yay

I woke up this morning and did my normal routine things.  But when I opened the door to the living room, I saw the backyard was covered in snow!  It's such a pleasant way of waking up in morning.  Now the snow is falling again, it's beautiful and big snowflakes layer the ground outside my windows.  I don't think it's going to be much fun to walk around in, but for now, observing it from a warm house is fantastic.  Weather experience in france=complete.

wow it goes

hi to all

it's been a while.  since my trip to london, I've been busy.  We had a soirée at my house with some of my friends from the university two weekends ago, it was really a great time.  It was cool to mix these two worlds that I've been living in here in Bordeaux, with some of my Californian friends and some of my friends from the classes I'm taking.  We had a long table set up in the dining room with candles and spaghetti and lots of wine.  There was even a fire going in the fireplace.  Erika was so excited to have people over, I was so thankful for all her help in making the dinner and allowing me to have people over.  The night ended with some piano and guitar by the fire.  Erika made it by far the most classy evening I've spent with friends, at the insistence of all those dinner party components.  I really have an amazing situation here in my homestay.

The day after that, Aurélie (the "sister" from the original homestay) and I went to St Emilion, a small wine town in the countryside.  It's a quaint place with vineyards literally in and around the city walls.  There were the remains of a moat surrounding the town and beautiful cobblestone streets running throughout, with tons of wine distributers.  The town is renowned as a place for wine tasting (dégustation), but we didn't end up doing that.  I had a great time with Aurélie, it's been really cool keeping contact with her even though I moved out of her house.  We switch english and french very casually, it's nice when it works out that both people feel around the same comfort level with both languages for conversation.  She's applying to go to Finland to study Urban Studies there, and I've been helping her with her letter of motivation and CV.  I've also looked over the letters of two of my good friends here, Laura and Charles, who applied to go to California next year.  To be able to help these people with their letters has been a really rewarding experience for me; it's made me reflect on the things I've learned here and the amazing opportunity I've had while in France.  I really hope that Charles or Laura (or both hopefully) make it into the UC program, it would be amazing to show them my home and help them with arrangements after all that they've done for me.  I'm going to Laura's birthday party in Saintes next weekend, looking forward to seeing yet another city here.

This past Friday I went to see Arcade Fire in Lyon.  My roommate and couple other girls came with me, and it was really cool to have people there for the concert and the whole experience of another city.  Bryce (my roommate) was really easy to travel with; she was always ready to go when we needed to be somewhere, we shared groceries to make it cheaper to eat, and she and I had some really great conversations.  Arcade Fire was great, I really enjoyed that they played a balanced mix of old and new songs, and their stage presence was fantastic.  However, the sound guy was situated just to the right of the stage, and sometimes the sound didn't mesh very well, which was frustrating because they have so many instruments going at once. it was easy to lose instruments like the violins in the madness.  Overall though I really enjoyed the city of Lyon.  It was interesting to see the city, after debating between Bordeaux and Lyon for my study abroad.  I think I would have enjoyed Lyon just as well as Bordeaux.  Friday afternoon it snowed, but thankfully not too heavily (it was very cold that night).  I didn't know this, but Lyon was the capital of Roman Gaul for a couple hundred years (around 0-400 AD).  While on the way up to this enormous castle-like church called La Basilique de Fourvière, we came upon the ruins of a roman theatre and markets.  It was so cool.  I really love the history that you see in the French (and european for that matter) cities, it's fantastic they're able to keep some of those structures in good shape for posterity.

well, I have three more weekends here in France.  It's wild.

prague/london

it's been a while since I last wrote, sorry to those who check this occasionally.  back at the end of october, I went to prague for 5 days to visit. I had heard it was a fun and cheap place to visit, but other than that I didn't really know much about it.  I stayed in a hostel for a couple nights and spent the other two nights couchsurfing with a guy who lived near the center of town named Jiri.  For those of you unfamiliar with couchsurfing.org, it's basically a site for people looking to meet others, but primarily while traveling.  People post that they have a couch where people can stay for a couple days, and then people traveling through the city can send messages to those people asking to stay for a period of time.  The site provides different options to make you feel comfortable, like reviews of the person (on both sides) written by people who either stayed with them or had them stay on their couch.  I really enjoyed my experience with Jiri, it gave the city a face of a person, rather than just the buildings or souvenirs I saw throughout town.  We played music together (he had this accordion that he let me play, it was really cool I'd like to buy one), went to a pub, and talked about disappearing languages.  That said, the city is beautiful with amazing architecture, most of it preserved from the destructions of WWII.  There is a lot of history in the town, with two castles on either side of the Vltava River from the 9th and 11th centuries, churches from the 12th century, and some remnants of Soviet rule.  I met some cool people on a free tour, and we spent the next two days visiting the city together, going to different museums and tourists spots.  The Czech beer was delicious and in most places, there was a large selection for cheap.  The city is definitely a tourist destination for a lot of Europe, I think in large part to the fact that things are "relatively cheaper" there.  The city is flooded with souvenir shops and western european stores, but there are still certain areas where you'll find people who don't speak english.  Most of the time I was able to ask in english for things like a menu or for a particular restaurant, which kind of surprised me.  To me the tourism was so strong there that it somewhat sucked away the Prague from Prague, especially in the Old Town, where there was a huge square filled with food and music and these old gothic church towers brooding above us.  Above all, I enjoyed going to a place that I had never heard much about and didn't know the language of the country.

Last weekend I went to visit Sylvain in London for two days.  I flew directly from Bordeaux through Easyjet, one of these new cheap airlines that has sprung up in Europe.  I arrived on Friday and met up with a friend from the Bordeaux program who happened to be there by chance at the same time. We went to this Wellcome Collection Museum, which had an amazing combination of things in one building.  The wealth of Britain was crazy in the 1800's, as seen in this guy Wellcome's collection of artifacts and list of donations and contributions.  After that I left the girls and met up with Sylvain.  It was pretty cool to see how he was doing in London, doing that whole grown-up thing, working 12 hours a day and what-have-you.  We went to a couple pubs that night and then got McDonalds around 2am, which was disgusting.  They're everywhere here in Europe.  And unfortunately they're the only thing open at that hour.  Saturday we got up and went to the London Bridge, Camden town, Big Ben, the London Eye, and all that jazz.  I especially liked the Tate Modern Art Museum because not only was it free, but it had modern art that wasn't too much to handle.  Sylvain and I get along pretty well, which is cool, because we're family, and we really didn't have too much interaction while we grew up.  It's good to feel like we can keep that family relationship going.  Sunday I had a really early flight (it was the cheapest) so we didn't get to do anything, other than see the Underground at that hour.  I minded the gap everytime I got on and off.  London wasn't as crazy as I imagined it, it was actually really pleasant.  I'd definitely go back to get a better feel for it.

I'm starting to feel the fact that I leave this place in a month and a half, and it's making me reexamine my actions.  It's as if each day counts a little more; I have to speak french as much as I can, eat as much french cuisine as will fit in my stomach, and stop to appreciate the little things more.  This weekend my friend Thibaut (maxime's cousin who showed me around Paris) is coming to stay with me in Bordeaux.  My housing situation is so cool, I just asked Erika if he could stay with us and she responded "sure he can stay in Bryce's room" because she's gone in Amsterdam.  The fact that she was so receptive to the idea surprised me because most people's homestays are very strict situations, but I guess what I'm trying to say is I appreciate Erika's welcoming personality.  I'm excited to be able to show Thibaut a little of Bordeaux, as he took the time to show me Paris when I was there at the beginning of my trip.

strikes (grèves)

I realized while reading an article on the strikes taking place in France that I had yet to describe them in my blog.   So here's a quick summary of what's happening:  France has a maximum age at which people retire legally.  From then on they receive retirement payments that support them more or less until the end of their lives.  Currently, President Nicholas Sarkozy and the majority of the National Assembly have created a law raising the national age of retirement from 60 to 62.  This has happened three other times in the past 20 years.  The major strike movements have risen from the transportation and oil refinery unions, which obviously effect the economy in a serious way on a day-to-day basis.  This is a nation-wide movement to maintain the current retirement age, and by that I mean college and high school students have joined the strikes by closing or blocking the schools.  For the majority of them, the rise in retirement age means less open jobs when they get their diplomas.  However, the rise in retirement age also means less people to pay for that will reach the retirement age.  Lots of gas stations are running low on gas now, with some of them limiting the amount of gas you can purchase.  The trucking industry pulled some interesting moves, deciding to drive really slow in one long line on the highways causing both traffic and late arrival of their product.  The recent protests in Lyon were apparently violent, with storefront windows broken and a high school set on fire.  The president has addressed these issues by saying that the protestors didn't have the right to take hostage those who didn't have anything to do with the situation and interrupt their daily lives.  He also said that the people who are breaking things won't have the last word in "this democracy, this republic."

The majority of people talk about how the demonstrations affected their trip to school or work.  I had that experience a few times now, where the tram was blocked from the center of town and I had to walk to school, but luckily I don't live too far from the majority of places I need to go. A lot of people are worried about gas and the next time they're going to get it, but again, way less people use gas on a daily basis here in Bordeaux.  Today I went to school, but the professors decided to go on strike and not have classes.  The police were stationed in the center of town, with shoulder pads, batons, and guns (and stern faces).  In terms of responses to the rise in retirement age, most of the students in my classes don't give me a straight answer about whether they are for or against the change in law.  But according to reports I've been reading in the NY Times and Le Monde, the polls show that the majority of people support the strikes.  I don't really know what that means.  I guess time will tell if people really support the strikes.  A lot of people are surprised by the presence of high schoolers in the streets during the protests.  Aunt Melissa and I talked a couple nights ago, and she was unhappy that a certain political party had encouraged the high schoolers to participate in the strikes.  I think the majority of high schoolers were participating because a) they got out of school and b) because they got to be rebellious.  When I saw them today at the center of town, they were saying completely unnecessary things to the cops like, I'm going to move that way now, and you can't stop me.  It was stupid.

For me, it's been interesting to ask the french people about the strikes, and to try to get a collective perception of the movement while not really being connected to it in a serious way.  Sure, I did experience the inconveniences of the lack of trams today, but it made me realize how fast I move normally, and how I expect to move that pace everyday.  At dinner tonight, one of the women who lives in this house from Monday to Thursday told us about how she arrived at work on Tuesday at Bordeaux 3, the liberal arts university.  The buildings were blocked, and the university president told everyone it wasn't worth it to try to work that day.  She said this in a somewhat cheerful manner, but also in a way that was implying she wanted to make it sound serious like there was a confrontation she encountered.  After that, she drove home she said, and enjoyed her day without work.  No one really tries to force their way into a place when people are blocking it.  When we were protesting the rise in public education last semester, there were plenty of students who tried to forcefully make their way through Sather Gate.  Here, people seem to accept the strikes easily, not focusing on the inconvenience that a particular aspect of society had taken a break for the day.

presentations

this week I gave two presentations in my classes on neurological modeling and "language and memory," my first presentations in french.  for the most part, they went well, it was just frustrating to feel like I was presenting adult information with the diction choices of a child.  A couple times I just stopped mid-sentence, not knowing how to express something, but everyone in the class was very understanding.  We did a presentation on OCD patients and their reactions in the Anterior Cingulate Cortex after learning something without errors and with errors.  It was interesting, but I wasn't too interested in that type of research.  The other paper was on synesthesia and memory, testing to see if they have superior memory for the stimuli that elicit the synesthetic responses.  It was especially interesting for me to work in a group with people in French, trying to express my feelings about whether an idea or topic should be in the presentation or not, or trying to suggest that they express a particular idea differently.  We use very nuanced language for that type of comment, in any language, and I found myself struggling not to sound like a jerk.  The simple words don't let people know that you care about their ideas or feelings.

I've bought my tickets for Prague next weekend, so this Friday I head to Paris where I'll take a flight Saturday morning to the Czech Republic.  I've been reading up on the history of the city, and I was completely unaware of all the craziness that city has been through over time.  If any of you reading this have suggestions about things to see/do/eat/drink there, don't hesitate to leave me a comment about it.  I'm looking for a place to stay on couchsurf.org, but having some trouble with responses.  I'm sure I'll find something, and if not, I can always stay in a hostel of sorts.

Today, me and Alex Spence went with Erika to the vineyard where I worked two weekends ago.  We worked about 2 hours, much less than last time, and had another wonderful lunch full of wines. Alex is another Californian from Venice Beach, we've been hanging out and swappin music from time to time.  Dylan, he, and I went to Mundaka, Spain last weekend to visit and (for Dylan) to surf.  The town is truly in Basque country there, beautiful green hills on all sides, all the signs in the native Basque language, and consistent grey clouds above. We slept in Dylan's car and had a great adventure hiking around and seeing a small part of Spain for the day.  Then we drove into San Sebastien for a couple hours, which was nice to see again.  It's too bad it's been cloudy both times I've gone there, I feel like it would be absolutely gorgeous when it's sunny outside.  I tried speaking Spanish with an old man there, but failed, which was really sad for me to feel incapable in a language I once spoke well "enough".  It's ok though.

Blind Pilot, a band I suggest to EVERYONE, played at Berkeley yesterday on campus.  I was bummed to miss it, but found on facebook this morning that Kelsey Westphal (a super-duper friend) had asked the band to say Bonjour jake while she filmed it on her iPhone.  I was so excited.  I miss my friends from Berkeley from time to time, I miss the city and the ambiance there.  But I'm torn I guess, because every time I respond to someone who askes me "How long are you here for?" I hesitate before answering December.  It's really not that far away now, I'm past the half way point of my trip.  Also I can see the effect it has on people to find out that this person is very impermanent in their lives.  It's too bad, but I understand why it's not as "attractive" for a person to want to make friends with someone who will leave in two months.  That said, I'm going to a birthday party for a girl in my class in Lacanau when I get back from Prague.  I was so excited to be invited to her place for that, and just in general I was excited to be included in this small community of my class in Bordeaux.

vendanges

I did more squats today than I have ever done in my entire life.

About a week ago, Erika (my host mom) asked us all if we'd like to go help with the vendanges (harvest) on a vineyard where her friends lived.  I was so stoked at the idea of working on a vineyard, but unfortunately as the week progressed I became more and more sick.  Today we woke up at around 730 for the 830 start on the vines, so I was pretty tired on top of being sick.  The chateaux is out on the right side of the Garonne, it's called Chateaux Montjon, and the family has a beautiful property.  There's an enormous mansion made out of stone and designed by the same architect that designed the Grand Théâtre in the centre of town.  The sun came up as we began our work, crouching down with a basket and clippers and cutting off huge bunches of little purple grapes, swollen after months of ripening on the vine.  We worked in twos, one on each side of the row, so I got to know a lot of the family's friends as we clipped grapes.  I worked with an older man named Terme, who talked with me at lunch about his thesis on french contemporary history and islam, which was really interesting but hard to follow from time to time.  There were around 20 of us total, and we worked until 1:30 with a break for coffee around 11:30.  By 1:30 I was really feeling the soreness in my back and thighs, this being the first serious exercise I've done since... honestly I can't remember.  The meal they prepared for us was delicious, and we drank all these old wines throughout the meal.  They kept serving more and more wines, while they brought out baked potatoes and cheeses and chocolate cakes.  The wine was apparently "good" wine, but I couldn't tell you one way the or the other.  I do know that the more aged wines were not as flavorful as I imagined they would be.  We had a couple wines from 1973 and 1984, but I didn't really see why they were worth more.  I learned a lot about how they grow the grapes though, so I didn't leave the vineyard completely uncultured.  When we started up again on the vines, I had enough wine in my tum to make it enjoyable (or at least I was able to ignore the pain in my knees.)  They had apple trees and hazelnut trees, and baled hay in the fields next to the vineyards.  It was absolutely beautiful, I'm thinking I'm going to go back in two weeks to help with the next vendanges.

As for my classes, they're going really well (in other words, I'm starting to understand my lectures), and I turned in the first part of my artificial intelligence project yesterday.  The program MASS (applied mathematics to social sciences) has a cognitive science division that is actually pretty cool.  The student association for MASS had a soirée the other night, and I was invited to someone's apartment for a party before we went out to the bars.  I was so stoked when they asked me to hang out, I wasn't sure how the students would be in my classes at first.  The fact that we're together everyday really helps, because I see the same people each day.  It's a bit like high school in that sense, and in the sense that everyone knows everyone else, which is weird to me.  I'm used to university where you go into a class and know maybe 2-3 people, and you meet new people as a result.  But this actually works out in my favor, so that's fine.

I'm hoping to go London to see Sylvain in the coming weeks, and maybe get to Berlin to see some friends, but it's a little difficult from Bordeaux.

jesus and schizophrenia

the new house I moved into suits me very well.  I love the location, the people here and the feeling that I can come home easily when I want to.  I live with an old (but lively) german/french woman named Erika Barry, who makes delicious food and always responds with "Ah! Jaaake...ça va?" on the telephone when I call.  She has three chickens who wander into the house from time to time to drink some of the cat's milk.  The cat's name is Tiger; he lives outside and sometimes I see him hunting things in the wood by the side of the house.  The backyard is enormous, with large old trees and places to sit and ponder life or read a book ( I haven't had time to do either yet.)  There are two Finnish girls who live in the room next to me, and another American from the California program with us.  It's really nice to have other people my age in the house; I'm looking forward to getting to know all of them.  The Finnish girls know who Teemu Selanne is, but they're not hockey fans.  Also, Suomi means Finland in Finnish; I felt like an idiot after asking why the Finnish national hockey team had Suomi on their logo.

Today in my neurological modeling class we talked about schizophrenia.  The professor talked about general info for awhile and then discussed treatments for the illness, and then began to comment on the fact that due to schizophrenia, a lot of people who consider themselves to be hearing God are now classified as schizophrenics.  He continued to discuss the fact that, if Buddha or Mohammed or Jesus were around today, they would have probably been diagnosed schizophrenics, delirious with the prophetic thoughts of God.  The manner with which he approached the topic was unlike anything I had heard at Berkeley, and naturally surprised me.  I've found that in Europe, if someone's not religious, their attitude towards religion is very negative and readily-expressed.  Even if Jesus and other religious figures were schizophrenics, which we'll never know, they had enough convincing material for us to continue talking about them today.  By convincing, I mean that their thoughts on society and ethics held enough substance for the ideas to be passed on to others.  It's getting old to read about the different church press releases on sexual abuse cases; it's a easy sale for the media right now.

The other thing about my classes is that, even though we are only 20 to a class, no one stops the lecture to ask questions about something.  I don't know if it's just not done, or if people don't care enough, but I feel discouraged from raising my hand by the lack of questions (and even more so because I don't want to sound like an idiot when I ask a question).  I was totally lost in my artificial intelligence course, but I didn't want to raise my hand because no one else was, yet I could tell that other people were lost.  I have to figure that one out.

I walked home from school today and found an "Albert Camus Preschool."  The thought of Ms. Kim's interpretation of Camus' dark existentialism plus little preschoolers made me laugh, and the fact that the French felt the need to dedicate a preschool to Camus seemed silly.