Virtually Home

I've been meaning to get this blog up and running again, but wasn't sure what direction it should go. And frankly, I'm still not sure. It's definitely no longer a chronicle of my time abroad, since I'm back in Oklahoma, where things are much the same as they were when I left them. Everything is different and the same. I've been missing my friends in Bordeaux like crazy, which is not alleviated by the photos posted by another OU student currently living in my apartment on Rue du Loup. I miss life in France in a lot of ways, and I feel like I'm living abroad sort of vicariously by meeting a lot of exchange students. I'm participating in a program that matches students studying abroad with students interested in cultural exchange. My student is Japanese, and we've so far had a lot of fun together. I envy the newness of everything she's getting to do, and the linguistic strides she's making. I teach her as much slang as I can work into the conv...

On my last night in Bordeaux, I did some hurried packing and cleaning and I went down to Dick Turpin's for my last open mic night with some friends. I stayed until a little after closing time, and went upstairs to try to catch a bit of sleep before I had to wake up at 4 a.m. to catch a taxi. I had fitful dreams and I woke up every hour, panicked that I'd missed my flight. I didn't miss my flight. I had four hours of layover in Paris and then the transatlantic to New Jersey. From the moment I got off the plane, everything was shiny and efficient. I had a Dr. Pepper, and some cheap Chinese food. Life was grand, if a little strange. People were wearing t-shirts and tennis shoes and there were entirely too many people who had bleached their hair blond. And then I got stuck in Newark because Continental purposefully overbooked their flight to Tulsa. They put me up in a hotel room and I spent the night and entire next day watching the Discovery channel and hanging around in the...

Last night I hung out with Vianney. We made a sort of sautéed beef at his and Benjamin's place, with figs and red bell peppers and lots of garlic. It sounded a little strange at first, and then it turned out to be awesome. And we mashed some potatoes with these weird white sweet potatoes he'd found at the Eurasia market. Which, by coincidence, I had also visited the day before. After dinner we met up with Vianney's friend Halforth at the Charles Dickens. Halforth is from Iceland but went to school in Stillwater starting about 6th grade, and went on to graduate from OSU before he moved to France to learn French. It was weird to meet someone who was Oklahoman in such a random way. I refrained from slandering the Cowboys. That's how novel it was. Xavier met us there, and it was nice to get to see him again, since it was looking doubtful. Benjamin wasn't around, since he'd gotten his driver's license earlier that day and was busy driving around his hometown ...

Friday, the two study abroad advisers from OU were in town to tweak the program, such as it is. All the OU kids were invited for lunch with them at the international relations office on campus, but I was the only one that showed up. I had a moment of panic when I arrived and the staff didn't know what I was talking about and told me the Americans had already been and gone -- it turns out that even though those staffers were invited, they hadn't been informed. Score one for French efficiency. And so we had a very French box lunch, and some red wine. Alcohol plus university officials on campus was odd. One of the French staffers confused me for French and didn't realize I was American until I started speaking with Jack and Kye in rapid English. That made me proud but a little incredulous. Dan and Mary came and picked me up from campus and we drove out into the outskirts of Bordeaux, where everything is much less rich- and idyllic-looking. There's a Nazi submarine base t...

Once again, I've fallen way behind on my updates. I find myself overwhelmed with things I want to do while I'm here, and this has made me largely unable to do any of them. This is a flaw I'm trying to correct as it pertains to school work, too. Anyway, last Thursday I went with two Californians and two French friends out to Benjamin's family's farm in Calonges, France. Normally, it's about 45 minutes by train from Bordeaux, but since they were doing some work on the tracks, we had to take a large tour of the surrounding towns and ended up, two hours later, at the Tonneins train station, where Ben's dad picked us up. After a short and awkward car ride, four people and some luggage in the backseat of a Mercedes, we got to Ben's house in Calonges. The town is not even really large enough to be called a town. On a fifteen minute walk from Ben's front door, you can pass through three "town centers". I only saw one church, though, so they'r...

On May 8th and 9th, I went with my landlady and twenty-five of her masters students who were variously enrolled in either English or Religious and Culture Studies on a whirlwind tour of the Dordogne region. The students brought, variously, their parents and girlfriends and whoever else might want to tag along, so we had a pretty massive caravan that often encountered trouble making u-turns on one lane, dirt roads in the middle of nowhere. I was planning a really elaborate post, but now that I've allowed so much time to pass, I've kind of lost interest. The first day got off to a rocky start, but afterward was pretty fantastic. I showed up where I thought we were meeting, at 8 a.m. on a Saturday, which, in Bordeaux, is about the only time of the week that there aren't a large number of people out in the street -- just a few teenagers straggling home, still drunk, from last night's party, and the team of (rather ineffectual) street sweepers fighting the constant battl...