Virtually Home

I woke up pretty late today and sort of wondered what I was going to do on a Sunday. I decided to look for a movie to see -- preferably one I'd seen before, and so would understand what was going on, but definitely in French. I ended up finding a UGC theater pretty near my house and seeing Harry Potter et le Prince du Sang-Mêlée. There were only a few peculiarities where the voices of the actors were crazily different -- Dumbledore and McGonagall, mostly. I enjoyed it. The theater was built in an old part of town so it went up five stories instead of out, like American theaters do. The theater itself was very compact -- the seats were really comfortable, but there wasn't a lot of leg room between the rows. I decided to sort of wander back in the direction of my apartment and see what there was to see. I passed an Irish pub not far from the cathedral, and on the wall they had a picture of one of the guys on the Bordeaux team and a sign about when the next game was. I checked my ...

The photo on the left is the view out my apartment window, if you look to the left. Notice the cathedral. I went to bed pretty early last night. About 6 pm I started wanting to go to sleep, but I made myself stay awake until 8 so that I could be reasonably assured of NOT waking up in the middle of the night, ready for the day to begin. Well, I did wake up at some point in the night, feeling awake. I don't know what time it was, but there were still people at the pub talking, and a few singing, so I could kind of guess. I went back to sleep until 10:30, when Bernadette arrived to give Adeline her deposit back and take her keys...I said goodbye to Adeline, who was my roommate for all of 22 hours, and asked Bernadette about power situations, as my power adapter is prohibited from staying in the wall by its silly square design that does not fit in the round inset power outlet. She recommended Fnac, which is the store that my brother told me would quickly be mentioned in my experience ...

I woke up this morning at 6 CDT, and sort of dragged my feet to the shower and through the end of packing. We put my stuff in the car and went to Blue Moon, where I ate a delicious granola parfait. Mom and Dad drove me to the airport, where I waited for two hours to get on my plane to Houston. The flight to Houston was uneventful. When I got there I ate a Chicago-style mini-pizza for lunch and found it to be way, way less than impressive. I waited for three hours, and then got on my plane to Paris. I had the best flight experience ever -- I had a window seat near the middle of the plane, with no one seated next to me. I got a lot more room than I otherwise would have had to stretch out in, and I could have gotten out of my seat any time I wanted! It was a miracle. I even managed to fall asleep for about ten minutes, until the airplane started beeping relentlessly and I couldn't get there again. I landed in Paris and-- you guessed it -- did another few hours of waiting. I wandered a...

I went to Houston Tuesday night, to prepare for my visa meeting on Wednesday morning. The flight was uneventful but very pleasant. We were at 9,500 on the way down there, among beautiful puffy white cumulus clouds. My favorite way to fly. We landed and took a cab to the hotel. We had dinner at a seafood place called Willie G's, which was tasty. The next morning we walked from the hotel to the consulate and I waited for my meeting while my parents went back to the hotel. The consulate was about an hour behind, and it was chaotic in that the other applicants didn't seem to have inquired about what documents they would need beforehand. There was a lot of having spouses fax information and calling of employers and running out to have passport photos taken, all of which was very disruptive, since whenever anyone would come back with an additional document the staff would interrupt their interaction with the person they were working with to talk to the person who had come unprepared....

Just a little over a month until my departure to Bordeaux to study abroad for the 2009 - 2010 school year. After a mix-up at the French office when they lost my paper application, I finally received an acceptance letter a little more than a week ago, leaving less time than I would have liked to complete the visa applications and make airplane arrangements. My flight leaves on the 27 of August, and today I was working on setting up an appointment at the French embassy in Houston. Hopefully everything will go smoothly. When July started, I think it became real. People are starting to make plans for the fall and I have to keep reminding myself that I won't be on campus next year. I'm beginning to get excited -- but also nervous. I need to review some French before I go. I need to do a lot of things. Hopefully I'll keep this blog updated, pre-departure and while I'm in France. I think it'll be good to have, when it's time for retrospection.