Virtually Home

So "Boomer Sooner" is about all I have to say. I'm tired of missing things.

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...

Today I had my first exam in France. It was a really straightforward test over the International Phonetic Alphabet, in a class that is composed of nothing but linguistics majors. So imagine my surprise when I noticed rampant cheating. Not that it would have been difficult, as we had one exam form, and one proctor for a class of over 200, who didn't even walk around the room during the test, didn't discourage people from talking, or even look up when cell phones rang and were answered. Also the girl in front of me kept asking me for answers. I pretended I didn't understand her. And that's today's advantage to being foreign! But seriously. If you're a linguist, shouldn't you know IPA?

This is going to be a long and rambling post. Most of it is going to be specific information about the two concerts I saw this week. Don't say I didn't warn you. Last weekend was a rather nocturnal one for me. Sunday night found me trying desperately to sleep "early" and utterly failing until 7:30, which made going to class at 1 pretty painful (and believe me, I know how sad that is). Monday night I didn't manage to sleep until 2 a.m., and woke up on account of a too-early alarm at 4:30 before getting up at 5:30 to start my epic London adventure. It was a really foggy morning. You probably can't tell very well from this photo, but even in the train station there was fog about the rafters. I would have appreciated it a lot more had I not been so exhausted. The train ride to Paris passed in a haze. I arrived at Paris Montparnasse and had to cross the city on the number 4 metro line to change trains (not to mention going through all of the metal detecting...

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.

Or, so I infer from the greetings around here. When it starts getting toward that time in the afternoon (which apparently falls anywhere between 3:30 and 8 pm, depending on the various people I've been greeted by), people start saying "bon soir" by way of hello -- for goodbye, on the other hand, they use "bonne soirée". They both mean good evening, but I'm still amused because we also use "soirée" to talk about parties. It's like wherever you are, someone is always hoping you'll have an awesome party. The cashier at the grocery store, the guy that asks you for money on your way home -- everyone! You can tell I didn't have an eventful day, 'cause I don't have much to say. Class as usual, and home now just before the rush exploded on the tram.