I Am Still Alive!!

Hey all, I finally got my computer back from the repair place, good as new but it was also pretty much wiped clean. However, everything is working fine (except for the fact that my computer thinks its French and a few of the keys are switched around!) and I can finally update again!

This week was pretty trying, being without a computer and having to follow along in classes with just pen and paper (I type much faster than I write by hand, which comes in handy in a 3 hour long class taught in French!) but my classes are all somewhat interesting. I am taking 2 three hour long lectures, one about International and European Institutions and the other is French History since 1940, which I have found myself being able to follow, but I don't know nearly enough about WW2 to understand what he's talking about! In my classes I've found that there is a big emphasis on details, and I will be tested on the big picture, whereas back at UCSB you're taught the big picture, and are expected to give examples and details on the final exams. Also kind of different is that most of my classes will only have 1 final exam to determine the entire grade! Yikes.

I'm also taking 2 classes that are kind of like electives for the IEP students, one is Socialism in Europe in the 20th century and the other is Hollywood Cinema of the 1990s. These ones are only 2 hours long, a lot more interesting, and the classes are smaller as well. I already have to do an exposé, or presentation, for the film class on Thursday! But its on Forrest Gump, one of my favorites, so it should be fine.

My birthday was on Wednesday, and I wasn't expecting much but it ended up being pretty fun! I started the day off with class at 8am, and it was a particularly busy traffic day so it took me about an hour to get to school. Usually I take the bus and then walk across the river to Lyon 2, or if I have class at IEP I take my bus, then switch to a different bus that goes to the tram station and take the tram to school. But after my 8am class (our mandatory Methodology class that I take with the other Californians) I didn't have anything else to do all day! So I went to the computer lab for a while to search flights for upcoming vacations, and headed home with my friend Robert to buy food to cook for dinner. We got a bunch of ingredients to cook Mexican food, then dropped it off at home and left again (since we wouldn't have to start preparing until 7 or so) to go explore some églises, or churches. We went to Vieux Lyon and spent some time at St Jean:




Afterwards, we went home and I COOKED! A delicious meal, fajitas:


I was surprised that I could even find all the ingredients...but I did, and they were spicy and delicious!


The little dessert my friends bought me...it almost burnt the house down, they crumpled up some paper as a candle and I was laughing too hard to be able to blow it out...Ha ha

Me and my roommate Eva!

Thats all for now, it's 6:30 and I'm already hungry!! I don't know how French people can stand to wait for dinner until 8 or 9pm...I'll check back with more updates and more pictures soon! Au revoir, and have a good week!

Un bon weekend

Hey all, I am still alive, and still unfortunately computerless. However, I had a really fun weekend and got to do a bunch of site seeing, which made up for it a little!

On Saturday, we went to a vineyard in Beaujolais, which was nothing short of spectacular. I have a ton of pictures from it but no way to upload them yet, unfortunately. But here's one that our program director Chris took of me, Elena and Brett, who also go to UCSB:


The vineyard was beautiful, and the cool part was that the couple who owned the place each showed us their specialties. So the husband was a wine expert, and he hosted this really big DELICIOUS dinner (at 1pm in the afternoon...) that began with a lesson on wine tasting. So we got to taste their own home made wine straight from the vineyards...and then we stuffed our faces :-P

Paté, quiche, beef stew, brioche (sweet bread) and neverending bread and wine, oh my! The food is definitely something that I will miss about this place. After the grand repas (big meal), we got a tour around the vineyard...although at that point, I could barely move because I was so full! We got to eat grapes right off the vine, and I got a lot of great pictures. Then, we went to another part of their estate where the wife makes fresh BREAD! And she made us all little loaves of bread to take home right in front of us! It was fantastic.

All weekend in Lyon, there was something going on called the Journées Européennes de Patrimoine, or something like that, (which roughly translates to.. european days of our forefathers) so all the museums and monuments in town were free for the weekend! To take advantage of that, I went downtown yesterday to do some sight seeing. I ended up at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, which was really neat. It used to be a church (but then again thats not saying much, most buildings here in Europe have some kind of religious value) but its basically your run of the mill Fine Arts museum. I was pretty excited to see a few paintings by artists like Monet, Manet, Picasso, and Matisse! There were also a lot of Rodin sculptures. (Sidenote: Mom, I can't wait until you come out here to educate me about all the stuff at these museums!!!)

I wandered around by myself for the first hour or so, and I ended up running in to my friend Birtue from Berkeley, so we wandered a little bit more together, before parting ways and heading home.

My birthday is on Wednesday, but it's a bit of a bummer since I have class at 8AM (it took me nearly 50 minutes to get to class this morning!)...However, I don't have class at all for the rest of the day after that, so hopefully I'll think of something fun to do!

Gotta go finish some homework and figure out how I'm going to fix my laptop...Have a good week everyone!

And the obstacles keep on comin..

So I finally have a day off from class today..normally, I have a mandatory class every other Friday for foreign students, but it doesn't start until next week, so I got to sleep in today! Then, I made myself lunch and did some dishes..whilst watching some LOST on my laptop. Then, LOST froze, so I restarted the computer, only to find that it would no longer start up. After going to the university to use the computer lab, I've done some research, and it appears that the most likely explanation is that my hard drive is dead.

Great. Super timing!

I did some research on how to identify the problem, and they all require the Mac Startup Disc...I'm not sure where my Mac Startup Stuff is, or if I even have it with me here (help me out with that one, Dad) but hopefully I'll figure something out, since my whole first week of notes from class is on my laptop, along with all my pictures since this summer, since the computer hasn't been backed up since June....

In other news, my colocataire (roommate) Eva came out to hang out with us the other night! It was fun, I think she might have been a little overwhelmed by my friends' French roommate Benjamin (pronounced Bon-ja-MAN, haha) who was shirtless in front of a bar in the middle of the night when she first met him...but I'm glad she came out with us!

Tomorrow, we have an EAP trip to the Beaujolais, which is a little wine town a little bit north of Lyon. Should be fun!

Les Premières Jours de School

So, I finally started what I came here to do: school. On Monday, I had my first class at l’Institute d’Études Politiques de Lyon. IEP is technically a part of Université Lumière Lyon 2, but it’s pretty much its own separate school. It is also one of a prestigious number of universities that French students actually have to apply to get in to…Normally, all French students who pass their BAC, or Baccalaureate, are automatically admitted into any university, save for les Grandes Écoles. So us EAP students have the choice to take classes there, or at Lyon 2, at one of 2 campuses (one of the Lyon 2 campuses is where all of our UC classes have been and where the study center is, the other is at Bron, a neighborhood 25 minutes away from the center of town) and I think I will be taking all of my classes this semester at IEP.

I started on Monday with a class called Institutions Internationales et Européennes, or quite similarly en Anglais, International and European Institutions. The material wasn’t too difficult to understand, and the professor didn’t speak too quickly or anything…but he definitely had some kind of crazy accent (he rolled his R’s!), and the class was also 3 hours long, so my attention span ran out rather quickly. But there are a lot of other étudiants étrangères (foreign exchange students) in the class of about 200 people, so I think we will all try to suffer through it together.

That class was a Cours Fondamental, or lecture. At IEP, the CF’s alone are worth about 4.5 UC units, so it isn’t even necessary to take a Cours de Méthode, or discussion section, which is another 3 units on top of that. But for the class that I’m going to tomorrow (Histoire de la France depuis 1940) I am going to do the CF and CDM in order to get a crapload of units that I can apply to either of my majors! In addition, there are also seminars and Cours d’Ouverture, which are kind of like elective classes. For students in France, there is usually a very strict schedule of which classes you can take each year, so it’s really cool that we get to choose between all of them. I’m not sure where Cours d’Ouverture fit in to the French students’ schedules, but I checked one out on Tuesday with another Santa Barbara student, Brett, about Socialism in Europe in the 20th century, which was SO interesting. The professor was also very easy to understand and well organized!

So today, I’m checking out the History class that I mentioned before, as well as a class about Globalization through the eyes of Hollywood (another Cours D’ouverture). So if I take all those classes, my unit total will be about 20 quarter units, which is a little more than most UC students usually take in a quarter!

But all in all, class is going pretty smoothly. In addition to my IEP classes, I also have a couple of classes with the other EAP students…we have Méthodologie twice a week, and every other Friday we have Societé Française. This class has kind of impeded everyone’s travel schedules, including mine, seeing as how we have our first class next Friday, 2 days after my birthday, on the day in which I was hoping to go to Oktoberfest in Munich to celebrate my 20th. But we’ll see, I’m still hopeful about my Oktoberfest birthday goal, although it will probably involve a pretty expensive plane ticket and me sleeping in a tent somewhere in Germany!

A Weekend Sans Internet & Cell Phone

So I had a bit of a difficult weekend, because after going out with some friends on Friday night, I left my cell phone in our taxi. Fortunately, my friend Nicky who was still in the cab picked it up, but I didn't see him the rest of the weekend, and didn't finally get my phone back from him until last night (monday)!

My friend Kate from UCSB was here on Thursday with her mom, and we went up to Mt. Fourvière to see the church...then we had some true Lyonnais cuisine at a bouchon (a special type of restaurant that serves dishes specific to Lyon). The plan was to meet up with her in Paris on Saturday, but plans had to change when I didn't have my phone with all of her contact info in it and where we were staying. I had a little bit of a panic attack on Saturday morning because I woke up to take the train, after about 3 hours of sleep, and actually took the bus downtown with the intention to go to Perrache (the train station) and catch the TGV, but I decided against it in the end, and went home and back to sleep.

My house is pretty isolated from everything and everyone...My roommate wasn't here this weekend, she was home in Germany taking some exams and spending time with her family. The only bus line that runs around here takes about 20-25 minutes to get downtown. My landlady is very kind, offers to let me come over to her place to use her computer, and her son Guerric even made me hot chocolate the other day (which was awesome!!) but I spent a lot of the weekend alone, wandering around Bellecour by myself and searching for internet, since I don't have it at my apartment yet. Unfortunately, none of the wireless networks at any of the McDonalds worked for some reason, so I had a lot of much needed alone time! However, when I was downtown on Saturday night, I happened to run into Robert and Willie (2 UC students in my program) and Nick (Another UC student in the language & culture program) who had just gotten back from the Olympique Lyonnais game versus Nice. OL is our prized football team who I guess have won the French championship every year for some years now. So I ran into those guys and we got some kebabs, always the late night snack of choice!

I went back downtown on Sunday to search for more McDo's with WiFi, but what I got instead when I arrived in Bellecour was a giant parade! It was called the Défilé Biennale de la Danse, or "biennial parade of dance"...I am still not quite sure what it all meant, but it was really awesome. From what I gathered, it was basically about 10-15 different groups who each had their own scene that went along with the theme for this year, which was L'Avenir, or "the future". Each neighborhood of Lyon was represented by a number of exotic looking, very elaborately decorated and costumed individuals. It was pretty awesome, I wish I had known at the time exactly what was going on (I later got a little booklet explaining the scenes) because it was pretty confusing!

I went home afterward and did some last minute schedule planning (a lot of the weekend was also spent scouring my UCSB General Catalog and the Université Lyon 2 emplois du temps, or schedule of classes), because school started the next day...and that is an entire blog in itself, but for now, here are some pictures finally of my place!! I will add some pictures of the biennale once I get them uploaded!


The view of my front gate from the bus stop..the house on the left is my landlord's


Ma petite maison!


The stairwell up to the front door


The bathroom, ha ha


My room!

All moved in!

Hey guys, I'm all moved in to my new logement...and it's AWESOME! It doesn't quite feel like home yet, but it's getting there. Upsides: big closets, comfy bed, lots of privacy...The downsides would probably be...creaky cold hardwood floor, and the portail. Portail is the French word for "gate" or "doorway"...So pretty much, theres this big gate that leads into the yard between my house and my landlady's house, and I can NEVER open it!! My landlord keeps telling me "appuyer, puis tourner", or "push, then turn!" but I still can never get it...I usually just call Eva (my roommate) and have her buzz me in...I guess I'll just have to practice!

Otherwise, I took some pictures of the place, I'll post them the next time I have internet. I am currently internet-less at my house, since no one has lived there for a while, but hopefully that will soon change.

Here is my new contact info, if anyone wants to be pen pals!! I think this address will mostly be good for letters (and you can send packages to my Study Center, the address of which I can send if needbe)

188 rue Commandant Charcot
69005 Lyon, France

Almost done with our Intensive Language Program, and real classes start on Monday!! Oh man!!

Some Belated Pics from Paris

Here are some more pictures from Paris that Ora finally put up online...hopefully I will have more in about a week, as I am planning on going up again for the weekend with my friend Kate from UCSB, who has been in Germany all summer, and her mom!


My coworker Scott and I at L'Arc de Triomphe at night! beeeautiful!


Cool staircase at the Louvre.


At Notre Dame!

La Victoire de Samothrace, or The Nike of Samothrace...definitely one of my favorite sculptures. I learned about it back in art history class, ha ha.



Eiffel Tower at sunset. Parfait.

No Longer Homeless!

Hello all...it's about 22:30 (10:30pm) here in Lyon and I am here to tell you all that I finally found a place to live!!! After 3 rendezvous in the past few days, I found a place that I love, with people who I feel really comfortable with :)

So my first rendezvous on Thursday was in Villeurbanne, a suburb of Lyon. It was a pretty nice place, and it would be with a couple other students...but I don't know that I made the best impression on my prospective roommates...It's really hard for me to be talkative and outgoing while speaking French! Weird, I know, since I never stop talking in the States when I speak English. But I was finding it very difficult to express how much I liked the apartment. So I went back to the university for the rest of our Intensive Language Program (ILP) classes, and afterward I had another rendezvous. This one was pretty far away, in a residential neighborhood that wasn't bad, but wasn't particularly nice either. I went into it not knowing any of the details, and it turned out being that I would be living with a 30-something year old woman who had a 5 year old son that she gets every other week. The woman was really nice, and the son was adorable, but it wasn't exactly the living situation that I was anticipating having!

-just a side note, on Thursday when I had those 2 rendezvous, we also had 3 classes that day...and there was ALSO a grève!! Grève = strike. one company controls the buses, metros, AND the tramways, so you can imagine what a disaster it was trying to get from meeting to meeting to class to class...-

However, Friday rolled around and, after class and an academic meeting, I headed out to meet Sabine, my landlord-to-be! I took the bus from Bellecour, the main downtown area, and it took about 20 minutes. I get there and Sabine shows me around her amazing house...she has 3 kids and theyre all college aged or older, so they don't really live at home anymore. She originally was going to rent out her son's room, but after meeting both me and another prospective tenant, she decided that it would be better for us and for her if the 2 of us lived in her guest house! It has a bedroom and a salon, or living room, which will be made into a 2nd bedroom...and it has a bathroom and kitchen as well. My colocataire, or "apartment-mate" is a German student named Eva, who speaks French fluently and also speaks a little bit of English!

I went back to Sabine's house today (which has a huge yard, a patio and a pool!) and met Eva, who turned out to be the sweetest girl ever. And we get to move in on Tuesday! I'm not sure that everything will be quite ready for us, like I think we will have to go into the house to use WiFi for the first few days, but I'm so excited to get out of this damn résidence! I'm sick of living in the semi-ghetto, where the only closeby food is the Kebab place, and we have to sneak food and drink into our rooms!

Here are some photos of the past week or so!


Birute (from Berkeley) and I at the Rhône on what felt like a 90 degree day last weekend!


Riding a moving sidewalk at the Métro station into town last night


Molly (from San Diego), me, and Sarah (also from Santa Barbara) admiring some cool street art...too bad Sarah wasn't ready for the picture! Haha


The view from the bus on the way to my future house!

Tomorrow, my plans are to go do laundry at a laundr-o-mat with Birute, then when she has a rendezvous, I think a bunch of us are going to go to the Lumiere Brothers Museum, a museum about the 2 brothers from Lyon who didn't create film, but who were pretty pivotal in the early film making process. At least now I can enjoy myself and not have to worry about scheduling rendezvous and searching for logement!

The Apartment Search Continues..

So I am still homeless, along with 10 others in my program (there are 37 of us total, I believe)...Which is a little worrisome, but also pretty nice because now there aren't like 20 people all vying for the same apartments, and my options have opened up a lot!

On Monday, I saw an apartment in the 8ème arrondissement (the 8th "area" of town) which was pretty ghetto, and pretty far away from pretty much everything. I haven't heard back from the girl yet, but I don't think I would take it even if she accepted. Tomorrow, I have two meetings to see apartments...one is in a suburb called Villeurbanne, but is right on the city limit, next to La Parc de la Tète D'or, a huge park (that has a zoo!!!) in a nice neighborhood near a big Métro station...The other one I'm seeing tomorrow is a little further out, in the 3ème, near a bus stop. And I'm seeing another one on Friday that would be a room in a big house up on the hill in the 5ème near a bus stop as well. Having public transportation closeby is such an important factor in looking for an apartment, because the city is very spread out, but there are buses, trams, and Métro lines everywhere!

So the outlook is good for now, and I'm pretty sure all the apartments I am going to see are 400€ per month or less, which is less than $600 per month, which is less than I was paying for my apartment in Santa Barbara! :-P Plus, once I get my Carte de Séjour (essentially, my Green Card) I get to apply for the CAF, which is a monthly payment from the French government that students get as an incentive for them to live in France. Each month, I will get a certain amount of my rent paid back to me, which is awesome!

In other news, we had medical exams today, which was pretty interesting...it was pretty much a normal check up, except they weighed us in KG and measured us in Meters, haha. They also took a chest x-ray to check for TB, and we got to keep the X-ray! Unfortunately for us, it is super windy today, so our huge folders with the chest X-rays have been flopping around everywhere we go, since we've been hanging around at the university for the past few hours until our class starts in 20 minutes.

Oh, and speaking of weather, it is crazy here! It is normally in the low 80s or high 70s, which is pretty warm...but this past week, there have been 2 nights where it is POURING rain and last night there was a crazy lightning storm! I had never seen anything like it. But this morning, all was fine and dandy again and it's 77 degrees F now. So strange...

But for now, here are some pictures of Lyon besides the couple I posted a while back!

Me and another UCSB student, Molly, around Bellcour (the downtown area)



Notre Dame de Fourvière, the church at the top of the hill! So pretty!!

Some random Roman ruins on the hill.



Secret passageways, called traboules in Vieux Lyon (Old Lyon)...they are all over the place, and were used a long time ago for transporting Silk when it rained, and more recently during la Résistance of the Gestapo during WW2. My university's courtyards were actually used as holding areas for the Gestapo, ha ha.


Hôtel de Ville, which isn't in fact a hotel, but Lyon's City Hall!


A view of part of the city from our Boat tour of the Saone river. Très jolie!

After our boat tour, we got treated (well...our program fees treated us) to a very nice French three course dinner! This was the dessert, which was soo delicious. The other 2 courses were a fish cake type thing, and the second course was chicken with rice and veggies. Much better than the baguettes, cheese, and apples we've been surviving on during the week!