Spain and Allez-Bordeaux...les Girondins

Bayonne

Since Thursday was a  jour ferié for Veterans Day and our classes were cancelled, Karina and I decided to take the opportunity to head over to Spain for 2 days! Unfortunately for us, we didn’t realized that on holidays the trams all run 30 minutes apart…so we almost missed first train leaving from Bordeaux! We made it just in time to jump on our Lunéa train (sleeper train – first one I’ve ever taken) and got the best sleep I’ve had in what seems like months ! We got to Bayonne, a little town in the Pays-Basque (but still technically in France) 3 hours later very well rested. It was much smaller than I expected! Looking at a map it seems pretty decently sized, but we saw basically all the sites in 2 hours, explored the whole city, and took our time scoping out restaurants for lunch. We eventually found this restaurant with regional, pays-basque cuisine, some amazing fresh seafood.

Karina and I exploring Bayonne

Next we started making our way to San Sébastien (also in the Pays-Basque, but actually in Spain). We had to transfer trains right over the border between Spain and France in a dinky little train station called Irún, so our ‘customs check’ was some people screaming at us in Spanish to see our train tickets, then shoving our bags through a scanner to make sure we weren’t carrying any bombs or firearms of course – not that the guys sitting at the scanner were paying any attention. How about that for a nice first welcome to Spain experience? Since our last train was around 15 minutes late and we only had 16 minutes between trains, we ran onto our next train (thankfully the right one!) and were on our way to San Sebastién! Upon stepping into the station, we quickly realized – no one speaks any French OR English AT ALL! And we pathetically realized we know virtually zero Spanish whatsoever. We didn’t even have a guide book with little useful phrases for tourists in the back of it.

San Sebastién

the beach!

The city itself is really beautiful, mostly all the buildings are done in the same architectural style (though I couldn’t for the life of me say what century it was from or anything) in some kind of yellow-tinted stone. It’s also right on the beach, and has a beautiful coastline – which we took advantage of on Friday since it was really warm out – a nice change from all the rain we’ve been having in Bordeaux! In the morning we explored a bunch of the city’s sights, then had to find a little internet café so I could register for classes for spring semester at Midd. Such a nice change from the environment when we register back at school – getting up super early so everyone in your grade can register at exactly 7am on the dot, have the system crash a few times, and not get into the classes you want so you’re frantically emailing professors asking to be put on the waitlist. Not bad that I got to do it for just a couple minutes in the middle of a beautiful day in the north of Spain. Then after I finished relatively quickly we headed to the beach, where we stayed until the end of our short visit and had to catch the train back to Bordeaux. It was a nice little preview, but I really want to go back and visit for longer some day!

City Hall

Saturday night I went to my first soccer match here – Girondins (Bordeaux’s team) vs. Nancy-Lorraine. Not exactly as exciting as the world cup games, but fun all the same. A bunch of the middlebury kids went together, and we were in the section right next to what would be the ‘superfans’ or the student section at a university game – they were super loud and kept the cheers going the entire match without even a minute’s break! In the end we won 2-1, after being awarded a controversial goal in the last few minutes of the match!

Toulouse

Biggest coffee I've found so far in France!

Last weekend I visited Toulouse with Noémie, first to visit and stay at her grandparent’s house and then with her cousins (François’ sister), who are 18 (Joséphine) and 16 (Rose-Marie). It was SUPER FUN. We left Friday morning and took the train, then eventually meandered our way to the grandparents house – which was pretty hard because even though Noémie had been there before she has no sense of direction whatsoever so we got lost and had to ask a bunch of strangers where the tiny little street her grandparents live on is. When we finally found their house, they of course treated us like any normal grandparents would – and forced us to eat much more than we normally would have! Over our whole stay, I tried a whole bunch of new foods – rabbit, mussels, beets, and this jelly made of a fruit that I’ve never heard of before called a ‘coing’, or a quince in English I think? Noémie’s grandfather makes home made jams so it was super good!

The rest of the weekend we spent exploring the city and its sights, doing some shopping to find Noémie some new shoes so she would stop complaining about her feet hurt so much, and stopping every few hours to relax and have coffee in whatever café we stumbled upon. We also stayed over at Joséphine’s one night, so I got to meet her family for dinner, then meet a bunch of her friends and hang out with them later. Hanging out with them was like learning a whole other language though! Since I’ve been living with my host family I’ve picked up on a bunch of ‘familiar french’ words (slang) that they use every day, but being completely immersed and surrounded by students around my age the whole weekend made me pick up on a lot really quickly – which was good because at first I had almost no idea what half the words they were saying meant!

embarassing...this is for you Noémie!

So when we were out shopping we passed a sign for a little restaurant / smoothie place called Banana Land, and Noémie absolutely spazzed and demanded that I take a picture with the sign. Story behind that: when Isabelle first asked me what I liked to eat for breakfast so she would know what to buy me, I said I wouldn’t mind at all just eating cereal every morning with fruit. So when they finally realized that I liked bananas and that I put them on my cereal – god forbid with milk – they thought it was so weird! So now the whole family makes fun of me for eating bananas. Any time there’s any mention of a banana anywhere they go “DANA! YOUR FAVORITE FOOD! BANANA!!” So that’s what they introduce me as to their friends…the American who only eats bananas and is allergic to ‘preservatifs’ (from my extremely embarrassing first day faux-pas).