Paris, take 2

I am such an overemotional wimp.

Today was cold cold cold then hot hot hot.

La Ville-Lumière

Finally, Paris. We got here late, went to dinner late, and I had my first onion soup in the entire trip. David is the only one of us that hasn't been to Paris before so we walked around with him a little bit. We're close to the Rue de Rivoli which runs along the Louvre and other sights. There's a big fair mounted up in the Tuleries gardens. We couldn't see much but we kept walking until we got to the site of the Louis Philipe obelisk. All the famous buildings in Paris are lit up. On one, only the French flag is illuminated (David called it awe inspiring). After probably the most stressful afternoon of the trip (hard to believe, even after such a nice morning) I got here wanting to leave and never come back. Go hide in a hovel. Standing there by the obelisk and the fountains looking at the Arc de Triomphe, some random Romanesque buildings...I couldn't stay mad at Paris for too long. And the temperature is just right. I felt like I was at Epcot when I was little waiting for the fireworks. We walked around there in complete darkness just looking at the pretty lights on a crisp cool evening.

Of course, on our way back I stepped on a wad of gum that is still on my shoe.

Stupid gum glob or not, I'm sad. I tell myself I'm mourning what this trip could have been. A nice opportunity to see a different country with family. But since everything with my family is so complicated and strained and difficult, I really can't enjoy myself. It has a lot to do with how wound up I am about anything in life and how relaxed is not my normal state. So to me, all of this traveling feels like one giant waste of money. Why pay to travel to an expensive foreign country with a better coin and strange food where I'll be three times as stressed as I am during October at Yale? Trips make me feel trapped and childish with a complete lack of independence. I don't even have any money on me. Did you hear that petty thieves? Now is the time to steal my bag because I left my kindle in the room and my bag is *empty*. Seriously. I don't have even a Euro centime. I have an American Express card (cue laugh track).

So now we're in Paris seeing it at night quietly and calmly. I finally feel like I'm in that magic pretty city we've all heard about. Not the dusty oven that I saw before. And I'm sad because we're only here three days. I'm sad because it looks like I won't be traveling for a really long time (especially since traveling with my family is rapidly running out of the picture). And even though I felt warm and happy hugging my mom while David looked around and felt all inspired, I'm sad because I'm not here with someone else. When I was little, I thought it was written in stone that I would study abroad in Paris once I got to college. I would eat cheese, perfect my French, dress à la mode française. Of course, my predictions have been wrong before (I didn't have a big poofy quinceañera dress with a party and the requisite boyfriend that all quinceañaras have to have as viewed by my preteen eyes). But this one felt like it was going to happen and was within my reach. And now I've lost that feeling.

Tomorrow I will feel really happy at some points and incredibly miserable at others. I'll most likely think back on this moment and realize that I'm exaggerating. But...maybe I've jumped too soon into grad school.

Poitiers

UPDATE: I wrote this on my phone and it has auto-correct errors and all sorts of funky stuff. Don't care enough to fix it, :P

We stopped overnight here in Poitiers after getting really lost trying to find this hotel. This city or town is about as far north as La Rochelle but further inland as we're making our way to Paris. The weather is lovely now-cool in the shade and getting rather warm in the sun! I greeted this weather by trying to wear Bermuda shorts only to realize that France and Spain and croissants have taken their toll on me. This is so different from my other vacations. Usually it's not that I eat less but I don't snack as much and walk around a lot more. I blame France. And croissants.

So last night we ate really late around ten pm. I'm still not used to eating dinner during the day time. Even after Yale. Mads knows very well that I feel really strange ordering a pitcher cocktail drink at eight pm when the sun is still out making fun of all of us mere mortals. Regardless we walked around a bit and my mom declared "no me like it. No me like it Poitiers" which got me a bit upset (I'm not a fan of judging). This morning I just wanted to get out of here. Even skip out on Notre Dame la Grande which is the main sight here. My mom and I set out to walk and got the biggest surprise of our trip. The weather is beautiful...and so is Poitiers. We saw a lot of construction (my mother insisted that it meant the town sucked while I said it meant the town was alive. I won) but beyond a few streets of rubble we got to a series of nice cobblestone pedestrian streets with...affordable stores! We bought berets. Yes. Berets. One for me and one for Nati. I never thought I would but I now own one and it shall keep my head warm in harsh new England winters.

We got to the main plaza around the church we wanted to see. The church has to be my favorite. We've seen some crazy ones but this one is so old and elegant. It's designs are mostly Moorish in influence. Aside from the windows which are more traditional stained glass the church looks a bit like a mosque with brightly colored geometric designs on plaster. Every column was different. We got there at noon for midday mass by mistake but stayed for a while. That's the first time I've been to mass since I don't know when. It was strangely nostalgic. Church always sounded like a foreign language to me anyway. I took a video which I guess I'll post eventually. It was so surreal with those columns and debris. The dimly lit church. I think we're actually going to stick around a bit more.

We bought white nectarines.

Internet Woes

updating by Kindle by email. No internet in Spain. Its still
raining. We're all sick and discovered that pills here are not coated.
Yuck. Also finished A Dance with Dragons. wowow.

La Rochelle

La Rochelle is a small port town on the western Atlantic coast of France. My dad constantly says "These are the waters that the Americans sailed up to for their invasion on D-Day. This is the English Channel and that in the distance is England." This is why you can't believe a thing my dad says. We are hundreds of miles from the cliffs of Normandy. However, boasting about my geographic knowledge only lands me as the navigator and thus blamed for any sort of road/direction mishap. So I try to keep things to myself. Anyway, La Rochelle was an important port town for France until it was burned and sacked by the British at some point (hah, remember what results you get when you google "French military victories"?). Evidence of other sea attacks and battles or invasions is present throughout the town.

Along the city walls is a canon ball presumably from some attack and the largest church boasts architecture from different ages.

The church was built first to replace a Roman style church (if I remember correctly). It was burned down and only the bell tower and part of the façade remained. The rest of the church was rebuilt in a different style. When you enter through the doors of the narthex you can see the rubble and ruins of a previous archway. Regardless it's still been a major center for the French navy and it has an interesting system of locks and gates to accommodate its various marinas.

Walking around the town is pretty easy. It's a small inner town and there are several streets for only pedestrians. One of these was a tiny little alley (Allee de Canards, I think, Alley of Ducks). What did we find there? None other than a Cuban cafe-theater called Mojitos. Cubans, they're everywhere. There are also these quaint little light houses, one green and one red, that used to guide sailors into the port. I'm not sure if they still light up since it stays light out so late. Shopping is really the same here as it is elsewhere. My main purchases were postcards and some concealer from Sephora. My adventure at Sephora has actually been one of the highlights of my trip since the girl that was helping me out didn't speak any English or Spanish so I really had to work out my French. I got what I needed in the end and probably creeped her out after thanking her a zillion times. It's still a bit awkward for me, however, that people here say hello and goodbye to you when you enter or leave a store. It's not that strange since a lot of them are small but what I usually say when I leave (if it's a small store) is something along the lines of "Thanks" or "Si, gracias" in response to "come back soon!" Here it's all bonjour and au revoir. I use "goodbye" and "adios" so infrequently that I hardly know how to use them anymore.

Another interesting encounter was on our first day here. I spotted a guy wearing a Yale Bulldogs sweatshirt. I'm a Yalie through and through, you see, and I can recognize the Yale bulldog and Yale blue from quite a ways away. I pointed him out to my mom who told me that I should ask him if he was a student even though both of us thought he probably wasn't. So I didn't because I thought it would be awkward.

Later we stopped by a candy stall where we bought banana and strawberry gummies and one of those alligators. Some sour key thingies too. Just as we've paid I turn around and find myself face to face (or bulldog since the kid was really tall and the bulldog was at my eye level) with the kid. I had to ask there was no excuse! Surprise surprise, the guy is not a Yalie, nor is he American. What he is is a Dutch teenager on vacation with his family (neither parent was anywhere close to how tall he was. He definitely didn't fit in the little candy tent). He had bought the sweatshirt in Holland along with some other US school jackets. I showed him my humble little Y for Yale on my jacket (which I've been wearing every single day since it's soooo cold) and he asked me if our mascot was really the bulldog. "So this is what they call you?" He took off his outer coat (seriously it's been that cold. These people were Dutch and freezing) to reveal "Bulldogs" printed in caps on both sleeves. I didn't laugh but it just seems so ridiculous to me that some Dutch kid decided to buy an ostentatious Yale sweatshirt with no intentions of seeing the school (he didn't know where it was. I don't blame him but he was wearing the sweatshirt, come on). This is just one example of the ridiculous euro-fashion where patterns and prints and excessive details are still in. It reminds me of German dude in my chem class who frequently wore printed shirts and pre-torn, pre-bleached jeans with even more decorations. American gaydars don't work in Europe. I've also seen about four different people wearing Franklin & Marshall shirts and jackets. Somehow I get the impression that these were bought because it sounded like a brand...maybe like Abercrombie and Fitch? One of these people I saw coming out of a residence so I'm pretty sure he's local and didn't go to school in Pennsylvania.

One of the water locks. Very steam-punkish

I'll write another post on La Rochelle later on since we walked the city again today. There's this giant beautiful aquarium that we didn't go see because we were too tired. I'm tempted to feel bummed but hey, there's always Sea World! Also coming up: FOOD (I was going to make an acronym with that but realized that if I used "oral" which I basically had to if I was going to make it about food it would sound really sketchy) and our day trips to Rochefort, Cognac, Ile de Re, and Meschers and Talmont.

We leave for Spain tomorrow morning and I don't know how internet will be. And my sister has also TAINTED US ALL so we've all got the sniffles. I want to take the cold medicine we bought here (the gooood stuff as my mom says, since it has pseudoephedrine) but it might knock me out beyond the point of waking up at a reasonably early time tomorrow.

Scene from the food market (La Marché). More on this later... I have to feed you pictures or else you wouldn't make it through my posts, n'est-ce pas?

France: Getting There

The next few entries are going to be about my stay here in France (and later Spain? Unclear). They'll be divided up a little bit, following my friend's friend's travel blog. That seems like a fairly good way of keeping things in order. And I don't have too much time to write giant entries anyway. So here you go: Getting there.

As some of you already know, we had a rough time of getting to France. Our flight was canceled and we took a detour through London which essentially took 12 hours longer. Given that we spent so much time in the Miami airport, I went to as many stores as possible looking for a kindle case. After I had dropped it a few times, I decided it needed protection. I did not spend an entire day negotiating with UPS and bugging the Yale Summer Office and finally chasing down a UPS truck all the way across downtown New Haven to lose my kindle because it got squished in my backpack. No inky screens for me. So when we were switching terminals (the result of switching our flight to British Airways) I would stop at every store asking if they had kindle covers. One did but it was for Kindle 2 so my wee bitty kindle would fall out. BUT, London is really spiffing up its airport for the summer Olympics. London-Heathrow is essentially one giant shopping mall. The only downside to this place is that each terminal in itself is fairly small so there aren’t too many gates per terminal. This means that you have to wait in a common waiting area until 30 minutes before your flight when a gate will finally be assigned for your flight. Luckily, the first store I went into had an entire collection of M-Edge Kindle covers of varying sizes and pocket quantities. I bought a simple one with just a cover, no straps or buckles or pockets, which is hot pink and matches my bag. It really was one of the two colors that was available for that style, but I might have chosen that color anyway. I think I’ll get an amazon one with an integrated light later on, but for now this is good. I said it was lucky that the first store had covers because at that point I was running on something like less than four hours of sleep over a weird 30 hour period and having slept very little before that (curse you late night packing!). We sat down in the common area and all proceeded to slump forward and fall asleep on our backpacks. I think that weird nap was what got me through the six+ hour drive to La Rochelle.

Last time I was in France, which was six years ago, it was one of the hottest summers of my life. When Europe gets hot, it’s dusty and stuffy and smelly. I don’t mean to group all Europeans under one stereotype, but it is very true that a larger population of Europeans do not wear deodorant/antiperspirant which leads them to smell. Luckily I have my Burt’s Bees lip balm so whenever I get an unfortunate whiff of someone’s BO, I pull out my lip balm and smell it. The mint smell is so strong that it has an astringent effect.

Well this time around, the people are likewise as smelly (although maybe fewer than last time) but it’s freezing. It’s been in the fifties at times! What is this? Ceci n’est-ce pas été? I don’t even know if I wrote that right but the point is that it is summer and I should not be wearing long jeans every day (I don't want to hear about me writing things here in French. It's just a few words and by now browsers are pretty good at translating. I'm looking at someone in specific here). Especially since I brought two pairs and I refuse to wear the other one because I wore it all through our 24+ hours of travel to get here. Those other jeans are basically falling off and smell like plane, probably. The problem is that these other jeans, although dark, will get dirty and I’ve already spilled some chocolate on them. I tried to wash it off but instead the towel came out blue. I don’t know if I got the chocolate or not. It’s also been raining a lot. La plui, the rain, it follows me everywhere. I feel like the rain god in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Next time: Pictures of La Rochelle and maybe some anecdotes!

Blue checkered-print sunglasses

I saw this and laughed out loud:


Madeline didn't hear me because she is a-nappin'!

I'm currently in New Haven. I left San Juan early Tuesday morning (flight left at 6 AM). I was really tired (and still am tired) but I think it's worth it because there are few things that irk me more than losing an entire day because of travel. If you can avoid spending all day traveling...you should. I'm really glad I took this trip and got to see many good friends. New England is beautiful (but pretty hot, meh whatevs) in summer and walking around New Haven makes me really nostalgic. I miss last summer and just Yale. It's funny because often I feel completely detached from Yale and as if I could just leave that time behind me (which, of course, is silly nonsense). It's really easy to lose sight of good times and friendships when Yale held some of the most difficult and stressful points in life. When you're here during summer and not under the constant pressure of exams and papers, it's much easier to focus on the positive. Hence the feel-good-ness of this little paragraph.

I spent Tuesday-Friday at Steph and Val's home in New Jersey. I really have to thank their family, their Mom, especially. I had a great time and was never once hungry :D (this is my main concern at home...survival-by-scavenge first, then social interaction). We played laser tag and mini golf with Anthony and Timmy. "Solo sole" Steph lost a shoe when she accidentally stepped in a bit of mini-golf pond in an attempt to rescue Val's golf ball. It's okay because she went on to win the game. There were some pretty spiffy pars and more than one or two occasions where some of us were forced to "take the six." The six was either an earned six or an undeserved six (ie. you had putted the ball six+ times and just gave up after the third time it landed in the water. Or if you just guided the ball into the hole because there were people catching up...that's it). However, probably THE MOST IMPORTANT THING...I saw a bunny on the course! I totally forgot I had seen a bunny until Steph and Val reminded me a few days later. I also saw a chipmunk, some Canadian geese, a turkey vulture (haha yes it's real), some really adorable deer nomming on grass, and turtles-on-a-log(!).

Went to a free skate session. We also met up with Anthony, Cori, and Erin. I really enjoyed playing speedmiton :P and blongo and Telestrations which is sort of like telephone meets pictionary.

Let's see...We did a lot of stuff this week. Friday we spent in the city where we went to the Central Park Zoo and then the Museum of Natural History. I swear, I've been to the AMNH before but I somehow missed the marine life center and the biodiversity hall and basically the first three floors. I had seen dinosaurs there and maybe some halls of North American mammals. We saw the mineral hall which is always one of my favorite areas in museums.

Now I'm in New Haven and what I can say is good people good food. In fact, this entire trip can be summarized by great people and great food. It's really nice to see friends again and not scavenge around in my kitchen (my typical lunch at home is one or two Kellog's bars, some cheese, and toast. Oh, and maybe some fruit snacks). When Madeline and I went to Mia's last night our waiter brought us a complimentary miso soup and then a free sake bomb which we drank at the same time with the (Korean?) girls that were sitting in the adjacent table. When we first sat down, I kept making faces at how ridiculous the waiter was with these girls and how he started bringing them free stuff (on the house Tokyo Fro and Miso Soup). I thought that he might have caught me making faces which led him to bring miso soup but I think he was just nuts. Somehow Madeline and I ate everything. And drank everything. It was good :D Earlier I went to Seoul with Ben, had some stone pot bi bim bap and now I know how to say thank you in Korean: "Kam sam ni da" ... at least that's my romanization of it. Ben was speaking Korean up and down all over the place but I felt pretty proud of my "thank you" at the end, haha. Then we went to FroYo World where I sort of, kind of, maybe accidentally served myself $6-something worth of froyo and toppings.

Linna and Madeline and I made it all the way to the Pantry this morning for breakfast. We got there super early, but alas! there was already a wait. Regardless, it wasn't too long before we got to sat down. We all had eggs benedict and some peach pancakes. After we left I thought I was going to pass out on the sidewalk from so much eating.

The days are so long and we've done so much that I feel like I've been here much longer. I like the eternal feel of summer when it's still summer. But it's so sad at the end when you realize that the days are dwindling, the winds are picking up, and you'll stay in one day and emerge to a landscape of autumn trees. True story.

Peace, yo. My kindle gets here tomorrow :>

The bitterest bitter melon

I got back to San Juan Sunday evening. Sailing went well. We were essentially running away from some really heavy rainfall that was following us westwards. So other than my boring zillion-get-them-out-of-the-way doctor's appointments, I've also been to Costco a billion and two times.

We've had a house guest, Canche (which apparently is a slangy way of saying Blondie. That's obvs not her real name) from Guatemala. On Monday, the Brazilian coach flew in (his wife flew in today, but I haven't seen her. They're both moving in to my grandmother's apartment). I think on Tuesday the other Guatemalan kid flew in. I say kids but both the guy and Canche are 22 (we're all old, aren't we). I tried being nice and friendly. I don't think I necessarily failed (I wasn't mean) but it's tough being quiet and only being able to talk about school and things olympic sailors don't care about. I'm listening to them yell while playing XBox (we've got a ton more people here today, more stinky salty sailors). It's funny but it's the kind of thing where I would like to join both for fun and to make friends. Right? Wrong. I'm too awkward for this, apparently. The result is that I feel like a stranger in my own home.

Earlier today, apart from starving, I was learning how to play Beethoven's Sonatina in F minor. I felt like everything I was playing was too happy so I looked for something in a minor key. This was the only one and it's pretty epic, honestly. And not beyond my grasp! Here's a video:



In other news, my mother hates me. I am the only one of her children that has taken any sense of responsibility and direction in life. Yet I am the inconsiderate one because I help her do all her shopping, cleaning, dealing with her manias, taking care of my sister, etc. Meanwhile, my brothers are playing XBox. Well, they have company. But some of you know what happens when I have company.