Well, I've got good and bad news. The good news is that Brad, Dora, and I all placed in the 3rd and highest level of French for foreigners. The bad news is that the resulting schedule is completely incompatible with my potential work in the lab, since the days I need the most, Monday and Tuesday, also happen to be the days when I have class from early morning to late afternoon. In full accordance with Murphy's law, Wednesday and Thursday are almost completely free - and useless.
We're finally beginning to meet real French students! There's a small club at the university called Café Polyglotte, which is essentially a group of students learning English who invite foreign students learning French for a weekly 2-hour-long informal chat over tea and biscuits. Everyone speaks only French for the first hour and only English for the second. It got off to a very good start, and yesterday we already took a little trip to Cannes with the Polyglotte gang. Adventures began in the train station, where we realized, ten minutes before the scheduled departure, that ticket machines accept neither Euro bills nor American credit cards. Since not a single one of us had the required 9 Euros worth of change, it was a frantic scramble to either exchange bills or find French people willing to put our ticket on their credit card - given the limit on the number of single card transactions, our French friends couldn't buy tickets for all of us. When the problem was finally solved, it was too late. Or, rather, it would have been, had the train not been delayed due to technical reasons. I can only guess as to what these reasons could have been, but the station supervisor seemed to be playing a little game with us: every five minutes or so, he would go on the intercom and tell the passengers waiting for the Cannes train to move to a different platform or a different area of the platform we were on. When the train finally did arrive, it was already full - but apparently there is no limit to human compressibility, and trust me, the sardines have it pretty easy in their allegorical can.
Once in Cannes, we took a ferry to a nearby island and walked through its groves to a rocky beach with a view of the city. The day was, in two words, a language overload. The younger generation uses such enormous amounts of slang that their conversations are basically incomprehensible if all you've learned is textbook French. I feel like I'm slowly getting the hang of it, but there's a lot to learn... Which only makes everything more interesting, of course. One surprising fact that I picked up from the students is that good contemporary French music is practically nonexistent. They listen to British and American rock and German sonic experimentation, but when it comes to their own language, the list of listenable bands is sadly very short.
Check out the Cannes pictures on Picasa!!!
The wrinkles in inter-group relationships are clearing up a little, at least no one is banned from our apartment. I still don't understand what exactly happened in the first place, but I talked to the warring parties (read: party, since the problem was pretty one-sided), and everyone is cool. Which makes me happy, because frankly, although we're enjoying a very courteous relationship within the apartment, we really have very few common interests. And since we had given up speaking French at home, all the more reasons to look for friends from other sources!
The Germans that briefly came into the scope of my roommates' interest left back to Germany after a heartbreaking (well, not really) farewell party. They were somewhat entertaining and more German than you can possibly imagine. They also lived far away and were hard to find, which explains the quote in this post's title (cell phone minutes are extremely expensive and are widely regarded as one of the most valuable resources of city life). Speaking of city life, I'm really beginning to feel at home as the people working in local bread stores start recognizing me. I even had a deep conversation with a lady from the nearest bakery a few days ago when there were no other customers and she was visibly bored of not having anyone to talk to...
I can't believe I'm here for almost a month already!
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
A seashell from Australia <3
I was finally able to catch the post office people! They don't work and Saturdays and Sundays and take 2 hour long lunch breaks on other days of the week. Anyways, after making me run back home to get my passport (a student ID and an ISIC card were dismissed as insufficient pieces of identification), they gave me a huge packet with "FRAGILE! DON'T BEND!" written all over it in a very familiar handwriting =) . Inside was the biggest postcard I've ever received, drawn by Alina to mark the end of the second year (or, rather, beginning of a third year) of happiness =)))
I'll upload a picture of it as soon as I buy new batteries for my camera... Also included in the package were a cute little stuffed Australian friend whose species I failed to identify (Alina, help me out!), and a half of a petrified seashell 180 million years old. You can only guess where the other half is... =)
I'll upload a picture of it as soon as I buy new batteries for my camera... Also included in the package were a cute little stuffed Australian friend whose species I failed to identify (Alina, help me out!), and a half of a petrified seashell 180 million years old. You can only guess where the other half is... =)
Monday, September 22, 2008
Heritage Day
I would first like to apologize for the tiny number of pictures - photography was prohibited in practically all museums. The few photos that I did manage to take are appended to the "First Days" Picasa album.
On Friday, we got a chance to sit in on a rehearsal of "Rock n' Roll" by Tom Stoppard at the National Theater of Nice. The opening is scheduled for next Friday, but nothing was ready yet. The angry director yelled at the actors, at the musicians, at the sound engineer, and at the lighting engineer with few pauses in between. Stage transitions didn't work properly; one time, a huge bookshelf nearly fell on top of the director as it was being dragged onstage because the control room engineer forgot to raise one of the side curtains. When the support band came on, the lead guitarist realized that he had no sound and yelled to the sound engineer - only to find that the sound engineer has mysteriously disappeared from the mixing desk. The furious director sent a few people out to find him. After five minutes or so the engineer suddenly appeared in the hallway, peacefully strolling towards his working place while hugging a random girl and whispering something in her ear. He didn't realize how much he's been missed until a stream of curses from the director snapped him back into reality and made him sprint to the mixing board, flip a couple of switches, and plug the lead guitar into the PA. This made me remember the "ok, take a nap... and zen FIRE ZE MISSILES!" Anyways, we'll see this production sometime in October, I'm really wondering how they're going to pull it off...
This past weekend, France celebrated Heritage Day (well, actually, two days). What this essentially means is that all museums are open to the public free of charge. By far the coolest one was the musée Masséna, located in a beautiful oceanfront mansion that used to belong to Masséna himself. This guy was one of Napoleon's marshals, and the mansion was in fact a personal gift from Napoleon. Items on display involved a jacket that Napoleon wore on Elba (that I was able to smuggle a picture of), Josephine's wedding dress, and tons of historical artefacts from Nice. I found the building we're living in on plans dating back to the 19th century =)
Now, two weeks into the trip, some tensions are already beginning to appear within our little group... My roommates have decided that they don't like two other girls, Sara and Dora, and so I guess they're no longer welcome in the apartment. Which is a shame, because Sara's a great cook and Dora has many interesting stories to tell, having lived in Hungary and travelled all over Europe... New people and new friends are appearing, though, but so far most of them are other foreign students - Germans, Swedes, Belgians, Austrians, etc. I'm hoping that eventually we'll get some real French people in the group, too!
On Friday, we got a chance to sit in on a rehearsal of "Rock n' Roll" by Tom Stoppard at the National Theater of Nice. The opening is scheduled for next Friday, but nothing was ready yet. The angry director yelled at the actors, at the musicians, at the sound engineer, and at the lighting engineer with few pauses in between. Stage transitions didn't work properly; one time, a huge bookshelf nearly fell on top of the director as it was being dragged onstage because the control room engineer forgot to raise one of the side curtains. When the support band came on, the lead guitarist realized that he had no sound and yelled to the sound engineer - only to find that the sound engineer has mysteriously disappeared from the mixing desk. The furious director sent a few people out to find him. After five minutes or so the engineer suddenly appeared in the hallway, peacefully strolling towards his working place while hugging a random girl and whispering something in her ear. He didn't realize how much he's been missed until a stream of curses from the director snapped him back into reality and made him sprint to the mixing board, flip a couple of switches, and plug the lead guitar into the PA. This made me remember the "ok, take a nap... and zen FIRE ZE MISSILES!" Anyways, we'll see this production sometime in October, I'm really wondering how they're going to pull it off...
This past weekend, France celebrated Heritage Day (well, actually, two days). What this essentially means is that all museums are open to the public free of charge. By far the coolest one was the musée Masséna, located in a beautiful oceanfront mansion that used to belong to Masséna himself. This guy was one of Napoleon's marshals, and the mansion was in fact a personal gift from Napoleon. Items on display involved a jacket that Napoleon wore on Elba (that I was able to smuggle a picture of), Josephine's wedding dress, and tons of historical artefacts from Nice. I found the building we're living in on plans dating back to the 19th century =)
Now, two weeks into the trip, some tensions are already beginning to appear within our little group... My roommates have decided that they don't like two other girls, Sara and Dora, and so I guess they're no longer welcome in the apartment. Which is a shame, because Sara's a great cook and Dora has many interesting stories to tell, having lived in Hungary and travelled all over Europe... New people and new friends are appearing, though, but so far most of them are other foreign students - Germans, Swedes, Belgians, Austrians, etc. I'm hoping that eventually we'll get some real French people in the group, too!
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Snowed in... No, seriously.
I decided to to switch over to Picasa so that it'll be easier for everyone to see the pictures (plus they will be of better quality). Please visit my page here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/vbelyy/
There's now also a link to these pictures on the left-hand side of my blog page.
This weekend Mme. Letzter, our resident director, took us out to the mountains. Nice actually owes its beautiful climate to the Alpes Maritimes, which surround it in a demi-circle and protect it from all the clouds swinging in from the mainland. Some of the mountains we can see from our window, which you'll notice if you follow the Picasa link! Anyways, the train ride in itself was quite an adventure... Covering a very modest horizontal distance of no more than twenty-five miles, the tracks have to climb a lot in order to clear the mountain pass and roll over into the plains of Italy. As a result, the trains go through over 40 tunnels and at some points have to slow down to a crawl as they clear the unbelievably sharp turns. In fact, at one point along the route the engineers could not come up with an easier solution for gaining 30 meters of elevation than building a kilometer-long tunnel that makes a complete 360 degree circle inside the mountain in an upwards spiral. Speaking of Italy, their trains could not be more different from the French ones - they're painted in all colors of the rainbow and completely covered with graffiti on top of that. Quite an interesting sight.
We got off the train in the village of Tende, and after a short car ride began walking up one of the mountains with our guide Frédéric. Just a few steps afterward we found ourselves right in the middle of a herd of cows, who were quite peacefully strolling in the opposite direction. They started licking our hands to express their friendship, but because of their persistence and the coarseness of their tongues we soon moved away from their path and waited for the herd to pass. The shepherd walking at the end turned out to be a really nice guy and talked us into walking with him to the farm and buying some homemade cheese from them. As we continued the ascent, the air became noticeably colder and the rare raindrops began to look more and more like flurries. By the time we got to the refuge (a little stone building where travelers can spend the night), no one had any doubts that it was snowing. By the time morning came about, there were a couple inches of snow on the ground and it continued to fall, and so the return trip became quite a challenge given the absence of proper clothing.
For the rest of the day, we walked through the countryside starting in a beautiful village perched on a sharp cliff. Our guide brought us to one of the most bizarre places I've seen here so far, a community of semi-hippies who decided to go off and live in the forest by themselves back in the 1970's. We were greeted by their spiritual leader, a crazy-looking guy with dreadlocks that Bob Marley couldn't even dream of (unfortunately, I only have one picture, because we were somewhat intimidated and didn't know if he was okay with cameras). He barely spoke to us, but did point us to an old sorcerer/healer's hut in the woods. Built like an Native American tepee, it immediately reminded me of the movie Across the Universe with its sheer randomness. We were already leaving when the sorcerer himself got out of a small shack nearby, chased us away and said that if we wanted to see him, we have to call ahead. Apparently, technology has seeped into his life, too - the guy now has a cell phone.
Unfortunately, I have to wake up veeery early tomorrow, so this will be it for today - although there's tons of stuff to tell. On a final note, we visited the Science and Mathematics campus of the University of Nice, and the entire thing is built on and around the former private park of a 19th century Russian baron. The castle that the baron lived in is now the administration building of the University, and the park that he created was kept up, modernized and transformed into a gorgeous campus. Just look at the pictures.
http://picasaweb.google.com/vbelyy/
There's now also a link to these pictures on the left-hand side of my blog page.
This weekend Mme. Letzter, our resident director, took us out to the mountains. Nice actually owes its beautiful climate to the Alpes Maritimes, which surround it in a demi-circle and protect it from all the clouds swinging in from the mainland. Some of the mountains we can see from our window, which you'll notice if you follow the Picasa link! Anyways, the train ride in itself was quite an adventure... Covering a very modest horizontal distance of no more than twenty-five miles, the tracks have to climb a lot in order to clear the mountain pass and roll over into the plains of Italy. As a result, the trains go through over 40 tunnels and at some points have to slow down to a crawl as they clear the unbelievably sharp turns. In fact, at one point along the route the engineers could not come up with an easier solution for gaining 30 meters of elevation than building a kilometer-long tunnel that makes a complete 360 degree circle inside the mountain in an upwards spiral. Speaking of Italy, their trains could not be more different from the French ones - they're painted in all colors of the rainbow and completely covered with graffiti on top of that. Quite an interesting sight.
We got off the train in the village of Tende, and after a short car ride began walking up one of the mountains with our guide Frédéric. Just a few steps afterward we found ourselves right in the middle of a herd of cows, who were quite peacefully strolling in the opposite direction. They started licking our hands to express their friendship, but because of their persistence and the coarseness of their tongues we soon moved away from their path and waited for the herd to pass. The shepherd walking at the end turned out to be a really nice guy and talked us into walking with him to the farm and buying some homemade cheese from them. As we continued the ascent, the air became noticeably colder and the rare raindrops began to look more and more like flurries. By the time we got to the refuge (a little stone building where travelers can spend the night), no one had any doubts that it was snowing. By the time morning came about, there were a couple inches of snow on the ground and it continued to fall, and so the return trip became quite a challenge given the absence of proper clothing.
For the rest of the day, we walked through the countryside starting in a beautiful village perched on a sharp cliff. Our guide brought us to one of the most bizarre places I've seen here so far, a community of semi-hippies who decided to go off and live in the forest by themselves back in the 1970's. We were greeted by their spiritual leader, a crazy-looking guy with dreadlocks that Bob Marley couldn't even dream of (unfortunately, I only have one picture, because we were somewhat intimidated and didn't know if he was okay with cameras). He barely spoke to us, but did point us to an old sorcerer/healer's hut in the woods. Built like an Native American tepee, it immediately reminded me of the movie Across the Universe with its sheer randomness. We were already leaving when the sorcerer himself got out of a small shack nearby, chased us away and said that if we wanted to see him, we have to call ahead. Apparently, technology has seeped into his life, too - the guy now has a cell phone.
Unfortunately, I have to wake up veeery early tomorrow, so this will be it for today - although there's tons of stuff to tell. On a final note, we visited the Science and Mathematics campus of the University of Nice, and the entire thing is built on and around the former private park of a 19th century Russian baron. The castle that the baron lived in is now the administration building of the University, and the park that he created was kept up, modernized and transformed into a gorgeous campus. Just look at the pictures.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Golfers and suitcases
Fun French fact of the day: you are never supposed to put ice in your drink, even on the hottest of days, because drinking cold water is apparently dangerous for your health. It is equally dangerous to run out of minerals, so one could learn the Periodic Table just by reading the labels on the bottled water shelf in a convenience store.
My roommates/apartment-mates arrived, and so has (albeit a little later) Kayla's lost suitcase. It decided not to take the London flight and spent a quite peaceful night in Boston, where it was discovered in the morning and eventually delivered right to our door. Speaking of which, another fun fact: the French are all about saving energy, so at night the staircases and hallways in every apartment building are pitch black. When you enter someone's building, the first thing you do is search for a tiny green light that marks the position of the switch. You then have about a minute to run up the stairs and find the apartment door, otherwise the light turns off and you're back to the starting point.
Ok, back to roommates. They both seem very nice and friendly. Lourdes' boyfriend is waiting for her back in the States, and although she loves it here she's still feeling a bit down about not being to see him for another four months. Kayla, on the other hand, is on the lookout for French guys but is still somewhat shy about speaking the language. That'll probably go away soon, especially with Brad and myself making everyone speak French even amongst ourselves. The policy is not yet enforced in our apartment, however, but we're working on it.
Today I visited my new lab for the first time. It's enormous, taking up an entire floor of the building and employing over 8 postdocs, many graduate students and quite a few technicians. The people there speak French and English roughly 50-50 percent of the time, as many are foreign and don't have a good grasp of French. After talking with my potential mentor, it looks like I will have a project there, but the string attached is that I will have to dedicate a LOT of time to this - they're busy people and don't want to invest time in teaching me whatever it is they're doing if I'm not going to produce any results. Interestingly, the whole story about the French working very little does not hold up in science at all. The people I met told me that they're usually in the lab from 8am to 8pm, with a short lunch break in the middle.
As I was getting there, I got pathetically lost when the bus passed my stop. I later figured out that you do need to let the driver know you want to get off, but the buttons that you have to press are tiny, unmarked, and hidden. Anyways, the bus made so many turns between the missed stop and the next one that I wandered hopelessly off course and ended up on a golf field (don't ask), where a very surprised golfer explained to me that I was actually right in front of the building I've been trying to find for the past two hours.
I'm uploading all of this using the University's WiFi network, but the campus is a good 50 minutes walk from our house so this is not going to work as a permanent solution. We're doing our best to get the internet started up, and have already created a French bank account, which is one of the key requirements. I'll let you know when things get settled!
Bonne journée,
Vlad
PS A few pictures are now on Facebook!
My roommates/apartment-mates arrived, and so has (albeit a little later) Kayla's lost suitcase. It decided not to take the London flight and spent a quite peaceful night in Boston, where it was discovered in the morning and eventually delivered right to our door. Speaking of which, another fun fact: the French are all about saving energy, so at night the staircases and hallways in every apartment building are pitch black. When you enter someone's building, the first thing you do is search for a tiny green light that marks the position of the switch. You then have about a minute to run up the stairs and find the apartment door, otherwise the light turns off and you're back to the starting point.
Ok, back to roommates. They both seem very nice and friendly. Lourdes' boyfriend is waiting for her back in the States, and although she loves it here she's still feeling a bit down about not being to see him for another four months. Kayla, on the other hand, is on the lookout for French guys but is still somewhat shy about speaking the language. That'll probably go away soon, especially with Brad and myself making everyone speak French even amongst ourselves. The policy is not yet enforced in our apartment, however, but we're working on it.
Today I visited my new lab for the first time. It's enormous, taking up an entire floor of the building and employing over 8 postdocs, many graduate students and quite a few technicians. The people there speak French and English roughly 50-50 percent of the time, as many are foreign and don't have a good grasp of French. After talking with my potential mentor, it looks like I will have a project there, but the string attached is that I will have to dedicate a LOT of time to this - they're busy people and don't want to invest time in teaching me whatever it is they're doing if I'm not going to produce any results. Interestingly, the whole story about the French working very little does not hold up in science at all. The people I met told me that they're usually in the lab from 8am to 8pm, with a short lunch break in the middle.
As I was getting there, I got pathetically lost when the bus passed my stop. I later figured out that you do need to let the driver know you want to get off, but the buttons that you have to press are tiny, unmarked, and hidden. Anyways, the bus made so many turns between the missed stop and the next one that I wandered hopelessly off course and ended up on a golf field (don't ask), where a very surprised golfer explained to me that I was actually right in front of the building I've been trying to find for the past two hours.
I'm uploading all of this using the University's WiFi network, but the campus is a good 50 minutes walk from our house so this is not going to work as a permanent solution. We're doing our best to get the internet started up, and have already created a French bank account, which is one of the key requirements. I'll let you know when things get settled!
Bonne journée,
Vlad
PS A few pictures are now on Facebook!
Monday, September 8, 2008
L'arrivée qnd elevators
Hi all!
I've not too much time today sitting in the internet café, especially considering that the keyboard layout is different and it takes forever to type certain simple words - if you find some q's instead of a's, for example - well, that's because they're switched =).
Saying that this place is beautiful would be grossly understating the truth. The thing that surprised me the most so far, interestingly enough, was the water at the beach. You know how city beaches are always crowded and the water's all murky and suspicious-looking? Well, here it happens to be that exact aquamarine color that you see on tropical island postcards - and transparent to the point that you can not only see your own feet, but also the rocks on the bottom several meters underneath. This is partly because the beach has no sand (it's completely covered with pebbles), but whatever the reason, it looks almost unreal.
I haven't met my roommates yet, since they're only supposed to arrive today, but the other people on the program all seem exceptionally nice. There's this guy Brad who absolutely refuses to speak English in France and shames the rest of us into taking our own dusty Fench out of the closet, brushing it up and trying to regain some control over it. For now we look like a bunch of idiots strolling down the street and using wild and sometimes very questionable gestures as we try to explain words we don't know/remember without reserving to English.
The apartment is on the fifth and last floor of a very French building that must be over a hundred years old. An elevator was recently installed there, but the thing is actually somewhat intimidating. It seems that the French in general have a thing for really REALLY small elevators, but the one at our place beats anything I've seen so far. Its official capacity is four persons; I don't know how the designers envisioned that happening. Maybe if two people curl up on the floor and the other two stand of them? But then again, the ceiling is not that high either...
Anyways, I have to run, but will try to write something else when I get a chance... Miss you all!
I've not too much time today sitting in the internet café, especially considering that the keyboard layout is different and it takes forever to type certain simple words - if you find some q's instead of a's, for example - well, that's because they're switched =).
Saying that this place is beautiful would be grossly understating the truth. The thing that surprised me the most so far, interestingly enough, was the water at the beach. You know how city beaches are always crowded and the water's all murky and suspicious-looking? Well, here it happens to be that exact aquamarine color that you see on tropical island postcards - and transparent to the point that you can not only see your own feet, but also the rocks on the bottom several meters underneath. This is partly because the beach has no sand (it's completely covered with pebbles), but whatever the reason, it looks almost unreal.
I haven't met my roommates yet, since they're only supposed to arrive today, but the other people on the program all seem exceptionally nice. There's this guy Brad who absolutely refuses to speak English in France and shames the rest of us into taking our own dusty Fench out of the closet, brushing it up and trying to regain some control over it. For now we look like a bunch of idiots strolling down the street and using wild and sometimes very questionable gestures as we try to explain words we don't know/remember without reserving to English.
The apartment is on the fifth and last floor of a very French building that must be over a hundred years old. An elevator was recently installed there, but the thing is actually somewhat intimidating. It seems that the French in general have a thing for really REALLY small elevators, but the one at our place beats anything I've seen so far. Its official capacity is four persons; I don't know how the designers envisioned that happening. Maybe if two people curl up on the floor and the other two stand of them? But then again, the ceiling is not that high either...
Anyways, I have to run, but will try to write something else when I get a chance... Miss you all!
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