Virtually Home

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...

Last night we went out with our friends Carley and Danielle to celebrate the end of their finals week. It was still sort of surreal to me, maybe because I really only had about two weeks of actual work during the whole semester, and most of that was me procrastinating my paper rather than just getting it done. Still, it was a good celebratory outing. Vianney and Benjamin ended up meeting up with us. Somewhere near the park at Gambetta at around midnight we encountered the only group of violent people I've yet run across in France, who, after asking us if we had any cigarettes, for some reason I couldn't understand, hit Alex and then pushed Benjamin over twice before disappearing into the night. Everyone was okay, if a little confused. We hurried home. This morning was its own trial. I had alerted our landlady to the possibility that Something Was Very Wrong with our kitchen plumbing. Every couple of hours there's this tremendous gurgling and water sort of shoots out of...

This is a photo of the chicken I cooked tonight, posing with Charlie, the inflatable turkey my parents mailed me a week or so ago. For scale, that inflatable turkey is 16" long. So, in the absence of a (real) turkey (and really the absence of ambition to make a turkey), I decided to roast a chicken, which I'd never done before. By the time I got my plans for roasting a chicken together, it was already 6 p.m. and I was beginning to get hungry, so I decided to just put some olive oil and rosemary and garlic under its skin and go with that. For some reason, it always looked really easy to do this kind of thing when I was watching my mother do it. What I didn't take into account is that chickens have skin that doesn't float freely over their muscles. I'm not really sure how I even thought that was possible -- maybe I just always missed the part where my mother must have spent several awkward minutes pulling the skin loose and listening to the fascia tear. I'm ...

In a country without Thanksgiving, there's not even a pretense of delaying Christmas until its allotted time. Decorations have been going up for weeks now -- lights hung from the sides of buildings and wires strung overhead were the first go show up. Yesterday they started putting up huge trees in Place de la Victoire and by the cathedral near my house. Also coming to Place Pey-Berland is what appears to be an ice-skating rink? I'm interested to see how this is going to pan out. I was told that it will rain all winter, which I interpreted to mean it will never get cold enough to freeze. I guess I didn't expect ice-skating. Although I've never been fond of even the idea of ice-skating -- all that strapping blades to your feet and gliding about and falling on your face seems to lend itself pretty handily to getting digits cut off. But since Thanksgiving is finally upon us, I'll stop feeling weird about seeing Christmas decorations. I'll even be posting pictures...