Time to Catch Up

Salut!

It's been awhile since I've taken the time to get my lazy ass to sit down and catch the blog up with all that's been going on. Much has happened in the time elapsed since my last entry. As I write I'm sitting in my new room, an 8x16 foot space that includes a desk, rolling office chair, a tiny "frigo", a bunk sized twin bed, shelves, and a tiny bathroom/ shower. Although it's not quite what I imagined when they said "studio apartment" in the institutional information sheet, its definitely growing on me. My room is only one of many in the seven story "Foyer Etudiant des Alpes", a student residence within, which I suspected and recently had those suspicions confirmed, one of the sketchiest parts of town...It keeps things interesting. I live on the third floor facing north west, giving me one of the best views of the lower rooftops of the city, awesome sunsets over some of the smaller mountains guarding the valley, the top of the 15th century Chateau de les ducs de savoie, including the tower and flapping french tricolor, the top of the city's cathedral, and the little river that runs through the city from le lac du bourget, france's largest natural lake. The rooftops are very mary poppins-esque, with each roof and crooked chimney cutting its own profile into the skyline. If I peer my head out my large bay window and look left I see the two large snow covered peaks that loom over our university campus on the hill above the city. I'm sitting at my desk sipping a 25 cl Kronenbourg, an Alsace brew very popular and cheap over here, contemplating the last 3 weeks and replaying my experiences in my head, mulling how best to share them...here goes:

School:

The French university system is, by and large, a disorganized mess, suffering from the same plague of bureaucratic inefficiency and disorganization that I've learned seems to embody all French administrative matters. The French are the least stressed population I've ever met. Everything, I mean EVERYTHING, except for cafes and restaurants, closes for at least an hour and a half at noon for the famous french lunches, they get at least 6 weeks paid vacation each year, civil servants get ridiculous benefits, and are, effectively, as a result of the unions, impossible to fire, transportation workers and teachers go on strike at the drop of a hat and often don't bother to tell anyone until it's time for class...convenient. The French certainly know a thing or two about how to live, but the lack of stress can sometimes be a double-edged sword. This lack of stress means that often you have to push, politely of course, to get what you want here. Often, when french workers say something is impossible, it really means they just don't particularly care to do what is being asked of them, it may be because they're busy with something else or it's just about time for the twentieth clop, or cigarette of the day, and it's nine in the morning...
Classes are touch and go here, there are good ones and bad ones, just like back home, only back home teachers don't go on strike when it rains...or there's a new tax on smokes.
Also, participation is something rarely taken into account in classes, teachers show up when they feel like it, and most lessons consist of the teacher talking for two hours, students show up if they care to, it makes no difference to the teacher. Another quirk is that most teachers take a smoke break at the hour mark during the class, halfway through, something unheard of in the states, a TEACHER....smoking??? ahh yes, vive la france, vive la difference. It's quite entertaining and many students usually file out after the professor to scratch their itches as well. I'm in mostly french language type classes which I enjoy and definitely help my french as I hang out with the other american students a lot because they're a good time, but isn't exactly making me fluent in french...but it's definitely getting better.

Hanging Out:

We frequent two pubs here in Chambery with a bunch of the other international students and some local french friends of ours. We also, when feeling a little wild, hit "L'Opera" the only discotheque in town, a den of debauchery, dancing, drinking, too much aftershave, eurotrash, hairgel, and clouds of sweat and BO. Needless to say we love it. The entrance fee includes a free drink, usually a "whisky coca" for me, a blended scotch whiskey popular around here called Clan Cambell is the sauce of choice for this drink, and of course, Coke. The Coca Cola over here is better than at home, no fake colors or corn syrup make the difference. The bars close around 1:30 here, but I've yet to see the closing of l'opera, and trust me, I've tried. I've made a few french friends but manfy more international friends, from Britain to China and Korea. It's been a lot of fun meeting people from such diverse backgrounds. I live next door to a very nice Estonian girl, and have met a Turkish guy, a German girl, a Polish girl, two Finnish girls, a number of French students and a bunch of Koreans. I, in blockheaded ethnocentrism, only imagined I'd see other Europeans here, never considering the idea, that, obviously, Asians want to learn European languages as well. It's cool to hear Koreans speaking french, and it's definitely interesting to only have French as a common language with non-Europeans.

Travels:

I traveled to Grenoble the second weekend that I was here in France and had a great time. Grenoble is about an hour away by train, the ride itself was worth the train fare, just amazingly beautiful, snow covered mountains, farms, and vineyards clutching onto steep hillsides, looking as if they were about to fall off. I traveled to Grenoble with some of the other American exchange students and we walked around the city, toured a 12th century chapel that was subliminally beautiful, and visited the city's large fine arts museum. The chapel had a very powerful and calming aura, one could almost picture the generations of locals who came here day after day to beseech, thank and worship the almighty for nearly a millennium. The walls breathed history as the tired, eroded sandstone tower balanced, reaching up to the heavens from the crest of the roof of the church, as it had done for 900 years. We also came upon a part of the original roman wall in the city that dated back to height of the empire....crazy, just crazy to touch something that had watched the people, seasons, and world change for almost 2,000 years! At the museum we saw all types of masterpieces, from morbid medieval scenes to beautiful impressionistic works from monet and co., to wacky and odd modern art which just I'm just not sophisticated enough to "get". From there I split with the group to meet up with Alison Quantz, my brotha, Julien's, girlfriend, who's studying in Grenoble for the semester. We had a couple pintes of Hoegaarden in a downtown cafe and chatted for a few hours, talking about our adventures and commiserating, it was a great time for sure. I met back up with the group soon thereafter and we hopped an evening train back to Chambery, a nice little saturday all said and done.

I've been snowboarding once and skiing twice since I've been here as well. We met two cool french dudes at O'Pogues one night, their type, that is not bathed in aftershave and hairgel and oozing skeezyness, just chill, being in short supply here in France. Damien and Fabien, a dynamic duo for sure, took me, Vanessa, the girl from San Diego who is #9 in the state of california in snowboard racing, and Tristan, an adventurous english literature major from Clemson, to Margariaz, a station du ski just into the alps, about and hour away by Damien's aging Peugot stickshift minivan, inculding whiteknuckle up-on-two-wheels-boston-driving-on-cocaine roundabout thrills thanks to Dabien, demonstrating his best French driving, working the Peugot for all she was worth up ridiculous mountain switchbacks. The drive would've been shorter, God knows Damien tried, but we had to stop so Damien could throw les chaines on les pneus or tires en anglais, so we could simply make it up the road. I, like a jackass, thought he was being a pansy, that we didn't really need les chaines, no one uses chains in VT and we have some serious snowy roads, but as we kept climbing the mountain I realized I'd been dead wrong, as we passed dozens of other cars swerving, spinning and sliding down the road, as they tried to make it up le montagne sans les chaines, shouting countless merdes , taking drags of their cigarettes as they struggled to put the chains on that they should have put on three miles ago. The scenery of the mountains was jaw-dropping, like NOTHING I'd ever seen before, including Mt Blanc against the perfectly blue backdrop in the distance. I rented a snowboard, one of the last ones they had...my size 14 feet didnt "really fit" on the board, so it was definitely a challenge to make those toe side turns, not to mention the fact that I didn't really feel it necessary to "remember my ski pants". So I spent the day on a board too small in VT rugby sweatpants...I don't think I'll ever forget them again anytime soon. The week after that we returned to Margariaz and I tried skiing for the first time in 7 years and had a blast, I definitely am converted back to the double boards. It was cheaper to rent skis and the equipment was much nicer than the snowboard stuff. I didn't fall once that day. This last weekend we went to the world ski championships at Val D'Isere on Friday, a sort of French Vale in the heart of the Alps, with more scenery that was simply unreal...we got to watch a few of the women's events and got to cheer for the american who took second place in the slalom...until she was later disqualified for missing a gate. I'm quite sure we were the only Yanks in the place. On Saturday, Lee, Tristan and I headed to Geneva for a daytrip. Another beautiful train ride, and a simply amazing city. Geneva was mine and Lee's first time in Europe outside of France, so we were both just taking it all in. Geneva is simply gorgeous, even on a drizzly day like the one that we visited it on. Switzerland's geographic location, located in between France, Italy, and Germany means that all signs in Geneva, being the capital of French Switzerland, were first in French, then German, Italian, and lastly, in English. We walked along Geneva's lake front, checking out the fountain in the middle of the harbor that shoots water as high as 420 feet in the air, and as we headed into the English gardens on the waterfront, were promptly greeted by a sketchy, swaggering middle eastern dude, who inquired if "tu veux quel-que chose? hash, marijuana?" We smiled and said "merci non" we were in fact, all set for the time being, thanks for the offer. After our stroll we headed to St. Pierre's, the main cathedral in town, started in the late 1100s, to give it a look. St. Pierre's, a Protestant church, was gorgeous, and I gathered through some reading at the church that, Geneva was quite a stronghold for French Protestants during the Huguenot era of the 17th century. For a small fee we climbed the massive north and south tower of the cathedral via aging spiral staircases that were a bit too tight for this gangly bastard who discovered a bit of a claustrophobic tendency on the climb up. On the hike up we got to walk through the belltowers, examing the massive timbers that once held the multi-ton bells. The views from a couple hundred feet up on the gothic open-air balconies were awesome. St. Pierre's unlike, Notre Dame in Paris, didn't have any grates covering the balconies on top of the towers, to keep people from falling/jumping off, which made it all that more intense of a view. The towers look out over le ville ancienne of Geneva and out to the lake front, just beautiful. From the cathedral we started pounding the cobblestones of the old city in search of some good, cheap grub, and perhaps a German brew, the former, we soon discovered, being nearly impossible, the latter, quite readily available. Geneva and Switzerland are notoriously expensive, and we were lucky to find some solid dinner crepes after nearly an hour of searching. The crepes, plus a couple brews each, were about 15 euro, cheap by swiss standards. Soon after that we hoofed it back to the train station to return to Chambery...or so we thought. We, in our "spontaneity", had neglected to check the train schedule and had missed the last train to Chambery by two hours. We knew we were in trouble when we told an assistant at the station that we were trying to get back to Chambery that night and he simply raised his eyebrows and looked sideways at us with pity. Lee and I had already bought our roundtrip tickets so we had to make those work. We were able to catch a 6 50 train to Lyon, and managed to not have our tickets checked, otherwise we might've been booted or had to pay more money, as our tickets were certainly not listed as Chambery via Lyon. Lyon, if you know your French geography is most definitely not on the way to Chambery. We arrived in Lyon, after changing trains in a little mountain town, tired but happy, to discover that Lee had left his bag on the train that we got off when we switched. This was bad news because the bag happened to contain his passport, camera, and 100 dollar ray bans. Lee then had to try reach security and have them search the train, etc. This did not pan out well for him, as he is now on his way to Paris as I write to the US Embassy to have another passport made...bogus. We finally arrived in Chambery four and a half hours after we left Geneva...a very long, and fun day, right up until we tried to leave. We got back and crashed into bed, as the next day we had to get up to catch a 8 45 bus to Margariaz to go skiing with all the other ISEP students. It was an absolute whiteout on the moutain, tons of fresh powder but visibility reduced to 20 feet or less due to pea soup fog that engulfed the mountain. I skied again and had a blast as well as a few good spills, and one yard sale on my last run of the day. I hit a little kicker of a jump on the side of the trail, unfortunately the hill down to the jump was a little steep, and instead of flying off the jump, my skis stuck into the base of the jump while I kept moving....spread eagle, sans skis onto the trail 20 feet ahead. It was another fun and tiring day...I slept like a log.
Well that's all I got for now, I'm off to Italy for school break to visit a couple who live in Torino who adopted the boy who was in the next crib over from my sister Tien in Vietnam. I haven't seen them in 7 years so I'm very excited to see them and their family! Will keep writing, a bientot!

Bonjour-

Je suis en France! France is fantastic, absolutely awesome. I'm in a medium sized french city in the foothills of the French Alps. The city I live in is situated in a huge valley, flanked by mountains on all sides, with the heart of France, including France's largest natural lake at one end, and the alps between France and Italy at the other. Its a pretty shitty place to spend five and a half months all and all....I met the rest of the exchange students at the Universite de Savoie yesterday and its been great getting to know them all. There are 11 americans, 4 brits, one canadian, and one Italian bird. Of all the students there is one other dude, with whom I'm rooming for the time being. He's a good old boy from Virginia, laid back and easy going; we get along quite well. He also has a serious girlfriend...so, the odds are just terrible for me...just terrible, but someone has to represent the american male in response to all the French creepers crawling and oogling the girls....
Yes life is good. Good wine is cheap, the market being saturated and all, the food is good and cheap aussi, the scenery beautiful, the weather temperate, you can't ask for much more than this. School is quite laid back as well, getting to know an entirely different academic and administrative system is quite a headfuck, but I'm getting through it. I have my first class tomorrow and I'm excited for it. I have l'initiation du latin ancienne at one thirty in the afternoon for two hours....tres interessant. I'm off to O'Cardinal's pub right now for a few drinks with the other exchange students, apparently irish pubs are big over here, which is nice because I know how to play that game, in fact I'm quite familiar with that scene, thanks to my hard work put in at O'Reagan's in Montreal over the years. Bonsoir, until later, go Obama go!