Marché des Capucins, Creole food and that time I ran into a parked motorcycle...

Oyster tasting

Last weekend we visited the Marché des Capucins, the immense covered market that sells everything fresh from all kinds of raw and cooked meats, fresh and dried fruits, vegetables, nuts, oils, etc...and of course tons of different kinds of breads and pastries in every size and shape imaginable. And for a nice change they also had more ethnic food stands where you could buy Italian, Spanish, and Moroccan prepared food or ingredients! We've all found that after continually eating the traditional french staples of bread, ham, cheese, and 'nature' foods for so long (meaning not very many spices or strong flavors) we NEED some spicy food! Luce, one of our 'guardian angels' for the semester and a few of the middkids tried some oysters, while the others did a cheese tasting. Afterwards we did yet ANOTHER walking tour of Bordeaux for about 3-4 extremely long (and painfully annoying) hours.


On Monday we had a traiditional HUGE dinner with the neighbors that live in the house behind us – a mom, her daugher Rémi who’s 27 and doing her residency (I think), and her coloc Alban, who’s around the same age as Rémi and actually spent a few years in the states studying in Wisconsin at a small university, talk about having a small world! Dinner was amazing, Isabelle and Rémi’s mom spent about 3 hours in the kitchen cooking créole food - finally some spicy food! We had some great chicken and creole sausage in these amazing sauces, spiced rice and beans, and an amazing lemon meringue pie for dessert. Almost everyone had multiple glasses of wine, and the meal itself lasted from about 8pm until midnight! 

Tons of cheese, of course

This week a bunch of the middlebury kids got together for a pot luck since one of the girls on the program's french roommates were away for the night. We had kind of a mix of french and italian food - but topped it all off with the most enormous mountain of bread I've ever seen! The guy who brought it said he was going to get a regular baguette, but that was the only thing they had left - and it was about 10 times the size of a normal baguette here. Between about 10 of us we finished less than half of it!

Cannelés and Macarons - Bordeaux specialties

I finally registered to use VCUB this week, the extremely convenient city bikes program - there are about 100 stations all over the city, and you can just pick up a bike at whatever station you want and return it to whatever station you want for a really good price per month! But, me being a complete klutz I managed to run my bike into a parked motorcycle and almost fall off my bike within the first 30 seconds of me even being on it, almost run into about 5 old people, and almost get hit by a couple cars. Woops! Later that night we had an erasmus soirée in the center city for all the new exchange students to meet a bunch of french students who were coming back from their semesters/years abroad with exchange programs - and Karina, Amanda and I took charge of the dance floor for a few songs and taught a bunch of french girls the cotton eyed joe and then all danced the macarena together. Gotta love those oldies. 

         

         

Ma maison et le grève national

Living room

Dining room / living room

This week I finally got around to putting up my pictures and stuff on my walls and taking pictures of the house and my room!  The house is beautiful! It's located just north of the center city, which is on the other side of town from my university. Besides that, you can basically walk everywhere, and it doesn't take too long for me to walk or run to the center city from here, maybe half an hour of walking. And once you're in the center city, nothing is too too far away! The house is along the Quais, which are a great place to run, since they go along the brim of the whole city.


There's also a grand parc and a great public park near me, and of course many little boulangeries, specialty grocery stores, marchés, and little boutiques. So here's where I'm living (very comfortably!) for the next few months. The living room is joined with the dining room in a huge open space, which leads out to a patio in the back that has a little pool (I have yet to swim in it!) and deck. 

Back patio

This week continued to be hectic and confusing with classes, and I still haven't completely chosen all of them even though our registration is due Tuesday! In all I'll have tried out 12 different courses to finally decide on 7. My schedule is super unbalanced and front-loaded at the moment, so basically I kill myself on Mondays and Tuesdays with 6 hours of class but then only have 1 class on Wednesday and Thursday and nothing on Friday! Yesterday there was another general strike, this time about the debate over raising the retirement age. This country cannot exist without its strikes! Come on people, you already have a government-mandated 35-hour work week, most everything is closed on Sundays as the day of rest, and a lot of things are still closed on Mondays too. Is it really going to kill you to raise the retirement age two years from 60 to 62?!

Strikers

France already has one of the youngest retirement ages in the developed world! Anyway, public transportation was extremely dysfunctional and it took FOREVER to get wherever you needed to go, which was super frustrating. The buses basically weren't running at all, and the trams were only running one for every three that normally runs - meaning you could wait up to 20 minutes at a station when you would normally have to only wait around 5 minutes between trams! 

Room view from the patio

My room

The weather has finally started to cool down, which is especially good because the cold will kill all the mosquitos, which are absolutely awful here! One morning this week I woke up with 15 bites on my face. Yes, I counted them all because they were extremely visible (and extremely attractive, of course). This weekend if it's nice Karina, Amanda and I hope to do some day trips! Maybe to the beach, Biarritz, the Pays-Basque, Spain...who knows! That's definitely one of the most convenient things about Europe - you can just hop on a train and be in another country and culture in just a few hours, and it's not that expensive at all! 

My desk

Cooking and pique-niques

pique-nique in the public garden

Since I have no class on Fridays, Karina and I took a long run/walk along the quais and explored the Saint-Michel neighborhood, where there’s yet another farmers/flea market a few days a week. That part of town reminded me of Montmartre in Paris - which was one of my favorite places when we visited there – with all these small food and trinket vendors lining the streets. There were also soo many bargain stores down there that sell everything from shoes and bags to middle-eastern style dresses and even middle-eastern goods shops! Karina and I might have found our Halloween costumes for this year…Later I cooked dinner for about 3 hours with Isabelle, and everything turned out fantastic! I’m gradually learning cooking and ingredients terms in french, which is like learning yet another language in itself! We made a salmon and crème fraiche tart with veggies for the main course and an apple cake (which didn’t turn out magnificent but the apples tasted great!). With the apple cake I’m pretty sure I messed it up because I didn’t understand the ingredients or the instructions too well…oops!

outside the grand théâtre

On Saturday all the Middlebury kids had to take an exam at the Alliance Français – basically to make sure we’re competent enough to stay here and survive on the amount of French we know and can speak. Afterwards, we all went to the supermarket Auchan, which is essentially a combination of the biggest grocery store you’ve ever been in on the first floor, a continuation of the grocery store plus a bed bath and beyond on the second floor, and then a best buy on the third floor! It was MASSIVE and extremely overwhelming, especially because it was packed since everyone was doing their shopping on the weekend.

grand théâtre

Today it was beautiful and we had a pique-nique at the public garden with all the Midd kids and our maîtres, the three girls who are basically our ‘guardian angels’ while we’re here. They organize a bunch of cultural activities for us to do together, and they’re there if we ever need to ask them anything about the city, school, or just adjusting abroad. Most everyone was super original (not) and brought baguettes and cheese to the pique-nique, so thinking ahead I decided to bring something extremely American – popcorn! Afterwards we took yet another guided tour of the city (these are becoming extremely pointless and annoying because we’ve all been here for about 3 weeks and essentially know where all the major sights are). But this time we visited inside the Grand Théâtre, which was stunningly beautiful! Then this afternoon I made my famous blondies with toasted coconut, white and milk chocolate, and added toasted hazelnuts this time. Everyone absolutely devoured them! Guess I didn’t mess up the ingredients or measurements completely this time!

inside the grand théâtre

à la plage and classes start!

This past weekend my friends Amanda, Connie and I went to the beach at Arcachon with all the Erasmus kids. It’s only about 45 mins from here by tram, and only costs 10 euro to go there and back! And it was amazingly beautiful on Saturday too. The other kids doing the Middlebury program at sciences-po and Bordeaux 3 (concentrations in the humanities like languages, history, literature, law, etc.) are starting to arrive, which is exciting!
(Me and Connie -->)

I found a huge, amazing farmer’s market along the Quais (the area along the Garonne river, which runs to the right of the center city) on a run this weekend – which had everything from fresh produce to regional specialties, many types of pastries and breads, who knows how many kinds of cheeses, and even home made spices, honeys, and other special products. Can’t wait to do some shopping there!

This week we start the extremely confusing process of choosing our classes, and Monday was a disaster of a day. So the way the French system works to sign up for classes is: you attend whatever classes you want for the first two weeks, and only officially register for them after that. But since most of the classes are 1.5 hours per week and Midd is requiring that I take 14 hours of class per week, this comes out to about 7 or 8 different upper level classes (in French!) per week – and these classes would be hard enough in English! Which means in this ‘shopping’ for classes period, I’m trying out 10 or 11 different classes in order to eliminate any ones I don’t want – where I either don’t like the material or completely can’t understand anything the professor is saying at all. I was supposed to have 3 classes Monday, but only one actually ended up happening. The first two were cancelled within the first five minutes of the class with no notice before! Gotta love the efficiency of the bureaucracy here.

When I finally finished at sciences-po on Monday after wasting my entire day there and only going to one class, I went to take the tram home but after two stops it stopped for good. Someone came on the announcing system to say that there had been an accident with another tram, and that this one wasn’t going anywhere for a while. So a bunch of people including me started walking towards the center city – with no idea of when we’d be able to get back on. I passed the tram that had been in an accident – from what I could tell it was a head-on collision with a car! The trams don’t go very fast here, but it still could’ve been really serious! Not sure if anyone was hurt or not, but there was only one ambulance there and the entire front windshield of the tram was shattered. I ended up having to walk halfway home – about 8 stops on the tram. I live north of the center city, and my university is about 10 minutes south of the city, so it was a long trek! Instead of it taking around 45 minutes to get home as it normally would (or a little longer when it’s super crowded), it took me an hour and 45 minutes.

The process of trying and failing classes is pretty aggravating, but everything else is going super well! Isabelle never fails to cook a great meal whenever I eat here, and I’m exploring new parts of the city and discovering new, cool things about it all the time with my friends. Mostly we do a lot of window shopping, which may eventually lead to a major shopping spree…but we’re trying to hold back as best we can for now!

salut!

Decided I would keep a blog while I'm exploring and thoroughly enjoying my semester in France so I can keep everyone updated on all the awesome things I'll be doing and cool people I'll be meeting!

After exploring the extremes of France from metropolitan, tourist-flocked streets of Paris to the cobblestone roads of the medieval town of Loches with mom and dad, we finally arrived in Bordeaux and I've moved in with my new host family here. I've been here about a week now and it's amazing! I had a relatively rough start just like everyone else when they go abroad, but with each day it gets easier and so much better as I feel more and more comfortable with my french, my family, and all the new fun people I'm meeting! I've made a few extremely embarrassing language and cultural faux-pas already, but I'm learning from my mistakes (thankfully!) and every day is a new experience!

My host family consists of Isabelle, the mom, François her husband (who doesn't live at home most of the time because he works about 2 hours away in Angoulême), and two daughters - Noémie, who's 17 and studying for her BAC this year, and Pauline, who's 19 and starting her first year at Bordeaux University 3. There are 4 other older siblings too, but none of them live at home anymore. My host mom, Isabelle, always cooks great dinners for us! And unlike many of the restaurants we tried while traveling around France with mom and dad, we actually get vegetables with the meal here! The first night when mom and dad were here she prepared an all-out classical french feast, complete with apéritif, entrée, main course, cheese course, and dessert! I've been trying a lot of foods that I don't normally eat, like beef, pork, duck, and 'Paris mushrooms' (cèpes). One day this week Isabelle even asked me to make 'sauce barbeque' to go with a pork loin François was grilling for dinner! I didn't have a recipe or anything , so we found one and had to make some major substitutions and measurement guesses since half the ingredients don't even exist in France (like corn syrup and molasses) while the other half we just didn't have in the kitchen. The sauce actually turned out great and they all asked me to make it again though!

Me in front of Sciences-Po

I haven't had much wine yet, guess I have to acquire the taste first. My sisters are great! At first it was super hard to understand them because they talk so fast and use so much slang, but I'm gradually getting the hang of it. We hang out a lot and Pauline even took me out last week with her friends when I wasn't out with the group of other exchange students I've been hanging out with. Most of them are part of Erasmus, the european exchange student program. At Sciences-Po Bordeaux, the university I'm studying at this semester, there are about 200 exchange students - from 30 countries not counting any in Europe!

Place de la Bourse and the Mirroir de l'eau

There are only 3 other Americans so far so we've been doing all these activities Erasmus organizes like a scavenger hunt over the whole city of Bordeaux and picnics, to go along with international student orientation this week. Basically they're trying to make the culture shock of introducing us into a system (if you could even call it that) which is completely unstructured and disorganized so we all don't completely freak out when nothing smoothly as classes begin. Perfect example: I've only been here a week and have already had to navigate my way through two strikes and demonstrations! Whenever there's a strike, none of the trams can get through the center city (aka the way I get to and from school every day) so you have to navigate your way through all the protestors - adding a considerable amount of time to your traveling. Since arriving here, the most important thing I've learned so far is you have to take things as they are, and not get stressed about something if it doesn't happen the way you planned it to. What needs to get done will get done...eventually, and most times there's nothing you can do about it but just let things fall the way they will.

The monument aux Girondins in the city center

This week since we've only had orientation stuff and no actually full days of class, I've taken my time just exploring the city and taking lots of pictures of all the beautiful architecture, monuments and buildings. The city itself is so picturesque! And the mayor has been trying for the past few years to completely renovate the city to become pedestrian friendly, so there's a whole section of the centre-ville where cars aren't allowed whatsoever - most importantly on the shopping street Rue Saint-Catherine (the longest pedestrian shopping street in Europe!) and the streets branching off of it. Looks like I'll be buying a lot of clothes this semester!

the Grand Theatre - in the rain during our scavenger hunt

Classes officially start tomorrow. Oh boy...