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.