On Parade Stalking

So, yesterday I went to an Occitan Carnival festival.... thing.  It was... well, it wasn't what I expected, but that's partially because I didn't have all the info about said Occitan festival, and it's possible that I jumped the gun a little.

Let me start off with something of an explanation:  As most of you know, a large part of the reason I chose this particular program in France was because of a fascination with the regional language, Occitan.  It's a strange mix of Spanish, Latin, and Italian, coated with a lots of French.  Said fascination lead to me choosing it as the topic of my Senior Thesis for the Honors College.  Thus, Occitan cultural activities are high on my to do list.
Thus, when my host mother informed me that there was an article in the Montpellier paper advertising that there would be an Occitan Carnival in the Peyroux garden on Saturday, I cheerfully went.  What neither of us got, however, was that it was put on by one of the local Occitan immersion schools.  (Yes, they have those here.  They're on my list of people to hit up for interviews for my thesis.)  With this information, you may have anticipated the punchline:  The vast majority of the proceedings were essentially designed for the parents of the students in question to coo over.  I saw most of a rather adorable skit (mostly in Occitan, they translated for the non-Occitan speaking parents) involving the city of Montpellier forgetting its animal totem for Carnival, and found the parade of students dressed up for Carnival.  Actually, I kind of stalked the parade, mostly because the costumes were interesting, and the music was fairly traditional Occitan style music.  It was rather cute, but not dreadfully outsider friendly.  Granted, I was late, so perhaps I missed the outsider friendly portion.  Definitely a possibility.

Still, they were so CUTE!  And it reassures me to know that there will be another generation of people who speak Occitan, even if it's not their maternal language.

Here are photos, and some video of that skit.  Really, what kind of stalker would I be if I didn't have photos and video?

A chunk (hopefully) of the skit, with the girls singing a song.  The songs (and there were several) were probably the best part...

The skit again, during a dance that took place during one of the songs.

Parade!  With costumes!  The red and yellow streamers are a massive tip-off that this is an Occitan festival.  Those are the colors on the Langue d'Oc flag.

Massive props to this kid for managing the stilts.  That type is particularly nasty.  And you can see a bit of the Langue d'Oc flag she has draped around her shoulders like a cape.

Geneva..... well, sort of.

I would love to regail you with tales of how lovely Geneva is, and how I've gotten to coo over the Saint Peter's Cathedral, and got to see the really rather nifty Jet d'Eau that is the trademark of the city.  But alas, I can't.  Geneva has been, well, something of a bust.  Which is depressing, because I really did want to come here to see things like the Jet d'Eau, and the UN building, and all that other stuff.

You see, my day started off at 8:00 am so that I could get to the train station in time to catch my train to Lyon.  The train was supposed to leave at 10:06, so I took the 8:50 bus to the tram, and then the tram to the station.  I got there at 9:30, and, like a good little girl, went to wait for my train.  And believe me, I waited.  And waited.  I waited a good forty minutes for my train to show up.  As it turned out, the train had broken down somewhere, causing a delay.  And you know how your flight always gets delayed when you only have like, forty minutes before your connection leaves?  Yeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaah.... that was my train schedule.  My train from Montpellier got to Lyon something like... fifteen minutes after my train to Geneva left.  So, I joined the hordes of other people in the acceuil, seeking to get a replacement ticket for a missed connection. And I got one.  It left at the same time my original connection was supposed to arrive.

Now, please, don't get me wrong.  I wasn't going to have tons of time in Geneva.  I really wasn't.  It was always going to be a hit and run.  I was supposed to get in at 14:27, and then spend the afternoon doing things like seeing the cathedral and the jet d'eau.  Then I would much more leisurely find some dinner.  There would probably be some Starbucks involved.  Arriving at 16:30 (the eta for the replacement ticket) would have meant no jet d'eau, but I could have hit up the cathedral, if I'd been quick about it.

You have anticipated the punchline:  We got to the first stop for the train, only to be informed that one of the passengers was feeling 'mal à l'aise' aka 'uneasy' or 'uncomfortable', and that there would be a bit of a delay. Well, a bit of a delay turned into 'a twenty seven minute wait while we call the SAMU (that's an ambulance for you Americans) to come fetch her'.  We got to Geneva at 17:00.  Pretty much everything is closed.  I go to the Office of Tourism to get directions to my hostel.  Finally get to my hostel at about 18:00, by which time pretty much everything is closed.

It's just not fair.

On the plus side, in my hostel, my roommates are all nice, and three of them are on my flight to Prague in the morning.  So, even if I do have to wake up at 6:30 instead of 7:00 as a gesture of solidarity (and really, it's probably not a bad idea to make sure that I get out the door by 8:00), at least I won't be alone or bugging most of my dorm mates with an early alarm.  And that is definitely of the good.

Carcassonna!

Early, early yesterday morning, I hopped a train with my friend Kathryn, and we headed to Carcassonne, also known by its Occitan name, Carcassonna.  The experience was fun, and pretty informative.  We discovered that by exploiting student ID cards (my ISIC card, in this case) you can get free access into historical monuments!  Hooray for seeing the Chateau Comtal without paying five to eight euro!

Also intriguing were the Basilica de Saint Nazari (Le Basilique de Saint Nazaire) and the two other churches we saw, but didn't actually get to go into (the Cathedrale de Saint Michel was under renovation, and the Eglise de Saint Vincent was just mean and didn't have an easily visible entry.  Or any entry, for that matter, as we tried all the doors.)

So, After a Long Pause

I haven't written a post in ages, yes, yes, I know.  I'm a horrible person.  Or perhaps it's just that I keep getting distracted by other things when I sit down to write a post.  Whatever the reason, my apologies and I'll try to do better.  At any rate, thank my lack of knowledge that my Medieval Occitan course had gotten canceled this morning for the post.  Otherwise, I wouldn't have had three hours to kill before my Academic Writing course.

So, what is there to say?  Université Paul Valéry remains as disorganized as ever, leading to never ending bouts of amazement that they get anything done.  My classes are going fairly well, although I'm not necessarily thrilled with how I did on my first Southern Civilization exam.  Then again, I'm told that  nobody is thrilled with how they did on that exam, so at the very least, it's not just me.  Fortunately, I think the professor liked my group presentation on the Cathar heresy and Albigensian Crusades, so that should work out.

My Occitan classes are going... well, my non-specialist (i.e. people who have never taken Occitan before) course is going well.  I've made my first friend here in France thanks to it as well.  Her name is Renata, and if the name wasn't a bit of a tip, she's not French either.  She's German and is studying here as an Erasmus student.  Still, she's really nice, and we commiserate about the random things about French culture that just don't make sense to us.  My Modern Occitan Literature class is also proving to be working out.  It's a liiiiiiittle tricky to follow the class sometimes, because it's a bilingual class, but that means that it's half taught in Occitan.  For those of you who weren't sure, I don't speak Occitan beyond a couple of short phrases including, but not limited to "Mi appelli Ginny", "Veni de Estats Unis", and "Agachi le can"  ('My name is Ginny', 'I come from the United States', and 'I see the dog'. We're studying pronouns under the pretext of studying animals at the moment, which explains why that last isn't quite as random as it seems.)  Thus, listening to explanations of Max Rouquette's Vert Paradis in Occitan can be a bit... interesting.  As Occitan seems like a strange mix of Latin, Italian, Spanish, and (of course) French, and I have a bit of Latin and Spanish capability in addition to my French, I can follow the general idea of what's going on.  Do I understand the details?  Heck no.  Fortunately for me, the professor is very good about explaining things so that I can understand them as well, and I'm starting to figure out how to take notes in very badly spelled Occitan for further study later.  Which then brings us to the problem of my Medieval Occitan course.

Medieval Occitan and Modern Occitan are actually two halves of the same class.  By taking them both, I'm getting three credit hours of Occitan Literature.  Never mind that they are taught by completely different professors on completely different periods of literature.   Not the point.  My problem in Medieval Occitan is that the language is, well, Medieval.  This problem crops up in English, too.  Ever taken a good look at the opening lines of Canterbury Tales in the original?  If you have, then you know that "Whan that aprill with his shoures soote, The droghte of march hath perced to the roote" is not what most of us would call normal English.  Guess what?  Medieval Occitan is similarly not Occitan, maybe even a little worse as they still use Latin word order.  This, added to the fact that I don't speak modern Occitan, and don't have a vocabulary basis, makes translation assignments rather difficult.  As an added bonus, the professor doesn't really want to teach in French, arguing that if we're studying Troubadour poetry, we should be studying it in the language of the Troubadours.  That means Occitan, in case you were curious.  Well, at least at the end of this I'll be able to spout off rhetoric terminology vocabulary in Occitan by the time I leave.  Perhaps I'm just feeling a bit bitter towards the subject at the moment.  After all, I did stay up later than I should have to finish an explication of a poem (something I don't like to do in English) in an old version of a language I don't really speak.... only to discover that I didn't have the class.  It's just not fair, I tell you!

And now, I've got to run.  My next class starts in 30 minutes, and I'd like to grab some lunch before it does. 

What we have learned...

So, after two and almost a half weeks here in Montpellier, I have learned some things.  They are, in no particular order:

1) L'Université Paul Valéry is quite possibly, no scratch that, is the most disorganized organization that I have had the dubious and/or mixed pleasure of dealing with.  And I am being dead serious about this.  I found out why I couldn't sign up for classes before I left the States.  Turns out, nothing is concrete until classes start, if then.  And that's only the beginning...

2)Whoever told me it doesn't really snow in the Midi (or at least not in the Montpellier area)?  Yeah, totally lied.  It's snowed at least twice by now.  Twice.  Granted, it didn't stick, but still.  Twice.  Plus, it's more than a little chilly.  It's out and out cold.  Like Oxford gets cold in January, actually.

3)I take psychotically good notes in most of my classes that really require them.  I have been trained to do this.  It's all a matter of writing down a summary of everything that the teacher says. Yeah, my notes here in France?  They're considered lousy, because they don't have absolutely everything the teacher says.  Hopefully, this doesn't mean I'll be toast for the exams....

4)As always, public transport is a lovely, lovely thing.  Living close to bus stops is also a plus.

5)Heating isn't as good here as it is in America.  I believe this is because France is more concerned about energy conservation than we are, but I can't be sure.

6)When one is hiking in the Garrigue in the middle of winter, it is a good plan to keep moving.  Because your toes will start to lose feeling after a little while if you don't.  Also, when someone tells you to 'dress warmly' for the hike, they don't mean 'coat and sweater'.  They mean 'coat, sweater, sweatshirt, gloves, thick knit cap, thicker socks, oh, and if you can manage to wear two sets of pants at once?  I'd recommend it now'.  Trust me, I know.

7)I am not a mountain goat.  I am a human of meager athletic skill.  The scampering over rocks portion of the aforementioned hike?  Yeah, going to be tricky.

8)The French apparently don't like wasting money on two lanes of road in the mountains.  One lane can function for both directions!  Guard rails are also a waste of money.

9)Walking is good for you.  Expect lots of it here.

10)Chinese sellers go for good quality, no mark, good price.

11)When in doubt, take the cell phone with a flash light built in.  You'll thank me later.  Also, don't buy prepaid minutes.  There's a better way.

12)Everyone above the age of 16 smokes, with few exceptions.  Deal with it.

13)In America, if you're getting a group of college students together for social drinking, most of them will be drinking beer.  Here?  Just go buy a bottle or two of decent wine.  It's not like it's expensive, or anything.  And no, that actually wasn't sarcastic.  Good but nothing really special wine can be had for about five euro a bottle here.  And it's what students drink.


Other than these eleven things, I present to you  la Garrigue ( for which my host sister kindly corrected my spelling in the last post)

More specifically, I present to you La Garrigue outside of Montpeyroux, a little village maybe... forty minutes from Montpellier, where I and three other Occitan students spent a good portion of the day hiking with a local Occitan Language Club.  It was.... kind of frustrating, because so much of it was in Occitan, and I was freezing, but it was fun, too.  Afterwards, we went and hung out at the house of one of the students, a guy named Remy, as he lives in Gignac, which isn't too far from there, during the weekends.  It was nice to get to know people a little better, and I did get to try a couple interesting fruity things, one called Cogne (I think.  I'm pretty sure that's how they said it was spelled), and Kaki (no idea on the spelling there.  Please, please don't hold me to it.)  I prefer the former, honestly, but both were good.

Other than that, life moves on more or less as expected.  I've become a fan of the tv show Once Upon a Time, courtesy of my host family's affection for it.  I have yet to see something like the first half of the first season, though, except for completely random episodes, much like I have yet to hear the actual American actors say their lines instead of the dub.  My host family, by the by, remains great.  I feel very much at home here, and everyone's been extremely nice and helpful.

And.... that's about it, really.  I'll let you know what happens when something happens.

And So It Begins....

So, you know that slightly annoying professor that forgets to email his class to let them know that he has to cancel?  The one that unintentionally makes everyone show up for class, and hang out in or in front of the classroom for fifteen to twenty minutes, until it is deemed polite to just leave?  Yeah.  Just had that professor.  He has a class full of American students, because this is one of the courses for English speaking exchange students, most of us here for our first or second day of classes, and he doesn't show.  We are irritated, me especially, as I pretty much ran through morning routine to get there on time (my alarm decided it didn't like me this morning).  Sigh.  Oh well.  Such is life.

At any rate, I got to Montpellier at around 14:00 last Wednesday, along with 34 other students in the Minnesota program.  From the airport, the program sent us to Hotel Ibis, a what I'm pretty sure is Hampton Inn quality hotel just off La Place de la Comedie, the center of Montpellier.  After a little bit of exploring, most of us found food and crashed in our hotel rooms.  Thursday was a whirlwind of academic information, starting with a placement exam, and ending with a basic run through of the program's rules and expectations.

Friday meant more academic talks, these focused on explaining the mysterious workings of the French university system (which can be a little.... insane at times), and several hours spent pouring over course catalogs so that we could find the courses we wanted.  For me, this was pretty simple; even before I realized that I was going to be taking fewer hours so that I could do research, I was going to be able to take.... pretty much whatever course I wanted, and I'd probably be able to get Ole Miss to count it towards my French major, or maybe somewhere else.  It wasn't like I had to meet super specific requirements.  I've already finished all of those that I could actually meet here.  Some of the students from Penn State (scratch that, actually, all of the students from Penn State, and there are plenty of them here with the Minnesota program) were pouring over the course catalogs and going through intense debates over whether various courses would meet super strict requirements over there.  I love having a more lax school!  At any rate, I wound up taking fewer hours so that I could have more time to do my research, and now I'm taking the required Français comme Langue Etranger (French as a Foreign Language, i.e. French as a Second Languae), an optional requirement of French Academic Writing, and Civilization du Sud (Civilization of the South) for my classes with English speakers, then Occitan pour les Non-Specialistes (Occitan for Beginners), Civilization de Occitanie (Occitan Civ), and Linguistique Medievale (Medieval Linguistics) for my integrated courses.  Should be interesting.

So far, I've been to Linguistique Medievale, both my Cours Magistrale (Lecture) and my Travaux Dirigé (Discussion) sections.  That.... pretty much makes up my Mondays, actually.  Wake up, go to CM, spend an hour and a half taking psychotically good notes, leave, go get lunch/hang out at the Minnesota student office, come back, go to TD, spend an hour and a half taking psychotically good notes, leave, then either take the tram back, or go hang out a bit and catch the one that will let me get the later bus.  The class was.... well, it was tricky, because I got everything, but it was kind of hard to get everything into notation, because the professors talk really, really fast.  One of the other Minnesota students, a girl named Emily (Li for short) is in the class with me, and as I get along with her really well, I think we'll end up pooling our resources to get better notes.  So, other than the fact that the CM was in a room that I swear was hidden, and trying to write like the wind on notebook paper with waaaaay too many lines in a language other than English, the CM went fairly well.  The TD was harder, more because I'm now terrified of translating Old French, but then, as my area of interest in terms of French Literature is the Middle Ages, it was going to happen eventually.
The fun part for yesterday's classes really consisted of trying to get the photocopy exercise packet that we needed for the TD.  We went to the copy shop that Mme. Nicolas had directed us to, and asked for the packet.  They didn't have it.  Now, we needed the packet to do half of our homework assignment.  Granted, it isn't due until next Monday, but still.  It's nice to get these things out of the way, and it looked like it was going to be pretty much required.  So, I went back this afternoon after my Civilization du Sud class got canceled.  Fortunately, they had it this time, for the fairly cheap price of 3€.  Such a relief.  I'll probably get at least half of my homework done tonight.  The translation portion.... may get put off for a while.  Can we say 'procrastination of unpleasant things'?

I have my Beginning Occitan course later this... well, the class starts at 17:45, so maybe 'afternoon' isn't quite the right term.  All the same, it's going to last about an hour and a half, and should be at the very least interesting.  I'll let you know when I know.

On to the non-school related stuff.
I met the Dequéker family Thursday evening, and personally, I think that I lucked out.  They're incredibly nice, and happy to have me there.  I think it helps that I have enough English that I can actually talk to them, and that I seem to fit into the family fairly well.  Everyone's been really helpful, and I think that I'm going to get along with them just fine.

Grabels, the suburb where I live, is a bit out in the boondocks, like Lamar or our subdivision in Springfield.  However, unlike my homes in America, it's pretty easy to get to Montpellier.  There's a bus stop about five minutes away from the house, and the bus comes by roughly once every 45 minutes to an hourm, which can be a bit of a problem if you miss your bus, but as the tram stop is only a mile or so away, walking isn't out of the question, either.  I walked there this morning, and my biggest worry was wondering if my non-existant sense of direction was going to strike again, leading me in endless circles and forcing me to miss my class.  It didn't, fortunately.  I managed to find it by following the very convenient bike path.  Sure, it was a twenty minute walk, but since I was planning on taking the 11:48 bus for a 13:15 class, I had time.  The walk was very pleasant, leading to the other very nifty thing about Grabels:  it's right next to La Garringue (please don't hold me to that spelling).  For those of you not in the know, La Garringue is an area where there are absolutely no buildings, no construction, nada.  It's like a little piece of the countryside right outside the city.  It kind of reminds me of a mini, kind of hilly Lamar, actually.  It's very pleasant, all the same, and it makes the walk to the tram station much more pleasant.

That's about it for the moment.  If things change, I'll let you know.

Preparations

Well, preparations are well underway.  Plane tickets have been purchased, the consulate has been visited, and visa obtained.  As of last Friday, I even know where I'll be living, and a very little bit about my host family.  (I get to be an older sister of two.  Perhaps I'll gain more appreciation for the trials and tribulations I have offered my older sister.  Somehow, I doubt it.)

Most recently, I've gotten to do battle with google documents, and a spreadsheet for travel information that the University of Minnesota requires that I fill out.... and google documents doesn't want to acknowledge that I should have access to.  Not a fun way to spend an afternoon, I can assure you.

Still, the process of manually stating all my travel information via email to the program director that I've been working with has revealed a fun and interesting detail about my travel plans for January 1-2:
My flight from Atlanta to Charles De Gaulle International Airport (That's Paris) lands at 6:10 am Paris time.
My flight from Charles De Gaulle to Montpellier?  Takes off at 12:35 pm.
For those of you who have done the math, I have a nearly six and a half hour long layover in Charles of De Gaulle International Airport.  Oh, this will be fun.  Remind me to make sure that I have something to do.

Also, this is something of a test run.  If you can't access this properly to comment, or whatever, let me know, and I'll see what I can do to fix it.