Virtually Home

Since I got sick I've been watching a lot of tv on my computer. Most of my time has been spent watching most of the first season of West Wing since yesterday, but I also watched a couple of documentaries online. I have to say that between Jesus Camp and Supersize Me, I haven't had the best impressions of Americans to contemplate today. In fact, they've been pretty repugnant. Looking at footage from Missouri didn't make a very good impression of small-town middle-America, either. Just fast food restaurants, huge signage, ugly highways and parking lots as far as the camera would show. Maybe it's because I live in an 18th-century stone building. Maybe it's because I live in a city made of 18th-century stone buildings with independently-owned shops on the ground floor and apartments up above, but that kind of life just is not attractive anymore. Physically, that is. What I wouldn't do for a Salina Dairy Deal hamburger and a Dr. Pepper right now. Or to drive ...

Maybe the second day after Alex got here, we went to the university and, on wandering home, got really hungry. We stopped into a kebab shop near St. Nicolas where they were very friendly, and we talked to the two shopkeepers, who were cousins, while we ate. I meant to go back, but as it's not in a place I'm usually walking around looking for something to eat, I hadn't. Until a few days ago, when Vianney and Benjamin wanted to get kebab and said they knew the best place in town. Well, mostly when people tell you their product is the best one there is, they're just trying to sell it to you. And the first time I wandered into that shop, having never had a kebab, I was pretty unaware of what I was eating. But, having sampled a wide variety of kebabs in Bordeaux, since it's the only thing you can buy to eat after about 9 p.m., I think I'm inclined to agree now. Most of it is that they make their own bread and that their vegetables are fresh. A big part of it is...

I didn't feel great yesterday, and when today decided to wake me up to go to the university and choose classes at the last possible minute, I felt a lot worse. I dragged myself out of bed despite the soft rain noises from the courtyard trying to lull me back to sleep and went to the school. I chose a bunch of classes in history, literature, music history,  and film and set about trying to figure out when and where they met. This is a complicated process of finding each department's tiny, hidden hallway with a bunch of posted paper timetables and locating your class, which may or may not have the same course number as the one you initially chose, or any posted title at all. As I expected (feared), many of the courses I selected were not on the schedules, even though they'd been posted for us foreign dupes to believe we could take them. I came up with about 16 hours worth of things, but I think I'll probably only take twelve. One of the ones I'm interested in is a...

I think I commented on this before, but the size of commercial goods in France is sort of strange to me. I know I come from America: Land Where Everything Is Bigger Than It Needs To Be, but I just can't get over it. A two-liter bottle of Coke here, which is a pretty standard format in the States, is called either the "maxi" format or the "family size bottle". My 300 mL bottle of shampoo is called the "giga size". I cannot, for the life of me, find a bigger bottle, and have to buy it with astonishing frequency. This wouldn't be too bad except that the largest bottle of accompanying conditioner is 2/3 the size. They sell "maxi" sandwiches at the grocery store in little triangular-prism boxes that are about the size of your average sandwich-on-sliced-bread back home. It is surprising to me, over and over. And it's not just commercial goods -- I'm apparently 2 and a half inches taller than the average height for males in this ...

In one of many incidents since arriving in France that have served to point out how uninformed, in general, I am about world news and American politics, I learned that the State of the Union had been given last night from a Facebook status update by a friend from Norway. And so I watched it on YouTube, where it had been posted in English and Farsi by a guy in Iran, and marveled about how cool technology is, and how strange it is that our politics are so widely followed. I liked the things he said about education. When Obama kept saying "both" parties, I thought about how bitter the independents and the tinier parties must be that they never get mentioned seriously. I liked that he called people out on denying the "overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change". I felt kind of awkward when he addressed Congress like a classroom full of children, asking them not to get in each other's way just because they could. I felt even awkwarder when the military ...

It's funny what growing up in a place will do to you. I never really thought about it until I moved far, far away, where attitudes and languages and body language are different, and started to see my country in a different way. Part of that difference is just starting to see it as "mine" for the first time. I've been making a lot of new friends. Some of them are French, but a lot of them are anglophone. Some of them are Canadian, and some are Australian, and some are English and Welsh. They're all part of the commonwealth, but the idea of connectedness seems to be one-sided -- that is, the British see Australia and Canada as very loosely connected to them if at all, and the Canadians and Australians I've met seem to feel a lot more part of Britain than the British think they are. These countries all have established national health care, and almost the first thing that happens on meeting someone from a country such as this, where everyone speaks at least o...

Lately I've been on a Mountain Goats, Bob Dylan, Neil Young kick. You know, guitars and male vocalists with hard-to-like voices (can't forget Conor, but I wouldn't call that a kick anymore). Today, I'm working on learning The Needle and the Damage Done on guitar. I'm making an effort to play more often, since I have all this time on my hands with which to learn while I'm, you know, not going to school. I'm wrestling with myself over whether I should try to go to the university today. I have to turn in some photocopies of a paper I got back about two weeks ago, but every time I've tried the professor hasn't been in his office, since they don't necessarily keep office hours in this country. Some of them do, if they want -- one hour a week, for all of their undergrad and graduate students combined -- and they don't announce it in class, so you're just forced to show up at their door, if you can even find it, as that's not announced in ...

Amy moved into a hotel a few days ago, to have her own space. We've been meeting for coffee or lunch just about every day. I've been seeing a lot of Vianney and Benjamin. Yesterday we tried to go see A Serious Man at this little indie move theater, Utopia. I must have walked past it a hundred times and never realized it was a movie theater. The line looked like it was going to take an hour to get through, and as we were five minutes to the last showing of the night, we gave up. We walked around aimlessly until we ended up at a sort of wine bar near the Grosse Cloche. I had a glass of an organic white that was, as far as I could tell, just called F, and by far my favorite kind of white to date white wine I've ever tasted. Today was kind of aimless, except for it having been open mic night at the pub downstairs. I learned that it's not just professional musicians in France that write their lyrics in English -- all of the amateurs were doing it, too. I think it'...

This morning I woke up thinking about my maternal language, and how it puts adjectives in front of the nouns they modify. And I thought to myself that, probably, this detail has influenced the way that I think in some way. And that way is probably to make me put more emphasis on the quality of a thing, relative to the type of thing it is. And then I thought it was too early to have this thought. I may think about it more later.

The first day back, I had to go to a mandatory medical visit to retain my visa. I was in and out of doctor's offices and waiting rooms, but aside from it being complicated, it wasn't too much of a hassle. I was in and out in 45 minutes, and really all they wanted was my height, weight, blood pressure, a chest x-ray, and to listen to me breathe. I guess I proved I didn't have TB because they gave me a carte de sejour and they sent me home with the chest x-ray, which I decided to hang on my wall to fix some of the previously un-relieved white. Plus, I think it's kinda cool to see my vertebrae and heart on the wall, but maybe I'm the only one. Amy has been on a furious search for somewhere to live on various apartment-finding websites for Bordeaux, with not very much luck. Tomorrow, she's going to look into getting a dorm room, but last fall there were too many students to accommodate them all in the dorms, so I'm not sure how much hope I have for that scenar...

I'm not sure exactly when this side-adventure took place, but at some point we took the U-Bahn out to the Olympic stadium that had been built for the 1936 summer games.  You know, the games where Jess Owens claims Hitler "didn't snub him". It was interesting to see, and imagine all the things that were starting to happen in Germany at the time -- and what all the droves of tourists around for the Games might have felt about it. There wasn't really anywhere to go in, but I was interested to see the grounds. Some of them had been knocked down and other things built over them, so that was kind of sad. But then, there were gold mines like this attractive, modern bathroom structure! This was one of the several moments during the trip I thought to myself "What the hell, Germany?" I mean, I thought Germans were all about tact. Or something. I guess that brings us to the part of the program where we return to a chronological account of matters. The mornin...

Berlin was cool. And by that I mostly mean cold. Freezing cold. It was -5 Celsius the first few days we were there (and all you Americans change windows to convert to Fahrenheit), and the ground was covered in snow. The first thing that happened on arrival was that the crew played Monsters of Folk's "Dear God" on the airplane's speakers. I was amused. The shuttle from the airplane to the terminal had a set of crazy doors that opened and closed and opened and closed for about a minute and a half, often seeming to spasm, or to close almost entirely and, at the last second, spring open again. I compared the sight to some kind of crab mating dance, to Hunter's vast amusement. I wish we'd gotten it, and the reactions of the people around us, on tape. We managed to get the right bus from the airport to our hostel, and left our stuff in the luggage room while we went wandering around the city in search of something to eat. We found nothing that looked remote...

On the 30th, Rachel and I took complicated, multi-change train ride to Paris. We couldn't get a direct train, so we had to go from Zurich to Basel, Switzerland and from Basel to Mulhouse, France. We went from Mulhouse to Belfort and then changed trains for the last time in Belfort to get to Paris. We ended up either on trains or in train stations all day. I do like riding trains a lot, but the lugging of luggage and the cold were a little unpleasant. And we rolled through northern France after sunset, which caused us to miss out on what the countryside looked like. I was curious, since I had considered studying abroad this year in Strasbourg instead of Bordeaux. That would have been a different experience entirely, I'm sure. Arrival in Paris was a trial. We took the metro from Gare de l'Est to the southwest part of town, where we were staying at the Aloha Hostel for one night. The hostel was cramped ad ecclectic...all decorated in bright colors and with lots of cheery New...

These photos are all from Lauterbrunnen and on, I think. The one at the left is just after arrival on Lauterbrunnen on the 26th...Not the best photo ever, what with the light having been terrible, but I think it sort of portrays our feelings about the travelling and many aspects of Switzerland that turned out to be frustrating. But I'm getting ahead of myself. We slept in on Christmas day. I think we might have awakened and walked down for free breakfast at the hostel, and then returned to bed for another few hours. I think the afternoon was mostly uneventful. We walked around Geneva looking for cool things to do. I was still nursing a pretty terrible head cold and the beginnings of a frightful cough, so Rachel suggested we look for something spicy to eat for dinner. Spicy of course, is relative in Europe, though Switzerland turned out to offer more in the way of flavor than the UK, for sure. We found an Indian restaurant that we decided to return to later. Somewhere during th...

"Disaster" is about the only word that can describe the beginning of my trip. About midnight before my train was going to leave from Bordeaux, I got news from my mom that the Eurostar might not be running the next day. Confirmation came around 2:30, when I began scrambling to book a last minute plane ticket from Bordeaux to London Gatwick, where I figured I'd catch my previously-scheduled train from Waterloo to Poole. Little did I know that Gatwick had been closed the two previous days, or that British Airways was planning a 12 day holiday strike. Luckily for me, the plane did make it to Gatwick, though it was delayed an hour and a half. Customs in London turned out to be a hassle. I didn't think to write down Tom's address before leaving, since he was going to pick me up at the airport. This fact did not make the customs agents feel comfortable about my being in the country. They seemed to think I would just decide to disappear somewhere in England and just...