Bordeaux, and continued suffering.
These two are not really related, it's just that I remain sick while all around me, people are falling victim to the plague. Erin and Andria were feeling bad when they moved out on Monday, and Maria and Alex are both sick. I've relapsed.
However, Amber arrived on a train yesterday afternoon. She got stuck in the middle of Auvergne due to snow, and they all had to sit tight while people got out and poked at the wheels to dislodge ice from them. She finally did make it on time, since they held her connecting train, and I picked her up at St. Jean.
We went out to an Italian restaurant, where I had a pizza with apples and olives and honey and onion jam. It was pretty fantabulous. Afterward we took a kind of epic walk, down to Place de la Bourse and along the river, then across Pont de Pierre and farther than I've ever walked on that side of the river, to a church that turns out to be called Eglise St. Marie. We walked in a circle around it, and found that while the front was all ornate sculpture and wrought-iron fencing, the back was an unadorned wall and a mudhole. It reminded me a lot of my art history class, as a lot of those churches were spectacularly plain on the outside and really detailed on the inside.
We walked back. On the way we remarked that there was a McDonald's drive through, which was the first drive through I've seen in France. A few days ago I noticed an automatic car wash, an eye sore sticking out of the side of 18th century stone. Modern conveniences just don't look right, here.
We walked up Cours Victor Hugo and picked up Anthony, who lives right by the Porte de la Grosse Cloche, which the Internet tells me is one of the interesting things to see in the city, and that was about the end of the sightseeing for tonight.
Today I struggled to wake up and go to class. I'd spent the majority of the night in that sleepless, half-dreaming daze that afflicts me every so often. In the dream, I was personal assistant to President Sarkozy and spent all my time trying to herd him around and get him to do what he was supposed to do for that day. He was not very good at staying on task -- that, or he was trying very hard to anger every ambassador and foreign power that existed. It was a very stressful half-dream, and I was grateful to finally fall asleep at 7 or so.
Class was rather painful for all the usual reasons of not having enough space or breaks. Also because the professor, whose class I was attending for the first time, was on a tangent that was supposedly related to a document we'd read. Except that he was talking about different kinds of grain for most of the time (none of which I'd ever learned the names of, and none of which were mentioned in the text). He called on me and asked a really strange question. He asked me, if the rye harvest was bad in Bordeaux (and I was supposed to know that rye was a popular 18th century Bordeaux crop and that it's a winter grain), when it would become apparent how the corn harvest near Versailles would be. I was trying desperately to work out that question in my head. All I could figure was that corn seemed sort of like it'd be a late summer crop, but how was I supposed to know what the weather was like in Versailles, and how that would affect corn growth? And what if I was wrong about the late summer thing in the first place, and what if I misunderstood the question? He kept using different words that I thought meant corn, like "Spanish wheat" and "Indian wheat", so who knows what he was actually asking. I told him I didn't know. The answer turned out to be late September or early October. You know. In case you're ever thinking about taking up corn farming near Versailles.
This afternoon Amber and I reserved seats on the train to Clermont-Ferrand on Friday, so that we could sit next to Anthony and his friend. We have a few hours in Brive-la-Gaillard, where he's from, to look around and then we'll hop on our next train.
We went to eat at this restaurant down the street from me that none of us had ever been to, called Funky Burger. It was all independent art hung on white walls, which individually-packaged condiments in what looked like sugar packets. The burgers were pretty good (although they all seemed to come well-done) but the fries were kind of amazing, as one of the options was to have them with a garlic-butter-herbs sauce that made the meal into the delicious bastard child of France and America.
They had a burger with Camembert on it, but I just wasn't ready to take that leap. Maybe next time.
However, Amber arrived on a train yesterday afternoon. She got stuck in the middle of Auvergne due to snow, and they all had to sit tight while people got out and poked at the wheels to dislodge ice from them. She finally did make it on time, since they held her connecting train, and I picked her up at St. Jean.
We went out to an Italian restaurant, where I had a pizza with apples and olives and honey and onion jam. It was pretty fantabulous. Afterward we took a kind of epic walk, down to Place de la Bourse and along the river, then across Pont de Pierre and farther than I've ever walked on that side of the river, to a church that turns out to be called Eglise St. Marie. We walked in a circle around it, and found that while the front was all ornate sculpture and wrought-iron fencing, the back was an unadorned wall and a mudhole. It reminded me a lot of my art history class, as a lot of those churches were spectacularly plain on the outside and really detailed on the inside.
We walked back. On the way we remarked that there was a McDonald's drive through, which was the first drive through I've seen in France. A few days ago I noticed an automatic car wash, an eye sore sticking out of the side of 18th century stone. Modern conveniences just don't look right, here.
We walked up Cours Victor Hugo and picked up Anthony, who lives right by the Porte de la Grosse Cloche, which the Internet tells me is one of the interesting things to see in the city, and that was about the end of the sightseeing for tonight.
Today I struggled to wake up and go to class. I'd spent the majority of the night in that sleepless, half-dreaming daze that afflicts me every so often. In the dream, I was personal assistant to President Sarkozy and spent all my time trying to herd him around and get him to do what he was supposed to do for that day. He was not very good at staying on task -- that, or he was trying very hard to anger every ambassador and foreign power that existed. It was a very stressful half-dream, and I was grateful to finally fall asleep at 7 or so.
Class was rather painful for all the usual reasons of not having enough space or breaks. Also because the professor, whose class I was attending for the first time, was on a tangent that was supposedly related to a document we'd read. Except that he was talking about different kinds of grain for most of the time (none of which I'd ever learned the names of, and none of which were mentioned in the text). He called on me and asked a really strange question. He asked me, if the rye harvest was bad in Bordeaux (and I was supposed to know that rye was a popular 18th century Bordeaux crop and that it's a winter grain), when it would become apparent how the corn harvest near Versailles would be. I was trying desperately to work out that question in my head. All I could figure was that corn seemed sort of like it'd be a late summer crop, but how was I supposed to know what the weather was like in Versailles, and how that would affect corn growth? And what if I was wrong about the late summer thing in the first place, and what if I misunderstood the question? He kept using different words that I thought meant corn, like "Spanish wheat" and "Indian wheat", so who knows what he was actually asking. I told him I didn't know. The answer turned out to be late September or early October. You know. In case you're ever thinking about taking up corn farming near Versailles.
This afternoon Amber and I reserved seats on the train to Clermont-Ferrand on Friday, so that we could sit next to Anthony and his friend. We have a few hours in Brive-la-Gaillard, where he's from, to look around and then we'll hop on our next train.
We went to eat at this restaurant down the street from me that none of us had ever been to, called Funky Burger. It was all independent art hung on white walls, which individually-packaged condiments in what looked like sugar packets. The burgers were pretty good (although they all seemed to come well-done) but the fries were kind of amazing, as one of the options was to have them with a garlic-butter-herbs sauce that made the meal into the delicious bastard child of France and America.
They had a burger with Camembert on it, but I just wasn't ready to take that leap. Maybe next time.
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