moon that I was going to explain that my friends had written POOP in my cahier. So I just nudged the two girls and showed them their own work and then we all three were shaking with laughter. Shaking, I'm telling you.

I'm going to Prague for vacation. Strasbourg-Prague-Bits of Germany-UK, to be exact.
If you know people a group of at least four can stay with in any of those areas, let me know. It's a two week break. I like keeping my money. I really do. I love my money, in fact.

Haha... it's 23h16. That translates as bed time.

10 March 2008

09 mars (say "nuhf mahrs")

This week went by quickly.

I can’t even remember if anything crazy important happened. It was just class as normal. There’s demon lady class, aka étude de la langue, which is taught by a really nice lady with a really poo-minded teaching style. We hate it.

Ok, I guess I could talk about my schedule. I have an easy schedule. Easy. Monday and Wednesday I start at 10h30 and I’m done at 15h30. Tuesday is from 12h30 til 15h30, and Thursday is from 8h15 til 15h30. Friday is Jesus-loves-me day, which means that I don’t have class. But even though I don’t have class I almost always end up at CIREFE for the afternoon. I go to the building at 12h30 to eat with my friends. I mean, what else would I do? They give us these food tickets to use during the week, and I might as well use them. If I didn’t head to the university to hang with my peeps, I would just be at home, and that’s silly and feels weird. I always feel like if I’m at home I have to be doing something. I can’t just sit around unless I’m in my room with my door closed.

Not having class on Friday means that I have three-day weekends every weekend. My friends say that they hate me because of this. I tend not to believe them, because they still hang out with me after classes. Strange.

It sure would be nice if Pierre would fix our wifi. I’ve already asked and I’m pretty sure he’ll do something about it, but I don’t want to keep asking, as if it’s the only thing that I think about. My mom said that I could use her computer for internet, but there’s this tiny thing called Skype that I want to be able to use, even to be able to talk to Jessica and Mark and Sophia while we’re all sitting in our rooms every night.

My life truly has become at least la moitié pathetic. Halfway pathetic. The last bus from St. Grégoire to Rennes is at 21h23. The last bus from Rennes to St. Grégoire is at 21h34. Does anyone else see the humor in this? I can’t even go out to dinner with my friends during the week without either taking a taxi, walking home, or taking a different bus which only goes about .67 of the way home. Actually, I’ve been planning on trying that. Usually I take the 18, but the 2 runs up the same road. I think the rest of the walk would be about 15 minutes, but I want to check it. I’d just rather not do it alone the first time.

Seriously, my life here is very much parallel to my life in Arvada, with reference to going to classes in Boulder. At least in Colorado I had a car. My parents asked me if my life in France was really different from my life in the states and I started laughing. Not really, I said. They were surprised, I think they were expecting a completely different answer. Except for the fact that I eat bread and drink wine with almost every meal save breakfast, and that I go to bars with friends, my two lives are very much the same.

Rien ne change, as my mère says. Nothing changes.

I bought a new jacket two days ago. I’ve been using Ariel’s navy blue wool coat, which has been fantastic, but it’s been getting progressively warmer, and the coat doesn’t fit me as well as other things might. So I gave in on Friday afternoon and went with Jessica to the mall. The mall here is funny. I mean, it’s a mall, there’s no question about that. But there aren’t department stores. It’s all small boutiques. And when I say small, I mean, sometimes you wonder how you’re supposed to fit more than 10 people in the store at one time. It would be impossible. You walk in, you say hello. Unless it’s a larger store, then you treat it more like you’re in the states, and don’t say anything.

The store I bought my jacket from, however, looked a lot like a TJ Maxx. The prices looked like Nordstroms, however. Ouch. The style here is army-tinted, and I found a really cute white-khaki jacket for 35E. I almost bought a red one. I almost did. But I figured that I would be wearing it every day, and red was maybe too loud. I love my jacket. I wore it yesterday, with my red scarf and my red shoes, and I looked very French. Apparently.

We were in centre ville, waiting for a movie time to come around (17h05, for There will be Blood…wow). We were walking toward a boulangerie at Place St. Anne which makes the most beautiful duo chocolate cookies I have ever tasted. It makes me sad that a French bakery would be better at an American specialty than America, but hey. It’s 1,50 for a cookie the size of my face and when it’s warm you just want to die with joy. Just when we were walking up to the door, we heard someone yell, “HEY AMERICANS!” Oh no…I recognized the voice, and started laughing to myself. Mark said later that he hadn’t realized who it was at first and his only thought had been “How is it always so freaking obvious?”

It was John. Oh, John. John is 27. He’s in the master’s program here. His French is practically perfect, and he does the slang to boot, which makes us all feel like idiots. So why was he yelling at us? Oh, he was drunk. DRUNKdrunkdrunk! I actually find drunks to be entirely amusing, so I just laughed during the conversation. I think Jessica and Sophia were a little horrified. Mark was laughing, too. John’s a nice guy, but he’s just….yeah. He’s one of those people. “He’s nice but.”

He invited us to come drink with him. He’d had class from 8 til 11 (and it was Saturday, mind you) and straight from class he and his classmates had gone to the bar and started drinking. Four hours of drinking makes a guy really loud and happy, but of course has no bad effects on his French. Maybe if I were drunk all the time, my French would improve…nah. That’s waaaaaaaay too expensive.

The movie was good. Creepy. Unsettling. But Daniel Day Lewis deserved his Oscar, just like No Country for Old Men deserved its own. Amazing and phenomenal and what a pain in the butt to try to describe in French…oh man. Impossible. I couldn’t do it. I tried so hard, but I had to resort to just expressions and moving my hands around. I think they’re used to not getting full explanations, though, so it was ok, I guess. I just wish I could get the hang of talking about how movies make me feel.

Last night after dinner we watched a French movie that Pierre and Lola had brought with them, Je vais, ne t’en fais rien I think was the title. “I’m going, don’t do anything.” I think. It was beautiful. It’s about a girl who comes back from vacation to find that her twin brother has disappeared, but her parents won’t tell her what happened or when. She falls into a really deep depression and starts starving herself, and then she gets a postcard from her brother talking about how he had to get out of the house and he’s traveling France and to give their mom a hug but not to say anything to their ass of a father. Even then, her parents won’t tell her what happened between Loïc and her dad, but since she’s gotten word from her brother, she starts eating again. Things go from there, but I don’t want to ruin it, on the off chance that you ever have a chance to see it. It was lovely.

And now I’m sitting in my room, about to go to the living room to do homework, because when I just sit in my room sometimes I feel like I’m ostracizing myself. It can’t possibly be true, but that’s how we feel here. It doesn’t help that the French don’t really believe in open doors. Every door generally stays closed, and if it’s open it’s only because it’s in the process of being closed. The problem with this is that we’ll go into our rooms to do stuff but we still want to feel accessible, just in case. But we don’t. We feel like, by closing our doors, we’re cutting off our families.

Which is why, for the past hour or so, I’ve been debating with myself as to whether I should go work in the living room or not. I mean, it’s not like I would be doing anything different, it’s just that I would be more in the family/public area, and not just in my room. It doesn’t help that ever since my mère told me that I was much quieter than the other Americans they’d had and that made her think that I was unhappy, I’ve been really self-conscious of what I said and how much and when. I’m always wondering if I’m talking enough, if I’m replying in the right way…

I keep telling myself that if it were all in English it would be easier. I don’t know. I know for sure that my père would know that I was more intelligent. I’m getting tired of only having responses like “Yes I agree” and “I know” to offer to the conversation. It’s just that I start talking and it goes really well until one of my most crucial points and I just completely get stuffed up and all my grammaire leaves my head and I’m useless.

Life is like a tiny dose of humiliation, taken with no spoonful of sugar, every night at dinner.

There’s just always the question of how much more work should I be doing? Should I be doing something else? Would that help me to speak better? I have no idea. Maybe, maybe not. I’ve already been here more than a month, but the only changes I’ve noticed are the ones that show me how horrible my accent is. And another thing: my family doesn’t correct me. My grand-mère does, but mes parents don’t. They just sit there and let me try, sometimes looking interested, sometimes looking like they’re watching a snake hang itself with its own tongue. Car wreck fascination, I call it.

I’m kinda tired of always being so frustrated with myself, I don’t know how to handle it any more. Even now, I’m telling myself that I’ve been doing too much English. Way too much. I can know that at night, too, if when I go to bed I’m not very tired, it’s because I didn’t do enough French that day.

LYON 3

Friday

This was an interesting day. I’m not sure if it was because we were tired or what, but going to Grenoble on Friday there was some definite tension on the train. Whatevs.

We hadn’t purchased our tickets beforehand, so the first thing we did when we got to the gare was to jump in line and stand and wait. If we had had our tickets, everything would have been fine; but because we didn’t, and because we got to the gare only ten minutes before the train was scheduled to leave, we missed the train.

Actually, we only missed it by three minutes, and probably could have run it, but we hesitated a few seconds too long and I just decided to stay where I was, instead of trying to cram myself into the sea of people heading up to platform H. And besides the fact that we had neglected to move a little bit faster that morning, the reason that we were later was because the lady at the SNCF office (train tickets) first only put us through the computer for one-way tickets. I mean, we did only ask to get to Grenoble, not to come back as well, but in the past the men and women behind the desk had always either assumed or asked that we would want to come back. It wasn’t like we had any luggage, or anything. Purses don’t count.

It was fun to watch Julia’s face as the lady asked for her money for the one-way ticket. That’s one of our dilemmas: when we say something and are understood perfectly well, but then we realize that we should have asked for something else. You ask a question, you get a nod and an answer. The person types something into their computer, and then quotes you a price. You agree, thinking, “Wow, that’s cheap.” And then you realize that it’s cheap because if you take that ticket you’re not going to be coming home. Suddenly, something more is required of you. You have to interrupt the person across the counter from you and tell them that you need something else. And then they do that sighing thing.

The French like to sigh at Americans. They like to roll their eyes at us, too. It’s a tad disconcerting every once in a while. I’d rather be outright made fun of than have someone roll their eyes at me while I’m still standing in front of them. What is up with that? Hello, I can see you! Yes, I can see you’re tired of talking to me. Get over it and give me what I want. And do it in French, pleasethankyou.

So we had to wait for about 45 minutes for the next train. Julia wasn’t too happy about that. We wandered into the bookstore and looked around for a good while, and then sat down on a bench and waited and talked. The ride over took about an hour, an hour an a half. We wandered around Grenoble (pretty. I love mountains.) and ended up at the Musée de Grenoble, supposedly one of the really amazing museums of France. Uh…sure. We actually didn’t buy tickets the first time we went in. Julia’s friend Guillaume lives in Grenoble, and he was supposed to meet us somewhere. Finally we met up with him and walked to a sandwich place in centre ville, then took our lunches to a park.

This park was phenomenal, but only because of one little girl. You know those rocking horse-type trucs (say: “trook,” means “whatchamacalit”) that look like they’re just really uncomfortable flat seats on top of a monster size metal coil? They usually look like horses, some of them are cars, I think. I always see them in parks and sit on them but they’re just not the same when your feet can touch the ground…

Anyway there was this little girl with shoulder-length white-blond hair who was sitting on one of these horse things and rocking her little heart out. Forward, backward, forward, backward: when I say rocking, I mean ROCKING. Her hair was barely keeping up with her face. And then she would let her neck muscles go loose, and her head would just be banging back and forth. I was so sure that she was going to hit her nose on the back of the head of the horse thing. But she didn’t. I just loved watching how serene she looked while she was sitting on that piece of playground.

Also my tuna sandwich was really good. It had more meat on it than I’ve ever had on any other French sandwich. Which reminds me: I read an article the other day that said that doctors believe that the French are eating too much meat. I find this hard to believe. Why not “they’re eating too much bread”? They don’t eat that much meat…so weird.

After the sandwiches by the playground we went to a café and Guillaume ordered us four cafés. This was fine, except for one tiny thing: I don’t really like coffee. And coffee in France really just means espresso in a tiny little cup. Since I wasn’t about to yell at the waiter and tell him to come back so I could have hot chocolate instead of super intense caffeine, I just sat back and let it come. A few minutes later, the mini mug of coffee was placed in front of me. I picked up the packet of sugar which comes with every hot drink, and without even looking down, poured its entire contents into my cup. This took half a second. Oh, man, that was strong coffee. I should have taken the rest of Mark’s and Julia’s and Guillaume’s sugar.

It did it’s trick, though. After the café, we were all a little bit happier. We walked to Grenoble’s gondola and rode it up the mountain, which put us into even better moods. I think we were up on the mountain at least an hour, if not more. It was just gorgeous; even though it was really cloudy and we couldn’t see a lot of the peaks which were further away. I loved it. We even climbed around the fortress thing and ended up on a little outcropping away from the rest of the people up there. Fantastic.

Yes, we did sing “The Sound of Music.” And Julia started singing the Little Mermaid, for some reason. I think mostly because it made Mark cringe and try to escape. There’s just something about singing on top of a mountain…

When we left the mountain we walked back to the Musée de Grenoble. It was pretty good. It was huge, and actually I think I didn’t get to see the entirety. You know how they turn museums into these monster labyrinths? Yeah…I must have missed a turn, because later Julia was exclaiming about a Matisse, and I was like, “What Matisse?” Dang. I would have liked to see Matisse.

From the museum we couldn’t quite decide if we were going to be hungry or not on the train ride back to Lyon, so we walked into a Petite C just to see if anything struck our interest. While there I almost broke a wine bottle, that at least is worth telling. I was holding a bag of something in my right hand, and Mark was handing me this bottle, and I totally thought I had it. Nope. Didn’t have it. Not even close. The bottle slipped out of my fingers.

I watched it head to the ground and I would have sqeezed my eyes shut, except I was ready to jump out of the way of a wave of red wine. That’s kinda hard to do if you don’t know where to jump. The bottle hit the ground with quite a lovely little !KLINK! and, as we were standing in the aisle four feet away from the caisse (say “kess”; cashier), all the French people in the store turned around to look at us. The cashier let out an audible sigh and shook her head with wide eyes. I’ll bet they thought we were drunk or something. Who else drops a wine bottle?

After the KLINK, the bottle bounced and I caught it with my toes.

Yeah, I bet you weren’t expecting that, huh? It was magnificent. I was just so afraid that if it dropped to the ground again, it would fall on the neck of the bottle, and not on the base, like it had the first time. So yeah. We got to the train on time, but it was a few seconds after the rest of the universe, so it was impossible to find three seats near one another. After one pass through the car I turned around to make another, just to see, and somewhere along the way Julia decided to sit down without my even knowing. Mark noticed, though, which is good. We stopped near the back of one car and decided to just sit down. I found a seat near the middle, he got one behind me.

Two seconds later Mark was yelling at me; a French guy next to him had offered to move so that we could sit next to one another. I think that was the nicest thing a stranger Frenchie has ever done. He even suggested it himself, crazy.

Back in Lyon nerves were tense again and we kebabed it, at the “cheaper” place. Cheaper, ha.

Saturday

I discovered on this day that it really is impossible for me to sleep in. I tried, I really did. It just didn’t happen. I think we had gone to bed around 11 or 12, and of course I was bright eyed and ready for the day at 8 in the morning. I left Julia and Mark asleep in the room and walked down to breakfast.

I love it when auberges include breakfast in their price. I love it when an auberge considers breakfast to be granola, baguette, and confiture and chocolate and coffee and tea. Wonderful people, the French. The only problem is, now I miss granola. And cashews. What I wouldn’t give for a big bag of cashews, not a little three inch shrink-wrapped cube for 4 euros…But the breakfast there was perfect. Although, my jaw isn’t used to eating so much granola, so it was generally a little tired after each breakfast, haha. What a price to pay!

I went back up to the room and took a shower, and literally right as I was stepping back out of the bathroom (another fantastic thing: having the shower and sink in the room. I can deal with walking down the hall to pee. It’s just having the shower right there that’s amazing), Julia walked out the door. She was gone for about an hour. I read and looked out the window and waited for my hair to dry.

Mark woke up and showered, and then Julia came back. He asked her if it was cold outside, and she glanced up from her guide book and said, “I don’t know. Open the window yourself.” Uh…ok. Slam? Julia left again, and Mark and I stood in the room for a while, trying to decide what we had done…and then we took the metro to Croix Rousse, another hill of Lyon. It gave an awesome view of the city, the only catch was that you had to walk up stairs to gain said view. And there was not a lack of stairs, lemme tell ya. Ooh boy. Lots of stairs. It’s like, they were designing the hill, and putting the buildings up and all, and the most fit guys were looking at it, thinking, “Something’s missing. What’s it missing? Stairs! Lots of stairs!”

Ok, no, it wasn’t that bad. It’s just that they were tiny stairs. It took maybe six or seven minutes to walk up the hill. What was awesome was that it was almost stormy that day, but the storm clouds were moving away from us. They were actually just above Fourvière Hill, which was off to my right, and moving away. The layers of white and gray and black were fantastic.

Then we went to the Parc de la Tête d’or (Gold Head Park- the front gate is gilded). Why? Because there’s a zoo inside, dur. So cool. The park is hugenormous. Yes, I just created a word. Hugenormous. Because it’s true. It has a lake/pond with an island, a zoo, the park itself, a rose garden, and who knows what else. I should have tried harder to figure out how many acres (or hectares, that’s what they use) it is. Cause it was monstrous, and it took a while to walk through, even just to find the other entrance.

We left the park and headed to the theater (after much debating as to what we really wanted to do…I hate being so indecisive. I think I’m going to decide to just make decisions, no matter how dumb they are. Everyone else can follow or not) to see about times for Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis. I hope you’ve at least heard about this movie. The French love it. When Asterix came out, it broke all French film records. All of them, no contest. Asterix is France, pretty much. Then Bienvenu came out, and broke all of Asterix’s records, times ten.

It’s been a week and theaters in Rennes are still full even if you’re standing in line 40 minutes before the show. It’s crazy. We had seen publicités for the film on TV, in the theater…it was everywhere. The basic plot is that there’s this guy who is a manager for the post office, and he applies for a transfer on the Côte d’Azur. But because he wasn’t sure if they would pay attention to his application or not, he applies twice, once as himself, and once as a handicapped guy in a wheelchair. When upper management finds out, they do transfer him, but to Nord Pas-de-Calais. This is equal, I guess, to someone applying for a transfer to Hawaii but getting sent to Wyoming.

He goes, without his family, into a sort of two-year exile. Nord Pas-de-Calais (say “nor pahd kah leh” haha I know don’t you just love missing letter sounds?) has a reputation for being, meteorologically-wise, really really really difficult. Then comes the comedy. The people up there have an accent. The preview for the movie shows Philippe first driving into the city, Beurgues. He hits one of his employees, Antoine, who’s played by a hilarious French stand up comedian, Dany Boon. Antoine goes flying, and rolls off the car hood to the ground. Philippe jumps out of the car and tries to help him, and of course keeps asking him if he’s hurt anywhere. Antoine responds, “No, no, I’m fine, sure, it’s ok, I’m fine.”

The problem is that Antoine speaks in Ch’tis, a sort of dialect/accent. So for Philippe, it sounds more like he said, “Nah, nah, mfeen, sh’ok, mfeen.” Or something along those lines. Philippe looks at him and asks again about how he feels, and Antoine repeats exactly what he had said before, this time while nodding. “Are you sure?” Philippe asks, “You’re not hurt?” “Sure I’m sure.” “Because you…you have a very particular way of speaking.” “Particular? Oh, cause I speak Ch’tis? Oh, it’s nothing.”

Haha…and close the bunny trail parentheses…so Mark and I really wanted to see this movie. We texted Julia and asked if she wanted to meet us, she didn’t. So we got to the theater and stood in line, and we hadn’t been there five minutes before we heard an announcement that the next showing was full. The next showing was in twenty minutes. Ten minutes later, we were of course still standing in line (the French have no freaking idea how to queue- haha that’s what a Brit said the other day. And it’s so true…), and another announcement came up. The next two showings were full.

When we finally got up to the counter it was Mark’s turn to be assertive so I handed him my money (it’s easier to just do everything at once, we’ve discovered. French people roll their eyes at you if you split things up like normal people. And also, it takes a million years for movie theater minions to do their thing.) and he stepped up to the glass.

A few things went wrong.

One, the lady wasn’t listening to us.

Two, Mark forgot which time he wanted and then forgot to stick with military time.

Three, we didn’t just set our student cards on the glass from the get-go.

Four, Mark didn’t stop her the first time she said that we owed her too much money.

He had gone up and asked for two student tickets to see Bienvenue at 21h50. The problems really started when the lady asked him to repeat himself. We ended up paying full price (9,50), not student prices (6,80), for the time slot of 20h35. I don’t really know how that last part happened…It was horrible. Another thing was that I could see the screen with the price on it, but Mark couldn’t, so I knew immediately that the she had just given us normal prices, but when I tried to show Mark, he couldn’t look because he was in the middle of trying to work out things with the movie chick.

But when all he got back from a 20euro bill was one coin, Mark stopped and asked, hadn’t he asked for student tickets? And what does the lady say? “Oh, but sir, you need to specify that from the beginning.” She didn’t believe us when we said that we had. Oh well. We got out of line and looked at our watches. It was 18h05. We had a little more than two hours total, but we needed to be back at the theater at 20h00, just so that we would be on time enough not to get screwed again.

This was the part when I was just ridiculously happy that I tend not to let things get to me. Learn the lesson and move on, is my theory. You can’t go back and change it, and the person will never remember you, so why be angry? Mark doesn’t operate on the same theory. He was angered. Not just angry. Angered. Mostly at himself. I need to learn how to better handle angry people. Usually I just laugh at them. Then I try to reason with them, and that never works. I never know what kind of person they are, whether they’ll react to sympathy or matching anger or presents or just silence. I think I tried all of them.

I mean, I was frustrated too. I hate it when I say something with so much surety, and then said surety is just dashed to the ground with one “quoi” and a tilt of the head. It’s having to repeat myself when I lose it. The same thing happened to Mark, and he fumed all the way to the corner, where we decided that when in anger, do something you’re familiar with. In this case that meant walking over Hôtel de Ville and getting kebabs from the good place. Kinda sad, I know, but they’re cheap and yummy in my tummy.

The movie was hilarious. I actually want to see it again. I went into it thinking that I wasn’t going to understand anything. The last French film I saw in the theater, Asterix, was so incredibly hard to understand, I’d had to operate just on what I saw. It was confusing. I mean, I can only understand cultural jokes up to a point. That’s why I was so happy during Ch’tis, when there were only about three times when the rest of the theater was rolling with laughter and I wasn’t. Otherwise, I laughed a lot. It was so funny, oh man, and afterward I could even remember a couple one-liners! That just made it fantastic!

When we got back to the auberge after the movie we got our keys (each time you left you were supposed to leave your keys at the desk, and then you had to ask for them again when you came back. It let them keep track of who was there, and kept you from just giving your keys to whoever) and found Julia. The thing is, I didn’t want to lose my key, and Julia was sitting at a table in the dining room area, so I stuck it in my back pocket. Bad idea. You see, the keys were…dumb.

They operated on the same idea of a key card. They were a little smaller than a playing card, and the thickness of two credit cards. Half of the card was solid khaki plastic, and the other half was punched with holes. You would slide the card into the slot in your door, push it in the entire way, the holes would line up with whatever was in the door, et voilà, it unlocked. But the key the guy gave me was almost broken. The holes on the upper half of the card acted as a sort of perforation line. So when I had the key in my pocket and then I sat around and all, it snapped. Oops…

The next morning when we checked out I handed my broken baby to the guy behind the desk. He took one look at it and looked up at me and sighed. He said a few words to his manager and then turned back to me. “I’m going to have to ask you to pay for this.”

“But…even if it was mostly broken when you gave it to me?” I asked.

“Oh. Well…ok. Here you go.” He handed me my hostel ID card and let me go. Julia and Mark and I walked outside and Mark sighed.

“If only I were allowed to use your sort of negotiation. I could get so many free things.” Apparently my “sort of negotiation” is to act innocent. I say I was innocent from the get-go. No acting involved.

We got home at 13h25 Sunday afternoon. I ran into Jessica, who had been in Vienne with a friend, at the bus stop. We rode up to St. Grégoire together, and then I walked home. It was a weird feeling. It had been so fantastic to be on vacation, but I really felt like I was coming home, like for a vacation from vacation. Strange. I had to ring the bell because my mère had left the key in the other side, making it impossible for me to unlock the door from the outside. She let me in and asked how everything had been and I said it had been fantastic and I guess something about the way I had said it had showed her that I was tired, because then she said that she would let me rest a little and I could tell them about everything later.

I laughed a little because I didn’t feel like I was tired, but I went to my room anyway and put my stuff down and turned on the computer to start typing out my blog (on Word, of course, since I still don’t have wifi back). Twenty minutes later I was completely unconscious on my bed. I guess I was tired. That was a week ago, and I just finished the blog.

LYON 2

Tuesday

On Tuesday Connor, Amanda, and Julia went to Annecy and Mark and I walked around Lyon. We didn’t really start out the day with a plan or anything, and we ended up seeing a lot of stuff on accident. I couldn’t tell you now everything that we ran into and said, “Oh, hey, that’s cool,” but it happened, I promise.

We almost went into the Musée des Beaux Arts de Lyon but we looked at the prices and I saw “4 EUROS” and made the executive decision to be satisfied with the statues in the garden. Then it was around 5 and we tried some shopping, since that’s what you do in France, but it didn’t really work very well. After a while we gave up and headed back to the hostel. This was a good idea because it was getting cold. It was a bad idea because even though we had made plans to meet and eat with the other people when they got back from their day trip, we ended up waiting, oh, about 3 hours. Give or take.

It’s amazing how much time you can spend alternately looking out a window and reading.

Around 8 we decided that they had to be close to being back and we left the hostel again. Mark tried to call and text Amanda but she wasn’t responding. I texted Julia and got the same sort of response (later we figured out that Julia’s phone had committed suicide). We kept walking anyway, figuring that the general direction of the gare would be a good idea, since they would be coming from there. Finally we got a call from Amanda. They were about to walk into a kebab place, cause they were tired and had decided that we must have already eaten.

We created a rendez-vous first at Hotel de Ville, and then at Place de la Republique. Once at Republique we stood around for a while trying to see them and then Mark got a call from Amanda. “We’re lost.” Uh….ok? Turns out they were just a couple blocks down, not lost at all. In the end we did have kebabs again, but I had falafel instead of meatiness, and we went to a different restaurant. The falafel was lovely. Four euros for a galette containing four monster balls of falafel, French fries, moutarde (made my eyes water, no joke, loved every minute of it) and lettuce and tomato. Of course, I try to refrain from translating that sum from euros into dollars…it’s ok. For lunch, we had “petite casino-ed” it. This means that we went to a mini marché and bought bread and cheese and saucisson and that was lunch.

Wednesday

Wednesday was the day that Mark and I went to Annecy. Amanda left in the morning to go off on her own. Well, technically she wasn’t on her own, because she was staying with a Lyonaise family that she knew from highschool. But she wasn’t with us anymore, so that’s how I count it. Connor and Julia went to Genève on Wednesday.

On Tuesday Mark and I had gone to the gare and purchased our tickets to get to and from Annecy. That had been another one of my moments to shine. I talked to the woman at the desk in French, and she continued the conversation and all the explanations in French. It costs the same to take a train or the bus to Annecy, and what was super nice about our tickets is that we could go either way with them. She printed them off and then wrote down all of our options. We ended up taking the bus there, the ride was about two hours. Give or take. I got really excited the closer we got to the mountains, because (surprise) I miss the mountains, and the Alps are gorgeous, even when you can’t see them very well because of clouds.

The weather was super, if a little cold, when we first arrived. We spent the first hour or so wandering first randomly and then with more purpose as we tried to find a Petite Casino to buy lunch from. Well, really we wanted to find the Monoprix (a bigger marché) that the other peeps had talked about, and buy from there, but we found the PCasino first. Of course, we walked out of the minimarché, headed to the lake, and there it was: a monster Monoprix just grinning at us from its rather obvious place near the water. I laughed.

We ate by the lake. While we were eating, a seagull menaced us. I have no other way to put it. He cawed and cackled and every once in a while I was afraid for my cheese, cause he was definitely eyeing it. And then a family came and sat to my left, and what else did they do but start to feed the birds? I almost wished I had seen some more Alfred Hitchcock so that I could have some freaky flashbacks. Suddenly there were sparrows and seagulls and crows and whatever else had been in the vicinity vying for my food. Even the swans, which were down in the water, came closer to the platform and looked up at us.

After lunch we started to walk around the lake; fifteen minutes into the walk we stopped under a tree that looked like it was covered with dead Christmas decorations and rested. Five minutes after we sat down it started to sprinkle. Five minutes after that, it was lightly raining. I like rain. I thought it was cool. Mark doesn’t like rain, and so we set off back around the lake, walking quickly with the goal of finding a café.

The funny thing about trying to find things is that you can never find something when you really want to be able to find it. At least when we’re in Rennes we know where all of the cafés and bars are, and the difference between the two. In Annecy, not only did we have no idea where anything was, we had no idea where we were. And of course, the longer we walked around, the harder it rained and the colder it became. I’m not really sure how long it was before we actually decided/found a place to go to, but I know that once I sat down and tried to take my scarf off, I discovered that my hair was absolutely sopping. I was tempted to wring it out, but since the bartender guy didn’t seem to be in that fantastic of a mood I didn’t.

After we were in the café/bar for about twenty minutes, the rain stopped. When we left we headed up to the castle, which cost 2Euro to get into, but I wanted to go in because it was supposed to be really cool, and because Julia had said that it had an exhibit of monsters that she hadn’t been able to see because the castle and museum are closed on tuesdays. So we went into the castle and saw the creepiest exhibit of fake monsters that I’ve ever seen in my entire life. Well, not that I go to a lot of those things, but I’m sure if I did this one would have beat them all. There’s a lot to say for people who put very very very fake monster animals on display next to pictures of said “monsters” and themselves out in the “wild.” Haha…oh man, oh the freakiness. Mark couldn’t handle it; it was like watching those really angsty teenage awkwardness movies, but only watching the parts where the main characters are being super dumb and only making their lives more difficult for themselves. Embarrassing and painful but also so incredibly hilarious.

When we couldn’t handle any more of the craziness we walked up the stairs to the rest of the castle, which contained more artsy-sort things. It was like it was trying way too hard to be a fantastic museum, and could do nothing but fail miserably. There was even an attempt at a modern art museum, and that was just terrible. I mean, modern art in itself can kinda be iffy, but when you’re getting a piece of metal in the shape of a G and putting it on the floor and calling it art…come on, guys. Come on.

There was even a movie room of “art” movies. One was about…uh…bugs? Actually, that one was really cool, despite the fact that I don’t like beetles. It was just a very rapid slide show of all these bugs. Kinda looked like they all turned into one another, beetles into butterflies and things like that.

After the castle museum we walked to a PCasino and grabbed some juice and snickers bars and walked back to the gare. We had the choice between a bus which would leave in ten minutes, or a train which would leave about an hour after. After a couple seconds of just looking at one another, trying to gauge which of us was going to take the lead and actually make a decision for once (that’s one of the biggest reasons Mark and I do a lot of wandering…neither of us are man enough to be decisive. Haha…gotta love people like us). Finally we agreed that it would be silly to just wait around for a train just after we had purchased all that healthy good-for-your-body snackage.

Oh, and the reason we were so hesitant in the first place, was that it’s easy to find where trains are. They have the platform and track number and everything displayed on this huge electronic table. But when it comes to buses, the French are more like, “Well, there’s this parking lot, quoi? And there are buses there. One of them happens to be the one you want. But we’re not going to tell you which one it is or on which end of the parking lot you will find it. Bon voyage!”

I’m pretty sure we ended up traversing the parking lot sidewalk about five times. I know it was an odd number because we stopped walking on the opposite side of the stairs that we had come up from, not that it matters. We did another bout of just standing there, silently daring the other person to jump up and say, “Ok, I’ll go ask that bus driver over there which bus we’re supposed to be looking for.” In the end it was Mark who said, “Isn’t it your turn to be assertive?”

It was. So I went up and asked the nearest conductrice if she was going to Gare Lyon Part Dieu. Oh glory, she was. We hopped on the bus and four minutes later it pulled out of the lot. The sad part was that two seconds after we sat down I saw the sign that said you weren’t allowed to eat on the bus. Um…I’m sorry for all you people who think I follow all of the rules. We totally gave in after about an hour of driving and ate a snickers bar. It was 18h30. That still kinda means dinner for me (even though tonight my parents and I didn’t eat until 20h30. and then they were surprised when it was 22h45 when we were finally done with all the courses. Crazy French. I love them.). So we broke that rule….bummer.

Once back in Lyon we met Connor and Julia and went to a pizzeria for dinner. Pizza here isn’t actually pizza. There are tons of pizzerias, just as there are tons of kebab spots. That doesn’t mean, though, that they make pizza. French people don’t believe in thick crust. They believe in one thin pizza per person. It’s about the size of a medium pizza in the states, and sometimes has stuff on it. The one I had was actually super good, it was the Mexicain, and apparently that means that they take refried beans, red and green peppers, onion, beef, and cheese, and pile it on. It was so good….and they had this olive oil on the table that was so magnificent, I could hardly contain myself.

I should explain why this oil was such a blessing: the French don’t believe in spices. I believe I’ve said this before. It’s true. I found spices in my cuisine, but I’m pretty sure they are only very rarely used. But this olive oil had something in it that added this spicey bite to the aftereffects; kinda like I was eating curry on accident but would only realize the fact after I swallowed.

You may have guessed by now that two of the foods I miss the most are curry and Mexican food. Oh, for enchiladas. Jalapeños. That spicy pain that climbs up your nose and yanks tears out of your eyes, oh yeah.

Thursday

Thursday was deemed “Lyon day” and it started with us walking with Julia (after sleeping in, yay!) down past Hotel de Ville to hit up the Petite Casino. The only problem we ran into then was that they were out of baguettes. Incroyable, I know. So we bought the rest of our food and then set out to find a boulangerie. You’d think that this would be easy, since it seems that the only things you see in France are boulangeries and cafes. Haha, not so much. We walked up the mini hill (not Fourvière), across the mini hill, and halfway back down the mini hill before ending up, not even joking, buying bread from a boulangère just on the other side of the Hotel building.

What was funnier is that I didn’t realize where we were until Mark and Julia had already commented on it and I was sitting down on my step. Suddenly I looked up, recognized the building, and started to laugh. Sadly, the two others had already enjoyed their “Oh my gosh look where we are” so all I got was a “dur” sort of look. And then there was this amazing kid who was chasing the pigeons away for us. It was kinda like a reverse of Annecy, where the bird was screaming at us to give him food. This time, some elementary age boy was running up and down the stairs in front of the fountain, yelling at the pigeons in French. It was pretty sweet, especially when all he did was scare the birds into flying over the heads of the women sitting at the café at the top of the stairs.

After lunch Julia headed to an internet café to do some parling (no, that’s not French. It’s totally franglais, how do you like that? Parler {to talk} + talking= parling!) via email. Mark and I said psh that and walked back through the plaza Hotel de Ville to the Musée des Beaux Arts, where Mark took initiative and asked the lady for tickets, which we then got for free…so much for 4 euros, even for students. We found it incredibly awkward after we asked for two student fares, showed her our cards, and I gave her my St.G zip code; and she just handed the tickets to Mark and walked away.

He looked at me, his wallet was still in his hand; my hand was in my purse, my fingers were playing with the snap on my own wallet. I looked back at him and shrugged. Whatevs, if she didn’t want our money…it wasn’t until a few steps later, when I looked down at the ticket, that I saw that it said GRAT. STUDENT (grat=gratuite=free) on the top. So we headed upstairs. It was pretty sweet. By that I mean, what a fantastic museum.

Like all French museums, it had an exhibit of Egyptian artifacts. I can understand how fascinating the Egyptians are/were, but really. That’s a lot of mummies. Lots of people died thousands of years ago so that I could pay the French to let me look at what was in their tombs. And I am eternally grateful for those deaths, lemme tell ya. When we left the museum we went and sat by the fountain in the plaza for a little bit, trying to let our legs revive themselves a little bit before moving again.

At this point Mark looked at the store façades behind us and poked me in the arm. “Hey, you want some ice cream?” I followed his gaze. Hagen Daaz. Uh oh. No, I said. I’m not allowed to have ice cream. Besides, it’s expensive. “But it’s ice cream. You know you want some. Let’s go buy ice cream.” Um…but….I…fine. Let’s go look.

Yeah, it was 4E for a single scoop cone thing. I can pay that for a monster kebab sandwich, but when it comes to a dessert barely the length of my palm, there’s no way. The only problem was that after he mentioned it I really wanted ice cream. I’ve been wanting it for a while, really. I’ve been trying half-heartedly to find a glacerie in Rennes, but I haven’t had any luck. Of course, that isn’t any wonder, since I definitely haven’t been looking that hard. I’ve just been looking at façades and keeping a log of where I see them in the back of my mind. But just thinking about having hagen daaz was driving me crazy, so I said ok, let’s go find some cheap ice cream.

Here’s the sad part. We ended up at MacDo’s. I know. I know! So lame. But we also learned our lesson. A sundae was 1E70: really really cheap. We didn’t want to do it, but the desire for ice cream was so strong, and we were right there, and it was the cheapest we could find…but of course we still couldn’t help but keep talking about how lame we felt walking in there. “Oh look at those Americans, they really don’t eat anything but Macdo’s!” Ohbrother.

Mark stepped up to the counter, asked for two sundaes, and the chick looks at him and asks, “What do you want?” Uh…Two. Sundaes. “No. *switches to English*What do you want?” The sundaes, please. “No. *sigh/roll of eyes* Chocolate, caramel, strawberry?” Oh…chocolate, please. Thanks, mean little poo brain.

You can’t imagine the humiliation. Freaking Americans can’t even get respect from a French chick whose life sucks. Somehow they always find a way to roll their eyes at you and to make you feel like the dumbest person in the world, even though you could have had the same misunderstanding in English, in any other fast crap place in the world. We ate the sundaes in the building, I don’t really remember why, but we did. Kind of a “yeah, so? Here I am, still in your space!” sort of a thing, I suppose.

Just when I was finishing my last bite of icecream (a good seven minutes after Mark finished his) Julia texted and said that she was back at Hotel de Ville and where in the world were we? We dumped our trash and walked over and told her about our little escapade. And what did she say? “Oh…I was actually going to suggest that we go to the petite C and buy some ice cream to share…” Of course. Of course she would say that and not have texted us earlier to tell us her idea. Of course.

After meeting Julia no one wanted to make any decisions so we just walked around. I mean this quite literally. Mark just kept on saying that he was easy, I said that I didn’t care, I was content walking, and Julia threw her hands up in the air in exasperation. I don’t think she was very happy with us. After walking around for about twenty minutes we stopped at a café and got drinks. From there we hopped across the street so that Julia could buy dinner. Mark and I were planning on going to a bouchon (say “boo-shah”), and since Julia didn’t want to come along, she bought quiche and a baguette.

A bouchon has a couple different meanings in France. The two main ones which I know of are “wine cork” and “small Lyonais specialty restaurant.” In Lyon, it’s a very small restaurant, usually with space for around 50 people, which isn’t very many, once you think about it. The great thing about all the bouchons is that they’re all in a row on the road, so you can tromp down the street, look at the menu prices and in all the windows, and then make your decision. The street near the auberge with the largest number of bouchons was Rue St. Jean, also the road containing our two favorite pubs.

The first bouchon we came to was packed. As we walked up to it, people were turned away and told to go further down the street. So even though the menu looked fantastic (it was drawn in white chalk on a monster black board nailed right next to the front door) we headed down the street and looked at all the other spots. They were all pretty good, most every resto had a menu formule for about 15E. This is kinda expensive, I know, but you have to consider a few things.

First, it’s France. Second, it’s Lyon. If France is supposed to be one of the gastronomic capitals of the world, Lyon is the capital of the capital. Gastronomy is their thing, one might say. Third, you get courses with the formule. Entrée, plat principal, et dessert for me, meaning salade lyonaise, cochonaille pot au feu, et crème caramel to finish. The salad was an interesting experience, mostly because I was trying to be French and eat it with a fork and knife. Yeah, that was hard. I can do it now with almost every food except for lettuce. There’s just something about leaves that makes them want to run away from my fork and not go down into my belly…

The “cochonaille pot au feu” is something I recommend to ANYONE WHO LIKES TO EAT. Unless you’re like Julia and are vegetarian, or you don’t ever like pork. Otherwise, you’ve got to go to Lyon and taste this pot au feu. What they do is take a pot the size of a saucepan, fill it with water and animal goo and salt, and then drop in meat and potatoes. Then they cook it (feu =fire). The waiter brough it out to me and I could see steam coming out of the pot (they don’t put it on a plate or anything, they just give you the pot and let you go at it. The meat fell apart, like a beautiful gorgeous perfect pot roast. I swear that little piggy was melting on my tongue.

The fun part (besides, you know, the eating part) was at the very beginning of the meal, when we were ordering. I answered the waitress when she asked what we wanted for dinner. I said we wanted some water. This is just fine, except for the accidental way I said it. The French don’t have diphthongs in their language, and that’s what I did. A diphthong is when you say a vowel sound, but you turn it into two vowel sounds.

For example, if an Anglophone was reading the word “too,” they would probably pronounce it as “too-wuh.” Try it. Say the word “too” a couple of times, and see if you end up with a little “wuh” vowel extension at the end. If a Frenchie were to read that same word, they would pronounce it crisply: “too.” I would go into more, but I seem to be the only one interested in this sort of thing…

The mistake I made was to say “De l’eau (“oh-wuh”), s’il vous plait”

Instead of saying, rightfully, “De l’eau (“oh”), svp”

The waitress was wearing chic square black glasses and she looked at me over them and repeated what I had said. She even raised an eyebrow. I grinned and I’m pretty sure I also turned a little pink. It was such an amateur mistake to make…I said it again and this time she nodded and smiled back and left to take our order to the kitchen.

In the end I ate way too much and we didn’t get out of the restaurant until after ten. I think we were there for about two hours. It was a great two hours, though; I think I’ll be dreaming about that food for the rest of my life. Then again, there was the part when we were afraid that we weren’t going to be able to leave, because we weren’t sure about the etiquette for asking for the check. It’s easy in the States, there’s always a little waiter buzzing around, waiting for you to finish and leave. In France, you see the waiter three times. Once when you get your menus, once when you order, and one time when you finally flag them down and ask for the check.

Oh, one interesting story. When we were in the bouchon, a couple came in the door behind Mark. I was facing the entrance, so I got a good look at them before the waitress intercepted them. The man looked normal, I have no residual memory of him. The women was wearing black shiny pleather. Pleather jacket, pleather knee-high boots. Blond hair, red lipstick. She was a, uh, “wow” sort of woman. But not the good wow.

The waitress met them just as they gained our table (we were three tables from the entrance) and asked them what they wanted. “Is there place for two?” the woman asked. The waitress gave her a quick up-down and then shook her head. “Sorry, you’ll have to go further down the road, we don’t have any more places…” The couple left.

There was an entire table for six open in the corner of the room.

Such is the privilege of being able to serve whom you want, when you want.