A trip to France (Part I)

The first week in November was a week-long vacation from school, le congé d'automne. For this vacation, my host family and I went to France!

Needless to say, I played the part of the camera-toting tourist. I took lots of pictures. Lots. So many pictures, in fact, that I have to make two posts. So, look above this post to find the rest of the pictures.

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On Saturday morning, we got into the car, and began our journey. It was raining-- magnificent weather.

After getting gas at a Belgian gas station in case of French strikes, we were on our way.

After maybe an hour and a half, we crossed the border. I got my first picture of France from out the front windshield of the car. It was still raining.

We stopped in a mini-mart type store on the road for a break, and I could really tell that we were in France. I don't think you could find wine like this in United States mini-marts.

Continuing on the route, it stopped raining for a little while. I got this picture of some French countryside, in the Champagne region if I remember correctly.

After maybe six hours on the road, we came into Lyon, a big city on the banks of the Rhône river. It was raining again.

Bouchon! Traffic jam in English. Slowed us down to maybe 20 kph for a good half hour.

Got a good look at some of the buildings, though...

After Lyon, it was another two-and-a-half-hour drive until the region of Ardéche, the place where we would be staying the first couple of days.

At maybe 7:30 in the evening, as we were walking up the driveway of the house where we would be staying, we found a salamander. The headlight lights of the car were not quite bright enough to take a great picture, so it turned out a little blurry. Thought it looked cool anyway, though...

Took a picture of the entry to the house-- again, it was really dark.

We were in the region of Ardèche, in south-eastern France. Here it is on the map, for a little perspective. Merci, Wikipedia.

We were staying there with some friends of my host family: a couple with four kids and some other members of their family. They were all really nice-- great folks to stay with. The house where we were staying was kind of their vacation home-- an old stone house built over 200 years ago.

The next day, I looked outside the door of my room, and saw this view.

Here's the same picture as the one two above, except taken in daylight.

The first morning, we went for a walk through the woods. All through these woods, there were walls like the ones you see in this picture. They were old terraces, built between 200 and 300 years ago (I think) by people who lived in the area.

If you look closely in this picture, you can see a wall with a door. Old ruins like this were everywhere thoughout these woods-- i mean everwhere. It was crazy to look at this forest that seemed really wild and natural, but then to see old walls.

We came down to a creek in the bottom of the canyon. It was raining on and off, and fog was rolling through the canyon. It was beautiful, if a little wet.

Headed back to the house, and played some games. The one below is called Carambole. It's very simple-- just shoot your pieces into the four holes in the corners. I wasn't very good at it, but it was fun anyway.

 

And of course... Monopoly Brussels-style, with labels in both French and Dutch. 

 

All around Ardèche are chesnut trees, and the chesnuts (called chataîgnes in French) were ready while we were there. For the people who lived in Ardèche hundreds of years ago, they were a very important staple-- people pretty much lived off them. They put terraces in the hillsides, and cultivated chesnut trees. You can still see the remnants of the terraces today.

With this pan, we roasted them over the fire. Just like Nat King Cole, but a month and a half early.

The view from the front door-- the yellow trees are chesnut trees.

The next day, we went for a walk in the forest, about a 20-minute drive from the house. Below are a couple pictures of the views from the trail.

I was so happy to see big cliffs again-- there aren't all that many near Linkebeek. The river that makes the canyon here is the Ardèche river (believe it or not).

The woods, also, were quite nice. Very very green.

Back at the house, we played another game, Les Colons de Catane, a "jeux de societé," as it's called in French. It's a great game-- it encourages interaction between the players as each person creates villages and roads to become the most "developed." 

A picture Alfred, the youngest child of the family we were staying with (4 years old) took while he was playing with my camera. Not bad at all, if you ask me.

Our breakfast. European, or what?

The next day, another walk through the woods...

Help to conserve this historic bridge. Do not destroy the railing!

From left to right: Quentin, Aude, Diego, Gaëtan, moi, Alexandra, et Emilie.

Autumn in France...

Les chataîgnes

One of our lunches. Just to make you jealous

And for dinner, soup with chesnuts. Delicious

Thought this picture illustrated pretty well the harvests of autumn...

Next morning, we went into Les Vans, a village near where we were staying. It was beautiful.

And back into the forest, to find some rocks to climb on.

Faire des blocs= go bouldering. 

They were a little slippery, so we didn't do a whole lot of climbing. But the view was nice.

Supermarket in France. Can't find that in Colorado, can you?

And a little countryside

Une eglise...

...and some more countryside

This was the morning of our last day in Ardèche, and I got some photos of the drive out.

We made our way north, towards Paris.

It was Thursday night, and we stayed in Fountainbleau, about 40 minutes outside of Paris.

We did a little more rockclimbing on the sandstone rocks

But again, unfortunately, they were slippery and I had no climbing shoes. Too bad...

Mais c'etait joli

For a change in dining experience, we went to McDonalds. It was my first time to one in Europe.

The burger was smaller, but a lot better than the United States, believe it or not.

Not bad, not bad...

After a quick look at the Château de Fontainebleau, built within the span of quite a few French kings (starting in the 16th century) to use as a vacation estate for the hunts(!), we headed towards Paris. 

The view outside our hotel room in Paris-- this was at a Best Western, of all places.

I met up with a group of Americans who I thought I knew from somewhere....

And I gave them speculoos! It helped fight the jet-lag... a little, I hope. I spent the rest of that day with them, and a little of the next-- It was so amazing to see my Cortez friends in such a different setting. If you want to see more photos of them and me together, check my Facebook page.

Une rue de Paris...

Et une autre.

Le Palais de Justice, with the Sainte-Chapelle in the background.

And of course, the Notre Dame Cathedral.

A look over the Seine, onto the Île de la Cité

See Part 2!

Fajitas avec sauce Brasil

 

 Last week, I made fajitas for my host family. Mexican food is something that doesn't exist at all here in Belgium-- people don't know what tacos or burritos are.

At first, I thought I could make burritos, but they sold no green chilis in the supermarket (not even canned ones) and nothing resembling pinto beans (closest thing was British boiled beans), so I gave up on that. They had bell peppers, though, and chicken, and salsa, and tortillas, luckily.

There's also no sour cream here, strangely enough. They were out of plain yougurt, which is close, but I thought that fromage frais might work as well. It has the same consistency as sour cream, and it's also white. 

I got home, opened the package, and realized that it was sweet, and tasted absolutely nothing like sour cream. Crap. 

  Anyway, here's the package of tortillas-- printed in French, Dutch, and German.

 

The fajitas were quite good--they made me think of the Flagstaff band trips, which is always a good sign. My family seemed to like them, too-- but I just wanted to share this picture below:

It's a fajita with brasil sauce, which tastes a little like a cross between curry and mayonnaise. My host brothers Quentin and Diego put it on lots of things.

Fajitas included. It was a crossroads of two completely different cuisines. Belgian and Mexican. Mmmm....

Diego-- he's the inventor of a new taste sensation. Look out, Fiesta Mexicana...

On rusty English, time perceptions, and expanding worlds

So for this post, because I haven't done so for a while, I just want to reflect a little on what time here has been like so far, and how things are right now. I warn you—it's going to be a little bit introspective, so if you're not interested in my in-depth self-analysis my mind as an exchange student, I won't be offended if you don't read on. Soon, I'll be posting some things that account more of my day-to-day life (pictures/descriptions of school, the grocery store, food, etc...), which may be more interesting to read.

So I'll commence with something strange I've noticed. For some reaon, when I write in English, I've found that it's a lot harder to write succinctly.  When I write something and then read it over again, I think to myself “good god, what would Koops (my former English teacher) say about this?” I'll sometimes use seven or ten words to say something I could have said in three,  and as I have been writing this I've already made a bunch of little mistakes (and corrected them as well, I hope) that I don't think I'd have made if I were still immersed in English. Compound words become two words and vice versa; I put apostrophes where they shouldn't go; I get my tenses and subject-verb agreement mixed up. It takes me longer to write what I mean to say in English-- I've been deleting and rewriting sentences over and over.  

But the thing is, it's not like my English is being replaced by my French. My French is still very basic-- simple conversations still consist of many errors on my part; I can only use simple verb tenses, and I often forget words people here learned as little kids like « towel » or « jump » or « remember ». So that makes it weird-- my English is getting rusty and my French is still feeble.

People who've done foreign exchange programs have told me that after a while of being immersed in the new language, it feels like you're forgetting your native language. You start to think in the foreign language, because you're using it so much. I feel that happening-- sort of, sometimes. My thoughts have become a mixture of English for the more complicated things, but for simple stuff I can think in French if I want to. It's very weird to have another voice in my head who knows French—maybe not perfect French, but French all the same. And even weirder to know that it will start to run things more and more as my French gets better.

So, if it seems like I've been rambling, that's why. But I'm going to ramble a little more for a while, and talk about perceptions. First of all, my perception of time.   Pretty much, for the past two months that I've been here, it has been very strange. Sometimes, time seems to be whizzing by, but at others the days seem twice as long. But these differences are not regular at all—there's no pattern. There will be an hour that seems like ten minutes, but then the next ten minutes could seem like an hour. It's a hard thing to describe....

I guess, the thing is, when you're immersed in a foreign language, in a foreign set of surroundings, your perceptions of things in general-- not just time-- are turned upside down. Starting the minute you step onto the plane and watch your country—your world of familiarity-- disappear, your world turns into something completely different. 

It starts out small.

When I got off the plane, my world consisted of the airport, then the inside of the taxi as we got our first look of Brussels, then the hotel where all the exchange students stayed the first night. That hotel was like a little bubble. Everything besides that hotel and its front yard-- the rest of neighborhood, the rest of the city, the rest of the country, the rest of the continent-- was completely new and unfamilar.

My first ride through Brussels with my host family was the same way. My world became the car, trying to converse with the family of people who I would be staying with for the next year. I peered out the car windows, watching new and unfamiliar streets, cars, buildings-- and listening to a new and mostly unfamiliar language being spoken all around me.

As I followed my host family into the house, took my first look at my new room, I knew that  house was the starting point, the first world that I would become familiar with for the year. And at the beginning, my world was that big. The house.

My second day, I went into Linkebeek with my host family, and speaking slow, very simple French, they gave me a tour. I looked at all the different paths, and wondered how I would ever find my way around. It was my first glimpse into Linkebeek, a slightly larger world.

And gradually, my world began to expand. I began taking runs around Linkebeek and the surrounding area, starting out very simply, only going places where I knew I could find my way back. I went to the grocery store with my host mom, on bike rides with my host dad, on a walk with my host brother Gaëtan and to a hockey game to watch my host brothers Quentin and Diego play.

I entered the world of school, another place that started off completely foreign, where I didn't feel sure of where I was of what I was supposed to be doing, but it slowly became more and more familiar.

Riding bus 43 to and from school was the same way-- it started out as a whole bunch of unfamiliar streets and turns-- and a lot of traffic. But after days and days of the same route, it became more and more familar.

In fact, it's been the mass transit system that has been a huge help for me to branch into new worlds. Each time I take a new tram or bus, I study the map for a long time to make sure it'll take me the right place. Sometimes I get on the internet to find my route and then write it down. I worry at first about about getting lost, about ending up someplace where I don't know where I am.

After a couple of repetitions, I feel I have mastered it. I think to myself, "I can do this." It's not that hard. No big deal.

Ironically, it's those times that screw me up. Like, for example, when I took the train, coming back from Louvain-la-Neuve University. I thought everything was good--I felt confident that I could get back home. But then I realized that all the station names were in Dutch, and that I'd been on the train for 45 minutes. And I started to second-guess myself. Good thing, because if I'd have stayed on that train I would've ended up in Aalst, about 30 kilometers outside of Brussels. But oh well.


Anyway, expanding worlds. I know that whatever new and unfamiliar place I go, things will be like that--it's natural. But on this scale, when two months ago I had no idea that bus 43 would take took me to school or that I could also take bus 43 to Heros, then tram 4 to the Grand Place, and take the train back home if I wanted to, it's a pretty cool feeling to feel my world opening up like it is now.

And it continues to do so. Next week my host family and I are going to Ardéche, France, and then to Paris. I'll begin to see other parts of the world of Europe. More on that after it happens.

Two Months

I just want to make a very short post to mark the anniversary of two months here. Yesterday, actually, was the official mark of me arriving in Belgium, but two months ago today I was spending my first full day in this crazy awesome country.

I can't write for very long, because it's late here. But I've been working on a longer post, that I hope to have up by the start of next week (don't hold me to that, but I'll try). Until that time, I'll wake up tomorrow morning, ride the bus to school, go to classes that I'm beginning to understand, walk to the grocery store with some friends during the lunch hour, go to two more classes, ride the bus home, and then pack for two nights with the Scouts, where I and the other chefs will take charge of 35 six-and seven-year-olds, speaking entirely in French. After that, I will go dance on sunday (more on that later), and then come back home and try to finish my next post.

So until that time, salut!