savoring strasbourg

five months majoring in pastry & cathedral studies, with a minor in confusion

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2012-05-19

Old french ladies rock

I had the loveliest experience today. I went to the park near my house with some friends and was reading a French translation of Pablo Neruda (which is too good to be real. The most beautiful poet in the most beautiful language. Every other line I just want to throw the book across the room because I can’t handle it.). An old lady came and sat down on the bench next to me and asked what I was reading; we ended up talking for a good half-hour about so many different things…the elections in both our countries, language, and her awesome life. When she was my age she backpacked through Chile; later on she taught geography in Mali and in the US. So cool. She reminded me of one of my grandmothers who was also a badass world traveler. If I can be anything like either of my grandmothers or this lady when I am old I will have succeeded at life. I wish more random French old people would strike up conversations with me, not just because I want to hear their stories but I’ve not been getting as much French conversation as I’d like. The past two months or so my host mom and sister have both been really busy with end-of-the-school-year stuff…of course we still talk but I don’t remember the last time we ate dinner at the table and actually had a good long conversation. Oh well. The lady today was shocked that I was American because “you have hardly any accent and speak so well” so the relative lack of conversation must not be that bad. When I first came here I was afraid that as soon as anyone got the slightest hint that I’m from Americaland they would only speak to me in English; now I’m glad I’m a nationality that people expect to be only-English-speaking because once anyone finds out I’m American they just rain compliments down upon me for making the slightest effort language-wise and not being obese or carrying a gun. Does wonders for the ego.

Other than that, I’m really ready to go home. My exams are virtually over (BIG SCHOOLS ARE WEIRD. Before every final you have to show your student ID and sign something and then sign again when you leave so they know you didn’t pay someone else to take your test for you because none of your profs have any idea who you are. It’s so weird.) and they’ve gone well for the most part - it’s nerve-wracking to have one test be 100% of your grade but whatever, at the end of my life I’m not going to wish that I had spent less time having fun French life experiences and more time studying. I don’t even wish that now. What I wish is that I could fast forward two weeks so that my BEAUTIFUL FAMILY MEMBERS will be here whisking me around France and Italy. I’m getting really lonely and bored. I miss America but I also miss there being more than one person in the same country as me around whom I feel I can be 100% myself and who cares about me for who I am, and with limited wifi access I feel more isolated from the folks in other countries who fit that bill. I’m trying to make the most of my last few weeks here because I know once I’m settled back in the US I’ll miss it, but I feel like I’ve eaten all the pastries and spoken all the language and done all the growing-as-a-person. I just want to cuddle with my friends and watch Netflix, dangit. I want it to be summer! I’m ready to move onto the next chapter and see more clearly how I’ve changed this semester in being back to my normal life. Soon enough. For now there are still church bells to listen to and Neruda in French to read, and in less than two weeks my family will be here.
2012-05-11

Three weeks

is how long I’ve got left in Strasbourg. Yup, it’s been a while since I’ve blogged and a whiiiiile since I got here. Since coming back from Paris, I went to a small village in the south of france called Taize for a school project, went back to Amsterdam and had the same one-earringed mullet master as my bus driver, and now I’m into finals already. Sadly, I have twelve in total. Yes, twelve. The good news is that when every class meets for only an hour a week, there’s only so much material you can cover, so the exams themselves are shorter and easier than three-hour-long brain death marathons like at LC. But twelve is still twelve and after an entire semester of no academic effort whatsoever beyond going to class and understanding the language, studying is PAS FACILE. Plus yesterday and today it’s been in the high eighties F, so i just want to lie around and eat pastries in the shade. Bluh. But I really am happy that they are spread out - I can’t imagine my last few days in Stras being only devoted to huge exams one right after the other. This way I get to relax more and savor these last few weeks. I’ll be ready to go home, but I still at least manage to be ready to go to the bakery or the park lately…
2012-05-01

Paris again

Four days in Paris were incredible! I don’t know if it was the fact that the weather or my French had improved but Paris made much more of an impression on me than when I went in February…probably the fact that I got to spend more time just exploring the city on my own had an effect, too. When we arrived on Saturday we had the whole afternoon free, so I decided to just start walking and see what I could find. I ended up stumbling across Le Pantheon, the amazingly beautiful “public temple” where people like Victor Hugo and Marie Curie are buried, a used French copy of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and the Jardins de Luxembourg which was the most beautiful park I’ve ever seen: a huge fountain with a hundred toy boats racing, old men playing petanque and smoking pipes, a choir in a gazebo, every kind of flower and tree and statue and cloud in the world. Lovely. That was probably my favorite day I spent, but I also got to see the Louvre and other big things I missed the first time around, eat soooooo much delicious fancy food, and even go to Paris’ apparently most famous jazz bar (part of Midnight in Paris was filmed there) which was incredible. Being obligated to sometimes move in a pack with a thousand American bros, not so much, but it made the time I got to myself or with non-bro friends that much better. Just more cultural exploration I would’ve never gotten to do otherwise, anyway….really though, who goes to a fancy jazz bar where all kinds of people of very different ages are having a classy jazz time and orders shots? BROS IS WHO. (When I got home I taught my host mom about the idea of the bro, and she later complained that about the school trip she had to take her students on since some of them “are bros and sisses”. I’m a great cultural ambassador).

Bros aside, I ate the best croissant of my entire time here (a coconut one, good lord), got to see many paintings in real life that I spent the semester learning about in my French art history class, got mistaken for a French person FOR THE SECOND TIME, and saw an Le Cantatrice Chauve by Ionesco which was about 800% more enjoyable on the stage than the page.

Still playing catchup blogwise, but that’s a good sign because it means I’m spending my time actually doing things! More later. Can’t believe tomorrow is May already…it’s a public holiday here (labor day) so most things will be closed and there are sure to be a lot of demonstrations and protests. A bientot!
2012-04-20

Skippedydoodah

Sometimes in life going to class is really not the best use of your afternoon. Today was one such time. All day it kept going back and forth between rain, hail, and bright sunshine, so the light and clouds were intense and perfect. I had one class this afternoon, but since it’s been dreary lately and since I’ll be in Paris til Tuesday I decided to take the day to myself, and just walked around taking pictures (and going to the library and the grocery and the stationery store) of beautiful Strasbourg. Even though I’ve been missing America lately and a month and a half seems like a long time, I know there are many days in my future when I’ll wish more than anything that I were back in Strasbourg. I have the rest of my life to sit in French classes. Today I ate the best pastry I’ve had yet so far, took some great pictures, and traded puns with a friend’s French friend. Good segue into the break for sure. It’s amazing how different everything looks once things have started blooming!!
2012-04-19

Elections a-comin’

So, on April 22^nd France has its presidential elections! It’s an exciting time to be here for sure – I’m getting to learn a lot firsthand. For one thing, the differences between the French & American election systems are so interesting. France has two rounds of elections instead of one day. They vote directly instead of having an electoral college. The first round is with all the candidates from every of the many political parties – this year there are 10. The second is just with the top two scorers from round 1, and that’s that. It’s looking like it’s going to be either 5 more years of Sarkozy, or the candidate from the Socialist Party, Francois Hollande. They’re scoring about the same and far above the other eight. But France is also having a lot of indecision, a lot of people saying they don’t like either so they’re just not voting, etc. Very few people seem to be passionate about any candidate. So it’ll be interesting to see what happens there. It’s also interesting just to see how the election is covered and talked about – every candidate is legally required to get the same amount of media attention and chance to speak, so the media is monitored/controlled more than in the US. Candidates aren’t allowed to directly criticize each other. Elections are publicly funded. Commercials are normally banned after 8, but they make an exception for the candidates’ ads – they show them all in a row, just once, and then that’s that for the rest of the night. It’s great.

Last week of classes is dragging by. Spring break #2 starts Friday - Paris with the whole group plus the Kalamazoo bros first off! A bientot!
2012-04-13

Ahh! Out of all the incredible places I’ve seen this semester, Amsterdam was my absolute favorite. Different parts of it reminded me of New England and Portland and France, so with that combination I just fell in love. Beautiful brick buildings everywhere, canals everywhere, more people on bikes than I’ve ever seen anywhere. The people were so nice, too, muuuuch more open than the French. I literally met more Dutch people in one weekend there than I have French people in an entire semester. Ridiculous… every French person I’ve met here as been totally great individually but as a people they’re incredibly reserved. I’ve grown to miss little things that are normal in the US like chatting with cashiers or saying hi to people you pass when you go for a walk, so Amsterdam was definitely a good change of pace on that front.

Another thing I loved was the combination of languages there. Everything is written in Dutch, so I felt like a got a vacation from being constantly advertised to, and I noticed that aspect more than I have in other travels since I was still able to talk to anyone I met and get around completely fine – everyone spoke English, quite a few spoke French, and I guess just because Dutch isn’t as prevalent as German I didn’t feel like a dumb American for not being able to speak it.

The bus ride there was ten hours long, but it was made more bearable by the fact that the bus driver had a mullet, one hoop earring, and played “No Scrubs” on the intercom. Francis’ plane didn’t get in til later that evening, so I had the whole day to myself. I got checked in at the hostel, walked around for a bit getting oriented, and then went to the Rijksmuseum. It was mainly Dutch Old Masters which isn’t really my favorite kind of art, but I found a few I liked a lot, and there was also a giant pirate ship and a violin made of porcelain. Plus the building and grounds were beautiful. Walked around exploring some more, relaxed in a coffeeshop, and treated myself to a movie IN ENGLISH (Take Shelter – really good). Then Francis got in and I met up with her and two of her friends who are studying in Spain, explored a while and hung out at a bar for a while, and discovered one of my favorite things about Amsterdam – a popular and cheap snack is a paper cone of fries with any kind of sauce you could imagine. I got the Oorlog – peanut sauce and mayo – and it was amazing. (Mayonnaise might sound weird on fries but it usually replaces mustard in Europe, so good).

I had planned on waking up early so that I could be at the Anne Frank house right when it opened, but like a good college student I fell back asleep after my alarm went off. Oh well. Instead I went off in search of a flea market with Francis and her friends – secondhand really doesn’t exist in Strasbourg, so it was nice to see that again, even if most things were still at firsthand European prices. We spent a good chunk of the afternoon in a café which was nice, good people-watching and good coffee – I like milky coffee and France does not, and many cafes in Amsterdam had a version of a Viennese mélange – black coffee with whipped cream on top. Yum. At night Francis and I went to a concert, Kings of Convenience – the venue used to be a church, and really looked like it – stained glass, balconies that used to be pews, etc. Super cool. The show was fun and we met a new friend who goes to school in Rotterdam.

We got a cheap late-night dinner of really fresh perfect falafel sandwiches and fries again, went to a bar briefly, and again I decided to turn in early to get to Anne Frank before the crowds, and again my body knew it was on vacation and wouldn’t let me get up early. This was Sunday, so most things (including the Van Gogh museum! nooooo) were closed, but the weather was good so I spent most of the day relaxing in Vondelpark, the biggest park in town – there was a big tulip garden, lots of little bridges, a lake, and lots of interesting locals. Have you ever seen a man with one dreadlock for a beard? Because I have. The sun went away so I went exploring again for a while, found some nice street art and another good coffeeshop, and then headed to the Anne Frank house to get in line right before it closed. Supposedly this was the other time to go to beat the crowds, but even then the line was ridiculous and the experience itself was less museum-ing and more sloooowly moving forward in a line past all the things you’re supposed to see. Ugh. It was still such an experience, though. Otto Frank would only allow the building to be a museum if they left everything unfurnished, but the same bookcase that was the secret door between the annex and the rest of the house is still there, and in Anne’s room all her postcards and pictures of movie stars are still glued to the walls. I really wonder if the person who gave the SS the anonymous tip that got them discovered is still alive – can you imagine what it would be like to have assumed at the time that you were doing something good and patriotic and then to watch one of the people you turned in become the symbol of the Holocaust whom everyone in the world knows? They probably didn’t even know who they were turning in, but I still wonder. Anyway, had another early morning for a ten-hour bus back to Stras on Monday, so I went to bed early again and thankfully this time I actually woke up when I wanted to! And because this bus wasn’t an overnight I actually got to see Holland and Belgium for the first time. They were both so beautiful it made me angry, Holland especially. And now I’m back again and completely baffled that it’s mid-april. It’s MID-APRIL. What is time. What is anything. Ughghh. Most other LC abroad programs are on summer vacation already, so thank God mine is the exception. I am really starting to miss America and to get excited for the summer, and I’m completely ready to be done with 20+ hours a week of lecture classes, but if I could get on a plane tomorrow I wouldn’t. Sadly it’s April showers here, but after three years in a town where only tourists use umbrellas it’s hilarious to me to see what wimps people here are about any amount of precipitation whatsoever. A bientot!
2012-04-05

It’s nice living in the only region of France without separation of church and state! It just means we get a four-day weekend, which is fine by me. I went to the store today and everyone in the world was there buying all their provisions before everything shuts down…aaaaand there was a petting zoo set up outside it with pigs and chicks and goats and rabbits. I kind of wish I were sticking around to celebrate with my family, but oh well - I’m going to Amsterdam with Francis! In two hours I’ll get on an 11-hour bus and wake up in the land of canals and Van Gogh. Hooray!
2012-04-01

I hate France. APRIL FOOLS I’m hilarious. In France they do have April Fool’s but they call it Poisson d’Avril – April fish. Instead of playing any old joke, you stick paper fish on people’s backs and go “April fish!” Hasn’t happened to me….yet….

March finished well. Friday we had our second group excursion, a day trip around Alsace. First we went to a museum about WW2 in Alsace – during the war Alsace was part of Germany, and it became French again when the war ended, so lots of complicated history there. There’s a memorial to the war dead in Strasbourg, and the statues aren’t wearing uniforms because which uniform would they be in? It was a really well-designed museum, too – rooms made to look like the trains with which they evacuated Strasbourg, Nazi offices, a battlefield, etc., and because it was with the program they gave us a guide, which was nice. After that we went to the only Baroque church in the region which was amazing – very different from any other church I’ve seen so far here, and the organ was playing! Some kind of religious site has been where the church is since 637. Amazing to think how many have been built and torn down and built again for so long a time, how people just kept choosing that spot. We got shuttled back onto the bus after fifteen minutes like touristy tour bus tourists, but it was nice to get to drive through towns and see them more than you do from a train. We passed “Stork Land” where you can look at a stork aviary and ride a rollercoaster…sadly not one of our stops. We went to a small wine village next and just walked around, then went to an Eaux de Vie (fruit brandy) museum, had a little tour and a little tasting, and then an twelve-hour eighty-seven-thousand course dinner in Munster…..bread with wild garlic and a peppery flower, salad with munster cheese (and duck for everyone else), lavender sorbet to cleanse the palate, potatoes gratin and eggs (instead of guinea fowl) and vegetables with mysterious fancy sauce, and then a little plate of chestnut mousse, chestnut meringue, candied chestnuts, chestnut paste, and a little spoon of chestnut ice cream. And then a little chocolate egg. And all the wine in the world. And then we waddled back to the bus and passed out.

On the day trip we got to meet the kids from a semi-connected program from Kalamazoo College, who just got here last week since they do trimesters. As people they are very nice and it was good to have new faces around, but they seem to have…slightly different motivations for being in France. And by that I mean they seem to be here to see how being schwasted every night in France is different from being schwasted in America. Uhh. It was good that they got us to go out clubbing since we hadn’t yet, but oh my god I’m so glad I don’t go to a bro school…

Saturday night we had a dinner party at Francis’s since her host mom is out of town. Spaetzle, lentils, salad, crème brulee, and all the wine in France. My host mom is so busy lately and so committed to knowing the state of the world that most nights the past few weeks we eat while watching the news, so it was nice to eat at a table for a change. A good long walk in the morning and then American brunch at Annie’s….good conversation and croissant French toast. A fine combination.

It’ll be a short week this week! Alsace was Germany when France decided on separation of church & state, so it doesn’t apply here, meaning we get both Good Friday and Easter Monday off as public holidays. Fine by me - Francis and I are going to Amsterdam for the weekend! A bientot!
2012-03-28

We paid our dues here with the subarctic winter and now we’ve skipped spring and gone straight to summer. Heaven. Suddenly the city seems twice as big and twice as busy as everyone comes out f the woodwork and into the sun. You can’t find a patch of grass that doesn’t have people sprawling on it, and I understand now why the sidewalks are so wide – every café wants to cram as many tables and chairs outside as it can. The last week almost felt like another break – I missed class Monday and Tuesday in traveling, and came back to find that all my language classes were cancelled for the rest of the week. Fine by me! Movies come out on Thursdays here, so Thursday night I went to see the Hunger Games and was able to understand almost all of it. The movie was dubbed in French, but for some reason they chose not to translate the title itself, so all through the movie people mentioned the “’Ungher Gehms” in strong French accents. Added nice comic relief to an otherwise very tense (but very good) movie. I felt at home, too, because I’m used to my college constantly organizing fun things for the student body like free movies, and in the first effort in that department from UStras that I’ve seen, the whole theater was only for students and was free. Merci!

With no homework and all the sun, it was a very relaxing weekend. Saturday Francis and I had lunch at a café outside and stayed there for about a week, walked to the library and got a few movies and graphic novels, and then went to another café for coffee. I love that it’s totally normal to keep your table for long after you’ve finished with what you’ve ordered. Sunday several of us went to a big park called Baggersee to have a picnic and lounge on the manmade beach. The lake was still a bit too cold for actual swimming, but we waded a bit and I caught a frog…a small green one that is, all the others were on the beach :) It was bizarre because the park was in suburban Strasbourg, so to get to it from the tram stop we had to walk through a giant parking lot of a giant shopping center, neither of which is something I’ve yet seen in France, so I kept thinking I was back in America. So weird.

Pretty slow week in general, but I learned two interesting things about the French today. Some French people believe that if you step into dog poop with your left foot, you get good luck. Now I know why no one picks up after their pets – they just want everyone else to be lucky! How kind of them. I’ll take my chances unaided by French poop magic if that’s what it takes to be lucky here. And if you ever fly a French flag or wear something with the French flag on it, people take you for a crazy nationalist or even a racist. The French love their country as much as anyone else but I think they show it more in terms of thinking they are the best at everything than paying attention to their flag. Fair enough.

I can’t wait for the weekend because on Friday we’re taking another group excursion around Alsace and on Sunday Annie’s host family is going to be away, so we’re having an American-style brunch. Paaaaancakes. A bientot!
2012-03-25

happy halfway!

I’ve been here for two and a half months and I have two and a half months to go. What. How is that humanly possible. It’s a strange thought, but then I walk certain streets and remember when it was freezing and I had no idea where I was, or walk by the cathedral and remember the first week before school when I would always eat my lunch around there, and those times seem very far away. It’s strange to think I’m halfway done, but most things become strange when you think about them enough, so I’m trying not to. I had a really good talk with Francis recently about how, especially at this point in the semester, it’s easy to let yourself feel like you’re missing something. There’s such an idea that a semester abroad should be nothing at all but happy amazing life experience opportunities falling out your ears nonstop – that in being here we should be fluent, have a thousand new and dear French friends, be dating some romantic smoker named Jean-Philippe, know Strasbourg in and out, have a great internship somewhere, grow as people and expand ourselves, and still find time to travel all over Europe every weekend. Obviously that’s not what’s happening, and in a way that’s just part of the experience as well – realizing that the expectations you had or have don’t necessarily match up to reality, and might not even have anything to do with you getting the most you can out of the program and out of yourself. Even if it were possible to do all those things at once, if it were all about every person coming on this program and just fulfilling the same cookie-cutter idea of a perfect six French months, where would the fun be?

So while I can spend time worrying about the fact that I only have two and half months left, I can also be amazed and excited and comforted that I have two and a half months ahead of me. I can wish I had the time and means to do everything I could possibly want to do here, or I can treat what I do have the time and means to do as if it’s everything I could possibly want. I can watch the moments as they pass or I can be in them. With ten weeks left, I choose the latter, settle myself into sun on my bare legs, coffee outside for hours, the first moment I say something in French out of total unthought reflex.
2012-03-23

After coming home to the first desperate attempts at spring, in less than a week it was already time to go to London. Many of my friends are abroad-ing there and their program finishes in about half an hour (or four weeks), so it was time to head up there before they got bogged down with end-of-semester craziness. We got in late Thursday. There was a little confusion because I thought we were staying at a hostel and it was actually the Peeling Wallpaper and Forgotten Underwear Emporium of England, but they let us sleep there anyway and it was better than the street, so oh well. Life experiences. And luckily it was separated from our friends’ flat only by Hyde Park! Hooray! So after a joyous reunion with pancakes and iced coffee we had a joyous reunion with them. We got lost in between but luckily in London getting lost means stumbling across the street where Virginia Woolf was born and Winston Churchill died, and having problems with your phone realizing it’s not in France anymore means actually getting to use a red phonebooth. Not so bad. Now, I love having a family and my own little apartment and everything but I am jealous of their living situation. They have two huge flats that overlook Hyde Park, for one thing, but I didn’t realize how much I missed just settling into rhythms of cooking-homeworking-movie-watching along with other lovely people. My life here is pretty structured: when I go down to my family’s apartment I internet, we eat, we watch the news and a movie, I shower and I leave. Every night, in that order, and most of the time when I’m in my room during the day I’m not around for long or I’m busy cleaning/homeworking and then running out the door (which I way I stay up too late reading and treasure Sundays so much). Sometimes you just wanna lay around eating avocados and watching Netflix with your friends. So that happened and it was good/needed.

But before that the troops were rallied and we went to Borough Market, a huge open-air food market held on the weekends. Everything in the world that you could eat was for sale and a lot of it was for sampling, so I had Turkish delight for the first time and bought a hot cross bun because London, along with GIN TRUFFLES from the fanciest chocolate store in the land (chocolate pasta and ‘Chocolate Dipping Adventure’ were around too). I have three truffles left and I want never to eat them because they’re incredible. That took most of the afternoon, so we came home, lazed around, made pasta, and Molly and I, Edith Piaf fans that we ever shall be, headed out to see a tribute to her – a woman singing her songs in between a little narrative about her life. So much fun. For one thing it was us front row center, two teenage boys with their mom, and about a dozen old French people and that was it. The woman, Eve Loiseau, did a wonderful job and also did a singalong version of our favorite song for her encore, and now I think Molly and I can say we have done literally everything Edith Piaf related that there exists to do.

Saturday we went to the Victoria & Albert Museum in the morning, which might have been the best museum I’ve ever been to. It was almost entirely 3D work, so lots of very old very beautiful parts of churches, an exhibit on set design in theater, Beatrix Potter watercolors, lots of sculpture and stained glass. Much fun. It was St. Patrick’s so we spent most of the rest of the day at a pub, eating vegetarian fish & chips and drinking and watching rugby (England versus Ireland! What more could you want! Discovery: I don’t dislike rugby). At night I was lucky enough to be in town the same weekend that my friend Taylor was having a show – she’s been interning at a really cool puppetry theater. It was not what I expected, in a good way. Most of the show involved an overhead projector and beautiful intricate paper cutouts being manipulated across the screen like a shadowbox as a band sang about what was happening. So cool. We also played Name the Whale and got to make props (germs to attack a puppet) for one of the scenes. I think Taylor is very happy there.

Then I had the shocking realization that things are open in England on Sunday! What! So we went to Wagamama for lunch (and of course I got the same thing I always get whenever I am in one of the few towns that it is in as well, the most delicious spicy coconutty vegetable-filled noodle soup in the world, but I guess habits are hard to get out of because most of the rest of the day was spent with Netflix and dying Molly’s hair. Fine by me. At night I went to an improv show with my friend Nate – it was so nice getting to actually do things at night since at spring break I was either traveling alone or spending most of my budget on museums during the day. I’m so jealous and happy for all my friends who get to live in such a vibrant city for so long – their program is for theater, art, and music, and it seems like almost everyone there has gotten to make amazing contacts or see incredible things happen, etc. It was so neat to tap into that energy even if just for a weekend.

After the British Museum (Rosetta stone! Bog mummies! Every English schoolkid in every ridiculously English school uniform swarming every exhibit! Wee!) we had a stressful adventure that resulted in us missing our flight back, and ended up having to take the train the next day. It was a huge mess but it got settled and we got back to Strasbourg safely. And now, amazingly, it’s in the high 60s and the semester’s half-over. What? What???
2012-03-20

Language reflections

Not being able to communicate was one thing, but not being able to understand anything around me in Germany/Austria was something I actually liked – just being immersed in this whole entire beautiful language of which I know absolutely nothing. In France the fun of hearing a foreign language is trying to decipher it and most of the time being able to. In Germany and Austria the fun was the fact that I couldn’t at all and thus that I only heard the pure sounds themselves and that the whole language was novel to me. Maybe someday I’ll learn German….but more to the point I think it was really good for me to travel somewhere I couldn’t communicate at this point in the semester. Our program director has told us that it’s common for people to get depressed and frustrated in March since they think “Okay, been here a while now, still not a master of the language, something must be wrong or I must be stupid/not trying hard enough/etc. etc.” and maybe this just a honeymoon feeling from having just gotten back, but I have been feeling much more confident and capable than I ever have. When I first got here our director told us that, on being immersed for the first time, people often think they’re getting worse at a language since how much they don’t know is thrown into relief. That’s been true for me for the most part – every day is different, and while I don’t think I’ve actually been regressing there have been several days where I’ve felt at a lower level than I would’ve considered myself in the fall. But now that I’ve just gone a few weeks without any French at all and with only four or five words of German it’s thrown my level of French into sharper relief. I definitely don’t speak fluently, but my feeling now is that even if I struggle with complicated tenses or don’t have every gender of every word memorized…I still speak it. I get around and get my points across. Sometimes I have to speak slowly and compose every sentence in my head before I say it but other times I am able to let go and just watch as good French comes out of my mouth.
2012-03-11

Spring Break leg 3: Vienna!

I made it to my early early bus and said goodbye to Berlin. I forgot to mention something I loved about Berlin – their drinks. Not only do they have YERBA MATE flavored soda, but they also have a blend of cola and orange soda, something like lemonade without a thousand pounds of sugar (but somehow more than just lemon juice), and those are just the ones I got to try in three and a half short days. Yum. Trying junk food in different countries is so interesting – I think because it’s always a surprise. Everyone knows you eat pastries and cheese and wine in France and schnitzel and apple strudel in Vienna and so on, but mate soda? In Paris I found chips that looked like cheetos but tasted like peanut butter. Quoi? Novelty is delicious.

Anyway, after ten hours and a stop in Prague I made it and was pleased to find that my hostel was very close to most of the museums and main sights in town, plus right across the street from a huge year-round market which is nicknamed “Vienna’s stomach”. Ja! As in France, almost everything in Austria is closed on Sundays, so I just read and wrote a little and went off to bed.

I was VERY excited to visit Vienna because it was the home of my favorite painter, Gustav Klimt, and this year would have been his 150^th birthday so the entire city was beside itself with pride and special exhibitions. Sadly I was about six months too early for “Klimt: the Musical” (no, really), but I made do.

The first thing I did Monday morning was go to the Belvedere, a former palace and current art museum which has the largest collection of Klimts in the world. Going to Vienna alone was a good decision because I was able to linger and double back all I wanted and that’s exactly what I did. In addition to his most famous painting, the Kiss, the Belvedere had several unfinished works of his which were still on easels at the time of his death. As great as it was to see so many of his finished pieces, I really liked being able to see his work in progress – how he sketched a painting out, what he chose to do in what order, etc. – and imagine how they would have been if he had lived long enough to finish them. The Belvedere also had a lot by Egon Schiele who is also someone I like a lot, lots of impressionism, good variety. After lunch I walked around a little and planned to visit the Austrian National Library, but it was closed. Tragic. Instead I went to a café and choked out enough horribly broken German to get a coffee and Vienna’s famous cake, Sachertorte – two layers of chocolate cake with orange marmalade in between and chocolate ganache over the whole thing. Pricey but so worth it, and the couple at the table behind me were speaking French! Oui! Then I went to wait in line at Vienna’s opera house -you can get a standing-room ticket for only three euros if get there early enough, and luckily I did. Seeing the interior of the opera house alone was worth it, and the opera itself was good – Simon Bocannegra, love and tragedy and politics and opera things, and luckily English subtitles on a little screen in front of us.

The hostel offered a free walking tour of most of the city on Tuesday mornings, so I went and got to see more of the city and actually learn about it. Vienna has its act together – it is most consistently pretty and clean city I have ever seen. Beautiful buildings everywhere, art everywhere – many different styles of both that somehow fit together. After the tour I ventured into the market for the first time and got some vegetables, a candy popular in Vienna called Mozart Balls, and a Klimt shot glass. What more could anyone want?? (the ability to communicate with more than pointing, “Ja” “Danke” and an apologetic smile for one. I felt like a stupid American tourist when I said anything and like jerk when I just pointed at things and paid for them. Oh well, life experiences, and almost everyone spoke English so I got around even if I didn’t get to wear a sign saying “I speak more than one language too DON’T JUDGE ME I’M STIMULATING YOUR ECONOMY.”) But thankfully in libraries one doesn’t speak at all so that is where I went next. Ohhhh myyy gooooddd. Just look at it. How is that real. The only thing I couldn’t take pictures of were a few cases with old manuscripts on display – ancient Greek guides to medicinal plants, Hebrew books on physics a few hundred years old, good variety and beautiful of course.

At night I went to the museum open the latest, the House of Music. There was an exhibit on the Vienna Philharmonic which wasn’t too exciting for a non-music person but the main part of the museum was more about sound and the science of music which was incredible. There was one room that reconstructed the what it sounds like to be in the womb, complete with a floor that vibrated a little bit when you moved, another that played first forest/nature sounds, gradually turned them into Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, and gradually turned that into club music, a chair that could sense your movements very precisely so that you could make a song just by waving your arms, all kinds of stuff. Very, very fun, and going later in the evening was good since most of the time I was completely alone in the exhibit rooms.

Wednesday I went to Leopold Museum, which also had many many Klimts and was doing a special exhibit about Klimt’s personal life. Klimt had a lifelong companion and no one is really sure what kind of relationship they had, and this exhibit had every single surviving postcard between them – hundreds - which was so neat, as well as life-size reproductions of three paintings of his that were destroyed during WW2. The same museum also had the largest collection of Egon Schiele paintings in the world, which I loved too. I spent most of the day there but went to another museum where Klimt’s Tree of Life is. Blew me away. I learned that every picture of it I’ve ever seen is dramatically cleaned up – the real thing is covered with little notes which made me wish I understood German, and you can still see his grids and sketching underneath the paint. So cool. Went to a café and called it a night.

The train home was very very long, but Austria is beautiful. Can I just get on a train that will take me everywhere in Europe and never leave? I love trains and I love being able to see the world around me as it goes past. I saw a flock of storks in a field of snowdrops that flew away as we passed and “SMASH HOMOPHOBIA” spray-painted on an overpass in some random tiny town. I like the world.
2012-03-09

spring break leg 2: Berlin

Berlin made me think of a top - full of energy, always back and forth between different political climates and phases of history, whirling in on itself with layers upon layers of graffiti and street art everywhere, always awake, always music and lights and something to do. Like Paris, I feel like I could’ve stayed for years and not seen half the things that there are to see. Sadly the friend with whom I was staying was sick for almost the entire time I was there, so I definitely got a different experience of it without him as my guide, but luckily he has wonderful roommates who took me under their wing and it was good getting practice making my way through a city whose language I didn’t understand. I had a wonderful time regardless.

The first night I was there Jonas was still healthy so we walked around his neighborhood and had Mexican food (!! which doesn’t exist in France at all - so good) and German beer and perfect Turkish cookies from the bakery near his house. Two of my friends from here in Stras were leaving Berlin just as I was arriving, so we dragged our full bellies over to their hostel and hung out for a while. On the way back to the subway we came across a pen of sheep in the middle of a street downtown. They were filming a movie so we stopped and got to watch them clear out the street before shooting and do a few takes - the scene was that a car chase had to stop and wait for a flock of sheep to cross the road. Common car chase occurrence. They probably gave Jonas rabies. The next day I set out on my own, got a feel for a different part of the city, and went to a few museums - most of Berlin’s big museums are in one area called Museum Island and being a student is cheap. Hooray! My favorite was the Neues Museum, which was mainly ancient Egyptian artifacts with some from other areas, like the ‘Mysterious Golden Hat’ (some kind of lunar calendar, they think. What else would a gold hat be?). The National Art gallery was good too, and on the way back to the train I stumbled across a BUBBLE TEA shop and bought every bubble they had (another thing that doesn’t exist in France).

The next day after a long German breakfast (bread, butter, lots of meat and cheese and coffee) Jonas’ roommates took me first to a market near their house and then to an abandoned airport in the middle of town. There are gardens and dog parks on the grass now, and people attach windsails to skateboards or skateboard pulled by kites. So good to see a space reclaimed like that. Walked around more, which was better with them since they knew all about where we were, rested at home for a while, had coffee and cake at five like good Germans. Then one of his roommates took me to the East Side Gallery, a portion of the Berlin wall which is now a public art gallery. Amazing in so many ways - for one thing to see the wall at all, how huge and imposing and terrifying it was, to learn more about it from the roommate, and for another the fact that at least that portion is now such a positive thing. The art changes now and then and almost all of it is themed around peace, the destruction the wall and the thought behind it caused, etc.

We made a late dinner and then another roommate and I went to a concert down their street. All different kinds of bands, some kind of gypsy folk and some electronica, hard to describe in general other than really good and really fun. There were also acrobats and jugglers and other kinds of performers sprinkled throughout the crowd on smaller stages. The thing that I liked the most, though, was that every kind of person in the world was there and everyone was dancing just to have fun. No one was (or seemed) interested in looking cool or fitting in or dancing only to attract somebody else to dance with. Pure fun, but I completely crashed. Berlin stays up late! I left around three and Jonas’ roommate said I would miss the afterparty…at six. Jonas said that many clubs open Saturday night and just stay open until Monday morning. They stay full all the time because it’s normal for people to go during the day on Sunday. I like the idea of being able to dance in the afternoon :-)

The next day I had the best falafel of my life - Berlin’s specialty for those who don’t eat its other specialty, sausage with ketchup and curry powder - and went to a museum about life during the time of the wall. Not a time I knew much about, so I learned a lot, and it was very hands-on, you could listen to a bugged apartment and so on, but I was pretty museum-ed out after that so I walked around one of the town’s main squares, watched some street performers and had fresh orange juice for a euro (Berlin was sooo much cheaper than France. Ugh), then walked down to Brandenburger Gate and a park and the Holocaust memorial, and called it a day. Pizza and Battlestar Galactica with Jonas and his girlfriend to round out the trip, and then woke up for a 7 am bus to Vienna….
a few pictures from Paris….more to come!

(fyi if you aren’t familiar with tumblr you can click on any picture to make it bigger :) )

Old french ladies rock

Three weeks

Elections a-comin’

happy halfway!

Language reflections

spring break leg 2: Berlin