To Market, To Market...too soon?

Sunrise: 8:22
Vocab: boudin - blood sausage

Farm attire.

At long last! The entry about my experiences as a murderer of small animals. Well, to be fair, they were large animals, and it wasn't me who killed them, and nothing was wasted. Seeing as I wrote 10 pages in my notebook when it was all fresh in my mind, I've decided to excerpt a few snippets for your reading pleasure. For purposes of discretion I will not: (1) post all of my notes, (2) include any names, or (3) post photos of the piggies. (Yes, I justified the text of this entry; trust me, it looks much better this way.)

Sunday, October 15, 2009

We had stumbled into an immense family gathering. Over the course of the weekend, I kissed easily over 40 people between hellos & goodbyes; you acknowledge everyone present when you arrive and when you leave. I am omniscient because I had no responsibilities and could bounce from inside to outside as the different family members proudly displayed and explained their roles.

We killed 4 pigs. I'm not a squeamish person, but I thought I might lose my proverbial lunch. The pig is terrified, seeing he must confront his own mortality. She struggles and screams -- not squeals, screams. Every fiber of her existence tenses and converges into one simple message: I am alive and I do not want to die. And that's what pretty much all of us want, isn't it? Her death is inevitable, though, planned by the human arbiters of life and death...the only gods in the pig world. I understand more than ever why the base of tragedy -- the most ancient and fundamental tragedies -- is inevitability. I felt myself in a completely alien world, watching a woman easily in her mid-60s eagerly place a bucket under the cascade of blood, while the men held the pig still in the throes of its death tremors.

After killing the pigs, the next step was griller... in other words, to light them on fire to clean the skin and slightly cook the insides before cutting them open. It was raining. Hard. And the bonfires felt oddly funerary as the pigs transitioned to meat (as Angèle said). The human role in all this requires a strong stomach and a hearty constitution: You have to face your role as a killer, but you also have to have respect for the whole process underway. The man who butchered the pigs had been doing so since he was eight. One fluid motion after another, he opened the animals, separating head from body, organs from flesh, and later, separating the different cuts of meat.

While the work was clearly divided according to sex, all the work for men and women alike takes a toll on the hands. The men worked outside in the rain, scrubbing down the charred carcasses, and setting up spigots to run cold water through the organs of the animals. The women worked inside to separate the intestines, finessing them out of their tangles, tugging and tearing at the connective tissue. Cold water, warm blood, hot insides. Even with hands no doubt numbed by the spigot water, though, the men still came inside periodically to roll themselves the perfect (filterless) cigarettes in zero seconds flat.

If the French are efficient in nothing else, they work quickly when preparing food. Within minutes the assembly line was whirring away. Ladies tearing at innards, an older mustachioed gentleman grinding away at the sausage machine, and the other men outside in the rain cleaning shit out of intestines that only minutes before had been inside, steaming with the heat of a recently-killed corpse.

After several hours of hard labor, we sat for lunch, which lasted easily two hours. With the efficiency of the day, we had converted the meat prep. room into a kitchen. Warmed by the fire, we passed around huge loaves of crusty country bread before partking of salads that people had made the night before. For the main course, we had sausage (not from our pigs) & pasta. I wasn't brave enough to try any of the recently killed cuts that we had cooked for lunch, but I did try a bite of the blood sausage. Never again. The taste was fine, but the texture reminded me too much of the substance recently flushed out of those same intestines. We wrapped up with strong country camembert, roasted chestnuts, & clementines.

That night, we had dinner with another part of the family. Again, there were at least 20 (une vingtaine) of us. This meal lasted around four hours. We took our time, starting with aperitifs & cold appetizers that we passed around on platters, then the warm appetizers -- a small plate of mini tarts for everyone. The main course, which came out in pre-arranged plates, consisted of three types of sausage, a cut of ham, half a baked potato, and a sauerkraut-like cabbage mélange. We three girls split a plate amongst ourselves and it was just the right amount of food for each. After the cheese course came dessert and digestifs. Angèle's uncle challenged us girls to try Calvados (affectionately: "calva"), a locally made apple brandy that you drink from a spoon, poured over a sugar cube. The other two didn't much care for it, but I appreciated the burning sweetness of the combination, which amused the family to no end.

I know Angèle and Anaïs said it depends on the family, but the French seem to thrive on family collectivity... certainly in the countryside.

My Life After Paris: Livin' in the Fast Lane

Sunrise: 8:01
Vocab:
plier - to fold

la brume - fog

In a little over a week, I've gone from having a decent amount to report to having decidedly too much to share. What have I done recently? Well, I've gone to Paris, I've suffered a bout of some mysterious illness (grippe AHH?!), attended a French surprise birthday party, and most recently, returned from a two day jaunt to see some of the chateaux of the Loire Valley. Between Paris and the chateaux, I've taken over 500 photos. I've discovered that I love taking high-contrast color saturated photos and I become vexed when the sun starts to set and the lighting ne convient pas for the "Vivid Colors" setting on my camera. On the other hand, I've also discovered how much I love taking photos in sepia. Please do not judge me for this. If you had just spent two days in enchanted forests, you would have wanted to take sepia photos, too. It's only natural.

I have my first exam at the fac coming up this Thursday and I'm going to tuer le cochon avec Angèle this coming weekend. I can only write in simple declarative sentences because I hardly know where to start (let alone where to finish!).

I guess I'd better start with Paris. First of all, I know this is maybe a cop out, but I've opened a new photobucket account called theainfrance -- pretty clever, I know -- to create photo albums for my big trips like Paris and the Loire (and so that I don't have to narrow down my photo selections quite as much). I know the photo blog entries are fun and pleasing to the eye and I promise they have not died, but I think we'll all be much happier this way. Paris photos should be up presently, followed swiftly by photos from the chateaux. And so, without further ado, my slightly scattered thoughts on Paris:

Thursday Night: Strangers on the Train

Getting to the train station would have been a cinch if we hadn't stopped at McDo for dinner. I should note that I had nothing to do with the choice of restaurant as I had lately enjoyed the last of my tabouleh, carrot rapé, cheese, and bread at the IES center. We spent about fifteen minutes waiting on a five or six person line and waited easily another twenty for...what? the intense culinary preparation required by a filet o' fish and two p'tit wraps? While we waited we waxed poetic on the inefficiency of many (most?!) French establishments and wistfully lamented the lack of Good Old American Capitalism...which would soon become one of the major themes of our trip.

At any rate, we made it to the train station with time to spare: Emily and Leah ate their sandwiches in peace and I had time to pick up a pre-train café au lait with whipped cream. The sound that precedes every SNCF announcement never fails to terrify me; in a minor key, it could easily precede the entrance of a legendary villain. I'm not sure which one, but it totally works. I managed not to die of fright before the arrival on our train, and after boarding we found ourselves in a pleasant purple and orange car sitting directly across from one of the cutest little girls in France. After about an hour of reading my book and goofing off, I decided to try and make a new friend, so I started folding origami cranes. My neighbor had been looking bored for quite some time so I wasn't at all surprised to notice her clandestine glances at my folding. When I finished, she could barely conceal her awe, and so I offered to teach her. Although I quickly discovered that explaining origami is nigh impossible when you don't remember the French word for "fold," we managed and by the end of my second crane, I had made a new French friend.

Her name was Laurie and she was off to Paris to watch her friend compete in -- of all things -- a double dutch tournament. Laurie was traveling with her friend's mom, who also started to chat with us. All in all, two hours well spent -- a little bit of last-minute French practice before spending the weekend speaking English almost exclusively. We connected with Emily's friend Theresa, you see, in the Paris train station. Theresa is studying in Italy this semester and does not speak a word of French...and it should basically go with out saying that most of the shopkeepers refused to speak a word of French to any of us.

The metro was a breeze. One look at a map and I knew what to do. One foot set in the tunnel and I felt at home. The rhythm of the Paris metro reminded me so strongly of my home subways that, I have to admit, I felt a pang of homesickness. We found our hotel just around the corner from the metro stop (a small blessing since, in the 19th arrondissement, we were not close to anything else). Hotel Crimée. The name looks sketchier than the hotel actually was. Crimée has nothing to do with the amount of crime besieging the hotel, but with the Crimean War. The rooms were small and the bathrooms oddly proportioned, but they did the trick for our purposes (sleeping, mainly) and the music channels on the T.V. provided some very useful insights into French pop culture.

Friday: The Real Paris

We commenced our first full day in Paris with a traipse around Monmartre, just one arrondissement over. After a couple victory!-we're-in-Paris pastries, we headed up to Sacré Coeur. Armed with a metro map and a pocket map of Paris, we could not wander astray, but we took the following intrepid approach in Montmartre: go up the hill! And later: go down the hill! It was as effective as you would imagine, which is to say, very. (I'd like to take a brief pause here to apologize for my syntax; I don't know what's gotten into me.) Upon reaching the top of the hill, Sacre Coeur's imposing facade confronted us...confronted is too strong of a word. I wouldn't say it welcomed us. I'll go with greeted. A legless man sitting in a wheelchair barked genially into a microphone while fashioning little dogs out of yarn; two boys showed off playing with Chinese yo- yos; a man dressed all in red struck up a tune on the didgeridoo.

Even on such a foggy day, the hilltop presented an incredible view of Paris (perhaps all the more incredible cloaked in mystery as it was). The crypt at Sacré Coeur was closed, but at the very least we got to see the main church which was lovely. We didn't dawdle, though; we had too much too see. Following our ecclesiastical introduction to Paris, we promptly headed down the hill in search of windmills (moulins)...you know...the red light district. Don't make me spell it out. At the bottom of the hill we found Moulin Rouge and Starbucks! Emily couldn't have been happier to "taste a little capitalism."

After a photo shoot in front of the Moulin Rouge with our Starbucks, we met up with Anna, one of my friends from Haverford and freshman-year-suitemate extraordinaire! She took us to the Montmartre Cemetery and showed us Hector Berlioz's grave. Even in the midst my recent existential ponderings, at that moment I just couldn't feel the weight of my own mortality; all I could think was how beautiful all the tombs were. And how oddly disorganized! Considering they take the time to sculpt their trees into rectangles here, you'd think they could line their graves up a little better.

From Montmartre, we hopped the metro to the opera house and from there proceeded to march all over the city, pausing for the occasional photo op. Our most notable photo op might have been at the Jardain des Tuileries, which, for some unexplained reason, hosts a display of monstrous oversized silver heads which could easily have sprung from the mind of one Tim Burton. We also took a turn around the Marais, the third arrondissement, upon my request. I can't remember what I was expecting to find there, exactly. The Marais is home to one of the largest Jewish neighborhoods in Paris. Also one of the gayest neighborhoods in Paris. We saw lots of Orthodox Jews, but their sexual identities remained unclear. I should mention that we spent the entire weekend playing "Gay or European?" It is not an easy game. Not all was lost, though! We took a spin by Place des Vosges and peered into the windows of the high-end boutiques that were much too classy for our American sneakers.

We rounded out our first day in Paris with pizza at an Italian (?!) restaurant and a walk by the twinkling Eiffel Tower.

Saturday: One Museum, Two Museums, FREE MUSEUMS!

I'm sorry, that pun is so bad it's probably not really a pun, but I think you'll understand my excitement when I tell you we spent our Saturday at the Louvre and Orsay museums for free! Thanks to (grâce à) our student IDs, we received the EU student treatment: eye-rolls followed by free tickets. This installment will go a bit faster since I'm not sure it's worth it to rehash every piece of art we saw. Suffice it to say, I saw the Venus de Milo, gawked at the crowd around the Mona Lisa (which is tiny!), found a bust of Benjamin Franklin (they seriously love that man here), and visited some ancient temples from Egypt and Mesopotamia.

Yes, the Louvre was incredible, huge, intimidating, formidable, but I think I liked the Orsay more. Set up in an old train station, the Orsay is home to more recent works of art, including paintings by some of my favorite impressionists (I mean, seriously, this is France). We traipsed through the current exhibit on Art Nouveau, which turned out to be a poor choice. The psychedelica room may have pushed us beyond our museum tolerance. We bought some postcards and headed out. Oh, but that didn't mean we had run out of steam. We went shopping after that.

I should also mention that I'd had to start the day buying some mysterious French cough syrup. I hadn't wanted to admit to myself how sick I was starting to feel, but as dinner rolled around, it was starting to get rough. I made it to (and through!) dinner, though. We ate at the Restaurant Chartiers, on the recommendation of my Let's Go! France (an absolutely invaluable addition to our team). The 45-minute wait was absolutely worth it. My camera had died at that point, so I felt the need to scribble something in my notebook. Here's what I managed to get down before our waiter unceremoniously tossed us out (they were turning tables like there was no tomorrow): "mirror windows, gilded walls, carnage on the table." It was seriously the most satisfying steak frites I have ever had the pleasure of eating. I didn't even care that our waiter mainly spent the evening yelling at us: "You have 2 minutes to decide and 4 to eat! I need to get home to my wife!" At first we thought he was joking...

We walked from the opera district all the way to the Champs Elysées, ending with a view of the illuminated Arc de Triomphe. We like to do our major monuments at night.

Sunday: La Grippe AHH!

My body finally succumbed on Sunday. I woke up with a pounding headache and could not stay standing for more than 30 seconds at a time. I had to pass on the Rodin in favor of spending the day alternately sleeping and watching top 40 music videos -- in other words, au lit.

In spite of the somewhat inhospitable bald concierge who always had the night shift, Hotel Crimee turned into a nice little home away from home.

Monday: Au Revoir, Paris!

Our last day in Paris began in much the same way as our first: in Montmartre. We picked the first brasserie we saw and went in for some brunch. As it turned out, we'd picked the local bar. As we waited for our chocolat viennois and croque monsieurs, lots of old men shuffled in and out, yelling at the bartender and then at each other -- geneially, of course. For the first time since our arrival, our hosts addressed us in French (up until the end, when another bartender said, "bye bye!"). Well, somehow we'd also managed to fake it pretty well at the hotel.

Bellies full, we headed back up towards Sacré Coeur to explore some of the shops we'd seen on the first day. Afterwards, we headed over to Ile de la Cité for a glimpse at Notre Dame and a peek at Sainte Chapelle. We had to go through the National Guard to get inside. On the bright side, they accidentally gave us free tickets. I had quickly discovered that holding up my University of Nantes ID, looking slightly confused, and asking if there was a "reduction" for students would often land me free tickets. Joined by my friend Maud, from high school, we ogled the stained glass for a while, and then headed over to the fifth arrondissement for our second round of hot chocolate.

After a delightful lunch, it was time to head back to Montparnasse and catch our train. I left the city sick, tired, and thoroughly content. For once in my life, I had embraced the chance to be a flagrant tourist, and it was marvelous.

My Life Before Paris...

Sunrise: 7:44! (We rolled the clocks back this weekend)
Vocab: tuer les cochons - to kill the pigs

...is coming to a close. Tomorrow evening I head off for a long weekend in Paris with a few friends and as my second full month in Nantes comes to a close, it's about time for another retrospective. I've devoted a lot of this blog to reflections on the cultural differences I've found in France (and also on all the beautiful places I've seen, bien sûr), but I think all along I've failed to mention my various sources of comfort -- and there are plenty of those.

I've been keeping a little notebook on my person pretty much at all times just in case I need to jot down something I've noticed or add (ajouter) a word to my ever-growing vocabulary list. The other day, I was flipping through it and I found this little paragraph from early on (September 19): "Officially three months left until the end of the program. Sometimes, it seems culture shock has nothing to do with the differences and everything to do with the jarring similarities. When a little French baby touches my shoe, everything seems a bit brighter. There's something magic in French children." And I still mean it. It's almost impossible to explain this to French people because it relates so closely to my position as an outsider, but I cannot get enough of French children. Their high pitched lisping French never ceases to mesmerize and astound me. Yes, I know it's their native language, but I always find it astonishing when a little blond girl who hasn't even broken a meter in height opens her mouth to jabber away, while I still blunder my way through simple declarative sentences. It's comforting though; if they can do it, I can do it, right? And anyway, I've managed to read all of Diderot's Contes, what five-year-old can say that?!

And, hey, being an American in Nantes can sometimes have its perks. I will always resent cashiers who address me in English even when it's clear that I know how to speak French, but when the kebab guy gives me attitude, all I have to do is look across the street. What do I see? McDo. The Golden Arches are a beacon of light, the apex of the American conquest of Gallic lands. Hyperbole aside, there's nothing like a good hamburger (or as we say, 'amburger) every now and again to lift the spirits of a weary soul, and there's one place I can always go where I won't mind being addressed in English. No, it's not McDo. It's Burger House, this tiny burger joint on one of the side streets behind the big cathedral here.

I feel perfectly comfortable calling it a "burger joint" because the owner is an American expatriate who doesn't speak a lick of French. He fell in love with this Frenchwoman and I guess the rest is history. She works the counter to take care of all of his French guests while he mans the grill. The friendly yellow walls sport framed photos of beaches and American cars. The music is a constant stream of classic rock and the menu defiantly proclaims dishes like "Le VRAI Cheeseburger" (the REAL cheeseburger). Picking up on our accents right away, the owner addressed my friends and me while flipping burgers, "Where are you all from?" "All over!" we replied. New York, Ohio, Colorado, Kentucky, Maine. He was impressed and we all felt at home.

Angèle had come with us and I think she was the only one who felt a little out of her element. She doesn't eat burgers that often, and I'm not sure she'd ever had an honest to goodness American burger like the ones at Burger House, and it was funny to see her approach it with curiosity while we dug in with zest. I'm glad I've had her at my side through all this. I was thrilled to bring her to Burger House because, in some ways, I felt like I was bringing her home, like I could welcome her the way she had welcomed me.

She's a peculiar girl, Angèle, and I mean that in every sense. Granted, I'm by no means equipped to generalize about French girls, but it seems to me that Angèle is kind of a special case. First of all, she's a ham. Nothing seems to embarrass her and she will go out of her way to make her friends laugh. She likes to read trippy American poetry from the 1970s by authors that I've never heard of. She seeks out (and has a penchant for finding) the quirkiest corners of Nantes: Trentemoult, "La Maison" (a bar set up like an art deco house), Moustache Poétique (a comedic slam poetry show performed by a trio of mustachioed Parisians).

In fact, Moustache Poétique deserves its own paragraph. Apparently the theatre, TNT, hosts this group annually and they always offer a reduced admission fee to girls who are brave enough to draw on mustaches. Naturally, Angèle was prepared with stage makeup. She met me at the tram and brought me back to her little apartment (where she lives with her brother). After giving me the grand tour and mixing me a drink of diluted mint syrup, she sat me down, whipped out her brushes and said, "Ne souris pas" (don't smile). Of course I cracked up, but after a few minutes, she had managed to paint on the perfect mustache. Then we traded places and I looked her in the eye and intoned, "Ne souris pas." She cracked up, but quickly composed herself, as time was of the essence. As it turned out, we were the only girls who had been brave enough to paint on mustaches. We sat dead center, so when the group came out they saw us and cracked up, too.

After the show, we thanked the group, bought buttons from them, and convinced them to take a photo with us. When we left, instead of rushing home to "shave" (raser) we headed over to Bouffay to meet some of my friends at a bar. We got plenty of stares, but also plenty of compliments -- "Elle va bien, ta moustache!" Prancing down the street, a pair of mustachioed girls, Angèle and I took Friday-night Nantes by storm; I sensed a change in my relationship with the city. "I own this town," I thought.

Soon, Angèle and I will take Normandy by storm. She's invited me out to her family home to tuer les cochons (see above) later in November. It's exactly what it sounds like. We're going to make blood sausage. I'm worried I might be traumatized, but I also know that I've been invited out to "la vraie campagne" (the real countryside), as Angèle says. She will show me yet another piece of French life I never would have found on my own...and that most American tourists probably never get to see! I can assure you an essay of the greatest magnitude will probably develop from this experience.

Following Angèle's example, I've started to discover some of Nantes' quirks on my own. It's a small world in this city and coincidences abound. The night after Moustache Poétique, I started the day by going to an film exhibition called "Popism" at Lieu Unique (the converted LU cookie factory) and rounded out my night at the same place, meeting Angèle at the bar after a concert. While goofing off and generally embarrassing ourselves on the dance floor, we ran into two of the three mustachioed poets and spent a few minutes trying out some outrageous dance moves with them.

And that's just one example. Day to day, I see a lot of the same people. I like that. I'm beginning to understand the rhythm of this town and to march in time. There's this boy who always rides my bus. He can't be more than 16, but he is the absolute portrait of French teen angst. Long black hair, long black coat, horizontal striped shirts. I just want to buy him a big wheel of cheese and a pack of Gauloises to see if maybe he'll smile. I realize the preceding sentence maybe sounds a little creepy, but I promise it isn't. His extreme Frenchness intrigues me; that is all.

Yesterday, my university classes were canceled, so had a slow morning and then took myself out to the Musée Dobrée, which resides in a converted (small) palace. Afterward, I spent some time reading Madame Bovary in the park adjoined to the museum. This is my city now, I think, and I guess it's about time I saw another.

To conclude, two photos from our night with the Grandiloquent Moustache Poésie Club:



Angèle's friend Romain, Angèle, and me with said grandiloquent club.



Me and Angèle, the mustachioed filles

Ticket Stubs

Sunrise: 8:36am
Vocab: la foule - the crowd

This entry, which has a lot to do with art and music, comes in movements.

Stub 1: Opera Graslin

To begin at the beginning, I went to the opera on the sixth of October -- long, long ago. Another introductory remark: I am very grateful to IES for buying tickets and organizing outings to the opera. That being said, the tickets they reserved toyed with my heart in the worst way. I had signed up with a group of friends, but since I kept forgetting to add my name to the list, I ended up getting the last available ticket. I therefore knew we would not be sitting together, but upon arrival, we discovered that we were in completely separate boxes. Now, the idea of a box at the opera was a total thrill to me, so one can only imagine my chagrin when I entered my orchestra level box (!) only to discover half of the stage obscured by the balcony overhang. As it turned out, though, I was among the lucky few who could actually see all the action on stage. I missed a certain amount of the scenery, but I had a clear view of the bottom half of the stage, which was quite enough to see all of the (incredible) period costumes.

While some of my more cultivated friends left the opera house thoroughly nonplussed, I ended the night sleepy but entirely enraptured. We had gone to see Massenet's Manon based on Abbé Prévost's novel Manon Lescaut, which I actually read for a class last semester. And I thought taking a class on 17th and 18th century French would have no external validity! The opera had collapsed the complex plot into a relatively banal story of love lost and regained and ultimately lost again in the throes of consumptive death (do all operas end that way?!), but I got over that the moment the principal soprano opened her mouth. In spite of my poor view, I was totally taken in... and I snuck into the main orchestra seating area to get a better sense of the space, which was everything I had hope to find in our small opera house. While blue is, apparently, not the traditional opera house color and while the painting on the ceiling may not have been as impressive up close, the view from where I was standing transported me.

Feeling classier than ever, I reseated myself for the second act, whose penultimate mise en scene was terrifying and spectacular: a large tarnished mirror stood as the backdrop to a decadent scene of gambling and debauchery in which everyone dressed different shades of red, except for Manon and des Grieux (her lover), who wore black. It felt like hell, but in the best way. To commemorate the auspicious occasion, my friends and I all dressed as secretaries (accidentally) and took a photo on the steps at the end of the night.

Stub 2: Ryanair to Dublin (and AirCoach, too!)

As per the requests of my loving fans, I took a lot of pictures of myself in Dublin, so I'll preface this stub by saying: there are a lot of pictures, so I have made them small for spatial purposes (this is a long entry). Click to enlarge.

My Irish experience started before flight FR1987 even touched down in Dublin. Ryanair, the sketchiest airline in all of Europe, does not assign seats -- which was actually a good thing for me and my traveling companion Angela. Upon boarding the plane, we commenced our search for a pair of seats, and after a few refusals ("My husband is sitting there!") we finally espied pair of seats next to a small man most likely in his early to mid 40s.

"Personne n'est là?" I asked, addressing him in French. He shook his head no and we seated ourselves (nous nous sommes installées), only to discover shortly thereafter that our new companion was Irish, not French as we had originally suspected. After hearing us speak English, his initial attempt at contact constituted a mumbled joke about smoking on the plane. Coincidentally, just moments after his weak attempt at humor, an announcement came over the PA that the crew would be selling cigarettes that passengers could smoke on the plane and, indeed, to our astonishment, the flight attendants began walking up and down the aisles offering us "Smokeless Cigarettes." Our Irish companion was infinitely intrigued, and fueled by the ironic commentary taking place between me and Angela, he exclaimed, "A cigarette without smoke? Why, that's like a beer without alcohol, like a sandwich without..." and he couldn't finish his thought.

Moments later he ordered a beer. While waiting for his drink, our new friend started asking us more questions that we couldn't answer about the Smokeless Cigarettes, and finally stopped another flight attendant: "How do they work?" he asked. "They're just a burst of nicotine for nervous travelers," she replied. "But can you light them?" "I think so, I'm not sure." "How much are they?" "Would you like to buy a pack?" "No, no, I'm just curious." "They're 6 euro." "And how many to a pack?" "Ten, I think. Would you like to buy a pack." "No, no. This is just research. How much are they again?"

A few minutes later, the beer arrived. When given a choice between the two types available on the plane, our companion entered a state of absolute panic for about thirty seconds before saying, "Both! Both! I'll take them both." Our (apparently) tipsy friend finished both beers in the remaining hour of the flight. Toward the end, he invited us to see his band play on Monday, and we regretfully told him that we would be back in Nantes by then. He sighed, "I live in Nantes and I'm from Belfast. I don't know anyone in Dublin. I wish I had someone to invite." The last fifteen minutes of the flight passed in utter silence. After touching down, Angela and I got through immigration without a hitch and parted ways at the buses as she boarded her bus for Belfast and I mine to the heart of Dublin. I found I had to fight the urge to address people in French, which we later determined to be just a sign of my ascent to fluency -- I hope!

Dublin, it seems, is a city of nostalgia. Lynn (my oldest friend in the world) met me at the bus, and we passed the first night (Friday) catching up, and finding my other friends studying in Dublin: Erin (my first roommate at camp), Janna (one of my freshman year suitemates), and Thomas (an old friend from elementary school who moved to Dublin and is now a permanent student at Trinity). An ever growing and shrinking patchwork group, we formed quite the motley crew and tromped all over the entire city. Here is some of what they showed me:

Some very weird layout spacing is about to occur here. But, here are the first two stops from my whirlwind tour of Dublin on Saturday. To the left is the only picture I was allowed to take of the National Museum and to the right is Grafton Street, great for people watching, shopping, and generally pretending to be Irish. NB: The National Museum is chock full o' Irish art and history, including several petrified corpses or "Bog Men" -- relics of an ancient clan recently discovered in (surprise!) an Irish bog.

Above, please find evidence of the various theatrics that take place in Dublin. Also, Leprechauns exist!
















Dublin is the perfect place to be a literature nerd. To the left, I've taken a moment out of my day to read a little Proust at the James Joyce center and to the right I've cracked open my copy of Joyce's Dubliners (which I bought at a fantastic used book store) in front of the James Joyce statue.


























And what would a trip to Dublin be with out some culinary exploration? No? You're not with me on this one? Well, at any rate, to the left you will notice my extreme trepidation before diving into a plate of bangers and mash, but perhaps I'm just overwhelmed by the excitement in the pub mere hours before the start of the Ireland vs. Italy football match. To the right, note my pride after sampling my first "sip" of Guinness.
















Sunday morning, we took yet another turn around the city before my departure, stopping first at Dublin Castle (to the left) and then taking a load off at St. Stephen's Green, which wasn't far from the AirCoach stop. Throughout the weekend, I felt like I was walking on air, not cobblestones and pavement. I was relieved. In Dublin, everyone understood me: the language barrier was basically non-existent, and I passed my time with friends who know me so well that I never have to explain myself to them. It was hard to leave, but there were, nevertheless, things to look forward to in Nantes.

Stub 3: Phoenix à La Carrière

And now we're about back up to date. Phew! Last night, my friend Christiana and I went to see the band Phoenix perform at La Carrière this huge venue out in the suburbs (les banlieues). At this point, Phoenix is pretty well-known in the states, and even though they sing in English, they are, first and foremost, a French indie group. They were on their home turf last night and it was astonishing.

I'd already been to a few smaller concerts around Nantes, and I'd fallen victim to the growing fear that French people never dance at concerts. It was all the more terrifying when, at La Carrière the entire enormous crowd stood stock still throughout the entire opening set. It was Chairlift. While French indie has reached the states, some American indie still clearly has yet to capture French audiences. After Chairlift's lukewarm reception, imagine my surprise at the crowd's roar when Phoenix finally came on -- punctually, might I add. France has no time for rock star theatrics: Chairlift started 10 minutes early and Phoenix came on promptly at 9:30. Swept up in the tidal wave of people, I hardly had to do anything to feel like I was dancing. The tightly packed crowd nudged me into unison with its swaying and jumping.

I'd never had more people ask me if I was British.

Stub 4: Tickets de Repas

Two days a week, I eat lunch at the University Restaurant (Restau-U or RU, pronounced: roo). I've written a fair amount about my frustrations with the atmosphere: the crush of students all trying to squeeze in a meal during the 1 1/2 hours the place is open and the general distaste French students seem to have for anyone they don't know. Well, all that changed last week when I discovered one vital piece of information: not all of the students eating at the RU are French.

On Thursday, I started chatting with two girls in my history class, ERASMUS students from Hungary and Italy. Outgoing and friendly, Lilla and Georgia seemed thrilled to meet other international students, and speaking French with them came easy. It was also more necessary with them than with anyone else since French was our only common language. We walked out to the RU together and while we got separated in the lunch line, we implicitly promised to try to eat lunch together on Thursdays from now on.

On Friday, a group of us inadvertently surrounded a Chinese exchange student. He handled it well though, and seemed relieved to be among chatty Americans.

In closing, I don't disparage the French students: this is their home turf. They have nothing to seek out. Most French students at the University of Nantes came with with other friends of theirs from high school. It's different from the States, where people tend to go their separate ways for college. That said, it's a relief to find a welcoming international community, finally...and to discover that I am a part of it!


TICKET SOON TO BECOME A STUB: TGV to Paris for Toussaint!