And it goes by the name of London

I find myself no longer talking about France on this blog but of my travels outside Rennes.  And that is exactly what this entry is too!  Maria, Erika, Lauren and I spent 4 non-stop, no-sleep days in the UK capitol.  But the first thing that should be cleared up about Londoners is that they are the COOLEST big city people.  Everywhere we went people would give us direction, give us advice, make our lives easier...even the bus drivers would stop the ENTIRE bus to let us take pictures (London is full of double deckers so they do cause a problem site-seeing wise).  Basically awesome people, period. 
On the other hand, the weather was bipolar the entire trip and couldnt decide whether or not it wanted to rain or pour or just be windy to piss everyone off.  This weather did nothing to deter us from our mission. Harry Potter.  We got to our hostel on Wednesday night at 11, slept as best we could in a 16 person mixed room, and got up at 2:00 to walk to Leicester Square where the premier would be.  And so the waiting began.  And then the rain.  We took turns coming in and out of neighboring telephone booths and taking food breaks at the McDonalds around the corner.  I have never been so thankful of the golden arches in my entire life.  So after 8 hours of waiting outside, we all got herded inside the premier gates.  After another 8 hours of standing and being rained on and pushed from all sides, the premier opened.  You know how premiers look on tv when you are watching them from the comfort of your own home?  And you think, "Those people are certifiable."? That was us. And we are proud of it.  After pictures and attempted autographs, all of the stars filed into the cinema and we left to get some substantial food in our stomachs.  Aside from gummies, trail mix, and madeleines, we hadnt eaten since 5 that morning.  Long fucking day, but totally worth it (even though it didnt seem like it at the time).
Friday, we got up and made out way to Abbey road.  We got lost after mixing up directions on our map and caved in to take a cab.  Taking a cab in london is almost cheaper than taking the underground; plus, they are all decorated on the outside to stand out from the rest of the traffic. After posing on Abbey road (with the perfect number for a reconstruction of the album cover) we walked to Camden market and weaved through the hundreds and hundreds of shops in the area.  Next destination was Kings Cross.  We found a sign indicating platforms 8, 9, and 10 that were behind a security checkpoint.  Luckily, the station has adapted well to the tourists and has built a fake wall labeled "Platform 9 3/4" with a half a trolly sticking out of the brick.
Finally, Saturday we took the mandatory walk on Parliament street to peek at the Prime Ministers digs and see the real sites of London: Big Ben, the Eye of London, the Thames, Westminster Abbey, Westminster Cathedral, and Buckingham Palace.  Things happened in between but they are rather boring bits about walking and staying up all night so I think I will skip over that!

Congé de la Toussainte

English translation- Fall Break.  La Toussaint is All Saints Day which is an actual holiday in France; the banks are closed, markets are open from 10-13h, and families pass the day by wandering around Centre Ville and window shopping at all of the closed boutiques. 

Let's rewind to last Monday where I left for Dublin to join up with Maddi.  I had meal of fish and chips with a pint of Kilkenny; I had been craving something, anything fried for weeks!  People just dont fry their fish in France.  We took a tour around her neighborhood then took the doubledecker bus to the center of town to walk around Temple Bar.  Here's the problem with doubledeckers-the stairs.  They are steep and narrow and the sudden start/stop of the bus puts you in constant danger of knocking out your teeth on the handrails that are supposed to support you.  When we got to downtown, we recounted a scene from Once (where Glen's guitar case full of change gets stolen and chased down in the park; I have pictures). 

On Wednesday, we got a 4 o'clock start to catch the RyanAir flight to Edinburgh.  Sidenote- RyanAir is cheap for a reason. Super sketch, played one loop of orchestra music before takeoff, and another song upon landing (as if it was a surprise success that we actually landed).  On the bright side, we got to Edinburgh bright and early.  On the less bright side, we had all of our luggage and had no place to put it; the hostel wouldnt open until 2 for Check In.  So what do you do in Scotland to kill time?  Go to a Tartan shop!  Every pattern of tartan relates to a specific Scottish clan and you can have a special kilt tailored for you in your desired tartan.  We hiked around Edinburgh castle and saw the Crown jewels of Scotland then went to Greyfriars Kirkyard (Kirk means church).  Fall is the perfect time to see a graveyard-the trees are losing leaves, its cold outside, and there is a good chance it will be overcast.  We ate at the Monster Mash café (mash is mashed potatoes) and realized that the Scots have just as hard of time understanding Americans as we do understanding them.  The next day we boarded a tour bus for the Scottish Highlands.  Among the spectacular sites was:  the castle from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the Highland cow, Ben Nevis, Urquhart Castle, Loch Ness, and Madonnas "castle" that she bought when she was with Guy Ritchie.  The bus driver makes all the difference.  Ours had been doing the Highland tour for over 17 years and knew the history and references of anything we passed.  For example: Braveheart was between 65-75 percent accurate and was the longest shown movie in Scotland; it was in theaters for over a year and a half.  If anything, he made me want to buy the Rob Roy soundtrack for traveling.  It makes everything more epic.  The last day we toured Mary Kings Close (close means small alley) which is part of a series of underground passageways that were buried after the Black Plague killed a third of the people living in Edinburgh.
Goodness, this is a long entry.
Finally we get back to Paris after another uneasy Ryanair flight.  We stumbled our way onto the metro after walking around the Arc de Triomphe and strutting down the Champs Elysée (I begrudgingly caved in and let Maddi sing "Oh Champs Elysée ba da da da da... il y a tous que vous voulez aux Champs Elysée").  We found Jérémie and Paul's place where we were fed and watered (with grenadine) before going on a GUIDED tour of Paris!  Oh what wonderful hosts.  Maddi checked off a couple more sites: Notre Dame, Hotel de Ville, Centre George Pompidou, Panthéon, Père Lachaise, and Musée National d'Histoire Naturelle.  In Père Lachaise, we saw Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde (Maddi kissed the tomb, blech), Chopin, Deproges, and ISADORA DUNCAN, what?  Back at the appartment, Jérémie cooked a failed (though delicious) raclette.  This somehow turned into a huge house party, but thats all that is important.  Bises.

Up to speed

Ok.  I feel bad that it has been three weeks since my last update.  There are a few things that I should say to bring you up to speed.

1:  I ate a sea snail.  "It's kind of rubbery," says my host mom while I am brandishing a three inch needle trying to fish this boogery glob out of its shell.  Probably not best to start a poor little American girl off on steamed, then rechilled escargots.  I would have had more success had it been drenched in butter and stuffed with garlic.  Anything to disguise the fact that I was about to eat a creature that leaves a slime trail behind it as it travels from place to place. 

2:  I ate the most incredible, heavenly, gut wrenchingly delicious pastry of my life.  The Kouing Amann is a specialty pastry of Bretagne that can basically be summed up in 4 ingredients- butter, butter, sugar and eggs.  There might be some flour in there but thats really just to hold together the fat and sucrose that create this chewy, swirled goodness.  It is the Zeus of pastries.  It reigns above all other desserts.  Our excursion last weekend was to the "Cornwall" region of Bretagne.  Pont-Aven is Kouing Amann central.  Maria was the first to try one of the 15 different flavors that the shop offered.  I have never heard someone speak so passionately about any food in my life.  And I made fun of her until the next day when I ate the Kouing Amann I bought.  "Elle, you look like you're going to cry," Maria says.  I wanted to.  It was that good.   I have to stop writing about it because  I am getting depressed that I dont have one in front of me.

3:  I am realizing, through my translation professors, that I dont speak English.  I speak American.  As much as I fought this idea, it is the truth.  I dont call diapers "nappies" and I go to college not "uni."  I didnt want the difference to be true; if it was that I spoke American instead of English, it would be like speaking Quebecois instead of French.  And I cant understand Canadian french to save my life.

4:  I watched Social Network in its original version.  You have to make sure it says VO (version originale) next to the title so that there are french subtitles and its not dubbed.  Have you ever listened to movies dubbed in french?  Painful.  And then, being American speakers, we understand the humor that doesnt translate.  And we look psychotic for laughing at something that wouldnt seem funny.  You could literally hear the whoosh of the jokes go whizzing over their heads.

5:  Finally, les retraites.  Protests and strikes all over the place with Marseille leading the pack. Television stations are talking about potential gas shortages while my professors lecture to the foreign students about the tendancy for my university to be rather "active" in the protests.  Two years ago, the students from Rennes 2 shut down the campus for 10 or so weeks.  In case you havent guessed by now, Bretagne is the rebellious cousin of the regional family of France, and they like it that way.

My Sincerest Apologies

    To those who felt cheated by that last entry, I apologize.  But at the same time, it is my blog and I will do with it as I please!!  It's probably the reason why I will have the outline of 15 different stories and never fully finish anything.  I get bored with it and then I have no desire to finish.  I get distracted.  It's the disease of my entire generation; we seek instant gratification.  This kind of satisfaction is easily achieved with a language like English.  The big difference between French and English is this: English loves implicit logic whereas French is very literal and direct.  Our first translation teacher summed it up as this in his posh British accent, "English is a dense language.  French is long, flowery, and direct."  His example was that this: "I'm locked out of the car."  To say this in French, you have to describe how your car is locked, how you are still outside the car, and how the keys are inside the car.  Nothing exists for "locked out." 
    I never had a great appreciation for the English language.  I speak it, I write it, and I understand it (in 90% of cases including ESLs and Scots.)  Therefore, I found nothing really special about English.  Until I got to France and I had to recite the epic tale of me being locked out of my house to my host mom. 
    There is no translation for "Awkward" in the French language.  Maybe the French have always been smooth and such situations that can only be described as awkward have never come to pass.  Similarly, there is no translation of "creeper," the French-English dictionary only references - plants (in jungle).  That certainly needs to be sorted out on the French urban dictionary. 
    Last, but not least, is everyones favorite curse word.  Dropping the F-Bomb is rarely ever as satisfying as it is after being restricted by French peculiarities.  It is the King of Curses for the simplicity of its pronunciation and the versitility of its meaning.  It is a noun, verb, adjective, and adverb; and is useful for many English speakers prone to using hyperbole.  There is no word in the French language quite like Fuck.
     Was that a better fucking ending? bisous bisous

The Week of the Cartoon Characters

Do you ever meet someone that just seems too much to be real? Yes, now I will explain how I encountered just this genre of person.  It was a peaceful Sunday afternoon in the Bretagne compagne where the wind was just strong enough to carry the smell of pig farm across my nostrils.  For those who can't handle the smell of cows, never ever let that the myth of pigs as cleanly animals fool you.  They smell like the underbelly of a port-o-john.  But with the shift of the wind, the toxic stench is no more and you can continue appreciating the beauty of the countryside.  This is where we find Chantal's cousin's house, the site of this years Cousinade.  The Cousinade is a reunion of all of Chantals cousins away from the prying eyes of Papi and Mémé.  I had been warned several times about Didier and his crude humor but I assured Chantal and Bertrand that I could be offended in no way by what he said (i left out the part where i wouldnt know if it was offensive in the first place).  Didier, with both the appearance and mannerisms of a comic book character, greets me with bisous, holds me at arms length and says "Adorable."  He has a weathered, tan face and the countenance of a bassett hound.  He rolled his own cigarettes and walked around with the unlit stem at the corner of his mouth, able to say or do just about anything without having to move it. Pure skill.  He also had a dog with a wicked snaggletooth that just made her look like one of the gargoyle men from Sleeping Beauty.
   To make this entry a whole lot shorter, we ate lunch for 4 hours, took a tour of the farm and garden, ate dinner for another couple hours, and drove back home.  We arrived at noon and left at 9:30.  Thats how they do it in Bretagne.

Outside Rennes, It's Still Bretagne

One thing to make perfectly clear about where I am in France, something that I didn't fully understand until my arrival, is that the people here are Breton first, French second.  Bretagne (Brittany for you anglophones), up until the 1700's was a territory completely separate from France with a language and culture that values family, food, and good hard cider.  I've decided to audit a Breton language course at the university for fun and every français that hears of this choice laughs, claps me on the shoulder, and says, "good luck with that."  We will see on Thursday whether or not this discouraging response has any merit.
Last weekend my host parents drove me out to the coast for an overnight getaway to Ile de Batz (Eel-duh-Bah) where the winter population of 80 swells to over 500 during the summer vacations with families taking advantage of the beaches for the kids, and fresh seafood and produce from the island for the adults.  Cars aren't allowed on the island except for those who live there year round; bikes and tractors are the most popular forms of transportation. That night, we went to a traditional Festnoz where twice a month the entire island comes to the community center to dance and play traditional music à la Bretagne. Breton is closely tied to Celtic so at first it sounds like you walked into an Irish bar as the music is so similar and fast.
The firsts for this week are as follows: eating shrimp that still has the head on (they have to be stripped and decapitated before safe to eat, a fairly violent process), running into a pole at Sainte-Anne (they are used to keep cars from parking on the sidewalk), watching a horse race (I bet two euros on a horse named Pony Express that promptly lost his jockey on the first loop of the course), finding Harry Potter in French at the book market (Hogwarts is called Poudlard and Severus Snape is now Severus Rogue and the houses are Gryffondor, Poufsouffle, Serdaigle, and Serpentard), and finally, having to break out my fake name and do bisous with a rando on Rue de la Soif (first, it was Thursday night which is the night to go out for the university kids and second, my new fake name is Marie after realizing that Heidi, although foolproof in the states, doesn't translate well with a french accent).
To end, I saw the lovely Mary Claire Chao today at the book market with the one and only David Chao.  Still waiting for the last Ole to arrive!

Une Semaine à Rennes

This title should rhyme if you are pronouncing it correctly.  I apologize for the tardiness of this post but since arriving in Rennes there has hardly been time to really sit down and write about it.  My host parents are Chantal and Bertrand and they are awesome.  Bertrand is incredibly sarcastic (like most of the french, who have very dry humor) and Chantal is a wonderful (the only adjective i could come up with after yummm) cook.  I eat dinner with them every night at 7:30, by which time I am dying of hunger because I am forbidden to snack during the day.  Careful distinction: I am not allowed to snack on food things but beverage things, i.e. café and half pints after classes is fully allowed if not expected.  There is a large plaza that plays host to more than 15 different bars and cafés called Place Sainte-Anne.  One would think that at 3 on a weekday afternoon that such a place would be a calm, inviting place to grab a coffee and look french; this is indeed the case, but Sainte-Anne is far from calme.  As 4 o'clock rolls around, the space is crawling with people (mostly between the ages of 15 and 25 as Rennes is a very young city) who just want a place to sit, talk, and drink.  Whatever your poison, espresso or beer, you are welcome, for less than 3 euros, to sit as long as you like with your drink of choice.  One thing I will definately be doing more of when I get bqck to the US is nothing.  Absolutely nothing but watching the people go by.  Sounds good, doesn't it?

Made it, now, who's got the camera?

This morning I awoke from my corpse-like sleep by the slamming of our french-style window against its seam.  With the 5 other girls in the apartment-style, sans kitchen, hostel room; I take advantage of the view from the 4th floor window that has both the Notre Dame and le Tour Eiffel in the distance.  Do not be fooled, the room isn't as glamorous as the view.  Yesterday, I went a full 35 hours without sleep, a personal best on my sleep deprivation scale where I would be perfectly comfortable falling asleep even without the g&t (finally legal) I had from our first night in Paris. 
All of yesterday and today could be summed up as a glorified walking tour of Paris as we haven't actually done anything substantial except for walk around and take pictures like the tourists we pretend not to be.  We did get a quick tour of Hôtel de Ville, which houses offices for the mayor and many other representatives of Paris and the larger France.  The building is beautiful, as expected, but the what most people dont know about it is that there are 5 metro lines that travel directly underneath the building, so every couple of minutes the rooms are consumed by a muffled humming and gentle vibration, that varies based on how deep the line runs, from the trains passing underneath. 
And then, I took a nap.  At 4.  Because I just felt that I earned it.

Airports all look the same

But not all airports are created equal.  There are a few redeeming qualities of the Salt Lake International airport: free wifi that doesn't have a countdown in the corner of my window, the big windows let me see the Wasatch front and the sun peaking over the top of the range at this unreasonable hour which is made bearable by the nonexistant security lines and my free luggage feat (exactly 50 pounds after removing 3).
The first leg of my flight connects me to the beloved Minneapolis/St. Paul airport, then Amsterdam, and finally Charles de Gaulle.  Judging by the first hour, it's going to be an uneventful journey.  Hopefully the airline will throw some major delays my way or lose my luggage to make things a little more interesting. (knock on wood that they don't, please). 
Next post will be from Paris.  Maybe.

Cliché is French, too

After trying, unsuccessfully, to fly under the radar and escape to France without having made a blog, I was called out by none other than FrickAbroad (see http://frickabroadinireland.wordpress.com/) to follow suit.  Hence the birth of my blog.  For those of you who don't speak French, my name means "she/her" in the land of wine, cheese, and cigarettes and I am forced to find another nickname so as not to sound ridiculous when I introduce myself to the French who are critical even when you don't give them a reason to be.

To catch you all up to speed, the itinerary is as follows:
Arrive in Paris August 23...act like a tourist until August 26 when we get herded onto a bus to the capital of Bretagne, Rennes.  Our arrival in the city is the first step to knowing where we will live.  I have no bleeding idea who with/where I am living for the next 4 months.  My best hope is that my host family has little kids so they know how to talk slowly and with a basic vocabulary.  Christmas break will be spent in the company of the beautiful Sarah Chao (see http://europeanchaos.blogspot.com/) - plans are up in the air but Germany was thrown around as a potential destination.  Arrive January 3 in Paris to learn the trade of the chic Parisian women, then fly Home at the end of January kicking and screaming. 

Still to do:
-buy a thoughtful "thanks-for-putting-up-with-an-uncultured-american-for-4-months" gift for my host family. (ideas?)
-master my french expletives so I can curse fluently and not sound "cute" if I want to mean it

C'est tout! For now at least.