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.