It's an Easter miracle! We have internet!

Montpellier is a funny place to live. This weekend we’re hosting Rachel’s future roommate at Penn State who’s studying abroad in Rome this weekend and she woke up to the parade this morning wondering the same thing we wondered a few weeks ago, what is all that noise? The frenchies love to parade. Last Friday morning we were startled out of bed by the drums and looking out the window we saw a huge crowd of people dressed all in white waving flags with the number 38 painted on them. The next group to pass was purple with “79” flags, then the pinks with their “42”s… Today’s parade featured multiple groups of tweens in matching jogging suits. The parade was headed by a bunch of grandparent type figures with trumpets and other brass instruments, flanked with mom’s and strollers, and peppered with adults in matching jumpsuits. I heard that the last parade had something to do with a meeting of the engineering school’s in the south and this latest parade had something to do with celebrating club sports. When there was a pause in the flow, I watched one of the red-suits break out some tecktonik—the biggest dance craze in France, this is what it looks like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36e9kZcRWGI . This is not a joke. I repeat, this is not a joke, they actually dance like this. Well everyone under 20. We want to learn some tecktonik because it’s so funny, but none of our friends will teach us more than how to dance the making-fun-of-tecktonik dance. Also, the high schoolers wear tight bright blue tshirts, skinny jeans, and mullets (well the guys) all of the girls at the high school wear black skinny jeans, black shirts of some sort, and black high heels. I finally got internet! I’m not sure what I’m doing for Easter, I think Ariana and I will dress up and wander into one of those big cathedrals around. Then I plan on skyping the fam tomorrow! I’m excited to see everyone! Happy Easter! He is risen!

I loved Orange. It was so … provincial, and so Stillwater. It was Provence’s version of Stillwater. The differences? The colors, the colorful little houses, the vineyards, olive orchards, and Van Gogh trees lining streets and back yards. It was exactly what a provincial town should be. For our “historic” (that word has a much different meaning in France), for our historic lift bridge that we’re so proud about (one of what is it, three remaining? Or is it just us and Duluth now?) Orange has an ancient theater (one of three remaining). For our Main Street, Orange has a few store-lined streets. I even had a good café in Orange (100% Arabica from Sumatra—my favorite origin). And on the way out we grabbed a couple boxes of really good pizza to eat in the car. It was a great weekend. We spent some time in Pablo’s garage listening to band practice (how normal is that? totally). Wandered around his area (on one side of the house + yard there were grape vines, on the other rows of olive trees, perpendicular, a stream). Pablo’s house itself was very cool; his dad is an artist, so there were paintings hung amongst the murals. He does deco art, so it’s totally different from mom’s, but at the same time much like our house at home with the hung paintings and murals. Sunday I got to meet Loris’s nine-month baby sister Lio (for Lionella)—she was adorable! So smiley! That was after Loris’ mom took us to see how the French people vote (they had municipal elections on Sunday). We shook hands with the mayor. We did it because we were just following Loris and his mom (we didn’t know it was the mayor, just thought it was a friend); his mom thought we were hilarious for doing it. The weekend trip to Orange definitely ranks highly on my French experiences.

My presentation went well, I think. I think Allison was satisfied with it. We got together before hand to practice, I was trying to tell her that I had seven and a half hours of class on Monday’s so that I wouldn’t have a lot of time, but luckily she has my schedule memorized, so she thought that if I got out of class at 2:15 that would be plenty of time to take the tram back to Centre Ville, eat lunch, and return to Paul Valery at 3:15 for practice. I was late to practice, but the presentation still went alright. I’m looking forward to Wednesday lunch with Allison (she comes over almost every Wednesday for lunch before phonetics) without this project looming over our heads!

Mom sent me a couple pictures of Josie Jones, she’s adorable! I can’t wait to meet her! I also liked the display of your portraits at the exhibit, mom. I love getting pictures!

I feel like I should have something to write about, but life has been pretty usual in Montpellier for the last couple of weeks. I had plans to visit Cecile in Dijon last weekend but when I went to the train station to buy tickets there was a fire in a neighboring city so I was not able to buy the tickets. Because Cecile and her friends leave Dijon by March 30th for stages in different cities, I won’t be able to go after all. This weekend I’m going to spend a night in Orange. It would be a suburb of Avignon, except it has one of three remaining walls to an ancient theater—their claim to fame. Orange is where one of our social assistants and all of his friends are from so I’m going with a couple other Americans to see what life is like in a dinky little provincial town. Other than that I’m spending my time in school and my internship. I don’t do much for my internship, I shelve books and she’s in the process of putting barcodes on books so there are huge stacks of stickers and I spend my hours looking up the books that correspond with the numbers and putting the sticker on. This is the work that I do while my friends take Friday day trips to Avignon, Carcasonne, and the other ancient cities around the south. I’m working on getting a resume together for summer internship applications and I’m preparing for oral presentations—I have two twenty minute oral presentations to give this month. The first is not intimidating because it’s for my lit fantastique class and the rest of the students are Americans. I am also preparing a twenty minute presentation for my Paul Valery class on parody in the media, but reading about the history of French newspapers is actually very interesting to me. I’ve had a lot more time to read here. I bought a yoga book that cracks me up. I picked it because it was the cheapest yoga book at the used book store with the most pictures and is actually very helpful in setting up different routines, but it’s also a book made by the French singer Aria. It’s called Le Yoga De Ma Vie, “The Yoga of My Life.” In the first couple of pages she describes her travels around the world and how all of the cultures influenced her, but the most influential of her travels was to Las Vegas working at MGM. She talks about how she met this great Yogi Master there, “A little good man, but a great yogi master.” Later we read that the Yogi Master’s name is Shawn and that he studied under “the Great David Swenson.” Haha! Rachel and I joke about The Great Yogi Master Shawn now. The used bookstore by my apartment is one of my favorite places—it’s five floors! Mostly I spend my time outside where everything is under three euro. For a euro each I bought the fourth Harry Potter in French, and a CD called Les 20 Tubes de Vos 20 Ans: 1987 (the top twenty most popular songs in France in 1987, “Walk Like an Egyptian” is thrown in amongst the French eighties music). Well, I’m off to work on my lit fantastique presentation, I’m giving it with a chemical engineering major, so, we have some structural disagreements to work out—it might make you laugh to imagine us working together. Allison expects that literature, like anything in life, should be logical, chronological, plug-and-chug, without ambiguities. She doesn’t trust that Lit classes are my strong suit because I told her that it didn’t matter if her socks were two different colors of black. Poor Allison, I quoted a poet my last English prof always quoted, “Allison, you can’t tie literature to a chair and torture meaning out of it, you have to walk inside it and feel the walls for a light.” It was probably the scariest thing she’s ever heard from someone whose grade is tied to hers. Our presentation is on Monday and it will probably be the best because of the different mindsets we have (Allison's on the grade, mine on the piece itself).

whoa, did i seriously post that at 8:48? I've already have most of my day behind me! I'm just about to head out for dinner and church with Ariana.

Okay, I have eight minutes and I'm dealing with a French keyboard, but I wanted to say Thanks Grandma, Grandpa, Mom, and Dad for the Valentine's Day presents, and Jill and Suz for the cards! I loved getting them!

Also, last week I was walking home through the Place de la Comédie and the acordian player was playing as usual, but I saw something that really made me smile-and I think it will make you smile too. France isn't so different from home because I saw a little boy of about four years dancing to the music dressed in his batman cape--just like Will's! Ears, eyeholes, everything. His hair was probably white blonde underneath that disguise :)

Also, I don't think I wrote this before, but Kebabs are extremely popular in the south of France, there's a kebab restaurant every six steps in Montpellier. The first night I was here (the jet lag/dramamine night) I stumbled across one called "l'Oasis." I took a picture of it because I thought it would make you guys smile to know that if I ever feel like it after church one Sunday, I could head down to the Oasis to get a kebab and maybe some hashbrowns.

Two minutes, not bad, I'm getting better with this rearranged keyboard ;)

Flocon de Neige

The Alps were gorgeous. We arrived in Vallouise, a little alpine village, late Friday night. Saturday morning we were all up early for breakfast and a ride to the slopes. We went to a relatively small chalet, but it certainly wasn’t Afton Alps. The pistes (slopes) seemed to have no middle option—I went from a green slope (the bunny hill) to the summit (red or black slope options there). I was skiing with a group of French students that came on the excursion with us—they started calling me “flocon de neige” (“snowflake”) because I always seemed to be covered from head to toe in snow. I would be skiing down the slope and trying to make a sharp turn, and I’d just lean back a little bit too far so that my butt would grace the side of the mountain; once that happened, my body would pivot I’d flip over, my skis would be crossed behind me, my arms out front, and I’d slide down the slope on my stomach like a penguin until the steepness wore off a little bit. I never got hurt (probably due to a lot of pre and post ski stretching) so all of my wipe-outs were mostly a lot of fun.

Hopla, it was a long week. I started classes, attended carnival, and I’m getting ready for a weekend in the alps! My classes are great. I have four classes with the other Americans in my program (grammar, phonetics, internship class, and literature fantastique) and two linked classes in the actual Paul Valery program. The Paul Valery classes are interesting, I cannot believe French students. On Tuesday morning Andrew and I (the other American in my P-V course) showed up to the classroom on time. We sat down in the third row (Andrew didn’t want to sit in front) and waited for about ten minutes, wondering if the classroom was switched or the class was cancelled. About ten minutes after the class was supposed to start the French students showed up (and filled the back of the class, so Andrew and I were alone in the front row) and then the professor showed up. Throughout the lecture the students chatted. I can’t imagine what an American professor would do if students chatted like that through the class.

Tuesday night I came home from my internship at the American Library and carnival had started. They started up by the arc de triomphe and there were a couple different drumming groups with dancers, the crowd followed the drums around town. Later, it was like Halloween—everyone had very bizarre costumes (though I did see a couple of Harry Potters) and they followed this train made out of junkyard scraps and the drummers. It was cool, a fun experience.