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.