audrey tautou and team tandoori

I’m determined to soak up as much sun as possible, but also ashamed about my lack of blogging. So today I compromise: I’m currently sitting in the quiet courtyard outside of my apartment, where the sun’s early-afternoon rays create a speckled show of light and shadow before hiding themselves behind the building for the hottest part of the day. I’m probably straining my eyes to the point of blindness to see the screen and text beyond the sunny glare but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.

Many modifications need to be made to the post before this because things have certainly changed. First and foremost (and perhaps saddest of all) is the fact that Paul and I are no longer getting chickens. Please take the time you need to process this news and its implications (no fresh omelets?!) before moving on. Unfortunately, Paul’s dad made him warn the neighbors that we’d be housing two poules in our miniature back yard, and some bitter single woman on the 6th étage (that’s the 7^th floor, folks) rejected the idea. People on the 7^th floor shouldn’t even get a vote. Anyone need a chicken coop?

Anyway, here’s a question for you guys to ponder: who knew volcanoes (and Iceland at that) were things worthy of our attention? After a tedious series of plane cancellations and reschedulings, my mom decided to postpone her visit to the end of May. Which, along with a most conveniently timed SNCF strike, left Tyler stranded in Paris for 5 days. Stranded? In Paris? Life is hard.

Luckily, I spent very little time alone. When I wasn’t visiting museums (a grand total of five), drinking coffee (I am obsessed with Paris’ café culture – they are everywhere!), or seeing plays starring Audrey Tautou from the second row of the Théâtre de la Madeleine, I had Gina, a friend from governor’s school who’s been studying abroad there all year, show me some of the finer aspects of Paris, most of which involved food. I finally fulfilled my 3-month-old craving for blueberry pancakes at Breakfast in America, an experience that made all 129,600 minutes of waiting worth it. [Interjection: a balloon just hit me in the head. No idea where it came from.] Also delicious were Berthillon ice cream and the yummy chicken dinner served by Gina and her friends at her host-family-free apartment on Saturday night. Additionally, I was fortunate enough to meet up with Kimberly, a friend from Davidson studying abroad in Paris, and we added a free play at the Théâtre le Temple to our food list of Pizza Pino and falafel in the Place des Vosges. Liz, a friend from my program in Lyon, made it up to Paris Sunday afternoon with her mom, and in addition to being graciously treated to an Italian risotto dinner, Liz and I wandered up and down the Champs-Elysées before we got ice cream and I returned to my hotel to prepare for my early-morning train back to Lyon (which I reserved only after waiting in line for over an hour and a half at the Gare de Lyon Saturday afternoon).

I was in Lyon for a grand total of 3 hours before JL and I met up for a terrace lunch at Au Petit Café Rose and spontaneously decided to buy train tickets to Nice. (Her trip to Greece was canceled because of the volcano.) After about a day and a half of studying (read: napping) in the sun next to the Rhône, she and I boarded, along with Ned, our train to Nice and rolled into the city’s beautiful gare around 11:30. Franny, a friend from Crozet doing a teaching assistantship in Nice was kind enough to let us crash in her apartment for the two nights we were there, and she showed us such a good time! In hindsight, we did very little that didn’t involve food, the sun, or beer. I think what struck us most about the city was all of its color: the bright oranges/corals/yellows of the buildings in Vieux Nice, the magnificent shades of Mediterranean blue…in Nice you are constantly confronted with a palette of vibrantly beautiful colors.

Activities included: Indian Lounge, the best Indian restaurant I’ve ever been to (I had what was easily among my top 3 favorite meals in France). Watching the OL soccer game at a bar called Thor on Wednesday night. Lounging on the rocky beach all day Thursday followed by a raspberry-lime milkshake at Fenocchio and then pub quiz at Ma Nolan’s. Crêpe lunch with Franny before catching our rainy-day train back to Lyon Friday afternoon.

In short, Spring Break ’10 (part two I suppose) was completely unexpected but entirely satisfying. It was so nice to get away for a while, but at the same time it's always comforting to return to a familar place. Spent the weekend in a happy stupor before returning to earth to study for the two finals I had this week. 2 down, 3 to go, and it’s the weekend. Time to meet up with my favorite Austrians for a picnic on the berges.

pissenlit pause

Spent a much-needed (can’t emphasize this enough) but inevitably short weekend in the country. Words can’t even begin to describe how nice it was to get away from the tangibly heavy gray of Lyon and bask in the colorful French campagne, where sweeping streaks of sky blue intersect with grass green, and splotches of bright yellow and terracotta red cut through the landscape as if smeared on with palette knife.

Due to last week’s SNCF grève (what?! strikes?!), Paul and I had to catch our bus Saturday morning from far-away end-of-the-metro Gare de Vaise. Unintended advantage: the trip only cost 2€! We made our way from city outskirts through industrial banlieues then rural villages before arriving 45 minutes later at the Villefranche-sur-Saône (birthplace of Claudius Crozet!) train station, where we were greeted by friendly-faced Madame Michel and driven to Paul’s house in Frans.

After a delicious home-cooked meal (one of many served to me graciously by Mme and M Michel), Paul and I spent the afternoon planning and constructing a chicken coop. That’s right, come May 1 he and I will welcome two feathered friends into our proud 65 rue Pasteur family, a prospect about which we are both very excited. Updates to come, but do know that omelet-craving visitors are encouraged to come over. Below is an image of the finished product, a fine piece of craftsmanship given our limited resources (this puppy is constructed from scraps lying around the garage and therefore a total of four types of wood) and amateur carpentry skills:

Otherwise, time was spent reading and drinking coffee on the porch, driving along meandering dirt roads straddled on either side by kilometers of sprawling fields, being treated to a dinner of pizza and wine by Marie’s parents at house-turned-restaurant Chez Dany, and visiting Paul’s fowl-owning friend Pierre whose house – built by his father – is probably one of the most charming ones I’ve seen in France. In other words, the weekend was all about taking advantage of the sun and beautiful weather as much as possible before returning begrudgingly to Lyon. The campagne spoils me.

I leave tomorrow for Paris, where I’ll spend two days alone attending plays, visiting museums, and wandering around its many and varied quartiers before Mom meets me there Friday morning! From Paris we’ll head to the Normandy coast where we’ll discover Mont St. Michel, the D-Day beaches, and hopefully eat lots of yummy cheese, and then we’ll end our mini French tour in Lyon. I’m so excited about her visit; it certainly couldn’t come at a better time, and I can’t wait to introduce her to this country. Echoing my conversation with Liz earlier today, time is passing ridiculously quickly, but I’m oddly comfortable with – and even looking forward to – my return to Charlottesville in just a month and a half. And when I get bored of that, I’m reassured by the fact that it’s only a matter of time before I return to France for who knows how long…

"monsieur _____ n'est pas là aujourd'hui. il s'excuse."

Copy and paste the post below this into a tidy mental document and welcome yourselves to the redundancy that is my life.

When I first started this blog, and particularly during the first two weeks of the semester when many of my classes were canceled, I considered sharing with you some of these stories because I thought them something extraordinary.

How wrong I was.

Since then, class cancellations have become a mundane, albeit irritating, part of la vie française, occurring on a weekly (if not twice-weekly) basis and almost always without warning. And when you've already only got six classes a week and therefore more free time than you know what to do with, this is something that gets really old really fast.

But I guess this is all just part of the authentic French experience I was looking for, right?

P.S. This is seriously not helping my already severe lack of motivation. Davidson workload, I never thought I'd say this, but tu me manques. Yes, I am that desperate.

this keeps happening to me...

Alarm goes off at 6h50. Immediately press snooze.

5 minutes later, it goes off again. Snooze.

Pattern cyclique.

7h15 now. Coffee’s on the stove, don’t remember how it got there.

Hot and hurried shower. Hastily habillé.

Coffee’s ready, bubbling, steamy.

Timid tongue, small sips: still too hot.

Acidic orange, juice beads strung together at the corners of my

mouth, toast-and-jam crunch.

Empty inbox, ten degrees Celsius and sunny, so early that

friends from home are online.

Conversations of clicks and taps, then

Goodnight! - Good day!

7h45: backpack back-packed, straight-shot four-block walk.

Matin smokefog greeting at the IEP entrée. “Bienvenue!”

Flyer dodge, paper pick-up, climbing stairs two by two.

I’m early.

Today’s news stained with ink-smeared thumbprints.

….Waiting, waiting…Speculation.

8h30: still no prof. Proof?

Departing by threes and twos ‘til we’re one: me.

No class, no word.

Typical.

On a completely unrelated note, some pictures of the kinds of alien clouds I was talking about in my last post (as requested by Ashley):

españa part 4: 300 days of sun? yeah right.

I’m sorry, Spain: I’ve been remiss. I blame the weather.

Spring is here and the manpris are out. Which means I spend my hours outside along the berges reading and people- and cloud-watching rather than inside blogging. Seriously though, the clouds lately are so mesmerizing. They glow with afternoon sunlight like they’ve swallowed some kind of radioactive poison and make me feel like I’m trapped inside of a painting.

But it’s pouring now. I can hardly hear my music over the thunder rumble and heavy patter of rain against my kitchen window.

So let’s talk about Valencia:

I rolled into Balenthia (as the Spaniards pronounce it) at night and the only thing motivating me to get off of the most comfortable train I’ve ever been on (thank you, Euromed) was the prospect of seeing Liz after months of failed European réunions. Seeing a face from home on this side of the pond is always so refreshing and has a way of shrinking the world, even if temporarily. In a nutshell, my visit to Valencia consisted of the two of us café-hopping, laughing, sharing stories about our experiences abroad, and marveling at the fact that we never met each other until first year at UVA despite the horde of common acquaintances we have in Charlottesville.

(Hey, Liz!)

For those of you unsatisfied with this brevity, here are some details:

- As we left the train station and headed by foot to my hostel, I immediately had the impression that Valencia is the Spanish version of Lyon. To name a few similarities: they’re big but not overwhelmingly so (in fact, both cities are the third largest of their respective countries); while their populations are at once old and young, they’re mostly dominated by college-aged students; architecturally speaking, traditional and modern blend together as one, although there are distinctively historic barrios (the Spanish word for quartiers) that are separate from their contemporary counterparts; both cities orient themselves around nature (Lyon its rivers, Valencia its rio turned orange-tree-scattered parque) and a linear series of plaças; and both are completely different (although equally as beautiful) at night than they are during the day.

(follow the redbrick road)

(part of the ciudad de las artes y las ciencias)

- Food: People eat late in Spain. As in restaurants are still packed at midnight. Which is why we were lucky, considering it was the peak hour of 11:00pm, to find a table for two at some great, side-street taberna (tavern) upon my arrival. Highlights from this dining experience include my introduction into the world of tapas and our awesome waitress whose enthusiastic, wide-smiled, belly-rubbing gestures convinced us to order the mystery-meat dish pictured below. She was also kind enough to punctuate our meal with free glasses of mistela, a kind of traditional post-dinner fortified wine (correct me if I’m wrong). Also memorable was Friday’s authentic paella lunch. Whether from pre-siesta exhaustion or some other inexplicable reason, Liz and I had a bad case of the giggles. We therefore found it particularly difficult to suppress our laughter among my futile attempts to remove a snail from its shell, a discussion of dishes that shouldn’t be eaten on a first date (paella is definitely one of them), an alarmingly high number of miserable-looking mother-father-daughter threesomes, and a restaurant-wide struggle to eat what looked like rock-hard pieces of piña (pineapple).

(mmm, goat cheese and mystery meat)

- Thursday night, we headed to the apartment of some of Liz’s amigos for a night of conversation and music. Red wine, Spanish, the orange incandescence of scalding metal: all of these kept me in a heightened state of vertigo. I was at once detached and present. I listened as seemingly accentless words poured like a steady flow of water from Liz’s mouth (seriously, Liz, yo’ español is impressive), understanding some of them, but mostly floating somewhere just beyond the walls, observing the scene as if through some distorted bubble.

(l'auberge espagnole)

As much as I hated the idea of leaving Spain, I was forced to hop aboard my train Saturday afternoon after drinking one last freshly squeezed zumo de naranja (orange juice) and saying goodbye to Liz. My train led me to Barcelona, where I met up with Denis, a Frenchman I’d found on covoiturage.fr (a legitimate carpooling website where you can find rides in people’s cars for nearly half the cost of other forms of transportation), who was to drive me the 7.5 hours back to Lyon (oops, I may have left this detail out when talking to you about my plans, Mom and Dad). After throwing my bags into Denis’ radioless ’93 Mercedes-Benz, he and I set off. The time passed remarkably quickly; night fell and the headlights came on somewhere among the Pyrenées Mountains, and we spent most of the time talking, comparing and contrasting the two countries (Denis had lived in Spain for three years and was in the process of moving back to France) among other things. We stopped at a typical side-of-the-highway service station to grab a couple of sandwiches and cafés for dinner, and entered the familiar territory of Lyon just after midnight. Denis dropped me off just in front of my apartment, where I plopped immediately into bed and fell asleep to the dizzied slideshow of Spain running on repeat in my head.

And for some reason I never thought that nearly a month and a half later I’d still be writing about it. ¡Adios at last, y’all!

another market meal

It's Sunday, which means another delicious post-marché midi:

(couscous, poivron vert, oignon, et saucisse de toulouse

sautés avec huile d'olive, sucre, sel, et herbes de provence)

("homemade" pita chips baked with olive oil and thyme)

(bon appétit!)

You're right, Dad : I do have a food fixation. But can you blame me?

isn't this what adults do?

Here’s a recap of my morning:

Woke up naturally at 9:00 (what?! on a Saturday?!) and had breakfast with Paul (toasted baguette topped with olive oil and coarse salt à l’espagnole) before he set off to Paris for the night and Nantes for the week. (Which means I’m alone until next Saturday – visitors are welcome.)

Went for a short run along the berges (third time this week!) and headed to the market for a pastry and some fresh cheese.

Showered and then took my time over a cup of coffee while reading articles from Le Figaro and Courier International and listening to the smooth rhythms of Ratatat playing on repeat in the background (thanks to Sarah for the sweet recommendation).

There’s a cool breeze coming in through the open window. It’s raining but it’s warm. I think I’ll spend the afternoon au cinéma.

Is this what they call "growing up"?