All sorts of adventures in the past few days! Unfortunately, it has been raining recently which makes me very anxious about bringing my nice camera with me. Also the fact that it weighs like 8 lbs makes it difficult to convince myself it is worth carrying when it might rain. I'm not too worried though, considering gray skys = boring pictures, and I am going to be here for a while. Plenty of time for more awesome pix. Just because technology is so fast doesn't mean I have to be!!!
But anyways, Thursday night a bunch of us in the program went to a bar au centre ville and then another more dance-y bar after that. It was really fun! Going out is so expensive though. I mean 5 euro for a pint of beer is only reasonable so many times. Friday I just slept in and ran some errands. Then Saturday was the excursion to St. Emilion, which is an amazingly picturesque medieval town! Now it is just known for all the wine that is made there, but it is actually a bit of a pilgrimage site now, as St. Emilion, for whom the town is named, lived there and had healing powers. There is also an underground, monolithic church there from like the 800s and like 500 km of catacombs. It was so cool in the church but we couldn't take pictures because it is private property. So lame. We also went in to St. Emilion's supposed house/cave where he prayed and had a natural spring that he used to heal people. I got some healing water, nbd.
Entrance to the church
Above is the clock tower they built in the 1100s. It was so heavy though it almost crushed the church (it weighs TONS, like the unit used to measure elephants)!!! They had to put in these brace things to keep it from collapsing.
The town was so adorable. I definitely plan on going back when the weather is better.
So after the town we went to a winery and got a tour of the HUGE factory where they ferment all the wine and stuff. That was cool but our tour guide was really old and french and was so in to talking about wine it was mostly incomprehensible. I bought a huge bottle of wine though because it was only 9 Euro. hahaha. Still good!
Once we got back to Bordeaux I went home and ate some dinner then met up with friends again so we could go to this electro club/warehouse to see "Mustard Pimp" play. They were actually really good! It was so much fun, we ended up staying until like 4:30am. Totally normal. The french don't go out until like 1am! It's so absurd! Luckily we stayed out so late I was able to take the first bus back home at 6AM! Oh well, that's better than walking 45 minutes back home (don't worry, it's safe, I swear!).
(normal view walking home - absolutely VOID OF ALL LIFE)
Monday was our placement test for the foreign students university classes and yesterday we started our methodology class with this sassy French woman name Isabelle. She is so to-the-point and does not take any bullshit. It's awesome. I think this will be infinitely more helpful than the "intensive" language class. It's all about the french university and their methods for papers and research and all that. Very interesting. And really important.
Last night was quiz night at the bar by my friend Ben's house and we won! We then befriended some random french people in our rush to catch the last night bus, which we also missed. I had a pretty intense convo about stereotypes in American and French culture with this French (by-way-of-China) guy. It was mostly in french. Nice work me. He was really surprised that I knew another language/ liked cheese/ food other than fried chicken/ and wasn't obsessed with Beyonce. It was legit.
Tomorrow's forecast: partly cloudy with a high of 51 degrees!!! Too bad I have class all afternoon.
wait WHY aren't you obsessed with Beyonce? also your franco-chinois seems to be confusing Americans with black people.
ReplyDeleteso he had a roommate from Ohio, so he could have been black? Not really sure about that one. But also, I switched that sentence from not liking american culture to not liking Beyonce because technically I do like American culture, just not the obnoxious pop culture part. haha
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