The Longest Vacation and the Labyrinth of Lyon 2

As you can see from my title, I like alliteration. But this alliteration is a pretty way of highlighting two polar opposites. The good of this week: seeing the beauty of Annecy for the second time with my lovely friend Sara and the excitement of meeting another dear friend, Insaf, in real life ("in the flesh"). The bad of the week: trying to navigate the French university system that is Lyon 2 and failing miserably.

Let's start with the bad because it is always better to end with the good. This week has only just begun but we have already all discovered the difficulty that is being a foreign exchange student in a French university. The difficulty is a lot of things, but the long of the short of it is that because we are not students officially "inscrits" (enrolled) we do not have priority. Meanwhile, the French students do not get to pick their classes, but instead have a set schedule with times and classes.  So these past two days have consisted of sitting in lecture courses that I didn't understand or finding a class that I liked but then having not enough spaces for us foreigners. Also, for some inexplicable reason, every class I have looked at is on Thursday and so I have to make some choices. All in all, it is much more difficult than I expected. I know it will work itself out but as for now it is looking pretty convoluted [thus "labyrinth"].

A few other dissimilarities between Berkeley and Lyon 2:
1. There are no toilet seats on the toilets in Lyon 2. You just have to squat.
2. Toilet paper is outside all the stalls, so if you forgot to grab some, you just don't use any. Because the bathrooms are like little rooms and you can't ask the person next to you.
3. There are virtually no water fountains (you use the sink water).
4. Classes are two hours and it is frowned upon if you leave early or come late.
5. No trusty Telebears, you sign up for everything the old-fashioned way (it's paper all the way).

This blog post is becoming a bit negative, so let's look at the positives. I found computers in the library that I can use on my own, I finally called FREE and they are re-sending my SIM card to the correct address so I will have a French cell phone number soon, the cafeteria food is cheap and I successfully navigated it, and a French guy asked me why I drew a Christmas tree on my notes (I CANNOT WAIT FOR CHRISTMAS). I have also been having wonderful dinners with my host family and I understand more and more of what they are saying. Today I participated when I wasn't asked a direct question so let's have a round of applause for that!

(One more embarrassing story for good measure: my translation teacher asked me to spell my last name and I mispronounced the letters in French, and she said "We will have to work on spelling" which was a great start to the semester)

Now is time for the GOOD. I have had many good evenings with new friends, I got to meet my friend Insaf (who I knew from a French class at Berkeley-we did a Skype exchange with students in Lyon) and I went to Annecy with another friend from my program, Sara. Here are some pictures.

A few of just fun times:

an example of the architecture of Lyon

another beautiful view of the Rhône

the garden in the middle of Le musée des beaux-arts 

one view of Hôtel de Ville (on the left is the opera house)

A stray kitty that was really friendly-Vieux Lyon

Le Saône

Just can't stop taking pictures of the Rhône

This is for Bridgét, Syd, Mom and Addie (little mix is everywhere)

Then on Saturday I had a lovely afternoon-turned-into-evening meeting Insaf. We found each other outside of Perrache and nervously waved at each other seeing as it has been almost 2 years since we have Skyped for the class. But then we figured it out and we went straight to an American hug. First, she was my tour guide and photographer extraordinaire (really, she just told me where to stand and that it was time for another picture which was good for me). We walked through the Croix-Rousse (another hill bordering Lyon) and into Hôtel de Ville where we had ice cream. We walked by a dance demonstration for the Biénnale de la Danse (I spelled that wrong) that is happening this month (a big festival of dance). We made our way up to Fourvière and she showed me the Gaelic(?)-Roman theater ruins. They are so peaceful and I can not wait to go spend some time there. After that we got delicious Indian wraps in Vieux Lyon and ate on the quai (the edge of the water) along the other river in Lyon (le Saône). It was a great day! 

Le mur de canut- a trompe l'oeil 

Overlooking the city from Croix-Rousse

Insaf and I at the top!

Enjoying the Saône

The ruins-theater 1

The ruins-Theater 2

Finally, on Sunday, I visited Annecy again with Sara. It was a lovely trip, minus getting up at 5:45 to catch my 7am bus. But, we arrived easily after quick naps, and hit the town. Unfortunately, it was still early and it was freezing! So we searched for a café to get a hot breakfast and we succeeded at finding a place called Le café des ducs that served breakfast "Anglo-Saxon" style: a hot drink, fresh OJ, toast, eggs, and bacon. After a good solid breakfast, we went to check out the market that Amber and I saw last week. The market was  crazy and we bought way too much good food. Afterwards, we went to the river and enjoyed a French picnic lunch with bread, cheese, saucisson, strawberries, and three desserts (macarons, meringue, and a sugar bread-which we did not eat all at once). Then we took the paddle boats out on the lake and semi-got in. I am excited for more day trips like this one. 

A smiley faced hot chocolate

This is literally what Annecy looks like.

This too. 

There is so much ice cream in France.

The hugest zucchini.

The meringues we ate! (at the top)

Sara being cute and eating our fresh bread!

A cute red door!

A secret passageway down which we were adventurous

The lake, still obscenely beautiful

We're on a boat. We're going…slow…and

Thank you for reading. Until next time :) 

PRUNE, CISL, and a host of other acronyms

Something I have learned (and something that my study abroad program leader noted) is that French people in the university system love acronyms. So this entry will be an entry of acronyms, to the best of my ability:

August 27^th-30^th: CISL

If you were to say CISL to anyone in my UCEAP study abroad group (50 or so UC kids all from different campuses around California), you would hear an almost instantaneous groan. CISL (a student-centered hostel in Lyon) is where I stayed for the first three days of my program. It is also where some other people, who chose apartment instead of homestay, had to stay while they looked for an apartment to rent. The groans you would hear had nothing to do with the people who worked there, they were all really nice! It had to do with the fact that we only received breakfast (between 7am and 9 am) of yogurt “nature” (which means really really plain), a cereal that resembled corn pops, and “compote” (i.e. jam). Also, the fact that none of us realized that they don’t provide towels or hand soap so we had to pay 1, 60 euros to rent a towel while we were there. But mostly, the fact that it had THE most horrendous wifi I have ever encountered. I could barely send an email, Facebook chat never worked, and even trying Facetime or Skype was hopeless. Moreover, every 5 minutes you lost your connection.

So now that I have had my official CISL rant, these first few days were good despite all of this! We bonded quickly over all of our first-world problems (which actually ended up being harder than we expected and made me feel very spoiled to live in a place where I could always contact my loved ones). We all stuck together within the program and went out the first night to the river to sit with the other university kids on the Berges de la Rhone. It was really beautiful. In these first few days, the city was still a mystery to us and so, throughout the day, we would explore Lyon and try to get our bearings. Here are some pictures of the first three days J

The first night along the Rhône

My university-Lyon 2

Grand group of girls from my program :) 

View of the Rhône

Only Lyon! 

Apparently "Danielle" became "Tania"-he couldn't understand my accent….this Starbucks cost 5 euros by the way….which is like 8 bucks, not a good deal in France. 

Touristy Lyon picture!

August 30^th and 31^st: LPWDH (Le premier week-end de homestay-the first weekend of homestay)

On August 30^th at 10am, my host mom, Bernadette, picked me up at CISL. All of us homestayers were waiting in the lobby with our luggage and a stomach full of butterflies. I met her and the first thing she said to me was, “Tu es Danielle?” (Are you Danielle?) and I said “Oui, bonjour” (Yes, hello), she said “Bonjour, je suis Bernadette.” And I could not for the life of me remember how to say “Nice to meet you” in French so I just said “Bonjour” again like a parrot. She looked a little confused and said, “You speak some French, right?” in French. I said “Oui, je parle francais” and luckily, we had a conversation about ten minutes later that proved to her that I truly was able to speak French!

My first day in my homestay was great! I could tell already that I was going to like my homestay family. Once I got to the apartment with all of my stuff, Bernadette introduced me to her youngest daughter. I think meeting her was the first time I “bised” anyone, which is not correct French but which is what two of my friends kept calling the French greeting. You give others that you meet “bisous” (which means kisses) but instead of actually kissing them on the cheek you put your cheeks together and make a kissing noise into the air. In Lyon, it is one kiss on each cheek, but in other parts of France, it is more or less. Then they gave me a tour of the apartment and let me unpack. A few hours later, Bernadette and I went for a walk around Lyon and she showed me la rue de Victor Hugo (shopping), la place Bellecoeur (the largest plaza in Europe I think), and Vieux Lyon (which is the part of Lyon that has been around since the Middle Ages). I was able to carry on a long conversation with her and she bought me my first Lyonnais specialty-a dessert called “brioche praline”- which has pink pralines (sugared almonds) inside a brioche bun. It was so good!

After that, I met two of her other children and tried my hand at listening to a family speak together (it did not go as well as I had hoped). Then I went out with my friend, Amber, to meet her and a French guy, Alexandre, at le Parc de Tête d’Or (which is a beautiful park that also has a zoo!). Finally, I returned for dinner with Bernadette; we ate upstairs on her friend’s terrace and it was truly an mélange of language and culture. Her friend is Croatian and speaks Croatian, French and English. Her friend’s niece was there and only speaks Croatian and English, and Bernadette speaks French and a small smattering of English. So at any given moment, any of those three languages were being spoken. That is something else I love about being here in Europe, a large majority of people speak more than one language.

There were many more things that happened that weekend, but here are some pictures to show you:

Le cathédrale de Saint-Jean (seen on my walk in Vieux Lyon)

A deer in Le Parc de tête d'or

Sunday: Exploring the basilica de Fourvière with Amber

View from the top of the hill called Fourvière

Panoramic (view from Fourvière) 

September 2-12: PRUNE

This entry is getting long so I will keep this short. But the next step after this first weekend was….my birthday but I think I will put that on a different post! Or, better yet, you can ask me about it J It was a lovely day, although I started out being worried about it because I was away from home but my host family sang me happy birthday and made me a cake and I went to The Smoking Bar for my first “legal in the U.S.” drink!

PRUNE, however, is the next acronym because that is the name of our “stage” that precedes the actual French university classes which starts Monday. We had 40 hours of class (one class that worked on writing, one on oral presentations and one on the area in which we are studying) in two weeks and three long tests. I learned a lot in these classes, about French slang and how the university system works (it is very different from ours, but I will leave that for another entry). I also met a lot of different people, girls from Frankfurt and England, many others from UPenn, and Georgetown. Today was the last day and now I am free! And Monday we start real classes. Now you are all caught up. If you read to the end, you most definitely get a gold star. Bon travail!

I don't have any pictures of the stage itself (that would be boring….mostly people in classrooms) so here are pictures of Annecy, a beautiful lake town that I got to visit courtesy of the PRUNE program and also 33 euros.

Like a movie!

A swan=un cygne

The streets are adorable but also really crowded.

The old prison in the middle of the river

Every town here has a beautiful river or two

A cool bike with pretty flowers

Amber and I 

A bunch of cool outside of a shop

Beautiful buildings

More water 

One final apartment where I would love to live. 

Le début

Hello!

I am back! 

So these past two weeks have gone by too quickly. I haven't posted because I was debating if I was even going to do this blog, but I have decided to do it and that is that! Welcome back to Les Silhouettes de Sophie. Anyways, in the past two weeks I have had a LOT of firsts: 

1. First solo airplane flight: I flew to Washington D.C. to meet my best friend and her family. 

2. First time in Washington D.C. (and thus first time seeing the White House is real life--granted from a moving car--rather than pictures) 

3. First time flying transatlantic (with said best friend to London--also first time being messed up by an airline as she had to move up to a different cabin because of a "seat malfunction" that frankly didn't really exist)

4. First time out of the country

5. First time in Europe

6. First time in London 

7. First time booking a hotel on my own

8. First time in Paris (Eiffel Tower, yay!) 

9. First time in Lyon 

Oh yes, and: 

10. First time with jet lag 

As you can see it has completely crazy, and looking back on it, I almost can't believe it has all happened. Addie and I maintain through all of this that it doesn't feel "real". It feels like a dream, something we have dreamed a long time ago but never really imagined would be staring us straight in the face. In London and Paris the world felt so unfamiliar--like I was floating away from myself. So I would force myself to be so in-the-moment that life seemed normal. Like it was normal to be laying in the grass at le Jardin des tuileries.  

The being away from home bit, that part no one really talks about in the pictures or blogs, bit me in the butt a few times as well. Sometimes, you feel lonely even with your best friend by your side. You can't communicate because wifi is horrendous or the time difference is 9 hours and everyone you know is asleep. Your real world seems so far away. So you might silently cry for 20 minutes in your hostel room in Lyon or something like that but you can feel yourself changing. Your mind expanding. A problem comes up and voilà, you have to tackle it (like navigating the Paris metro to get to Notre Dame or going through security on the train with 1000lbs of luggage). Finally, even if the day of you were hysterically laughing along the Thames because you couldn't sleep on the plane, the day after, the magnificence of the sights you have seen coming rolling back to you in prettier pictures. 

The Eiffel Tower (and the view from it) are magnificent in person. The Notre Dame and the Palais de Louvre  (with a nice flutist), left us feeling serene. In London, we ate at a pub, walked the streets of in the rain and listened to the steel drums, saw the brightly-colored dancers at the Nottingham Carnival. In D.C, we saw the Lincoln Memorial in the sweltering heat and I saw my first firefly. Which was pretty exciting for me. Then I hopped on a train after 3 days in DC, 2 days in London and 24 hours in Paris and ended up in Lyon. I will post more about my first week here soon!

Here are some fun pictures of us :)

A church right by our hotel in London

The rainy streets of London with Addie looking cute

Nottingham Carnival in the rain!

A Primark for Bridgét and Sydney (it exists)

London double-decker bus

Piccadilly Circus

Paris architecture

Le Palais du Louvre with Addie :D

La Seine

Typical Eiffel Tower photo

Flight to D.C. as the sun sets

National Mall

British Museum (in London so kind of out of order)

London 5:45 am waiting for our Green Tomato car

One of two? Lock bridges in Paris

Cool games on the side of the Seine in Paris