Taking Up Time

No fun pictures today, sorry. I did take some earlier but they were just of things like graffiti in the bathroom and boring empty classrooms, and I think I've inflicted that enough on you all. So you now get the pleasure of me trying to take up some time before 1:00 PM since Penn State's stupid server won't work before seven in the morning, which it is not yet.

Oh! I read in the Montpellier Plus this morning that Redeye is playing tonight on Canal, which made me get my hopes all high since we actually get the Canal station, but then I realized that they usually fuzz it out when good movies are on. Maybe Redeye isn't of high enough caliber to be worth messing with our cable. I remember when I went to go see it in theaters with Travis. I thought that it was Flightplan. I then found it odd that they would show a preview of Flightplan before the movie itself. At the end of the preview, FLIGHTPLAN showed up in really big letters. I felt incredibly dumb. However, there is a silver lining in all of this, because Redeye turned out to be really exciting and good, and Flightplan (when I did get around to seeing it) was suspenseful up until the horrid ending that made no sense and got me angry that I had waited so long for it. But anyway, it's on tonight. And I've loved Rachel McAdams since Mean Girls.

And I just finally realized after literally months of off and on torment that reason that Pierre Henry's Psyche Rock sounded so familiar was that it was in both Mean Girls as well as the intro to Futurama. I am relieved at last.

Suzy recounted yesterday about how our Promised Lands teacher told her that the reason that the server doesn't work well here at Paul-Valery is that it's about to implode and that the university won't replace it until it actually bites the dust. Why can't we have nice things?

I stayed after class today in Shakespeare to flatter and cajole the professor into giving me a basis for how he would be grading the final, and eventually wheedled out of him that English structure and form would be given weight and that I should not worry myself about getting higher than an 11, which is the A mark for non-Minnesotan classes.

I've been able to register for classes since the 20th but none have been so popular that I've needed to right away. I have one film class left to take for my minor, and several options:

1. Comm 453 Film and Literature
2. Comm 455 Film Theory and Criticism
3. Comparative Lit 153 International Literature and Film
4. CAS 415 Film and Television
5. Phil 005 Philosophy of Art and Film
6. Jewish Studies 497A Food and Film

I'm for the food and film one, personally.

Puddles

I don't know what this green crap is in front of my apartment, but it's always there. It looks like someone just dumped a ton of radioactive material in the street.






This bus was fun.








Here's the local animal life. We have a lot of pigeons.







Hee, Whippy Creme.








I don't know why this guy was at the tram stop when he obviously wanted the bus. Aha, aha.








I tried to get a picture from a different angle, and ended up with a delightfully inadvertant shot of the local masculine fashions.




Love the pink shirt, dude.

All-Nighter

Since it was Monday yesterday and hence the 9:00 film class, that meant that I had to wake up at 7:15, which really meant 6:15 because of the time change. And I did end up going food shopping, so I was pretty tired after lugging everything home (I’ve sacrificed personal ease for not looking like a Wheelie Backpack Girl). I made myself a little dinner, and then I thought that I would just lay down for a second, just close my eyes, you know how the rest goes. I woke up again at midnight and tried desperately to sleep through the rest of the night, but it wasn’t in the cards. I got up to go to the bathroom at two o’clock and have been cold and noisy in the kitchen since then. Why is it that I am so much more clumsy and loud in the wee hours o’the morning than in real life? I guess the combination of it being really dark, my hands being cold to the point of oafishness, and the quiet seeming to amplify every sound you make. Although I did knock my straightener off the dresser and I bet it was every bit as loud as I feared it was.

Have I mentioned the hot dogs here yet? On a whim, I checked the ingredients list for the regular pork ones, and it’s horrifying so I won’t mention what’s in them. So I thought that maybe the chicken hot dogs might be better. They give new meaning to the word fowl. 16% of the entire hot dog is chicken skin. Ew, ew!

But I did break down and buy the pork ones because gosh darn, they’re only 89 centimes for ten and they are so easy to make and filling to boot. I picked up some mustard in the next aisle because it was on major sale (29 centimes, hope it’s not crap in a jar) because the mustard I have in my apartment, tasty horseradish sauce it may be, is not mustard.

Anyway, I meant to post awhile ago about a particularly amusing incident in Shakespeare class. We’re onto Antony and Cleopatra, not one of the better known plays. The professor was getting all deep and interprety into one of the passages, which after an initial skim made me giggle. Why? Here’s why:

The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne

Burn’d on the water: the poop was beaten gold;

Heh! Juvenile, perhaps, but I don’t care. The poop was beaten gold! Hee! I’m still laughing. Still funnier, though, was that the professor loved this entire passage. He gave us an impromptu lesson on rhythmic Shakespeare stylings, and would bang his fist on the desk to make sure that the duller students understood the emphasized words. So, he ended up chanting,

BURN’D on the WAter: the POOP was BEATen gold;

I bet he did it just to give the Americans a laugh.

So! Aigues Mortes! I really wish it had been a sunnier day, since I’m sure that it’s beautiful in good weather. But, it wasn’t bad nonetheless.

What are all those crazy specks in the lake? Flamingos! Oh yes! An entire flock of them was just camped out in Camargues. Why? Well, the area (which happens to be the basin for the Rhône, or something) is really salty, and this particular kind of red algae loves it like mad. So the shrimp come and eat the algae, which in turn is like a magnet for flamingos, or as the French say, les flamants roses.

Here we are inside this fortress of sorts, which was used in ye olden tymes to imprison the Protestant women for decades.

Nice arches. This is my current desktop background.

From the top of the fortress.

Note the purplish haze on the water from the algae.

Sam and I made a judgmental error in deciding to walk the entire way around the sentry path that surrounded the city. Back in the day, they had steps that led down to the road, but those were boarded up so the only way to get back down was to just keep going the entire way around until you got back to where you started. It was a good half hour walk.

The sentries seemed to have crude bathrooms every so often. At least they're nicer than the ones at the university.

As well as spying peepholes. If Mom had been there, I would have called it the Snoo Peephole, and then laughed.

So we finally got down, and set out to the shopping district which sold naught but ice cream and tacky souvenirs.

And, augh! The scariest mannequin ever manufactured.

They did have one frightening store where it seems all of France goes for its weaponry needs. I really want that huge Swiss Army Knife.

More knives. They actually sold guns there, too, but I couldn’t get a good picture because of the reflection. I think that was the first time that I’ve seen a gun in France besides the Uzis that the soldiers had at the airport.

No arms store would be complete without some nerd memorabilia.

Like a huge dragon knife.

Now I want a Taser.

Oh, my mistake. They don’t sell arms – they sell arm’s. Egads, no French person can manage apostrophes correctly. Bonus points for the handle, though.

Brass knuckles, wow!

The flowers were blooming nicely.

Sam and I went halfsies on some gummi bears manufactured by Tom and Pilou. So that there’s no confusion, Tom’s shirt says TOM on it. I want a gigantic gummi bear that I can sit comfortably on.

This flavor was the devil. I thought it was grape, but it was a horrible hybrid mix of grape and black licorice and badness.

All-Nighter, Part II

After we were done admiring the fortress, they took us to a ‘wine tasting’. I put that in quotes because it was really lame. The other wine tastings we’ve had (I’ve been to four now) we’ve always gotten real glasses and a selection of more than one wine. Here, no. They gave us a half inch in a plastic dentist’s cup. Classy. Not only that, but the wine, which had a pleasant light red color and I was expecting to be light and fruity, was anything but. It was this heavy, cloying Muscat dessert wine that I didn’t realize until I had taken a sizable swallow and went “blahhhhhh”. It was a challenge to finish even the paltry amount in the plastic cup.

But they did have olives out in a little bowl to sample. We ended up having about a half hour just to look around this store of ‘regional specialties’.

Honk!

I wonder if it’s real. I bet it is.

Sadly, it was being used to peddle goose fat.

They had every type of oil known to man.

Including what looked like motor oil.

It was a struggle to not buy the different spices and flavorings. I was craving pasta.

This was weird. It was right next to the wine vats and seemed to be a Jerry Garcia-styled compressor of sorts.

I hope they don’t sell flamingo fat.

This seemed to be the market for any kind of southern France merchandise. I really wanted this plate. 19 euros? I don’t think so.

There’s some sort of cicadian fascination around these parts. I see pictures of them everywhere, but no one’s ever mentioned them nor have I seen any buzzing around.

More cicada.

Neat pottery, probably cicada-themed.

They sold some sort of absinthe wannabe product but I read the label and I think that it said something like ‘extract using the same process used in the creation of absinthe’ or some such nonsense. The name “Absente” is probably short for “absent of any absinthe”.

Ah, pretty gel candles.

This is the not-as-pretty Camargues stream next to the gift shop.

Wildlife fun.

Oh, god, the tour guides. When we started out on the tour bus this guy grabbed the bus mike and started yammering on about the history of Aigues Mortes, which I guess is his job, but then he ran out of stuff to say but desperately wanted to keep talking so he started making lame jokes and unhelpfully adding in English words when I suppose he thought we’d be confused, with words like ‘lakes’ and ‘castle’ (because lacs and château can be tricky). Then it all went downhill and he attempted to have a conversation with one of the other guides but we could only hear half of it, not like anyone was interested at this point anyway.

I let my thoughts wander for a good five minutes, then I snapped out of my blissful reverie and said to Sam, “good lord, is he still talking?”

Note how it looks like he is mid-song. You know why that is? Because he is. Yeesh, it was awful – on the way back, he was like ‘why don’t we sing some songs? I just happened to bring my guitar!’, like hah, funny. Not intentionally! He really did bring along this acoustic guitar conveniently in the storage compartment. Along with a packet of songbooks so that everyone could sing with him. It had a rather planned air to it. This was never mentioned in the ‘come with us to Aigues Mortes’ email.

It was poorly planned at that, since he ran out of songbooks by the middle of the bus, not that I was really crying in bewildered anger. When all the songs had been sung, Tour Guide couldn’t handle just sitting down and enjoying the ride, so he handed the mike over (finally!) to the girls in front and implored them to sing some American songs, like the national anthem. This quickly degenerated into someone singing the Oscar Meyer Weiner song. It was a good thing to get off that bus.

All-Nighter, Part III

I know that there’s no way that I’m going to get back to bed before six o’clock. I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time listening to Kidz Bop as of late. For those of you cool folk out there who don’t know what it is, Kidz Bop is a series of bowdlerized popular songs with accompaniment by actual children. When the songs are too scandalous, they don’t hesitate to throw in their own lyrical gems. With the Black Eyed Peas’ “Pump It”, the chorus includes the innocent, exploited children shouting “foshizzlin’!”, which makes me laugh and cringe at the same time.

I didn’t realize how many volumes the Kidz Bop library has grown to include. Not only is there Kidz Bop, the original, but also Kidz Bop 2 – 11, A Kidz Bop Valentine, Kidz Bop Christmas, followed up by A Very Merry Kidz Bop, Kidz Bop Sports Jamz, Kidz Bop Halloween, Kidz Bop Gold, More Kidz Bop Gold, and my personal favorite, Los Kidz Bop, with sassy salsa beats.

Did I ever post the video clip of the street corner singer? Well, I did now. The Montpellier Plus newspaper featured an article about him the other day, and it turns out that he’s actually trying to become a professional singer and uses the corner as a way to help him get over stage fright. I should have known that he wasn’t just some crazy guy from the fact that he was singing actual songs with actual words.

There is nothing to do at 5:54 in the morning. I wish I had wireless. The internet never sleeps.

I checked out two comfort books from the library today: Critical Essays on Harry Potter and Pride and Prejudice, which I am just flying through.

Ooh! I can write out my essay!

I had Phonetics today, and for a change we worked on something useful – the ‘r’ sound that most Americans will probably never master, myself included. It’s pronounced ‘air’, but you have to kind of cough it out a little, so it sounds like “airhah”. Apparently the ‘r’ and the ‘l’ sounds are similar so we got to work on pronouncing the letter L as well. Here’s what we had to repeat:

Ni – dine – line; note – dot – lotte; natte – date – latte; Nantes – Dante – lente.

I always feel so silly in that class. Oh, good news – I got an 18.75 out of twenty on the test we go back today. I think that an A is something like a 14.1, so I’m not worried too much. At least we get grades in that class, albeit sporadically. Most of my other classes just have one final grade that counts for everything. I don’t like that.

Just for fun, and because obviously I have the time, here’s a writing sample that I had to translate into phonetics.

Lorsque le cours était fini, à quatre heures, une longue soirée de solitude commençait pour moi. Mon père transportait le feu du poêle de la classe dans la cheminée de notre salle à manger ; et peu à peu, les derniers gamins attardés abandonnaient l’école refroidi où roulaient des tourbillons de fumée.

[loRskәlәkuretєfini/akatRœ/ynlõgswaRedәsolitydkomãsєpurmwa//

mõpєRtRãspoRtєlәfødypwaldәlәklasdãlәƒәminedәnotRsalamãje/

epøapø/ledєRnjegamẽataRdeabãdonєlekolRәfrwadiuRuldeuRbijõdәfyme//]

Ugh, that is really not fun to type out.

Here are some sentences that sound almost exactly the same in French:

It’s a knowledgeable man / It’s a soap.

She is at the edge / She is in butter.

I love urchins / I love bear cubs.

It’s in satin / It’s a Satan (that’s close in English, too).

Here is Tintin! / Here’s your thyme.

Hee. Here are some more like those, because I think they’re funny:

I love old handsome men / I love old beef.

He dies / He bites.

Make a wish / Make veal.

He has no fear / He has no father.

You have nice hair / You have nice horses.

I don’t want anything / I’m worthless.

He is very young / He is very yellow.

Still Not Aigues Mortes

As a quasi-celebration for our last class, Early Russian Montage Theory Cinema was let out an entire fifteen minutes early. Whoa, there. But, of course, I remembered halfway through the class that I left both my Phonetics book and packet at the apartment. Yargh.

List! I may go shopping today since I don't need very much and hence won't have to wheel around any conspicuous luggage. What do I need?

1. Bread
2. Eggs
3. Chocolate Muesli Cereal
4. Fruity Muesli Cereal
5. Lettuce (my lettuce keeps getting all mildewy in the fridge)
6. Vanilla Ice Cream
7. Toilet Paper

Yawn, yawn. Not really an exciting trip aside from the muesli and ice cream. We're currently in a toilet paper crisis state at the apartment, and it is imperative that I buy some today. We're down to using the little Kleenex pocket-packs.

The stars aligned recently and provided me with Alias in continuous form. By the merest chance, both disc 1 and 2 of season 1 were available at the mediatheque, so I watched them greedily and then I went back on Saturday, not daring to hope, and yes! There was disc three! Woo!

Sadly, though, 24 from noon to 4:00 PM has still not shown up.

And now the internet at the office is being fussy and not wanting to upload any of my brilliant photos. Hmmph. So, you'll just have to wait with bated breath until the next post. Be strong.

Not Quite Aigues Mortes

I'm on the illicit internet right now, at the office that should lock its gate but doesn't. So I'm sitting outside, which gives the screen a horrific glare and makes it very hard to see pictures. Hence, our trip to Aigues Morts from yesterday will be recapped tomorrow when I am seated properly and inside.

I wanted to spend a relaxing a peaceful lunchtime hour at McDonald's yesterday before our trip, but that proved impossible. Argh! Balloons! They were everywhere! I had to dash out and grab a seat outside on the terrace despite the chill and guard it like a doberman against the other outward-bound patrons. They were fierce, but I held my own.

It's warming up a bit here, thank god, since last week's mistrals were terrible things.

How cold was it? It was fraikin froid. Hee.







I had to disguise my laughing as an errant cough after reading this title.






Now my bottom is starting to hurt. Peace out.

Shopping Day

I've started making my grocery shopping excursions on Tuesdays rather than Wednesdays, which means that I have to carry my suitcase to class with me before I head out to Leader Price. Today I was dragging my suitcase to the library when I stopped and realized "oh no! I look like I have a wheelie backpack!" Now I'm really embarrassed and self-conscious because I remember how funny Intense Wheelie Backpack Girl was in high school and do not want to provide that kind of humor to the French. Egads.

About ten minutes into my Cinema class today, some yahoo tried to open the main door (which is always sticky and also the professor has declared numerous times that if you're late you should go through the back door) and after a few hearty tugs on the door, does this impressive jump through the open window beside it and almost tears down the curtain. Oh dude! The professor was having none of it. He got all angry and sputtered "sortez! maintenant!" a.k.a "get out! now!" which he did. That livened up the class a little.

Grabels

I just happened to be passing by the Virgin Megastore on my home the other day when I noticed a commotion from within. Being curious, I found that some famous French rapper was signing autographs. Joy! I didn't want an autograph but I did manage to get a picture and this video. I don't have any idea what he's saying either.

I think McDonalds is wishfully thinking here. The entire accumulation of snow that has ever fallen on Montpellier would never be enough to make two snowmen.





Finally, my deepest wishes came true on Saturday and Sam accompanied me to Grabels because lord knows I couldn't find it myself.






I liked this butcher's sign because of how animated it was. And, it also made sense. See, there were the chickens up top because they sell poultry, then the pigs playing instruments because they sell pork ... and then it takes on a dark, scary twist with the addition of two cats and a dog near the bottom. I didn't buy meat there.



Heeee. This is a sign for a company that does repairs. How about you repair that there sign, buddy.








We could have visited the Fresh Prince, but sadly we ran out of time.





Oh! Who takes great pictures? Um, that would be me. Notice the bicyclist that I just happen to catch going past at the exact right moment. Yes, yes.




The flowers everywhere have been blooming lately.







Oh, crap. I was all set to go swimming and then they ruined my good time. Sam told a tall tale in saying that it was a river. It was a gentle stream, at best.




This was my favorite spot - there was a tiny waterfall next to this old chateau that I now want to buy and inhabit.





Ooh, picturesque.










Hey fisherman - World War I called. They want their uniform back.






This was my favorite stepping stone bridge. We even got to see a cute dog bounding across.