Virtually Home

Since I got sick I've been watching a lot of tv on my computer. Most of my time has been spent watching most of the first season of West Wing since yesterday, but I also watched a couple of documentaries online. I have to say that between Jesus Camp and Supersize Me, I haven't had the best impressions of Americans to contemplate today. In fact, they've been pretty repugnant. Looking at footage from Missouri didn't make a very good impression of small-town middle-America, either. Just fast food restaurants, huge signage, ugly highways and parking lots as far as the camera would show. Maybe it's because I live in an 18th-century stone building. Maybe it's because I live in a city made of 18th-century stone buildings with independently-owned shops on the ground floor and apartments up above, but that kind of life just is not attractive anymore. Physically, that is. What I wouldn't do for a Salina Dairy Deal hamburger and a Dr. Pepper right now. Or to drive ...

Maybe the second day after Alex got here, we went to the university and, on wandering home, got really hungry. We stopped into a kebab shop near St. Nicolas where they were very friendly, and we talked to the two shopkeepers, who were cousins, while we ate. I meant to go back, but as it's not in a place I'm usually walking around looking for something to eat, I hadn't. Until a few days ago, when Vianney and Benjamin wanted to get kebab and said they knew the best place in town. Well, mostly when people tell you their product is the best one there is, they're just trying to sell it to you. And the first time I wandered into that shop, having never had a kebab, I was pretty unaware of what I was eating. But, having sampled a wide variety of kebabs in Bordeaux, since it's the only thing you can buy to eat after about 9 p.m., I think I'm inclined to agree now. Most of it is that they make their own bread and that their vegetables are fresh. A big part of it is...

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...

I think I commented on this before, but the size of commercial goods in France is sort of strange to me. I know I come from America: Land Where Everything Is Bigger Than It Needs To Be, but I just can't get over it. A two-liter bottle of Coke here, which is a pretty standard format in the States, is called either the "maxi" format or the "family size bottle". My 300 mL bottle of shampoo is called the "giga size". I cannot, for the life of me, find a bigger bottle, and have to buy it with astonishing frequency. This wouldn't be too bad except that the largest bottle of accompanying conditioner is 2/3 the size. They sell "maxi" sandwiches at the grocery store in little triangular-prism boxes that are about the size of your average sandwich-on-sliced-bread back home. It is surprising to me, over and over. And it's not just commercial goods -- I'm apparently 2 and a half inches taller than the average height for males in this ...

In one of many incidents since arriving in France that have served to point out how uninformed, in general, I am about world news and American politics, I learned that the State of the Union had been given last night from a Facebook status update by a friend from Norway. And so I watched it on YouTube, where it had been posted in English and Farsi by a guy in Iran, and marveled about how cool technology is, and how strange it is that our politics are so widely followed. I liked the things he said about education. When Obama kept saying "both" parties, I thought about how bitter the independents and the tinier parties must be that they never get mentioned seriously. I liked that he called people out on denying the "overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change". I felt kind of awkward when he addressed Congress like a classroom full of children, asking them not to get in each other's way just because they could. I felt even awkwarder when the military ...

It's funny what growing up in a place will do to you. I never really thought about it until I moved far, far away, where attitudes and languages and body language are different, and started to see my country in a different way. Part of that difference is just starting to see it as "mine" for the first time. I've been making a lot of new friends. Some of them are French, but a lot of them are anglophone. Some of them are Canadian, and some are Australian, and some are English and Welsh. They're all part of the commonwealth, but the idea of connectedness seems to be one-sided -- that is, the British see Australia and Canada as very loosely connected to them if at all, and the Canadians and Australians I've met seem to feel a lot more part of Britain than the British think they are. These countries all have established national health care, and almost the first thing that happens on meeting someone from a country such as this, where everyone speaks at least o...

Lately I've been on a Mountain Goats, Bob Dylan, Neil Young kick. You know, guitars and male vocalists with hard-to-like voices (can't forget Conor, but I wouldn't call that a kick anymore). Today, I'm working on learning The Needle and the Damage Done on guitar. I'm making an effort to play more often, since I have all this time on my hands with which to learn while I'm, you know, not going to school. I'm wrestling with myself over whether I should try to go to the university today. I have to turn in some photocopies of a paper I got back about two weeks ago, but every time I've tried the professor hasn't been in his office, since they don't necessarily keep office hours in this country. Some of them do, if they want -- one hour a week, for all of their undergrad and graduate students combined -- and they don't announce it in class, so you're just forced to show up at their door, if you can even find it, as that's not announced in ...