Santorini!

Hello! I'm writing you from the beautiful Santorini island, the furthest greek island away from Greece. I took a seven hour ferry to get here on Tuesday, and it was really enjoyable. I found myself disapointed when I arrived and am looking forward to the ferry ride back to Athens. It was just very relaxing; four friends and I spent the morning sitting in a glassed-in part of the upper deck profiting from the beautiful views of incredible cobalt blue sea and misty islands off in the distance as well as the green-house warmth of our spot just away from the wind. We spent the hours reading and they passed in a flash. We arrived in Perissa in the afternoon and got picked up from the port by a cute old greek guy named John, who took us up the winding road to his hostel. In Santorini now it's off-season, so the fifteen people in our hostel make up most of the population, but it's been really relaxing. We have found really good food for the lowest prices in Europe, become well aquainted with a 24-hour bakery, and walked to "center" (a couple of tiny super markets and a go kart track) for a whipped coffee. Today I went on a fabulous day tour with a couple of my friends. We hopped on to this pirates-of-the-caribbean-ish boat with a senior tour and enjoyed the day out on the sea. We first stopped at a beautiful volcano and had great views of the main island and the vast blues of the sea and sky from the top of the volcano. We felt a few hot steam shoots and threw around the light lava rocks. Our next stop were "hot springs." We jumped off of the boat into FREEZING cold water in order to swim to the luke warm pockets of water. By the time we made it back out to the boat, our bodies were so numb that it was actually kind of nice to be swimming around. It did take a little bit of time after the swim for the system shock to wear off as parts of my de-numbed one by one. Our next stop was Thirassia, where we took donkeys zig-zagging up the steep island cliffsides to a little village of two-hundred people. We ate the only meal offered at the only restaurant up there on a patio looking out over the ocean and the islands (gorgeous!!!!) Our last stop was Oia for the famous sunset. Unfortunately it was cloudy, so we didn't get to see the sun set, but the town was really cool. If you've ever seen the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, you might have a good idea what it looked like, because the Greek part of that book was set on Santorini island and the movie tries to capture the look of Oia.

Now I'm back in Perissa, with a little bit of sunburn, ready to say hi to our twenty-four hour bakers, and spend a night in reading! I just got to talk to my dad a little bit, and I'm ready for bed! I hope you're all doing well! Love, abbie

A couple minutes in Athens

Hello friends and family! I'm now writing you from Greece! After showing up to registration time for next semester's classes I have just ten minutes left of Internet time before getting the boot. Athens is fabulously warm. Today we marched to the top of the Acropolis (with the Parthenon and all of the ancient theaters dating back to before Jesus' time) and then went to the beach where I was the crazy Minnesotan who jumped in the salty Mediterranean. Tonight and last night all five of us stayed at a couch surfer's apartment (the cheapest way to travel through Europe) and we have 7 am boat tickets for our 7 hour long ferry ride to Santorini.
I just left Paris, where I spent the weekend with Mom, Will, Liza, and Will's friend Olivia. We did a LOT of walking there—we only took two metro rides the entire weekend! We saw the Louvre and Musee d'Orsay, the Eiffel Tower. Paris is MUCH more beautiful in the spring than in the rainy winter and it was really nice to walk along the Seine river reciting poems I know on the Seine in my head (La Seine a de la chance, elle n'a pas de souci...)
The week before Mom spent in Montpellier. We made it to the beautiful city of Avignon and the cool industrial fishing town of Sete (the biggest French port on the Mediterranean). Her favorite meal was eating salad and fish with my friends at my apartment.
The weekend before that I met mom and Will in Milano—a gorgeous city! (if expensive!). It has the best window shopping and people watching in the world I think. Italians let their kids be loud and their dogs play. I really enjoyed sitting in their big park and climbing the thirty meters of spiraling stairs to the top of the Duomo.
Well, sorry this post is just stacked events, but, yipes! I only have a couple minutes left!
I love you and miss you all and will be home bientot! (I cannot believe how bientot!) See you soon!

I can’t believe how fast time is flying by; because of the two week spring break, I have just three weeks left living in Montpellier, and my mom will be here for one of them (she is now in Europe! I’m meeting her and Will in Milan on Friday morning). I hope you all had a lovely Easter—mine was pretty low key, I went out to the Creperie with Rachel, saw Juno, had a chicken nugget happy meal for dinner, and skyped the fam. I loved getting to be in contact with everyone at my house on Easter! I was super bummed that I couldn’t figure out the video thing at first. I figured it out while talking to Sophie and Alyx, and let me tell you, discovering Olivia sitting quietly there on that bench gave me such a happy surprise that I’ll remember it for ten years! She told me about ballet and Cinderella, and I told her I liked her haircut, and we gave each other kisses through the webcam—it was fabulous! Then I spent a couple hours skyping Will and exchanging funny stories. I really enjoyed Easter.

Monday Rachel’s friend Sara flew back to Rome and my friend Miles came for a visit. He goes to Macalester, is best friends with Liza’s boyfriend Mike, and is studying in Denmark. He mostly came to visit our Macalester friend Diana, but I was happy to host him for the week.

Liza came on Friday night! It was the best weekend I’ve spent in Montpellier. Not only did she pick our first nice-weather Saturday, she picked Francois’ birthday weekend so she got to meet almost everyone. We spent Saturday at the beach collecting shells and digging our feet into the soft sand, and then we got to eat at our friend Diana’s host family’s house! She got to see our Dr. Seuss music park (that’s what I call it), eat dried strawberries from les Halles, get a Crepe at Café du Theatre, and be “disco” with all of the frenchies. And I dragged her into my favorite stores—a lamp store and a children’s bookstore called Nemo that I spend hours in.

Some things I may not have written before: only café’s are open on Sundays, so you have to make sure to buy enough groceries on Saturday for two days. If you forget groceries, you can survive with the cafes, but Rachel and I have had more than one miserable Sunday because we forgot to buy toilet paper. Toilet paper is mostly pink, and ours smells like peaches (though I hate the scented toilet paper, it’s my turn to buy the next pack, and I’ll just go for the plain pink paper). At home my goal was always to get rid of my coins, here my goal is to get coins—and there are many! There’s the 2 Euro coin, the 1 euro coin, the 50 centime, the 20 centime, the 10 centime, the 5 centime, the 2 centime, and the 1 centime. The 1 centime’s are useless; I don’t know why they exist. And the 2 centimes annoy me too. On the other hand, at least they’re marked! Our coins in the US have no numbers on them, so foreigners must have trouble!

Well, as I said, I’m meeting Mom and Will in Milan this weekend. Then mom will come home with me, and we’ll meet up with Will again in Paris. From Paris I’m going to spend a week in Greece with my friends for spring break! I have one more week of spring break after that and I haven’t decided what I’m going to do, but I think I’ll try to go to Normandy beaches and see another region of France. I’ll see you all bientot!

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.