My Facebook albums

Just thought you'd like to see some of my photos! Now that I don't have that crazy firewall to deal with, I uploaded one or two hundred pics this afternoon!

http://bsu.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2144339&l=28211&id=20714806 First impressions

http://bsu.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2152398&l=7072a&id=20714806 The cathedral

http://bsu.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2154975&l=acb65&id=20714806 Bike trip to Naours

http://bsu.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2154983&l=05f0d&id=20714806 Les hortillonages

http://bsu.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2154995&l=f53f2&id=20714806 Amiens things

http://bsu.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2155002&l=68c8e&id=20714806 Pastafest

http://bsu.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2155006&l=dc494&id=20714806 Trip to...Amiens

http://bsu.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2155009&l=6a088&id=20714806 London (first album)

http://bsu.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2155010&l=ec132&id=20714806 The game

The last four albums have all the photos, but they aren't captioned and people aren't tagged in them. I'll take care of that in the next couple days.

Enjoy!

Stephen

Vacances

Well, it's time for another update! So much has happened in the past week! I'm writing this in London, where I have a much better Internet connection, so I can use Skype now. More on that later...

If you've been watching the news, you probably saw that France had some pretty bad strikes going on in the transportation industry. I wanted to go to Paris a week ago Thursday, and I couldn't because everything in the country was shut down. That was the 'official' date of the strike, but on Saturday when I tried to go to Abbeville (the second largest city in Picardie), we were told that there were no trains coming back to Amiens because of the strike. But that day still was fun. We went to a little plant garden and a market in town and ended up at a café (my first time at one). I also stopped inside a pastry shop and saw some incredible French food (and bought some, too). It was a good day to see a little more of the city. That night, I went with some British and German friends to watch the World Cup final. It was not very exciting. Our football is much more exciting than soccer and rugby. Most of the time.

I had a growing experience in class last week. In my English to French translation class (which is much much harder than the other way around), all we do every week is translate. The prof calls on a student who gets to go up in front of the class, read the paragraph in English, propose a translation in French, and then work through it until we end up with a good final draft. Tuesday, that student was me. There were a couple other people that did different paragraphs, but mine was the longest, and I was in front of this class of 40 or 50 students for at least 20 minutes. It was really difficult, but I was able to talk to the professor and correct my mistakes without getting too embarrassed. There was only one time when she said "Ca ne veut dire rien en français"--"That doesn't mean anything in French." I was pretty close most of the time.

I decided that I was going to the All Saints' holiday in London. Getting here was a horrible experience. After I bought the train tickets in Amiens, I realized that I didn't have my passport. So I had to run back to my room and get it, and I missed my train. Getting from Amiens to Lille wasn't a problem. My ticket was good for all day. But from Lille I was taking the Eurostar. All of those tickets are non-exchangeable, non-refundable. I decided that I was going to go ahead and try to go, although I was expecting to have to buy another ticket. I really didn't have another choice since I'd already shelled out a lot, buying round-trip tickets. So I went to Lille. (On a side note, I ran into three of the American girls in the station. They also were taking a train to Lille on the way to Brussels.) When I was ten minutes away from the Lille station I looked at the notes I had written and saw that the last train was leaving in ten minutes. I was pretty mad, because the helpful guy at the counter at the Amiens station had told me that I'd have enough time to make the next London train. And at Lille, there are two stations. The international one is 400 meters away from the one I was arriving at. So I ran over, looked at the terminal, and (praise the Lord) I saw that there were more Eurostar trains that day. I went to the ticket office, and told an agent there my predicament, and he said, no, there's no way to exchange these tickets. He looked at other trains, and there was only one train left that day that wasn't sold out, which cost 50 Euros more than the ticket I had already bought. I just asked, "isn't there anything I can do?" and he said, "well, tell me your story..." So I told him what had happened that morning and he went and made a phone call. He came back, saying, "we never ever do this, but..." and he stamped my missed train ticket, and didn't charge me a thing to go on the other train. Let me tell you, I've never experienced relief like that before.

I got to London, and took a cab over to Tony's place. I'm staying with a friend of my uncle Mike's. Tony has been incredibly helpful so far. He showed me how the Underground works and gave me advice and probably the coolest thing about him is that he's a football fan! He's originally from Detroit, and he is still very much attached to the NFL after seven years in London. Finally, someone I can talk to about football! Oh yeah, he also got me a ticket to the game in London yesterday!! For those of you who don't watch ESPN, the first ever NFL game played outside of North America just took place at the brand new Wembley Stadium, in front of a sellout crowd. Probably half of the crowd was Americans, but there were plenty of European fans, and still more people who didn't have any idea what was going on. I helped explain the game to some of Tony's British friends. It was an experience.

London is great. I've heard a lot of languages, but it has been a huge relief to hear so much English, and to not feel guilty when I speak in English! I guess I needed this vacation. The weather here was terrible the first couple days, but today is sunny and in the 60's (Fahrenheit, of course).

I've already done some walking around and seen some great things, including St. Paul's Cathedral, the Wellington Arch, and Buckingham Palace, and I finally have some things planned out to do. When I finish writing this, I'm going to take a trip to the London Museum. And it looks like I've finished writing this now.

A bientot!

Stephen

Octobre Part 2

Hey again,

My last update took us to Friday, leaving you to wonder what happened to me over the weekend. Well, here's the rest of the story...

Friday, before I went to my first French-as-a-foreign-language language class (as opposed to FAAFL culture) I saw an ominous notice taped to the wall in the hallway on my floor. I found out that Skype doesn't work here because they're intentionally blocking it; it's a "security threat." It's incredibly frustrating because I had this great way to communicate for free, I bought a mic and a camera, and it only lasted a week or two. Skype is the only thing that has worked reliably here, besides my cell phone, which costs people calling me 20 cents a minute. The pay phones just don't work.

I talked to Emily that afternoon and found out a few more things. The kitchens in this building are now closed after 4:30; you have to go to another building and borrow the key if you want to cook dinner. This is because people came from the other wing, which isn't completely finished, and used our kitchen, and they left two small bags of trash plus two wine bottles. It's a punishment, I think. So now the 150-plus residents here have to take an extra 10 or 15 minutes every time we want to eat dinner. Also, the kitchens are the only common areas in the building. Last week, a security guard was walking the halls and yelling at people who were outside of their rooms after 11:00. The rooms are just too small to accommodate more than four or five people, so there really was nothing we could do. I think that guard was transferred to a different building, though; there were a few complaints after he threatened, manhandled, and sexually harassed students while he was drunk on the job.

Things got better, though. Friday night, some of the exchange students were commiserating over the state of things, and once again it helps to have people going through the same thing. There really is no one here helping the exchange students. Questions go unanswered, problems remain unsolved, things go from bad to worse without any sort of administration working on our behalf. It's just so different from what I'm used to. In the U.S., it's so easy to get help when you need it, almost no matter where you are or what you're doing. Emily offered a really helpful perspective that night. She said in a book she's reading (the best book written about French culture) it was described like this: If we went to South America or Africa or China and everything was radically different, we could accept it. We would adapt. But because this is France, we expect things. We expect that, because it's a developed country, it's going to be like ours, but it's not. There are some things we just don't understand. The Polish students and the Germans and the Portuguese all feel the same way. And that bothers us. It helped to hear it from that viewpoint. I'm coming to grips with it.

Saturday was the bike ride to Naours. I went with seven other students. The way there wasn't that much fun, because the weather was bad and we weren't exactly going at a leisurely pace, so we got pretty spread out. It took a little over 2 hours to get there. When we arrived at the park/village thing, we ate lunch and waited for their lunch break to end (people work 5 hours a day in France. Literally.). We then took a tour of the underground city of Naours. I didn't really understand what was going on, but I gathered that it was a refuge during World War II and up to 2600 people lived there at one time. There wasn't a lot to see besides an occasional giant sculpture, but it was a pretty impressive setup they had. There was a lot. After the underground part, the tour progressed into a history of various Picardy occupations. After that, we visited the windmills. I'm not really sure how the three things were connected (there also was miniature golf on the property), but it was a nice little park. Actually, going up in one of the windmills was about my favorite part. The sky had totally cleared up by that point, and I could see miles of rolling French countryside. It was beautiful; I had a "I can't believe I'm in France" moment. On the way back, I had a similar moment while we were resting. I just looked out across fields, eating a baguette and taking it all in. When we got back, we ate a snack at the park in Amiens. As we were leaving, a kid checked out the bike I had rented (I think he had one from the same place) and challenged me to a race around the lake. We were leaving, I was tired from riding for almost 5 hours, and--oh yeah-- the kid was about 12, so I turned him down.

One more thing. Last night, right before I wrote my e-mail, I had an interesting experience. The day before (Monday), a French student came here yesterday with something he needed to translate into English. I told him I could help, but if he wanted it done completely, he'd need to find someone else. He said he understood and went his way. Then Tuesday night, he came back to my room with a French girl (who he had just met) who knows a little English. We looked at the essay he wanted translated, and we had barely done anything after half an hour because the grammar in the first paragraph was so convoluted. So we gave up, and he started singing songs he knew in English and the French students (he had another friend with him) talked to each other a mile a minute as I tried to keep up. It was really strange. I guess it's never a dull moment in Amiens.

A bientôt,
Stephen

Octobre Part 1

Hey all,

A lot lot lot has happened since the last time I posted, so I broke this up into two e-mails. If you only have time to read one, read the second! It has some pretty good stories..

Okay. Let's go back to le 2 octobre. That's when I took the French-as-a-foreign-language class placement test. It was harder than I thought it would be. There's class 1, preparatoire, intermedière A and B, and then there's level 3, advanced or something. I'm in 2B. I think it's really perfect for me, and it should stretch me just enough without making me go crazy. I've been to two culture classes, and they'd be hard to pay attention to in English, but in French it's nearly impossible. It's 2 hours on Monday, with no break, and so far we've talked about 1) the color of dirt, 2) the shapes of roofs, and 3) weather. It's called civilisation and it's supposed to be cultural, but it's just been geography so far. It's good to know, but it's really difficult to hang on every word when you're learning dirt vocabulary. My other French-as-a-foreign-language class is more focused on the language and vocabulary, although the professor doesn't really have a plan yet. That was a lot better. In both classes, I've gotten to meet people from other countries, which is always exciting. I'm going to work with a Turkish dude (the first one I've met!) for a project at the end of the semester for the first class.

Last Wednesday, I had another great night at the Lipstick, the first club I went to here. Every other week, I think it's college night or something and students can buy discounted tickets ahead of time. Again, I only knew one person who was going to be there, so I was forced to meet new people. I went both times with Loren, the Brazilian-American girl, and she mostly goes to UPJV's sister school, so she knows people from there, and I meet her friends. This time we went to a Madagascaran (?) girl's apartment beforehand and talked with her, her Moroccan friend, and her probably French boyfriend for a while before we left, all in French. It's really nice to meet people and talk to them in French the first time we meet. I'm breaking the bad habit of speaking English! These 12-page e-mails aren't helping me with that... Anyway, lots of fun. On the way back, we were going to walk halfway back and only take a taxi for the second half because we weren't tired yet (bad idea; they charge from the train station instead of where they pick you up. Yeah, it's France.) Well the time came and I called the taxi, and I had trouble talking with the driver. I said "we're on this street" and "it's right next to this other street" (one ran into the other) and I described it every way I knew how. I thought it made sense... Well, the guy was mumbling and getting frustrated and I was afraid that he was going to hang up on me and we were going to be left there when Loren said to me, "Ask this guy." And there was someone walking down the street, and while I was talking on the phone, Loren asked him to explain where we were. Now, it's important to understand that there is no one on the streets of Amiens after about 1:00, let alone 3:30. But here this guy was, and he talked to the driver, hung up, and said "he's coming" (in French). Then he turned to me and said "weren't you in a C.A.P.E.S class?" It turns out that he was in the class that I got kicked out of. I don't think I ever explained that story...I tried to go to a new class, mostly by accident, and the teacher wouldn't let me just sit there and listen. I didn't think it would be a problem because I was in another C.A.P.E.S. course, and the teacher didn't mind at all. That was the class that wasn't for a grade. So this professor asked me to leave in the first couple minutes of class. It was embarrassing, but kind of a relief since I didn't really want to be there. And this guy, the only one on the street in the middle of the night in Amiens, had been in that class, and he recognized me. So we talked about that incident a little bit and I think he sympathized with me, although upon reflection I realize he could have just been explaining further. Probably not, but it is possible.

The next day I went to the cathedral for the first time. It was big. I didn't see exactly how old it was, but I think they started the first construction in the 1200s. Wikipedia tells me it the last tower was completed in 1406, almost 100 years before Colombus set foot in America. Yeah, it's been around. It's the tallest and largest cathedral in France, and it's built in the Gothic style, like Notre Dame de Paris. I took my time and walked through, and I thoroughly enjoyed the good experience, but I don't get as excited about things like that as a a lot of people do. After I left, I bought my first macarons, the Amienois specialty. They're good. I don't know exactly what they're made of, but it includes butter and coconut.

Well, that's it for Part 1.

Stephen