Virtually Home

This morning I had a 9:30 appointment with a long-awaited plumber. We've had sort of ridiculous amounts of water dripping from our sink for upwards of four months now. Our landlady has variously claimed that the linoleum peels up because we spill water when we do dishes, that the wooden baseboard under the bar rotted completely because we spilled a bottle of water under it, and that the brown puddle that oozed out from under said bar with said rotting wood was simply spilled alcohol. Her solution to our problem is to have the counters and sink replaced, and I'm not sure if that will help, but at least it's something. So I'm awaiting the plumber at 9:30. Imagine my surprise when the door bell went off at 8 a.m., and my brain struggled out of its dream bliss to make my body get out of bed and answer the door. The fixit dude (who, as far as I can tell, is either in no way qualified to be a plumber or entirely trained to tell our landlady exactly what she wants to hear, i...

I woke up this morning feeling better, in a relative way. I'm still doing a lot of coughing, but my head no longer feels like a bowling ball and I left the house for the first time since Friday. My only class on Monday was supposed to be an introductory film analysis class. The class turns out to be a continuation from last semester, so it seems doubtful I'll try to take it. I was hoping it would be an opportunity to watch a bunch of French movies, but the first thing we did was watch the first fifteen or so minutes of Edward Scissorhands. Then we watched it again, scene by scene, and discussed it. After was the final scenes of the Bride of Frankenstein, and then some clips from Frankenstein, the 1994 version with Helena Bonham Carter. I remember that the reason I didn't want to take a history class called The France of Louis XV was because it conflicted with film. I thought I'd go check that out next Monday, but when I went to check out what room that class is in, ...

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...

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'...

I tried to go to bed relatively early last night -- and by that I mean around 2 a.m. Instead, I was awake until sometime after 5 a.m., and woke up when my alarm went off at 10 in a haze of dream-confusion and grainy-eyed pessimism. I got online and bought a plane ticket from London to Geneva to meet up with Rachel on Christmas Eve. The next plan was to head over to the SNCF office and get a ticket from Bordeaux to London to visit Tom, since their website has been steadfastedly refusing to show me train schedules for days now. But after a comically cold shower, while on the point of pouring cereal into a bowl, I was surprised by a phone call from our landlady regarding the washing machine problem. Yes, the washing machine problem is ongoing. Yes, this is three months. And of course, since I can't stand letting cereal sit in milk for any length of time longer than strictly necessary, I halted my breakfast preparations. As it turns out, Auchan mailed the estimate to my address in ...

Friday, I went to see Paranormal Activity with Anthony. I liked it a lot more than I thought I would, to be honest. It was fun to see, but I'm struck by the oddity of the flood of horror movies that are coming out in December. It seems like now is the time for Christmas movies. Afterward we met up with Xavier and Maria at Dick Turpin's, and ended up running into Carley and Danielle, some Canadian friends. The next night, I went to Anthony's to watch Miss France, which was pretty much exactly what you would expect if you took Miss America and made it more French (which is to say, not any better). The announcers had a much more French sense of style, though one of them was wearing a dress that made both Anthony and I think she looked like an ostrich. The panel of judges included Jean-Paul Gauthier. There were lots of coordinated sort-of-dance routines with matching outfits. All of their swimsuits and bikinis matched (yes, there was a swimsuit contest AND a bikini contest)...

Sometime over the weekend I managed an incredible feat of physics, the likes of which only seems to happen to me. Like the time I broke my toe by barely knocking it on the side of the desk chair at my Traditions apartment. Or the time, while lightly dusting a bookshelf, I managed to wedge my finger against the shelf in such a way that a big chunk of it got sliced off. Pretty awesome. Anyway, while rinsing out the coffee pot, it sort of barely touched the side of the sink, and grew one perfect round hole about the size of a pin-head, from which was a pretty impressive halo of radiating spider-webby cracks. Yeah, I just mixed my angel and arachnid metaphors. Deal with it. Anyway, today I got home from class and decided it was not okay not to have a coffeemaker. I went and bought one, and then spent the next chunk of too-much-time cleaning the apartment. I find that when I procrastinate, one of the first things I do is spend copious amounts of time on the Internet. Next, I clean the...

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 ...

So about an hour ago I was panicking that I hadn't yet received my tickets to the Monsters of Folk show on Tuesday in London. So I called their office, told someone my problem -- he got a superviser to change my tickets to will call (apparently they don't mail things to France, and didn't bother telling me that when I ordered?), sent me a confirmation email -- and the problem was solved in under five minutes. Why, oh WHY can my washing machine problem not disappear in the same way? Tomorrow I will call them...when I have gathered my willpower...and put more money on my phone. Somehow I doubt my 30 seconds of credit is enough to resolve this problem.

Today, I am frustrated beyond belief. Already. Last week I called the company that came to give me an estimate about the washing machine to ask them why the hell they still had not come to fix my washing machine. They told me I had to wait for the formal estimate in the mail and then MAIL IT BACK TO THEM when I made my decision. And so I waited with as much patience as I could muster, for over a week, for a piece of mail they claimed they mailed to me from not even a mile from where I am sitting right now. No luck. I just called back to beg for someone to come fix it, and their response was that they HAVE to have the request in writing and I MUST wait for it in the mail. They agreed to send me a new one. I asked them if we could just forget I ever "asked for" the estimate and start a new work order. She said no. And furthermore, there are parts to order. I asked her (rather hopelessly) if she could order them in advance. She said no, she has to receive a request i...

Today, I went to the university to try and figure out when my classes are actually going to be held, since school starts on Monday. I thought that by waiting until Friday I had behaved in a remarkably laid-back and French-compatible manner, and that surely, by now, everything was sorted out and communicated to, at the very least, the International Relations office, which would help me in my quest. What I found was a room with a table of schedules, unlabeled, sent from different departments, containing only that department's schedule. They were not even in a stack. They were scattered in no discernible order. This system is, evidently, not a problem at all for real French kids, because when they pick a major they take all the classes (and not really any others) on the agenda, at the same time as everyone else with their major, and that's that. For one such as me? Not going to work so well. Luckily for me, none of the four departments I have preliminarily aligned myself with ...

Okay, so not as dramatic as "Veni, vidi, vici", but I guess it'll do. Today was a tremendous day for me. I accomplished, mostly today, all the things I wanted to get done in the first week of my stay here. It just took a lot longer than I initially thought. I was able to enroll (or, mostly, I'm still missing one form), get a student ID made (which took all of thirteen seconds while the ladies helping us played a video game), pick up my checkbook, activate my Carte Bleue, transfer money between bank accounts, find a recharge card, learn how to recharge my phone, and, as a bonus, found out that the package my mother sent me over three weeks ago (probably) didn't get lost after all. In other, unrelated news, today I saw a 4-wheeler in the middle of downtown Bordeaux. Totally incongruous. And then I ran into the guy who owns the neighborhood pizza joint, who we've talked to at his restaurant a few times and have run into in multiple situations. I guess tha...

Today I left the apartment with the full intention of finally completing my administrative enrollment and getting my student ID card made before I leave town this weekend. So, I hopped on the tram in time to get there about 30 minutes after the office workers were supposed to come back from lunch -- I figured I'd give them some time to NOT be back when they were expected...since that seems to be what's expected. And, of course, the tram service was "interrupted", since it so often seems to be, a few stops from my apartment, for a "suspicious package". At least, that's what I translated it as -- I hope I was correct. I guess it was a terrorist scare. Anyway, we had to disembark, and we walked what google tells me was 2.3 km to school, on the way passing the "suspicious package" which was completely invisible, but roped off and sort of swarming with police who only seemed to be keeping foot traffic away, and not really looking at the problem at...

So this photo doesn't actually have anything to do with today, but since I didn't take any good photos today and they have been such a hit...Well, it's a shot I took at St. André yesterday as the organ concert was sort of ramping up. I spent the day mostly at home. I did have an adventure to the post office while trying to mail some stuff internationally, which turned out to be a sort of spectacular demonstration of either my incompetence or theirs...but probably both. When I walked in, I looked around and decided I should probably get in line. Then I was promptly yelled at to use the automated machine. Having had several frustrating experiences in France that were based around the apparent unwillingness of French people to use automated services when they could otherwise be helped by a person, I got out of line and made a brave attempt. The machine, predictably, spoke French. Probably better than I do. I navigated my way through the buttons -- yes, I want to se...

So yesterday Alex and I went to the university, and we found it closed just like before, but this time with a sign on the door that said "Nous sommes exceptionellement fermée aujourd'hui". I saw it and started laughing, because literally I took it to mean "we are exceptionally closed today". I think what it meant was that there was an exception to their regular hours, but still amusing after two days of failure. We went back this morning, hoping to catch them before lunch because they're closed each Wednesday and Friday afternoon. We found the same sign on the door. After sort of wandering around campus, we came back to check again, and there was still the sign. Luckily for us there was a French person showing some newly-arrived Asian exchange students the door and explaining that it was closed -- when someone exited the "closed", but well-lit and transparent, office. She walked upstairs and we all sort of followed her. I explained that we needed t...