Virtually Home

Last night there was a "tempête", which the internet translates as "gale" or "storm" or "uproar". I'm guessing that first is the most appropriate, because there was a lot of wind. However, it wasn't enough wind to shut down anything except maybe the C-152s at training schools, had it happened in Oklahoma. They shut down the trams on account of the storm hours early, and I was expecting more. The sky was clear and the moon was full and we ended up at a house party with some friends. The remarkable thing about a house in Bordeaux is that it's more like a multi-story, multi-bedroom apartment, since all of the buildings in Bordeaux are connected to each other. This particular house was among the most spacious places I've seen in France. The bathroom was, as Nico said, big enough to play soccer in, and there was a small garden in the back yard, complete with a magnolia tree. When the gale was starting, it was oddly warm and felt a lo...

Sophomore year at OU, I was assigned a 20 minute exposé for my French class about French music. I chose, more specifically, to talk about French rap. I played some MC Solaar and got in a bit of a sticky situation explaining NTM's "Pose ton gun". I thought this was an exercise in speaking for a prolonged period of time, since we were all there to learn a foreign language. Little did I know that it was, in fact, just the way French classes are taught. Each class assigns exposé topics. Without fail. And then the student is responsible for gathering information and presenting it to the class. Your teacher might interrupt numerous times to correct your grammar, or your facts, or tell you he/she just didn't like the order in which you made your points -- or your opinion on a certain subject. In fact, opinions are discouraged, though I think this stance would probably have a lot more weight if it was ever the professor who was responsible for conveying information. We sp...

Being an American abroad opens one up to all kinds of judgments about our culture. I guess that's a danger when everyone else seems more acutely aware of your culture than you are of theirs. I get questions about George Bush and Obama and the wars. Movies and taxes and health care and rock stars. Most of these questions I can't answer, and a lot of them I don't even have opinions on. It's amazing how many times I'm criticized for not knowing more about American pop stars. One night a few months ago I was in the pub downstairs when a man heard my accent and came over to talk to me. This is a pretty common occurrence, because anglophones tend to be targets for commentary. This particular guy, though, said something weird. He walked right up to me and asked if he could shake my hand, which, in France, is a business sort of thing and not a met-in-a-bar sort of thing. He then said, quite excitedly and in heavily-accented English, that his name was Pierre (of course i...

This is a gratuitous Bordeaux photo, since I haven't posted any in quite a while. It was taken about two weeks ago, when we had a very brief blizzard. It was beautiful, particularly because it started with a wonderful peal of thunder. Unfortunately, it didn't continue. But I was glad that it didn't stick -- not only is it unpleasant for walking around in, but everything seems to shut down in France when it snows. On Amber's last day in Bordeaux I was feeling pretty terrible, but my protracted illness has kept me largely indoors lately, so I wanted to go out anyway. We looked around online for things likely to be regional and interesting, and we ended up finding a wine museum near the river that seemed promising. It was all about the wine trade through Bordeaux and the process of negotiation between growers and brokers and sellers, and not about the growing or the wine-making itself, but the venue was pretty cool. It'd been the home/store/barrel-building shop/bottl...

These two are not really related, it's just that I remain sick while all around me, people are falling victim to the plague. Erin and Andria were feeling bad when they moved out on Monday, and Maria and Alex are both sick. I've relapsed. However, Amber arrived on a train yesterday afternoon. She got stuck in the middle of Auvergne due to snow, and they all had to sit tight while people got out and poked at the wheels to dislodge ice from them. She finally did make it on time, since they held her connecting train, and I picked her up at St. Jean. We went out to an Italian restaurant, where I had a pizza with apples and olives and honey and onion jam. It was pretty fantabulous. Afterward we took a kind of epic walk, down to Place de la Bourse and along the river, then across Pont de Pierre and farther than I've ever walked on that side of the river, to a church that turns out to be called Eglise St. Marie. We walked in a circle around it, and found that while the front wa...

Last week I tried to watch the Superbowl. I'm not really all that interested in professional football. It's just too pretty when everyone is the best guy on the team, and since I have no professional team to root for, the babbling of the commentators is usually too much for me. On a side note, my extra-North American anglophone friends think it's hilarious when I say "to root for", but since my audience is largely back in North America, I'm not worried about this. Anyway, we went to the Cock and Bull, which is an English pub a few blocks from my house, for the 12:30 kick off. It was pretty disappointing because the coverage was coming from the UK, so they kept playing the same Domino's pizza commercial. I'm not usually that interested in Superbowl commercials either, but since there was all the fuss about the Tim Tebow spot, I wanted to see them this time. No such luck. And then the pub closed at 2 a.m., just before the end of the first quarter. ...

Today I woke up feeling listless, and then I remembered I had a bunch of homework, re-evaluated what  "bunch" of homework meant based on my experiences this year, and felt rather like a letters major. Or, what I imagine letters majors should feel like when they're complaining about the homework they have to do. So this afternoon I've been reading some about the reign of Louis XV on the internet, and I've just started reading Rimbaud's Illuminations, which I'm supposed to finish by our class on Thursday, even though she's told us we're only going to discuss one of them that day. I'm not sure what etiquette on homework here is, as I never figured out in the linguistics department when the homework, which always seemed suggested, was really just suggested, and when it was actually taken up. This wouldn't make much of a difference on my quality of work, were I writing in English, but the difference between taking French notes for my benefit a...