Vacation, and the start of July

This needs to be a rapid fire update, because I haven't written in too long of a time.

So, Friday, June 20th: It was a bit of a sad day because I had to say goodbye to my really cool roommates, Melanie, Gabby, and Robin. I was really fortunate to have started out here with great roommates since they made France feel more like a home for me, and this home-stay feel more like a family. Melanie was really excited to go back home (she's from around Albany, NY) because she has been homesick for awhile, but it was nice because that Friday night she stopped and said that she was actually going to miss France because we had all become so close. This is also going to sound a bit cliché, but you really do make Study Abroad families...people that you become close to and can lean on and go to for support, whether it be when dealing with homesickness, or coming to terms with some weird cultural difference, or just simply having a good laugh in a foreign situation you would never run into in the States. We all exchanged phone numbers and emails, and after that was all sad and done, we sat in le salon (living room/dining room) and played around with the piano and sang songs. Haha, it was hilarious. Melanie was very good at impromptu piano playing, and Robin mostly took the lead vocals while gabby and I were rolling on the floor laughing. We made songs up about Huguette getting upset that she was changing the toilet paper too often (hahah, oh the French) and songs about Tours, etc. We all agreed that we should have had "music time" every night after dinner, not just on the last night :( but it was a great last hurrah.
me and melanie (and robin jumping in the back)
Jin-ah and Yuka (I swear I didn't tell them to make peace signs)
Gabby and Robin

Saturday: La Fête de la Musique!! The craziest pagan tradition that exists everywhere in the world except in North America. Every year on the summer solstice is the music festival, in every city, and literally EVERYONE participates and goes out to have a good time. It starts at 8pm, and musicians and bands litter every single street, plaza, alley...all different sorts of music. And everyone comes out to take part in it. I saw parents with very young children walking around at 3 in the morning, and that was something that struck me as odd because I think if the festival were in the States it might be more just for a younger crowd than EVERYONE. But it made it that much better. I started the night off with Gabby and Robin (their last night in Tours) and we went for an organ concert in the cathedral at 8pm. It sounds dorky at first, but it was actually really impressive listening to this huge organ in the cathedral playing all these very baroque and medieval songs. The funny part though, was the 15 minute intermission in the middle of the concert where the organ player did an impromptu piece that was him simply touching different keys one by one in the most random order, and then playing Dracula music. HAHAH. Everyone kept looking at each other in the church, as if to say, "What the heck is going on? Where did this guy come from?"

After that little concert I met up with MSU people and started walking around the city. There were hippies, reggae music, 60s and 70s rock bands, grunge bands, hard core scream-o bands (really strange to hear in french), salsa and cha cha, techno, house dj's mixing beats, French rappers dueling and spitting mad-rhymes.. and a sea of people, in every street, dancing with everyone and going from different band to different band. We followed a drum line around for awhile and danced walked down the streets with them. It was such a fun night. I really wish we had the solstice music festival in the States.

Sunday: Stayed home most of the day and felt my plague coming on...I had a little bit of a sore throat that would later turn into a bad cold and laryngitis during my vacation with Lauren and Christian.

Then I got a call from Mrs. Silver! She told me that they would be in Tours that evening and invited me and Matt to have dinner with them. I met up with the Brighton group at 6pm at their hotel. It was very crazy. A little piece of Brighton in France. Suddenly I found that when I was speaking French with Mrs Silver, Mr Dufon, Mrs Carleton, that I could speak much more fluidly and easily than when I have ever spoken with my host mom... I don't get it. But it was a good feeling anyway. We went to the restaurant and had a really nice discussion with the French teachers and Mrs Prieskorn. Even Mrs Harvey was there which was odd. I didn't know that she was coming to help chaperon the group either. She was my Health teacher in 10th grade. We talked about different cultural occurrences, our host families, language things that only language students would find interesting, etc. Then they were really nice and paid for Matt's and my dinner. Hurray for free food, eh? I walked them to the park by Jen's house because one of the kids on the group wanted to go jogging a little bit. Some of the students tagged along for the walk, and I got a chance to chat with them (including Kelsey) about how they were liking their visit to France so far. The whole night was like having a little piece of Brighton in Tours, haha. It was strange but cool at the same time to meet up with them in France. Mrs. Silver walked back with Matt and I, and when I said my goodbye I kind of felt choked up. It was so nice seeing familiar faces, and so comforting, that I was reluctant to return back to my French life in Tours.

Monday-Thursday morning: Paris with Lauren and Christian!

I arrived on Monday afternoon in Paris with Matt and he tagged along with me as I looked for the hotel in the Latin Quarter. Uncle Greg kept calling me asking to meet up with them, but I was sweaty, hot, tired, and busy walking all over looking for the stupid hotel and I told him to call me back but we didn't end up getting a chance to meet up. Finally found the hotel, and they were sleeping. They told me that they hit a huge pocket of turbulence during the beginning of the flight and the plane just fell straight down and everything went flying. Oi. That would scare me so much. I think if that had happened to me I would have peed my pants. Oh là là. I seriously get so freaked out from flying anyway. But they made it just fine, to the hotel as well. We went to the train station to buy our tickets to go to Provence later in the week, then met up with Matt again after he got settled in his hotel and we had delicious croque-monsieurs at a cafe near the hotel.

We got to see a lot of different monuments and sights while in Paris. We went to the catacombs (which I was dieing to see and wasn't disappointed) and it was very eery and interesting to be walking down many damp passageways beneath the city, seeing all of the bones just piled up on either side of the corridor. We saw Notre Dame, Eiffel Tower, Champs Elysées, Montmartre, Musée D'Orsay (with all the impressionist paintings), the outside of the Louvre, Place de la Concorde, Arc de Triomphe, and visited little shops and markets inbetween.

Thursday-Saturday: Made our way down to the south of France via the TGV train. I love that train. It's so smooth and really fast, only took 3 hours to make it all the way to Aix-en-Provence. Our hotel was really cute, and used to be a monastery. Now it was time to unwind a bit from such a rushed vacation. The first afternoon Lauren and Christian went to go walking around the city, and I went to a cafe and read one of my required reads for the program. The only draw back of being in the south was that it was soooo hot. There was no escaping the heat.

On Friday we took a shuttle bus from Aix to Marseilles so we could go to the beach! I loved that. The Mediterranean felt very refreshing in the heat. That evening Matt and I met up with Jen and Lindsey who had arrived in Aix. We sat at a cafe and talked about how our vacations had been going, and then walked around a little bit. But we were all pretty tired especially from the heat so we called it an early night and I went back to the hotel. Saturday I spent the afternoon buying my train ticket back to Tours and then doing a little souvenir shopping for people at home. We decided that it would be nice to stay another day longer since classes didn't start till later this week, so I went back on Saturday night to Jen and Lindsey's hotel, and said my goodbyes to Lauren and Christian, who were leaving early on Sunday morning to try and make it on some flights out of Charles de Gaulle.

Their hotel was a little bit outside of the city (only about a 10 minute bus ride away) but it had a pool!! I haven't uploaded pictures yet from this last leg of the trip, but I'll add them in the next entry I write. Needless to say, there is always some interesting Study Abroad adventure/crazy story around the corner...the hotel was more of a long-term hotel, where workers and people would stay for more extended periods of time. In our building? Three or four 30yr old Australians, one older 30s Norwegian, and an Englishman. Hahahahaha. They were really funny. One of the Australians had no teeth either...eww. But they were really funny to hang around with at the pool, and seemed to be glad to meet us (ehhh..hahah). It was all so random, but very amusing.

beautiful view from my hotel with jen and lindsey..mountains in the background

I finally got back home to Tours on Monday night after a long day of train travel. We had a lay-over in Lyon for a couple hours, so Alice came to have lunch with us inbetween our trains! It was good seeing her again.

So, thats the vacation week summed up in a long entry, I've got to getting going for the moment to meet up with my Profs and see how I placed in my classes for the month of July. Only 4 weeks left! Where did the first 4 go?!