Missy, Maman, et Marie-Do

I promised to write a bit about Missy and my mom's stay in Aix after we came down from Paris. Well, again we had rented an apartment, and it was perfectly situated. I don't think my mom and Missy really believed me when I told them how small Aix is, but they soon found out since the farthest we walked was ten minutes to the bus station.

Compared to Paris, Aix is a lightweight when it comes to attractions and museums. So mostly I was on restaurant duty, and we found some excellent restaurants. I'm glad Aix didn't disappoint my guests on the food front. I showed Missy and my mom around town a bit, the markets and the squares and the fountains. Also, my host mom, Marie-Do, invited them over for panisses and wine the first night we got in. Panisses are these little greasy biscuit things made from chick pea flour, and they're a specialty of Marseille. Well, it was an amusing meeting. I was in translation mode, and I was kind of anxious about Marie-Do's reaction to our American openness. I was in charge of somehow describing all three women's dating histories, opinions on men and celebrities, and theories about my own lovelife. But it was a fun little get together.

The apartment in Aix was perfect, very charming and decorated in the Provencal style. Couldn't have asked for a better trip, really. I did get bitten by bedbugs in the foldout couch, I think, but they're almost gone now.

Okay, next post about Rome. Ciao,
Maggie B.

"Une cousine, grosse mais gentille..."

It is officially spring in Aix. It's sunny and warm and the Aixois who were reluctant to come out in the harsh, bitter cold of February (=40 degrees), fill the streets, cafés, and parks. And so do tourists, which is both amusing and painful to see. I'm at least an extended-stay tourist, which I tell myself is more respectable. It's interesting to see American tourists at their most stereotypical--comfy clothes, sneakers, et cetera--and, after being here for two months, understand why the French sometimes just don't get us crazy Americans.

I've already enjoyed complaining about tourists like a true Aixoise. Now, I've never needed an excuse to be bitter about minor inconveniences in everyday life. But my hostmom is the champion. Marie-Do has done some top-notch complaining, guilt-tripping, and nagging that would be hard, even for me, to replicate. Marie-Do is a good host mom. She's very interested in my experience here, she doesn't make foods I don't like, and she does my laundry. So it's important to know, I wouldn't write about her if I didn't find humor in her antics and if I didn't think my observations could give a little insight into the French mentality.

Marie-Do can talk forever about her health. The first time I met her she told me her glands were swollen. Recently it's her right eye (it's 'pulling,' she says, which I don't quite understand). She's a hypochondriac, as my program director says many French people are. The French are also more pessimistic than Americans. I didn't really think of Americans as being optimistic, but Marie-Do has made an optimist out of me. When I came back from Nice and Monaco and was describing the Bataille des Fleurs, she said "Oh! It's too bad you didn't go to Venice for their carnival." Same thing with Spain "Oh! It's too bad you didn't stay until Sunday." The number of times I've heard Oh! C'est dommage que....

I've gotten used to having the same conversations over and over with Marie-Do, because it's a courtesy, from what I've learned, to avoid silence or gaps in conversation. I think that goes for things like car rides, watching the news, and other times when Americans wouldn't necessarily be uneasy with an extended silence. Marie-Do is constantly asking--a more positive characterization than 'nagging' that I use for my own sanity--about my class schedule, my social life, what I'm doing this weekend, even though I told her yesterday, or often earlier that day.

When I say Marie-Do guilt-trips, I know it sounds bad. But maybe it's considered more polite to be passive-aggressive here. Okay, that doesn't sound any better. It's just something I've noticed, with Marie-Do and, to an extent, my host mom in Nantes, Roselyne. Maybe it's a French mom thing. Anyway, our upstairs neighbor, when he's home, constantly wears his shoes, which we can hear clicking on the floor. Marie-Do always says she's going to bring it up with him but that he's really very nice and she'll just 'mention it' or 'slip it in' by kindly suggesting that he wear slippers around the house. I won't recount the exact circumstances that led her to use this sneaky tactic to me, but it was artfully done, I must say. And, again, it wasn't as affronting as it sounds; I just laughed it off after.

I'll leave you with one amusing Marie-Do moment that happened just last night. Her ex-boyfriend took her out to dinner, but he came up to the apartment first to sit and talk a bit. This was the first I'd heard of him. This is not the ex-husband and father of her son, this guy was later. All I know is he is "very, very rich". So Marie-Do is babbling at him about everything going on in her life, her health problems, her efforts at home decorating, and her recent trip to Corsica. She's showing pictures of her extended family in Corsica, I couldn't see them but I was in the room. She gets to one of her and someone else and says "C'est ma cousine, grosse mais gentille." Translation: That's my cousin, fat but nice. I couldn't help but laughing, and neither could the very, very rich man.

That's it for now. I have an idea, though. If anyone is curious about some part of French culture or language I haven't written about, leave a comment. I'm no expert, but being in France means I can find an expert (okay, so maybe just Marie-Do) on whatever you might be interested in. So, comment!
A plus,
Maggie B.

Zola & Cézanne

After the whirlwind of activity last weekend in Nice and Monaco, I decided to take it easy this weekend. It's not a very hard thing to convince myself to do, especially when I know I'll be going to Spain in just a few days for my first vacation this term! I will be in Madrid from Saturday to Monday, at which point I'm off to Sevilla from Monday to Wednesday night. I'm doing this largely on my own, though I'll see my friend Alicia in Sevilla and I'm hoping to spend Saturday in Madrid with two girls from my program whose plans overlap with mine. I'm a bit apprehensive, but if everything goes off without a hitch--read: I come back with all my possessions and documents, I fudge my way through Spanish enough to not get in trouble, and I maybe get a little sun in the face--I will be happy.

As for this weekend, it was filled with two people, who were natives of Aix!: Emile Zola and Paul Cézanne. They grew up here and were best friends. Until Zola wrote a book called L'oeuvre that depicted a painter in an unfavorable light. Cézanne was not pleased.

I've been working on reading Zola's Germinal in the original French almost since I got to Aix, and I finally finished today! It was a challenge. Zola, like most of the grands écrivains in French, uses the passé simple a lot (simple past), a literary tense that replaces the past tense used in spoken and most modern written French. And then there is the usual difficulty with elevated vocabulary. The biggest temptation was to look up every word I didn't know in a dictionary, but I knew it would be better to just read for the plot and the characters. I'm so glad I got through it. And I hope to read it again so I can understand more of the nuances next time.

Germinal is about mining in France in the 19th century when political awareness and activism was rising in the working class. The miners go on strike under the leadership of a young miner who has educated himself on new socialist ideas, but it's only the very beginning of organized labor, and the miners are ill-prepared for a two and a half month strike. Zola describes in detail the horrible conditions in the mines and the corons, the slums that the Company has set up for the mining families. And once the strike is under way, the families are constantly battling starvation waiting for the bourgeois management to accept the workers' demands. I won't ruin the end for you, but there are two movies of it and the translation in English. I've heard good things about both of the movies; one is from the 60s and the other is from the 80s or 90s, I think.

I don't think there is a book quite like this about the US, probably because America didn't exactly have bourgeois and wasn't as influenced by socialist ideas. At least, that's what most would like to think, since socialism=communism (duh, right?), the most terrifying of all political systems ever. But also, la grève, the strike, is a central part of political expression and activism in France. It is a rite of passage. Unions are incredibly strong here. When several of them get together on one issue, they can literally stop daily life even for weeks, by setting up boycotts or blocking roads with tractor-trailors.

All the French know the songs, slogans, and chants of la grève, even if they pretend to make fun of themselves for this common obsession of the strike. It doesn't seem to matter what the object of the grève is, there will be a song to fit it and a crowd who will sing it. It's an entirely different viewpoint from the US, where strikes are seen as last resorts and often burdens on the rest of the community. My junior year of high school my teachers went on strike for a month, and there were many people who criticized the teachers for abandoning their jobs as educators. Even if certain people among the French don't agree with the reasons behind a strike, I have never heard anyone question an individual's morals or character for participating in one. It would be just as surprising as someone complaining about a smoker in a restaurant!

Now, as for Cézanne, I did something this weekend I've been wanting to do since I got here: I hiked Mont Saint Victoire. This is the mountain that Cézanne painted, I think, 28 times. Or something like that. I had seen several of these paintings at the Met in NYC and the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, and now I kind of want to go back to see what I think, having seen it in person.

I went with three girls from my program, Allison, Sherie, and Jill. Four was a perfect number, very manageable. We took the short bus ride to the base of the mountain and started on a trail that was marked 'moyen', or mid-level in difficulty. It was a good day for hiking, not too warm, kind of brisk, and sunny most of the time. Eventually we came to a fork in the trail and we decided to take the more difficult path that would lead more directly to our target, the Croix de Provence, at the top of the mountain. Well, it certainly was difficult. I found myself thanking my friend Claudia for taking me once to the rock-climbing wall at Pitt. We were probably not wearing the right footwear for this kind of trail, but we made it, even after one rather dangerous detour from the path in search of pesky trailmarkers. And we got a huge payoff for our hard work of almost 4 hours climbing, not hiking (Allison was right to insist on the distinction in her blog, which again I'm referencing), to the Cross of Provence. The cross itself wasn't incredibly unique, but the views were amazing. Three-hundred-sixty degrees of rolling hills and mountains, a river, little towns peaking out from valleys. It was impressive, to say the least.

I still can't get over how different the geography (or topography? I'm losing my sense of the precision of certain words in English) is here, and the natural life. The mountain seemed to jut out of the land, not at all like the mountains I've seen before. The huge cliffs are streaked with this glowing orange that is the same color as the bright clay soil at the foot of the mountain. And the slopes (or dropoffs, really) are covered with beautiful conifers that are all over Cézanne's paintings, perfectly geometric bark and just the right amount of branches in the top third of the trunk. The brush is interesting too. Even though most leaves haven't come out yet, there's wild holly and these twiggy plants with muted purple-red branches that make the mountainside look like a patchwork of purples and greens and browns.

Needless to say, it was a great day. And tiring, after about 6 hours of hiking. This mountain is not for the faint-hearted or the out of shape. I count myself lucky to have only been slightly sore the next morning.

Pictures are to come!
A plus,
Maggie B.

Les cours commencent

Bonjour!
It's been a couple days and a lot has happened. Let's see...well, last Friday was the Abroadco welcome dinner. It was very nice. The thirteen girls went out with our program director and a student from last semester, Hugo. We had roasted red peppers, kind of a pork curry with rice and pineapple, and this great gooey chocolate dessert. Afterward, almost all of us went around the corner to the Irish pub, O'Shannon's. I got to show off my previous French bar knowledge since I knew what a 'monaco' was (beer, seltzer/orange juice, grenadine). Then we went over to a place called Le P'tit Bistro, where most drinks are only 2€ and there's outdoor seating. I didn't get anything, but it was fun.

Saturday was a free day, but it was rainy and gross. I did some exploring with a girl Sam from my program. Then Sunday, all of us went to Marseille, where Pamela actually lives. She took us to Notre Dame de la Garde, this gorgeous cathedral up on a hill looking out over the rest of the city. We also walked around a cute neighborhood by the Vieux Port and saw an old building that used to be a homeless shelter (I would've wanted to be a homeless marseillaise in the 19th century). Oh! And then I touched the Mediterranean for the first time. It was really cold, but there was an older French man swimming anyway!

This week is the first week of classes. And it's even more tiring than it will be normally, because in addition to my required 10 hour language class and 2 hour phonetics class, I have to sit in on all the elective courses for my level to see what I will take. So I think I've narrowed it down to these four:

-Regards sur les médias--basically a conversation class, but with emphasis on current events in France and Europe.
-Traduction--translation; it'll be difficult but useful, since it's kind of a review for grammar and writing.
-Contes populaires--the professor for this is certifiable, but interesting. I don't even know what we're going to read, but last semester they did the short stories of Maupassant, so maybe something of that genre.
-La Vème République--the only polisci-related course offered, about the current French government. We'll see, I have yet to actually go since it's tomorrow (at EIGHT AM!)

I guess that's it for now. I'll put up a link for the facebook album of Marseille (you don't have to belong to see it, no worries).
Bisous!
Maggie B.

Un peu d'histoire

Salut tout le monde,
It's rainy and cold today, so I took the time between my Abroadco walking tour and getting my student bus pass to relate what I've learned about Aix so far. Also, I wanted to change my socks.

This morning all the Abroadco kids met Pamela, our director, at the Cathédrale Saint Sauveur (loosely translated, the Cathedral of Our Holy Savior). She's an art history person, which she apologized for since she loves to talk about it, but I think it's great. I like hearing that perspective when sight-seeing. Saint Sauveur is considered ugly by many Aixois because it mixes several styles of architecture spanning many centuries. But I think it's interesting.

The oldest part is from the Roman era, the 11th or 12th century. Right outside the main entrance there are stones from the old Roman road that ran north to south past the cathedral (they let cars park there!). We were lucky and got to see the cloisters, too; they're often closed to the public because of vandalism. Then there is the part that was built during the Gothic period, so all of a sudden the rounded arches and columns from the older part become vaulted ceilings and kind of intricate decoration. There's this kind of garish (I think it is anyway) green, gold-trimmed organ on one side, and on the opposite wall there's a fake one that looks just like it, except it's just a façade. Oh, what we do for symmetry.

After some time in the Cathédrale we looked at a few "hotels", which aren't really hotels but old, humongous town house type things that wealthy families used to live in. The Institut where I will take classes is the Hotel Maynier Oppède. We also tried calissons, the specialty of Aix. Calissons are made with almond paste and have a layer of some kind of icing on top. I'm not a huge fan because they remind me of marzipan and I once ate too much marzipan and felt sick for the rest of the day.

Our next stop was the Palais de Justice. I can actually see the Palais de Justice from the kitchen window in Mme Orsoni's apartment. Inside was a statue of Mirabeau, for whom the Cours Mirabeau is named. Apparently he was quite the character. He wasn't a looker, he had smallpox or something when he was young, but he was persuasive or charismatic enough to be Aix's representative for something in Paris. He was pursuing the prettiest woman in Aix and he played a nasty trick on her. He left his carriage outside her house one night and kept it there until morning, when the town woke up and started gossiping about what was going on. So the girl's father forced her to marry Mirabeau to avoid any scandal. Mirabeau, whose family had run out of money, proceeded to spend all of the girl's money and she filed for divorce. He refused a lawyer for the hearing and argued on his own behalf. It is said there wasn't a dry eye in the courtroom after he presented his defense.

I still don't really know why the Cours Mirabeau was named for him, even though he was Aix's representative. Maybe it's just because he was a 'rascal' and the French kind of liked him. I wouldn't be surprised.

That's about it for now. Tonight is our welcome dinner with Pamela, I'm sure I'll be writing about the wonderful food.
A bientôt!
Maggie B.

French Fun Fact: I pulled this from my guidebook and haven't found a dictionary with this word in it yet to verify, but apparently part of the reason French people may laugh if they hear an American say "Oh my God" is because godde means vibrator in French. I must find a French person I will never have to see again to verify this...stay tuned.

A Aix enfin!

Bonjour!
I am finally in Aix-en-Provence. After 11 hours in transit I made it to Marseille where two Abroadco students from the past semester greeted three of us from the Munich flight. They took us on the bus to Aix, where we briefly met our program director, Pamela, before she sent us off to our homestays and apartments.

Before I go any further, I must discuss my travel. First, I booked with Lufthansa this time since British Airways lost my luggage and I didn't want to deal with Terminal 4, Terminal 5 nonsense in Heathrow. The Munich airport terminal was alien to me. Maybe if I hadn't taken French first I could do it, but I do NOT understand German at all. But I was so hungry when I got to Aix because once I finally found a place to buy food in the Munich airport, the only food I wouldn't have to ask for over the counter was cut up pineapple. I know I could've tried English, but it's the first time I've ever been in a country where I wasn't at least operational in the native language and it wouldn't have felt right.

While I don't understand a word of German and never endeavor to try, Lufthansa beats British Airways hands down. Better food, absolutely doting flight attendants, maybe even better selection for in-flight movies. Also, there were no delays, even though it had been snowing for hours when we left Munich.

So my program director sent me to meet my host mom with the two students who greeted us at the airport. Madame Marie-Dominique Orsoni lives in (or perhaps right on the fringe of) the old city. The streets are incredibly narrow and are filled with pedestrians, except when the occasional car comes along. I played around with paint and Google Maps to try to give an idea of how Aix is laid out. The green lines are the old city, the outer orange ring marks what I think is considered the "centreville", and the purple line is the famous Cours Mirabeau. The biggest fountain "La Rotonde" is at the western end (the circle to the left labeled D17). Pictures of these places are to follow eventually.

Last night I got settled in in my room. Madame Orsoni lives in her apartment with her cat Miya (I don't know if that's how it's spelled). She has one son who has a 4 year-old daughter Anna. Marie-Do is very talkative and likes watching TV, even reality shows like the French version of Survivor (same title, just say it Frenchily). She seems very laidback and gets along well with my program director, whom she knows from hosting other Abroadco students.

Today I took my placement test at the Institut (des Etudes Françaises pour les Etudiants Etrangers...l'IEFEE). There are probably at least 5 private study abroad companies who have brought students to this one school. To explain the exam instructions there were translators for English, Chinese, and Japanese. And I know there were at least a few Germans and a group of very chic, overly tanned Italian girls. So even though I won't be taking classes with French students, being with people who speak a different native language should prevent me from speaking too much English. That's the plan anyway.

The test was fine. The written part took probably an hour and a half and then the oral exam was just 5 minutes with a professor. After I did both of those I kind of wandered around Aix on my own, got lost a couple times, bought some pasta for lunch. It's not too warm but the sun is really nice. I can't wait to see the Cours Mirabeau when the trees get leafy.

That's it for now. Tomorrow I have a free day and will be figuring out my cell phone situation. Then Friday I find out which level I placed into for classes, and all the Abroadco students are going out to dinner on our director's bill. Saturday is free again, and Sunday I'm going to Marseille with the Abroadco kids again.
A bientôt!
Maggie B.

French Fun Fact: In French, a woman "tombe enceinte" or "falls pregnant".