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.

homestay and courses

I'm living in a beautiful house.  really, I am, I'm right across from a vineyard with a freaking castle.  But I'm finding it hard everyday to get on two buses and a tram to take me an hour to my campus on Bordeaux 2 in the middle of town.  I gotta figure out something soon.  My "mom" was helping me look at options tonight, but really it just came down to home much I wanted to walk and which buses would take me fastest to the tram.  I can't take a scooter because I need some type of license and insurance (how cool would that be, riding around on a moped of sorts). I miss the 5 minute walk to campus from my home in Berkeley, and I'm realizing more and more how spoiled I am there.  We have online registration.  We have easy to follow schedules.  We have a single campus, containing all the undergrad majors, enclosed on four sides by large streets.  (Anyone reading this who has online registration, thank your university administrators. I love the utilization of the internet in our modern times)

Waiting for a bus is like watching your life be inefficient.  But the worst part is, you can't get up and do anything about it.  Because you can't do it any faster on your own.  Today I thought, "I'm not going to wait 4 minutes for this tram to take me 4 minutes to the next stop, I can definitely do it in less than 8 minutes."  I arrived at the spot I wanted to go at the same time as the tram that I claimed would have been slower.  Public transit: I like it, but I don't like the time where you realize you're waiting for something.  I love google maps: it gives me a nice-neat-little number saying "You will get here in this much time if you walk at this pace and make this tram yadadada..."  What a great way to feel like you're in control of your life.  If I just make it to this tram at this time, I will be here at this time.  I think that is what's peeving me about this whole mess of a transit situation I'm in.  I don't feel like I'm in control of when I want to go somewhere and how.  Usually that wouldn't be a problem, but feeling like I have to do that EVERY SINGLE DAY is going to "casse mes couilles".  It's making me want to live close to where I work.

I found a bachelors program that is "Applied Mathematics for Social Sciences" in which they have a specialization in Cognitive Science.  I was very excited to see the curriculum had lots of stats and algorithm work, things that I don't have much experience in.  The professor that helped me initially brought me to my first lecture, right in the middle of a two hour lecture, and announces to the class that I was a student from California, and that it would be really nice if they could make me feel at ease and help me out with stuff.  In front of 40 people I just kind of stood there trying not to look up.  It was bizarre that she decided to do that, but now I'm kind of glad she did, because I had a couple girls come up to me after class to talk and ask if I had questions.  I went to an artificial intelligence lecture where the professor asked "What is computer science?" and randomly chose people, until he landed on me.  I gave him some sort of response, and he gave me some positive feedback, so the shakes I had from the nervousness afterwards felt good.

The lab work today wasn't anything too big, but I really thought it was cool.  We started to prepare the syringes of cocaine for the Skinner Boxes where the rats will be self-administering.  I got to see how the computer programs work to record all the information automatically and how the boxes themselves are structured.  The other researchers thought it was kind of boring, but I was stoked to see the stuff before all the rats were in place.  Tomorrow we see the rats in action.  I have to sleep I think I'm getting sick.

first thoughts on bordeaux

so it's been a while since I wrote a entry, but that's mostly been due to the fact that the internet in the dorms was somewhat spotty.  That aside, I arrived here a two weeks ago and finished my french courses yesterday.  I'll give some kind of background up until today.

Tuesday the 25th of August I arrived with a bunch of luggage and took a taxi to the campus, which on first sight, was not what I expected.  It looks kind of run down, but we learned later that the French spend more time and money on their town centers than on their universities.  I was the last to show up because my train broke down for a couple hours in the south of France, but everything worked out.  That night the students from the program all got together and hung out in the hallway drinking wine and chatting, it kind of felt like freshman year all over again, but not as awkward.  The next day we just hung out and had a meeting to orient us on future meetings, and then we went out that night for dinner in the center of town.  We ended up going to a bar and getting stuck in town because the tram closed at midnight, and we were unaware of the schedules.  So then 25 of us ran around trying to find a taxi, which was an adventure, but we all got home eventually.

Thursday we went out again after a meeting on housing, where we talked about homestays, apartments and other options.  Friday we had an excursion with the EAP program coordinators to an oyster farm, where we learned about the history and techniques of oyster farms.  Afterwards we tasted oysters (my first time with the crustaceans, possibly my last), but most people didn't really enjoy them.  They're still alive when you put them in your mouth, which kind of bothered me, and I didn't really enjoy the taste, but it was still a cool experience.  We then drove in the huge air-conditioned buses to La Dune de Pyla, which is the largest sand dune in Europe.  We climbed up and the hung out up top for a bit, it was really impressive.

We had classes for the second week in from 830 until 1230.  I really didn't find the courses that helpful unfortunately, they didn't use their time most efficiently.  I'm so glad I came early and had the experience I did with Maxime and Aunt Melissa.  After class, most people would go to town to hang out or eat or laze around.  While I was in Toulon I got in contact with two research teams here at the Centre de Neuroscience, and both responded positively, so Tuesday and Wednesday of that week I went to interview with them and see the labs.  I decided to work with a team in the INSERM building doing research on addiction and cocaine, and the following Tuesday (6 days ago) I started work there. I'll get to that eventually.  On Thursday we went to a chateau for a wine tasting at Chateau Raymond-Lafon.  They talked to us about how they make the wine especially sweet, because the particular type of wine was a Sauterne, a dessert wine.  The vineyards stretched for kilometres and kilometres in all directions, and the region was apparently somewhat famous (Le Medoc).  There were some castles off in the distance.

Last weekend I went with Dylan and Spence, two guys from UCSB, to Lacanau, a small beach town an hour away from Bordeaux.  We took the bus there and stayed in a really cool hostel just 5 minutes by foot from the beach.  That Friday I went swimming while Dylan hit the waves with his surfboard, and I got swept out by a rip current that nearly drowned me.  I've never been so tired from trying to swim in the ocean.  All I kept thinking was, "I'd really like to be back on shore right now sipping a cold beer.  And I don't want to drown."  It was a scary experience, and eventually I had a bodyboarder follow me as I slowly swam back in.  The waves that day and Saturday were enormous, 8-9 feet high and heavy.  They were tubing and really throwing that lip over the edge.  It was an adventure for me to jump back into the surf at that level, but Sunday was a much nicer 4-5 foot day, and I had some really fun rides.  We rented surfboards which weren't too expensive, surprisingly, and I really enjoyed the 6 foot shortboard that I got. It was fantastic to get out in the water and exercise again...

This week I started the actual internship at the lab, beginning with surgery on the rats.  The team is looking at rates of rat self-administration of cocaine to replicate some data they found a year ago.  To allow the rats to self-administer cocaine, they insert a tube into the back that leads to another tube that leads into the jugular vein.  So on Tuesday and Wednesday I was at the lab helping shave the rats and anesthetize them while the grad students found the jugular veins.  It was awesome.  Bit by bit, my advisor kept adding things for me to do: shaving them, putting them to sleep, making the incisions on the back and shoulder, finding the jugular, and stitching them back up.  At first it was hard for me to work on something that I new was still alive and breathing right in front of me, but I got used to it much quicker than I was expecting.  Definitely looking forward to working more in the lab.  For those who are interested, the research is looking to replicate previous findings that showed less neural plasticity in brains of classified "addicts" according to the way DSM-IV classifies human addicts. Too cool.

So yesterday I moved into my host family here in Pessac, just outside of Bordeaux.  I live with a mom, dad, and two sisters who are 18 and 21.  They're very welcoming and curious about my life;  the mother (Sylvie) is a professor of history at a high school and Bordeaux 3 (the university), and I'm still not sure what the father (Vincent) does.  He's quiet and rides a motorcycle, which reminds me, I'm trying to buy/rent a mobylette, which is like a bike with a motor.  I really would like to be able to leave the house and not worry about getting on a tram and bus and another bus to get back to the house.  The place is situated kind of far from my school, but it's a great house.  I live on the second floor and look out on vineyards of Pape Clément, where I can see an old castle tower.  It's really quiet, my room is huge, and I have my own shower.  I'm diggin it here.

So from here I try to find out when I can enroll in courses in pysch and neurobiology, which should be monday... I'm still figuring out those logistics.  I'll try to update my photos on the flickr account, so check them out when you get the chance. up and out

many (kilo)metres with maxime

after spending a pleasant 5 days with maxime's family in Saintes Maries de la Mer, we moved on to hang out with his friends in St Thibéry near Agde.  The house is owned by the grandparents of Max's friend Chris, and was spacious enough to accommodate 10 of us.  We hung out mostly on the beaches of Cap-d'Agde which were nice, but again, the Mediterranean lacks waves.  It was really windy and sandy Saturday evening while we tried to eat our dinner on the beach, but it was fun to play dodgeball and paddleball with max's friends.  At first I was very timid with them, hardly saying a word, because I couldn't understand a single thing they were saying.  It sucked.  I felt uncomfortable butting in to ask "What does ____ mean?"  But slowly I started asking more and more questions once I got used to their pace of talking together, and by the end, I learned a lot of things with them.  Mostly bad words.  But more seriously, I did learn a lot of quick expressions that comprise the average 20-year old's vocabulary, and I got much much better at trying to guess what people were talking about.  By the last night together, we were really conversing (sounds silly) and I was so stoked.  We talked about hardcore music like A Day to Remember and Underoath, which really made me laugh.  I NEVER thought I would have to search for words in French to describe the aspects of hardcore music that I enjoyed.  Thanks to Brian and Blaine I actually had a lot of bands to throw out when they asked me what I had heard.  I went from being completely uncomfortable with these people to exchanging numbers with them so that we could meet up during the school year in Lyon (where most of them go to school) which was a moment I won't forget.

Max and I left for St Julien en Genevois on Tuesday afternoon after a really cool day at a river gorge.  The river had carved a lot of cliffs from which people were jumping and flipping.  We swam up river to the faster currents and large rocks, and we could see the springs where the water was spewing out of the rock cliffsides. It was absolutely beautiful.  From there we headed towards St Julien, Max's hometown, and along the way I tried to clarify what a lot of words meant that I had heard during our stay with his friends.  I wanted to make sure I wasn't saying something impolite if I used a certain expression, and in general learn more words from Max while we had 5 hours to kill in the car.  It was really cool for me to speak in French with Maxime, because at school he doesn't generally speak with me in French, but here he stuck to his promise to not substitute an explanation of a french word for the direct translation.  It's much better for me to hear an explanation in french for a word than for someone to directly translate it into english.  We arrive at midnight in St Julien, so I didn't get to see any of the Alps until the next day.

Mathéa and Max woke me up around 1030 Wednesday morning and shortly thereafter we left for Maxime’s grandparents’ chalet in Combloux, which was beautiful.  It’s situated just across from the Mont Blanc and a huge valley where you find the city Megève.  The chalet is all wood, with around 7 or 8 rooms.  It’s enormous.  We sat on the porch in huge armchairs eating sandwiches (jambon cru, jambon haute-savoie, camembert) and these chips that are rotisserie chicken flavored.  What?  That’s right, I said rotisserie chicken flavored.  We went for a short 40 minute hike into the hills, very peaceful but somewhat strenuous after my lack of exercise and excessive eating of cheese.  There were raspberry bushes.  After that we drove through the mountains super fast, following the Rhone as it carved the cliffs, until we reached the Lake at Annecy.  Annecy was nice, but almost too quaint, like they thought out what would be the “cutest” setting possible.  After that we returned home to eat dinner with Max’s parents and watched a friendly with France and Norway, which they lost.  Too bad for the new coach.

            Thursday we woke up and drove to Geneva in a lime green, convertible Volkswagon Beetle.  That was too cool.  Driving through the tunnels I felt like I was on a Disneyland ride, and emerging at the end with the voice from the speakers by my head saying "Please watch your step as you exit the car...into Switzerland".  We drove to the UN campus to visit Dean Lissner’s brother who works at WHO.  Talk about a cool job.  He basically uses the research done there to show economic feasibility for answers to sexual reproductive diseases in developing nations. There were 156 countries represented at the WHO building out of the 168 present in the World Health Assembly, so the place was like a microcosm of the rest of the world.  I’d love to work there someday.  We ate lunch in the cafeteria and talked about his work, alternating between French and English.  Afterwards he tried to get us into the central meeting hall, it was locked, but he went to the front desk and asked to have it opened.  It was just like I imagined but cooler, with all the blue comfy-looking chairs and the huge WHO symbol at the head, with the translators desks up top.  We drove to Geneva after saying goodbye and thanks to Craig Lissner, where we walked around the different watch shops.  There’s a huge jet of water on Lake Léman and beautiful churches.  But the churches seemed different to me at first, until I realized that the lack (completely relative in France) of decoration was due to the fact that it was protestant.  Everything costs a lot in Geneva, its crazy.  A normal cup of coffee at Starbucks cost $6 (swiss franc = dollar).  We returned home in the convertible and ate dinner with maxime’s parents at this pretty restaurant in the calm of St Julien centre.  There were houses across the street, which was really relaxing for some reason.  It didn’t feel like we were at a fancy restaurant, but we were, because there were all these crazy entrées and plats on the menu. I tried the bull testicles that Maxime's dad ordered, they were like chicken but softer.  After dinner, Maxime’s friend Thom came and picked us up with Mathéa and we drove out to Quar (car) Rouge, a quarter in Geneva with a cool bars.  We all sat around and drank delicious beers (Chimay and Cérule des Trolls) and for one of the first times since I’ve been here I could follow pretty much everything and feel like I was part of the conversation.  Being with Maxime and his friends was so cool for me, because I got to hear what people my age sound like, what expressions they use, and how they interact.  All of Max’s friends were super mature, very cool people, and I hope to visit them in Lyon during the school year.

For now, I'm back in Toulon with Melissa, Alain, and Raphael, where I'm going to get down to grammar studies.  I leave for Bordeaux the 24th.

a man in Arles

Last night I went to see about a man in Arles named Le Condor.  Arles is a city just north of where I'm staying right now with Maxime and his family in Saintes Maries de la Mer, it's in the Provençal region of France.  Maxime has an extensive family here in Stes Maries; his great-grandma, great-aunt and grandma, and some aunts.  So right now there are 4 generations here hanging out for a couple weeks, plus Jake.  They've been very welcoming, we eat pretty much all our meals together and go out to the beach together.  I've had the chance to get to know Max's sisters too, which is very cool.

But back to this guy named Le Condor.  Max's grandmother sings in a tradition Provençal choir, and this group was asked to perform with a musician named Le Condor in an enormous band that plays traditional music from all around the world with a modern "feel".  The concert was held in an ancient roman theatre in Arles, with crumbling pillars and original stone (so cool).  I didn't really know what to expect, so when Le Condor walked on stage after an opening Peruvian flute solo with an enormous black trench coat and blonde ponytail, I knew this was no ordinary "traditional" music concert.  Then came the lasers.  This guy had every laser and light show in the world on his stage, with fog machines and confetti at different points. He played a tiny recorder/flute called a galoubet, traditional to the Provence region, but it was tiny in this huge guy's hand.  I say hand because he always played it with one hand with feet firmly planted spread apart and the other hand swaying gently with his eyes closed.  Remember the black trench coat.  Then his entire band come out, with violins, tamborins (another celtic drum), guitars, more flutes, even more flutes, and lots of bag pipes.  The music was always fast, with lots of little stoccatos, like the Braveheart soundtrack for Peru, Ireland, and Spain.  I was excited to see Scarborough Fair and El Condor Pasa on his playlist for the night, but his rendition of Scarborough Fair was too quick for me.  The bagpipes were cool.  But overall this guy was more funny than anything else.  I'll include a video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYZ2NdeCU3Q

We've been mostly relaxing since we arrived, which has been nice for me after the party in Bayonne.  We went to this secluded beach that was only accessible to local residents, which was a huge sand delta with flamingos and herons and other beautiful birds.  Unfortunately, Maxime's uncle slowed down too much and got stuck in the sand.  We spent another hour trying to get the car out, and actually it was kind of fun. Everyone had a positive attitude while we tried to get the car out, even the dog Tapas helped dig out the tires.  On Tuesday night I went to a toro piscine, which is in a big arena with a square one foot pool in the center.  They let a bull run free in the arena and then allow any man (18 and older) at the event to get down into the arena to try to get the bull to chase him through the pool.  Apparently bulls don't like water.  Maxime and I did a different game where we had two buckets, one for filling the bigger bucket and the other for holding the water.  Then I tried to distract the bull while maxime used the smaller bucket to fill the larger bucket with water from the pool.  There were four teams like us, and we were definitely winning with the most water in our bucket, but then the bull caught a guy by the butt and tossed him around real good.  So the game stopped.  The guy looked really hurt, laying there clutching his leg.  An ambulance arrived and I realized just how dangerously stupid this game was.  It was still fun before somebody got hurt.

les fêtes de bayonne

If you ever have the chance to go to Bayonne for this festival, go.  For the past five nights, I've been walking around the town of Bayonne with 250,000 other people visiting concerts, eating french junk food (crepes and the like), dancing through the streets, and laughing at/with lots and lots of drunk people.  The Fetes open with an event where a choir sings a bunch of traditional Basque songs and they present the town's key to famous people.  I didn't know any of the people, but it was still cool to think there were (relatively) famous people there.  Then they unveil this big puppet called Le Roi de Lyon, who is kind of like the mascot for the Fetes, and launch fireworks that were really really loud.  Alain told me on the way to Bayonne about the fireworks, and he said they were more loud than pretty, and I definitely understood what he meant.  After the overture we started walking and found our first passed out dudes.  At first I was kind of shocked that these guys had friends who left them passed out on the sidewalk like that, but then I kind of got used to seeing people like that.  That aside, the first guy we saw was passed out standing up with his elbow resting casually on the ledge.  It was hilarious.

Most people bring their alcohol in large 2-litre coke bottles mixed with some type of juice, so the ground is littered with empty soda bottles.  I met a couple guys and told them it was my first Fetes de Bayonne, and they told me to step on a couple bottles to crush them flat.  Then they grabbed my hands dragged me skiing on these bottles down the street. Super fun, much more dangerous on the cobble stone streets than I imagined.  We stopped a lot to dance in front of the bars where they set up speakers to play music, and conveniently, served alcohol to the parched peoples.  Wednesday night we hung out on top of this hill for a while to get away from the craziness below us and I got the chance to meet some random people here and there.  There was a guy who went to Brown University, a girl from spain, and a french girl who had a boyfriend who did graffiti (I found out after I started talking to his girlfriend).  In general, everyone was pretty friendly with few to no angry drunks.  The first night we met a girl who was going to be late for her train, and she didn't know where the station was at, so we ran to catch her train at 4:30 in the am.  My feet were killing me afterwards, but I found a two-euro coin on the street and felt like a gentleman when she thanked me with bisous on both cheeks.  Speaking of finding things, I found another two euro coin and a nice (man-ly) bracelet, so I was pretty stoked.  That was Wednesday, a very cool way to start the fetes.

Thursday morning we woke up around 10 to go play a game of Pala, which is a typical Basque country game very similar to raquetball but with a much harder ball.  Raphael's other friend, Ambre showed up on the train that morning and we all went to San Sebastian, Spain for dinner later that night.  The city is situated just across the border from France, 45 min by car from where we are in Bayonne.  It was wild to drive just under an hour to a place with another language.  We tried out the local "tapas" in a bar, which are little hors-d'oeuvres with tasty dried hams and cheese.  Mailiss was there again, the wife of Charlie (uncle Alain's old friend), and she was full of information on the city.  Really full of information.  She would talk your ear off every time she stopped to look at something with you.  We drove back to Bayonne around 930 and made it in time to start the party at 11. Again another night of dancing and concerts.  Thursday we saw this pole climbing game where guys try to make it to the top of a light post while everyone around them throws empty (plastic) bottles at them.  It was really funny to watch, and for a second I wanted to try, but then I thought twice.  There was a rock concert at one of the stages so Raphael and I jumped in the dusty mosh pit for a bit.  Also very fun.

Friday afternoon we went to the beach and Sylvain and I surfed a little bit, and ate lunch after.  I took a huge nap and woke up at 1030pm but everyone was still just sitting around.  It kind of surprised me that we started our nights so late, but we came back home around 4am most nights, so I guess it balanced out.  Friday night was really fun, there were even more people out and about.  We ran into a drumline that was marching through the streets right in front of the cathedral, so we danced behind, following them for half an hour or so.  Saturday was more of the same, but with even more more people, so the streets were extra-crowded by this point.  There was a défilé, which is basically like a float parade with 4 or 5 cars outfitted with decorations of sorts.  I forgot to mention that everyone wears the same outfit at the Fetes:  white shorts/pants/skirt, white shirt, red scarf belt, and a red bandana around the neck.  It was so cool to see both old and young in the same clothes, day and night.  Saturday night, Raphael and I slid down a hill on our butts and so my shorts were pretty dirtied up by the end, but it was part of the experience to have dirty white clothes on every night.

sunday: the day of rest.  I needed it.

Tomorrow Sylvain and I leave for Montpelier/Toulon, and he will drop me off at the former so that I can meet up with Maxime Chevée, a friend from Berkeley.  Maxime lives in a town near Geneva on the French side of the border, but his grandparents live in a city close to Montpelier called Agde.  We're going to drive back to his house after a day or two in Agde, so I'll see the French Alps for the first time.  Life is so good.

surfing on the côte basque

After 9 hours of driving on thursday, we arrived in Bayonne.  It was pouring rain for some parts of the drive, but along the way we saw a couple castles and some beautiful stretches of forest.  We also passed through the town from where the 17th stage of the Tour de France started. The apartment that we're staying in is right on the Adour River, with a beautiful view of the Pont St Esprit and the two churches in old town Bayonne.  Sylvain told me it's situated in a great spot for the festival de bayonne, just on the other side of the river from most of the bars and festival activities.

yesterday I had my first taste of the atlantic ocean surf.  it was very windy, too windy, for any consistent surf to hold up, but it was great to get into the water and exercise my arms again.  The Michels had two surfboards stored in the garage, one longboard around 8.5 feet and another around 6 ft, but I was just glad to not have to rent one here.  The Biarritz/Anglet area is renowned in France as a surf town, so there are a lot of people out in the water who have rented boards at high prices.  Today the surf was much better, with the shape and form both holding up nicely.  I talked a little bit with some younger guys who asked me if it was hard to leave the California waves for these waves.  The waves are very comparable to huntington or newport, but there are definitely more people in the water, which was annoying sometimes.  I was able to see Spain from where I was surfing.

Last night Aunt Melissa, Uncle Alain and I went out with some old friends of Alain's from grade school.  They live in a nice apartment in Biarritz, so we went walking around the downtown area of Biarritz and walked to a bar situated on the hill above the main surfing beach in the area.  We walked along the coastline on the cliffs, where you can see a lot of huge rocks that have all fallen from the same land mass.  You can see the lines of the sedimentary rock that match up perfectly with each other in the way they slowly eroded from the wind and sea.  The city was built up during the period of Napoleon III and during the early 1900's when a lot of American's came to visit.  As a result, there's a really cool mix of stone walls and Art Deco buildings along the coast line.

As for the language learning, its getting much easier to understand people and understand whether they've asked me a question or not, which sounds silly, but it's really hard sometimes to tell whether people are directing something at you or not.  Last night, the wife of Alain's friend, Mailiss, was explaining a lot of the history of the region to me which was interesting, but she was talking so slowly with me that I couldn't follow her.  I finally had to ask her to speak a little faster with me because I found it difficult to understand what she was saying.  It was also getting kind of annoying to have someone talking to me like I was a child, but I left that out.  We had some good sangria and tapas at the top of the bar and then a great dessert at their house afterwards.  It was called La belle athene, which was vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce, roasted almonds and pears.  it was a delicious way to end the walk around biarritz.

Sylvain arrived today from london, so I'll have someone around my age to hang out with now.  It wasn't too bad to be with the older folks though, because I got to drink and eat for free, and we didn't eat "Macdo" as the french call mcdonalds.  But it's definitely nice to have someone to hang out with again.

mediterranean sea

today and yesterday I experienced the Toulon seaside.  Two of the Michel's church friends took me to the beach yesterday to a "grotto" called Sainte Marguerite.  To get down there we walked this long path that opened up on a little cove with 6 or 7 houses packed in around it.  The houses were exactly what I imagined of Mediterranean architecture with a light blue finish on the doors and a beige stucco covering the walls.  The beach isn't really a beach here in Toulon, it's more like a rock that has enough room for people to hang out.  One of the girls I went with, Claire, took me swimming around this huge rock structure, mentioning off-handedly before we jumped in that it was a little swim.  I didn't realize how out of shape I was in the water, but I managed well enough.  The water was a beautiful aqua blue, and relatively warm.  We climbed and jumped off some of the cliffs here and there.  It was great to go swimming and be active again, and I slept well last night.

Charles heard us talking about the spot we went to yesterday and told me, "I'll take you somewhere cool tomorrow."  So today we went with fins/masks/snorkels and hit the water again in a different spot.  Again, it was a beautiful, warm day so the water felt great.  Charles took me to some different jump spots on the cliffs, but also took me into this tunnel where the water surged in and out, and I couldn't see a thing.  At a certain point it completely blacked out, so we felt around using the walls and eventually saw a faint green light at the other side.  I was reassured to see the light because it was really getting creepy in there.  When I swam out the other side,  I wouldn't have guessed that there was a huge cave under the rock...pretty cool.  Unfortunately there weren't too many fish to look at, but the occasional small fish floated by us.  The sea is much more salty than I imagined, and I even found salt crystals deposited on the rocks that we climbed on.  I think tomorrow we leave for Bayonne, but I'm not positive.  chow time

toulon

I arrived in Toulon last night by the TGV, my favorite form of transport thus far.  But I wanted to recap a little bit about the rest of my time in Paris so I'm going to back up a bit.

There are a gazillion parks in Paris, so on Monday I made a park tour of all the parks I could in one day.  I walked all day in the 9th, 10th and 11th arrondisements to see the Pere Lachaise Cemetery, Parc de Belleville, Buttes Chaumont and finally the Jardin de Luxembourg.  Pere Lachaise is one of the oldest cemeteries in France, and its absolutely packed in there.  there are graves upon graves, jam packed along little cobble stone paths.  To be honest it was kind of creepy, because it was all cloudy and it had just rained, and the occasional crow cawed at me as I walked alone through this huge city of ancient graves.  I saw Jim Morrison's grave, which is the one everyone asks about when you say "I went to Pere Lachaise," but whatever.  It wasn't large or impressive, in fact it wasn't even in a spot where you could see his name very clearly.  I still don't know why he's there in fact...  Parc de Belleville: not much to look at.  Buttes Chaumont though was pretty cool, it's got this central park feel to it with all the trees and big lake that Napoleon I had constructed around a huge central rock that you can walk up to.  There's a great view of La Defense, the business sector, from up there.  Jardin de Luxembourg was absolutely beautiful.  By that time I was really tired of walking around, but the sun had come out and there were so many beautiful statues of all the queens of France, beginning somewhere around 500 AD.  I sat and watched some old guys play pétanque, a game in which two or four players try to get the closest to a marker ball thrown at the beginning of a round.  I'm sure some of you have played something like it, sometimes its called boule.  But these guys were pros.  They knew it too, because they would make all these sarcastic comments to each other about a certain throw or placement, and I only caught a little bit of their banter.  I think they enjoyed the fact that so many tourists stop by to watch, because one guy was a real clown, and I could tell the other guys were getting annoyed with his antics.  Charles (my cousin) told me afterwards that the Jardin de Luxembourg used to be a place for art exhibits in the past, and they still had a small one there with all these cool Chopin posters from Poland.  There was this really cute girl wandering through the exhibit, and I tried to think of some French to say to her for small talk.  The best I came up with was, "This one is my favorite" when she walked by.  She stopped and smiled at me and said she was from Poland, so she had seen a lot of posters like these ones.  "Oh, really, you're from Poland?  That's cool..."  And then I said goodbye.  Fail.  Apparently I'm not very good at talking to girls in another language yet.

Originally when I was planning out my flight to France I wanted to make sure I was here for their Fourth of July, Bastille Day, which was the 14th of July.  I'm so glad I didn't miss it.  The 13th I went out with Charles and some of his engineering school friends to a bar that was like an American saloon, with Bud Light on tap.  yeehaw.  After that I rushed off to join this new Parisien friend Tibaul (Maxime's cousin) at the Champs de Mars which is right beneath the Eiffel Tower.  There were a bunch of kids around our age sitting around drinking and eating; very cool.  He told me, "Ok, now we're going to use your accent to meet some people," so I asked some girls for a bottle opener for our wine bottle.  They just handed it to us, and asked very dryly where I was from in English, implying that they spoke english very well, thank you, and expressed no interest in talking.  But there were some drunk dudes singing so we stopped and talked with them for a little bit.  Afterwards we went to another party where Tibaul's sister was and I talked with some people about American sports.  Success of a night.

The 14 Juillet is somewhat different than the 4th of July.  There's a big parade with all the different armed forces, all marching very properly, and it's much more focused on the military than your average fourth of july.  It poured down rain during the parade, so I was glad I decided to watch it from Charles' living room.  No barbecues, but that evening we had a picnic with Charles' friends on some grass by the Seine near the Eiffel Tower to watch some really cool fireworks.  We ate all this fantastic french food and drank good beer and wine; I tried pâte for the first time.  Its really salty.  That night was the perfect way to finish my Paris trip.  By the way, the French know how to have a firework show.  Having seen my fair share of fireworks at Angel Stadium and Disneyland, I was still impressed by the display.  I don't think I'll forget this moment, watching the fireworks with my two french cousins on a bridge over the Seine, with all the cars behind us, stopped by people staring up at the sky.

So that brings me to Toulon, where I was greeted by my French family members Sylvain, Alain and of course Melissa.  Alain and Sylvain showed me a quick tour of Toulon at sunset, which is a beautiful mediterranean city situated in a harbor.  No waves, but still absolutely beautiful.  Aunt Melissa has been feeding me since I arrived, and I'm realizing how great it is to have family here.  I couldn't have done this trip without them.  I'm not sure what I'll do for the next few days, but I'm kind of glad to be out of Paris.  The city was a bit overwhelming with all its hustle-and-bustle on the metro and in the streets, I don't know if I could live there for very long.  It's so nice to have some open space finally.  The cigales have been croaking (? I asked sylvain what the word was for the sound they make but he didn't have one, it's like a cicada)  all morning.  Melissa is already calling me to lunch, I guess I'm going to eat a lot here.  I'm fine with that.

blogging and all that jazz

salut tous

So I've decided to share a bit of my trip to France through this medium. After enjoying my cousin Annette's blog so much I realized that it's a great way to involve people with your life while abroad. so that aside...

I arrived a week ago in Paris and since then I've been having a blast. My Uncle Alain graciously asked his brother if I could come rest at his house for a bit before my cousin Raphael could meet me. This saved me. I had no idea how tired I would be and how confusing this city could be at first. The metro is a great system, however very confusing at first... I have the hang of it now, but let's just say that morning I repeatedly tried to exit through the enter. My backpack was much more heavy than I remembered it being when I weighed it at home.

As for my cousins, it's been really cool to get to know them more, and to have them help me with my everyday french. Raphael is working on his nursing degree, and for the past few weeks he's been working at a psychiatric hospital. He had to get up at 5 a.m. each morning, but we were able to get dinner in the evenings and watch the game between spain and germany together. I'm trying to speak only in French with people, and I'll usually ask someone who can speak both english and french to speak in French with me. It's what I'm here for. Occasionally with Raph I'd speak english and he would speak French, because we could understand each other well enough, but I'm sure it was funny to listen to. On Friday night, Raph took me to a birthday party which was right off the Seine in a beautiful old apartment building. It was really cool to chat with his friends and just have people my age to talk to after the long days of walking around Paris by myself. They're showing me just how much I have to learn; it's very different to speak the language with 20 year olds. After a couple hours we walked down to the Seine and hung out down there for a while where I saw (for the first time) the sparkling Eiffel Tower. I didn't know about it until I saw all the lights going off and on like flashes on thousands of cameras all concentrated on the tower. Wowoweewow.

Charles is an engineering project manager from my understanding, and he works in a region of Paris called La Défense. You can see it from a lot of places in Paris because it's the region where all of sudden, you have all these buildings shooting into the sky. I really like that about Paris actually, they keep most of the huge office buildings to this one area, which is completely different than most of the big cities I've been to in my life. He has a nice place in an area close to La Bastille. He took me out to the Centre Pompidou Saturday afternoon, which was interesting to say the least. The modern art there is very... modern. It definitely made me think about how little I know about the art world, and how someone can be called an artist today. Afterwards we took bikes to a bar to watch the Germany Uruguay game, which was super exciting for those of you who missed it. Paris has a public bike system called velib with stations all over the city. You can take a bike and then return it to a different station for free if you do it within 30 minutes, and if you don't it's around 1 euro for the day. I was seriously impressed with this idea for a public bike system. My roommate Danny proposed something like this for city planning class project, so it was really cool to see it in action after hearing about something like it from him.

I've done most of the big touristy stuff so far: walking on the Champs Elysées, the Eiffel tower, visiting the Latin quarter, touring some gardens. My friend Maxime Chevée told me his cousin could show me around Paris a bit, so we went to the Louvre, which was AWESOME. It was the first day I had someone to walk around with, but more importantly he was full of information on art history and Paris (in general). If I understood correctly (he spoke very quickly in French, but I needed some mental exercise), his mom teaches art history privately, so he kind of grew up with the artists and painting in the Grand Salon. It was a fantastic way to experience the Louvre.

ok enough for now. I really have to study some grammar so I can know where I'm making mistakes instead of feeling around blindly like a child. Although that hasn't been such a bad strategy so far...