I have been very lazy about updating this blog lately. It is my last weekend in Angers and it is raining so this is as good a time as any to write about the past month.
The weekend after my parents visited Angers I thought I might try to meet them in the south, but I had too much homework to do so I stayed in Angers. I was supposed to film members of our group at the market on that Saturday morning, but it rained and no one went.
The week after that was our Ascension holiday. Classes were cancelled for that Thursday and I left Angers on Tuesday morning with Marco. We went to Luxembourg to stay with his parents. He had been telling me all semester about how much I would like Luxembourg and I was not disappointed. We arrived in the late afternoon and after dinner we joined several of his friends and went to Maastricht, Holland. I’ll let you, reader, assume what it was we went to Holland for. The next day we slept late and Marlisa joined us in Luxembourg. Marco showed us around Luxembourg City for a while and then his friends called and invited us to go camping. We drove to the north, Luxembourg is not a very big country and to get the northern part of it only took about an hour. There are a lot of Portuguese people in Luxembourg and one of their traditions is to camp in the hills in the north on Ascension. They make some kind of pilgrimage there. Marco is Italian, but he has a lot of Portuguese friends. None of them were really there for the purpose of making a pilgrimage though. Camping with them was very similar to camping in Texas in that they grilled a lot of meat ever couple hours. We probably ate four meals of just sausage and bread in the 14 hours we were at the campsite. We didn’t leave the camp site until about 7 pm the next day and I pretty much immediately went to sleep once we got back to Marco’s house because I did not sleep very comfortably in the tent. The next day we woke up and got a train to Brussels. Everything was closed because of the holiday but we walked around for a while and saw the Grand Place. Brussels is a really pretty city and I need to go back for longer one day.
Last weekend I met Melissa and her friend Pete in Paris. We stayed in Montmartre and I got to play tour guide because neither of them had been to Paris before. Since we were not there for very long we did a lot of site seeing in a very short amount of time. Melissa came to Angers two days after I got back and we got to spend more time together. It was fun and I am really glad I got to hang out with Melissa. We spent a lot of our time talking about Austin, our friends and restaurants that we miss. We decided that in the fall we are going to have a Prom party at our house, and it is going to be the best party ever.
St. Ed’s took our group out for a big going away dinner at a really nice restaurant in the old city. Benoit made a toast in French and it was a good end to our time here, although most of us are still in town until next weekend.
On 5 June Emily and I leave Angers for Berlin, Prague, Florence and Rome. On the 18th we will take an overnight train to Angers, via Milan and Paris. We will spend 2 hours in Angers on the 19th just to pick up our bags and then return to Paris where we fly home from the next day. I am conflicted about returning home but once again I am too lazy to write about here. I know it will be good to get home and that I will surely miss France.
I've never been as excited about seeing my parents as I was last weekend. After film class on Thursday I met them at their hotel. I called my dad after class and told him I was on my way but still on the other side of town. He asked if I could catch the bus or take a Taxi. I laughed because he didn't realize how small this city is. We had a good dinner, during which I discovered the best part about their visit.
Dad: "blah, blah... when we were getting gas..."
Me: "Wait, gas? did you rent a car?"
Dad: "Yeah we decided it made more sense..."
Me: "LET ME DRIVE IT"
I had been dreaming about two things for a while: mexican food and driving. I still haven't had very great mexican food, but I did get to spend the weekend speeding around the Loire valley in a diesel Mercedes. I am not excited about going back to Austin and driving everywhere, but speeding through the French Paysage, through the canola fields, passed orchards and ancient Chateaux, was fantastic.
We spent the weekend in Chinon, a small city on the Vienne river known for its great wine. For two days we woke up late, ate breakfast in the hotel and then lazily toured several chateaux and jardins and then drank wine and relaxed. I especially enjoyed the jardins of the Chateau Villandry (seen above). That picture is only a little bit of the garden, which is huge. The only gardens I have seen that were better were at Versailles.
I hadn't really expected to have so much fun with my parents. Maybe I was just really stoked about driving, but that weekend was one of the nicest times I've had with them in years.
Most Sundays in France, whether I’d read or worked or procrastinated all day, I’d go out after dinner looking for a café. Any place where I could sit outside and enjoy a beer in some where that wasn’t my little room where I spent all day would have done fine. I’d know it was closed every Sunday but I’d still walk past Café L’Atelier because it was close to the apartment and the most familiar. Then I'd walk in to the city center to see if there was anywhere to sit at the Hotel Bar du Centre. When I first arrived in Angers no one ever went to this café. But when it got warm and they’d put chairs and tables outside it became the most crowded of all the cafés in town. It seemed like it filled the instant it opened in the morning and didn’t empty until 2 a.m. the following morning.
Once I’d realize that Hotel Bar du Centre was too crowded and that even if I could find a table it was too crowded for a boy to sit at alone I’d settle for whatever smaller café was open. I’d pay more for pint of good beer than I would have paid for dinner had I eaten anything but an omelet or just bread and olive oil. Sitting outside I’d open the book that I brought to make it look like I was there for any other reason than that I was simply lonely and wanted to be around people even though I knew no one would talk to me.
When you’re lonely in France, or any place that isn't home, you spend all the daylight hours alone cleaning, reading or killing time in whatever way you can. Then at night you decide to go out because you think maybe you’ll meet people even though you’ve been in town for three months and have tried the same way and haven’t met anyone. You sit yourself down at a little café or in a bar and watch girls who should be in love with you talk with guys who should be your friends or maybe people you don’t want to know just talking the language you don’t understand. And you order a beer because it will give you the most time in the café before you feel obligated to leave or order something else. A café, even a café grand, is cheaper than a pint but will only last you five minutes before it is cold and impalpable. So you get a pint of beer and sit.
Then you sink into a chair, surrounded by strangers, and pretend like you’re okay with being there alone for thirty minutes. And then you begin to long for something familiar like your mother’s cooking or a slow dance with an old sweetheart.
Most Sundays there would be a soccer match on T.V. and patrons yelling simultaneously cheers or curses depending on how the team they favored was fairing. I’d sit outside and at breaks in the game the sidewalk would fill with people smoking and then empty again as they went back inside to watch the remainder.
Tons of stuff happened over the past two weeks. So here is a summary:
Paris: Arrived 9 April. Train workers were on strike so we took a bus. St. Edwards got us a nice hotel for the first two nights and then I stayed in a hotel with some friends for three more nights. Saw everything: Notre Dame, Shakespeare & Co., Pere Lachaise Cemetery, Sacre Coure, Eiffel tower, got in to the Louvre and Musee D’Orsay for free just by showing my student visa. Rode the metro like 30 times. Saw Gertrude Stein’s old house, cafes were Hemingway wrote, a café were Malcolm Cowley punched the owner. Spent tons of money but it was great. I love Paris.
Dublin: Met Rachel at the airport, found our hotel near the city center, toured the Guinness factory and got free pints in the rooftop bar. Our whole trip basically revolved around Guinness and James Joyce. I got to see 7 Eccles Street and the James Joyce museum. Spent a lot of time laying on St. Stephen’s Green, this was nice after wearing myself out in Paris.
All of that volcano mess ruined my plans after this. Our flight to London was canceled so we caught a ferry to Holyhead, Wales. We slept on the floor of the train station. It was terrible. We caught a train to London.
My time in London was cut in half because of how long it took me to get there. I saw Piccadilly Circus for a few seconds.
After I abruptly left London with out saying goodbye to anyone I caught the Eurostar to Lille. I decided I didn’t want to go back to Angers just then. I tried to get a train to Brussels but they were all full so I just spent the night in Lille at a shitty hotel and went back to Angers the next(yesterday) morning. Because of another train strike I had to go to Tours—the land of fucked up train plans—and spend an hour there.
It is nice to be back in Angers. Today I rode my bike out into the suburbs. There is an old Slate quarry in Trelaze that is pretty cool. I ate lunch on the bank of the Loire and then got lost on my home and came back into Angers from the North even though I left from the South. I’m going to be in such god shape.
Also I gave myself a hair cut and removed my beard:
Here is a travel essay that I wrote for creative writing class with pictures:
I’d been in France for almost two months, but I was still confused by the idea of going west to get to the Atlantic coast. We boarded the bus that would take us from Angers to Normandy early in the morning, and like most other days, to appease my almost insatiable paranoia, I had to climb back up three flights of stairs to make sure that I had in fact locked the door to my apartment. I think that was the form my homesickness was being manifested into, the need to know my only possessions and I were secure in a place that still felt somewhat unfamiliar.
My apartment in Angers reminded me of a hotel room. The empty, white walls; the space-saving furniture; the micro-kitchenette, despite having been my residence for almost two months, it all seemed cold, sterile and foreign. For lack of room in my suitcase or money to spend I had neither brought decorations from home or purchased anything in Angers that would make my room seem like anything less than a temporary habitat for my stay in Europe. The only ‘decoration’ in the room was a single 4x5 photograph of my brother and I dressed as British soldiers that was taken the summer before in a costume shop in Austin. I didn’t even own a single picture frame. I was excited about spending a night away from this room that, save the want of iron bars and abundance of metal silverware, had the aesthetic quality of a minimum security prison cell.
Angers is different from Austin, not in a bad way—its just different. The people are different. Just like in Austin, the young people flock to the bars and cafés at night, drink, flirt and make noise on their ways home. But there is something profoundly different that I had a lot of trouble placing. Teenagers in Angers don’t use their 24-hour laundromats as free music venues. No one is out chugging beer while riding bikes in groups of 50. People in Angers live, work and socialize in the same basic way, but maybe it was the age of the city or lack of live music in every bar that made everything feel routine and complacent to me. Part of me wanted to be like the young French men who sit in cafés in evenings, drinking espresso surrounded by friends. In Austin every coffee shop is full of people typing on laptops with their headphones on and it isn’t the most inviting environment. I wanted to feel like a part of French culture, but I always wound up sitting alone outside of cafés, unapproached and afraid of approaching. I like Angers, and I like Austin, and I was ready to get out of Angers for a while.
Mont Saint Michel is one place that, at least to me, seems like it should not be a community. Nature, God or whichever force made the tiny mountain, placed it in the middle of what during low tide is a lovely, barren peninsula with a grey beach and low hanging clouds, all of which give the place a dream-like quality. During high tide, however, Mont Saint Michel stands in what the French call La Manche— the English Channel. This inhospitable, yet strangely attracting place was obviously idyllic for the Benedictine monks, not minding the solitary and isolated life, to establish a monastery in the 11th century. I would think the monks would still be there had it not been for the French revolution.
The modern village of Mont Saint Michel appears to be mostly based around capitalizing on the vast amount of tourists who pass through every year. The base of the mountain is filled with souvenir shops, restaurants and pay toilets. Miniature Eiffel towers and novelty knives with pictures of French kings are just a prevalent as prayer cards and depictions of saints. Above the commercial street is the neighborhood, complete with its own adjacent graveyard—high enough to keep the tide from uncovering caskets.
After 300 or so steps one finally makes it to the abbey at Mont Saint Michel. With it’s combination of Romanesque and gothic architecture you can imagine the abbey on a stormy night as the setting of a Victorian vampire story. The view of the channel from the terrace in the rear of the abbey awed me. In the distance you could see the remains of the island from which masons obtained all of the stone used in the construction of the abbey. If you allow your eye to follow the lines in the brick all the way up the side of the abbey your eyes will find the tall spire, atop which sits a statue of Saint Michel the archangel. Saint Michel hangs in the air, the highest point on the island, as if he is singlehandedly supporting the entire mountain, preventing it from washing away in the high tides.
My group took a tour. Our guide was a Frenchman who had lived in Liverpool for a lot his life and had a bit of British accent. He liked The Kinks more than The Beatles. It had never occurred to me before but I decided that what British rock and roll band someone prefers over The Beatles might actually be a very important character trait. I tried to figure out what my liking The Zombies more than The Beatles said about me.
Our guide seemed to have worked at the abbey for a long time and he liked to joke about the fact that he could very well be making up everything he told us. Very little of the written histories of the abbey exist anymore. During the French revolution the abbey was converted into a prison and the contents of the library were sent to Saint-Malo, where they would later be destroyed in WWII.
Part of me wished I could have the abbey to myself for a few hours. I wanted to ask all the other tourists to leave me one room in which to spend the afternoon in silence and solitude like the monks who had built the place. I wanted to find the old the Mont Saint Michel and understand the ascetic, spartan lifestyle that the monks had led. But the abbey, after all these years, remains a major destination for travelers, both pilgrims and tourist.
Saint-Malo pretends to be an old city, but the first Saint-Malo was destroyed in the Second World War. The new Saint-Malo, modeled after the original Saint-Malo, is a beautiful beach city surrounded on all sides by a large wall. You can circle the entirety of it in a 30-minute walk atop the wall, with the endlessly blue Atlantic on you right and the marvelous, bustling city on your left. Though a large tourist destination, inner Saint-Malo is like a coastal Angers or any other small French city. The strange twisting streets are filled with cafés, patisseries, restaurants, libraries and art galleries. After walking the wall I found an antique shop that I wanted to investigate, but like all French businesses the employees were out on a two-hour lunch break.
Our hotel was outside the wall, in a newer part of town a short walk from the city gate but on the beach. Even as evening set in to Saint-Malo I could see children, unaffected but the cool ocean wind, playing in the sand and locals walking their dogs. This part of Saint-Malo some what reminded me of an American East coast city like Charleston, South Carolina or Savannah, Georgia. The city had a kind of lazy, coastal feel to it—given we were only there over a weekend.
Walking down the beach in the morning, with the wind blowing my hair, I searched for the quick sand I had been told about. I had only seen quick sand in movies and wanted to experience the potentially deadly absorption into the Earth. After almost thirty minutes I found a spot in the sand that started to suck my feet in after I stood on it for a few seconds. Resisting is supposed to cause it to suck you in faster, I’ve heard, so I wiggled my feet and I think if I had tried hard enough I could have gotten in further than just a few inches of my shoes. It certainly was not ‘quick’ by any means, but I had found quick sand. With my now muddy shoes I boarded the bus to return to Angers.
As the bus drove back into the city on Sunday evening Angers was still alive. The city buses still circled the town on the their usual routes, the few shops and patisseries that operated on Sundays were open, and the whole city seemed to have gone on about its life all weekend unaware of the missing busload of American students with whom I had travelled. John Berger once wrote: “Home is the return to where distance did not yet count.” I knew that Austin, or at least my friends and family in Austin, knew of my distance, noticed my absence from the city, but it didn’t seem Angers would. Could you call you call a place home when 95% of the people you know there also leave with you? Back in my apartment, beginning my writing, I wondered if I could really call this place home if it didn’t notice my absence when I left and if I would have to miss Angers the same way I missed Austin.
Last night my greatest French aspiration came true... kind of.
I was sitting at my desk applying jam to my toast when I heard a knock on my door. Before I could get up to check the peep hole and open the door for whoever knocked, the mysterious knocker opened the door.
For, at most, an entire second my eyes were locked with those of a beautiful, skinny, long-haired French girl. I thought to myself, "Sacree Merde! I've been waiting for a pretty French girl to just burst into my room out of nowhere for the past two months, and it's finally happened!"
Before I had finished this thought the French girl, realizing she was in the wrong place, shut the door quickly saying, "Pardon! Excusez-moi! Desole..." And then she was gone.
This weekend our group went to the east coast, specifically the departments Normandy and Brittany. The bus was in front of the residence at 7:45 on Saturday morning, but big surprise, it took everyone an extra 30 minutes to get on the bus.
Our first stop was Mont Saint-Michel, which from a distance looks uncannily like Minus Tirith, the capitol city of Gondar in Lord of The Rings. Mont Saint-Michel is actually an island when the tide is high, but other wise it is just a big rock in the middle of a plain. It sits in the middle of the bay over looking the English Channel. The abbey on top was once a monastery, but like hundreds of other monasteries, it was shut down after the French Revolution. Mont Saint-Michel was converted into a prison. There is a big wheel attached to a pulley system in which prisoners worked like hamsters to pull tons of brick up the steep abbey wall.
We had to climb about 300 steps to get to the abbey. I continued my work as cinematographer for our film project and filmed everyone running out of breath and panting as we finally reached the top. Our guide was really cool. He was a Frenchman but had lived in England for a long time and really likes the Kinks. He said we shouldn’t believe anything he told us about the history of the Abbey because all of the archives were moved after the revolution to a city that was destroyed during WWII.
After our tour we piled back on the bus and went to the city of Saint-Malo, a beautiful former fortress on the beach that was completely destroyed during WWII and rebuilt to resemble the original. We didn’t take any tours so I don’t have very much historical information about Saint-Malo. I did take some pictures so once I find a place to process my film look out for those. There is a big wall surrounding the entire city and you can walk all the way around on top of it. The view of the ocean and all the islands was beautiful.
Our hotel was right on the beach. We all had dinner at a restaurant nearby. Our meal consisted of raw oysters, grilled salmon in a spinach cream sauce, baked potatoes, and a lot of raw vegetables. I got so damn full it was amazing. I also had several glasses of a pretty dry white wine and for desert, a crepe with caramel on it.
After dinner we walked downtown and found a couple nice bars. Being near the beach it only seemed appropriate that I drink a couple caprihinas, which were surprisingly well made.
In other news, I have had a stomachache since lunch on Monday. Last night I got to video skype with Jake, Lisa and Rachel, which was pretty cool but my internet sucks so it didn't work that well and it would have been better had Corinne not been at work. I miss Austin a lot. I wish I was home for SXSW.
I'm working on my spring break plans. I'll be in Paris for April 10-14. Then I am meeting Rachel Coley in Dublin and staying there for 3 mights. Then I'll go back to London with her for a few days. After that I might go meet up with some friends in Barcelona or maybe take off for Istanbul by myself. Who knows.
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
"When I lived in France in 2010, I did not marry a beautiful European woman or write a great novel, as I had intended to do, in that order. I did, however, curate a selection of English poetry for a Francophone primary school."
-Cameron Dodd: Legacy of Literary Mediocrity (Self-Published memoir, 2037).
Since last we met, many things have happened, some eventful and some not. This will be pretty short because I need to go to school soon.
After more than three weeks in France, I think I have returned to a normal sleep schedule. I’m not sure if this is good, because when timing permits I have slept until 1 p.m., even on the bricks I’m using for a mattress.
I got a bike from the city, a big cruiser with 3-speeds and an internal-hub. It’s pretty fun for riding around the city. Angers is extremely flat compared to Austin, so riding is easy. One of my neighbors rode the cruiser bike to Nantes last semester; it took him about nine hours. I want to bike out into the country, but probably not anywhere as far as Nantes.
We took a trip to a vineyard, Le Château des Vaults. The same family has run the winery for really longtime, the exact number escapes me now. On their website, they trace the history of the vineyard back to the goddess Pomona. The woman who is currently in charge gave us a tour of the grounds and explained the growing process. This was very interesting, but then we had a tasting and I learned the method for determining the quality of wine. Now I can look super pretentious at parties in Austin, swirling wine in a glass and smelling it before drinking. The wine we tasted was pretty good, but expensive, so I didn't buy any.
I think I had a dream about Chile Rellenos and Dos Equis a few nights ago.
I’ve begun to settle into a seemingly nice routine here in Angers. I only have class on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. This allows for a lot of free time, which I have been trying to fill with studying French, reading about linguistics and other things to keep myself from freaking out about being so far from home for so long.
Our film class has been given the task of making a documentary about our semester abroad. This will be very interesting because (1.) some how I’ve been charged with doing most of the filming and (2.) none of us, myself included, really knows anything about making movies. The school is offering us free Final Cut Pro certification classes, which I am sure would be valuable but I don’t want to give up every Friday afternoon in March to take the class. This is fine because I don’t have to do any editing of the film.
Yesterday we went on our first day trip. We were picked up in two vans and taken to the town of Saumur to see Fontevrault Abbey. The abbey was built in the twelfth century and once housed an order of both monks and nuns until the French revolution. In addition to vows of chastity, poverty, etc… the nuns took a vow of silence. There is one bench near the courtyard where they were allowed to speak. The architecture of the abbey was pretty cool too. Given my limited lexicon of architectural terminology, I’ll leave it up to you to look up pictures.
The abbey holds the grave of Richard 1 (the Lion Heart), king of England, and his family. For some reason Richard’s brain and (lion) heart are buried at two other sites, respectfully.
Since I was made videographer I reluctantly spent most of the time at the abbey holding the camera. I’m pretty sure all of the footage is useless because it was so cold that I was shaking profusely. At one point, just to have some stable shots, I set the camera down on a ledge where most of our group was walking around and left it running for 6 or 7 minutes.
After the abbey we drove back through Saumur. Near the river there are many houses that are built into the hillside, like caves. The residents of these caves homes have affectionately named themselves the Troglodytes. Every year they have an annual Troglodyte day on which they all open up their homes for people to tour.
For lunch we went to the Restaurant Troglodytique, which, as you might have guessed, is in a cave. Being the borderline claustrophobe that I am, I was not very excited about being underground for a long period of time. The cave was pretty spacious, though, and there was a lot of wine so I made the most of the situation and tried to put thoughts about the candles burning up all of the oxygen out of my mind.
The food was amazing. Saumur is the mushroom capital of France, and our meal consisted 90% of mushrooms; different varieties prepared in different ways. The wine was from a local winery. They served us five courses, including a peach tart for dessert. Unfortunately the video camera’s battery died at the abbey, so I had to charge it during lunch and did not get the ten-minute, low-angle shot of the table lengthwise that Dr. Flynn wanted. I did, however, manage to shoot some probably unusable, wine saturated, interviews in the van on the ride home.
Today I have to write an explication about Malcolm Cowley's book Exile's Return.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
I'm giving myself a writing schedule. I had planned to do this before I arrived in Angers, but Dr. Flynn has encouraged everyone in the writing workshop to make, and hopefully stick to, a writing schedule. I've been writing what I think are vignettes but might actually just be really short stories that aren't very good (or even worse, it could be 'microfiction').
So I am awake at 8:30. There is petites pains au lait and strawberry jam and coffee brewing in my french press-- the other day I made a dumb joke about how the French just call it a press, and someone told me the actual word for it, but I do not remember. I also made a dumb joke a few days ago about how the coins here are called Eurocents. Upon further investigation, it actually does say Eurocents on the coins. Instead of speaking French I make dumb jokes in English.
I think so far my homesickness has decided to manifest itself in the form of my being unable to walk more than two blocks away from the residence without having to back to my room to make sure it's locked. This has happened every time I've left the apartment in the past three days. Some times I get lucky and decide to turn around when I'm in the lobby. It's inconvenient when I'm at the crosswalk at Rue de Boisent and can't shake the fear that all of my important possessions will be gone when I get home.
On the first Sunday of every month all the museums in France are free. I went to the Musee de Beaux Arts this week. They are currently having a Rodin exhibition. The woman who gave me my ticket told me the Rodin exhibit was closed until later that afternoon, but I could come back I wanted. The exhibit will still be there on free museum day in March and I've been to the Musee Rodin in Paris anyway, so I decided I would just see the gallery downstairs (which was supposed to have works by a french video artist) and leave. The gallery downstairs had nothing in it but Rodin sculptures, sketches, letters and portraits. I was so confused. I never found the video art.
Last night I ate an entire baguette and un pain au chocolate by myself. I'm going to be so fat when I get back to Texas.
It’s been a week, and I think I’m adjusting well. Without the distractions of Austin I have had even more time to work on my French, read and write. Somehow between spending an astronomically higher amount of time on facebook and getting lost in a new city I have found time to write a lot more than I was in Austin. It might be because I’ve woken up at 8 a.m. every morning without an alarm. I was right about the subway being downstairs. I haven’t eaten there yet, but the whole building always smells like subway. This has been pleasant so far, but I think I might start to be grossed out by it.
The buildings and streets in the center of Angers are all very old. The Château d'Angers, the original Ville d’Angers, dates back to 1204. It’s right down the street from my apartment. As you go further and further away from downtown all the buildings seem newer and newer.
I’ve been doing a lot of walking, which is beneficial for working off all the pastries and crepes I’ve been eating. I took pictures of the crepes I made, but I forgot to bring the cable that connects my digital camera to my computer.
I had my first classes yesterday. I am very far behind the (only) other two students in my French class. I’m trying to converse with French speakers as much as I can, and I feel like even little things like ordering lunch in French is slowly helping me feel more confident in my speaking abilities.
Dr. Flynn’s film class seems like it will be interesting. Yesterday we watched a documentary about the first films made by Auguste and Louis Lumière, all of which are silent and 50 seconds long but extraordinarily well composed.
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YviZri3fbv4).
Last night we planned on going to a club. I was nervous about this because I don’t go to clubs in Austin, where I imagine they are exponentially tamer than clubs in Europe. Unfortunately (read ‘to my relief’) the bus that was supposed to take us to the club was delayed so long that our group decided to give up. A few of us went to the James Joyce Pub, which was very expensive, and then to another bar near the city center. There are a lot of Irish themed bars in Angers for some reason. Last night was the first time I had stayed out until the bars close. The night ended with a group of people standing on a table singing a song in French, which I'm told was about men showing their asses to each other or something nonsensical along those lines.
After I returned from the bar I Skyped (somehow this is an acceptable verb, even to the French) with Corinne, Lisa, Rachel and Jake for the first time. It was good to see their faces (and Ernie’s). I’ve been talking to Taylor everyday. I hope he is staying sane in the house by himself and not letting Hollister rule his life.
I have arrived in France. After a 9 hour flight and a strange time change, my sleep schedule is quite messed up. I stayed semi-awake for the entire flight, watching episodes of Law and Order and finishing The Sound and the Fury in a delirious state of sleep depravity.
We took a bus from Paris to Angers, about a four-hour drive. I managed to get my first hour of sleep in over 24. There was a lot of English graffiti along the side of the highway, which makes me wonder if the French have decided that their language doesn’t translate as well into spray-paint letters as ours does.
I forced myself to stay awake until 9 pm, walking around the city and trying to figure out my Internet, but woke up at around 6 am unable to sleep anymore. Through the magic of Skype I had breakfast/dinner with Taylor and Walker. My meal consisted of petits pains au lait with peanut butter on them. I brought my own peanut butter from Austin. Walker and Taylor were eating chicken and macaroni.
It’s about 7:30 am now, and I’m waiting for the sun to rise so I can wander around and try to find some coffee. Some students that have been here for a while are taking us on a walking tour of the city today, mainly showing us how to get to campus. I’ll update again soon when more interesting things have happened.
until I fly to Houston and then on to Paris. I found the address of what I think is my apartment building in Angers. If it is correct I am living right on the Maine River and, more importantly, right next to a Subway.
