Catching up and April Vacation

So I know it's been a really freakin' long time since I wrote anything, sorry about that but it's been busy over here. Anyways, I'm now on vacation which means less schoolwork and more things worth blogging about. So here ya go...
About two weeks ago we had another AFS reunion, the last overnight reunion before Paris at the end of the year. We met up at some camping ground place and broke off into groups. Luckily, I got squeezed into the paintball group because I really wasn't looking forward to archery. So yeah, it ended up being a bunch of foreign kids, in the very sexy jumpsuit modeled below, running around in a fenced area with lots of wooden obstacles, desperately trying to snipe one another being being hit. It was pretty awesome...

We did a capture-the-flag version, the second of which I won, then we did elimination rounds and last-man-standing. Of course, it was more or less chaos since there weren't more than 5, out of 25ish, people who had ever played before and so there would be a group of people all behind one obstacle shooting randomly in the air, and then there's us, actually shooting at the other team and running around. It was awesome anyway.

Changing lines a little (I know there's an expression like that but it escapes me right now), the last Sunday was Easter or Pâques and so by midday we had all the family, numbering 16 total, at our house. It was a really fun day, we had some very intense family ping-pong contests, played around with the kids and did the Easter Egg hunt. Yes, it exists in France, but Easter is definitely different. Firstly, here in France, and I think all of Europe, there is no Easter Bunny (sacrilege!!) and instead theres a bunch of bells that fly from Rome with their wings and drop chocolate, candy and little toys into all the yards... It's not any more plausible than a giant rabbit that hops around chucking chocolate eggs, when rabbits don't even lay eggs but whatever.
Anyway, we had a giant Easter lunch, all cooked by my host mom, and it was fabulous! I didn't get pictures of everything but below is just one of the delicious appetizers we had, along with tons of other good stuff. I also got to try some really good wines, especially the white, sweeter ones.

The other day, we went to check out a castle at Saumur, le château de Brézé. However, on the way over there, we stopped in a little village with some beautiful old houses and mini-castles, like the one below. 

These kinds of villages are not at all uncommon in France, and actually very well known in the Pays de la Loire. In this region, particularly, many houses are made out of a certain kind of stone called tuffeau and because of all the stone they excavated for the houses and castles, as well as the industry started that is still popular today for its unique look, created a network of tunnels.

(Below) This looks like another quarry for tuffeau but it's actually a house under construction! It's being built into the ground so that it's more like a series of caves on one side and a real house on the other but the architecture is really cool.

So anyways, we went to see the castle of Brézé, and it's really a beautiful castle. From this view you'd think that it's just a normal Renaissance castle, but actually it's a château fort, which means it was a military castle.

What made this castle unique is its extremely intricate underground tunnel system. Like the whole region, there is a network below the castle but here it's a whole different level- in fact, the castle's motto is un château sous un château; a castle below a castle.

I don't know if you can make it out on the sign, but it warns about adjusting to the "gloom", the very low ceilings, and sense of claustrophobia that can be induced by the tunnels. Pretty dangerous, but we went for it anyway!

There are all sorts of little rooms, connected by long, dark, and occasionally steep descending tunnels. They tale you all over the castle and it's to wonder how many got lost there before the electric lights and path markers.

In fact, there is one whole section that used to be strictly a village, all underground, and although you can't walk around it because it's fragile, you can see that there are rooms that used to be kitchens and dining rooms. Of course this is all carved out of the stone by some poor guy with a chisel and hammer. I actually learned that before castles like this there was just a mason but the extreme use of tunnels created the job of tunneler with his inventory of 60-something tools (I read this all of a placard in one of the caves). Below, you can see how deep down the went. Where that bridge is, that's about level with the ground so from there you see just the castle but you cross the bridge, look down, and it becomes pretty clear that it's a heck of a lot bigger. This was a siege tactic to avoid enemies from storming right into the castle and it must have worked pretty well because they obviously never had their castle destroyed. I took this picture from a niche that I found in the caves: I thought I was still very much underground but I walked into this room and from the holes designed for the archers, I saw that.

It was very bizarre in some places because you're walking in the castle and suddenly your turn a corner and there's a tunnel that plunges straight underground.

Another perspective, from the lowest point of the moat- here it's pretty clear where it's a castle and where it turns into underground passages.

This made me think of Lord of the Rings, not sure why...

Now imagine, back in the day, there weren't any of those lights and there aren't even brackets on the walls for torches so if you happened to be in the caves looking for something and your light went out... well yeah, you're screwed.

Something else special about the château de Brézé is its wine. The castle is very famous pour the vineyards outside of its walls and one of the more reputed features of the tour is the wine tasting. This is actually it, but just one of the hundreds of caves in the underground network stocked with thousands and thousands of barrels.

Once you get out of the tunnels, there's the inside of the castle to check, which is all fancy and very Renaissance-ish. We weren't allowed to take photos inside but it's just a lot of portraits, fancy stonework, carpets and canopy beds: you know, your classic European castle.

Although you can't see too much of the details, there's also a lot of very intricate stonework framings around the windows and on the roof that make the castle famous as well.

No explication needed, as I'm assuming you can read English if you've gotten up to here without problems.

It brightened up a little in the afternoon but still pretty cloudy- typical weather around here.

So after, we decided to pop over to the town of Saumur for a little visit, as I've never been there before. It's actually a pretty good-sized city, smaller than Angers but not by much. There's still the Loire that cuts right through the middle.

They also have their very own castle, right in the middle of town on a hill. We didn't tour it (there's a limit to how much time one can spend in a castle per day) but we walked up and checked it out anyway.

The view from the castle's hill stretches very far out across the flat French countryside and although it's a perfectly modern city, it's gives an impression of being older, probably the similar architecture of the houses with the tuffeau and red brick.

Again, the castle of Saumur.

Now, this isn't even a special building, just a normal house but it's incredible anyways!

Again, something very European- the woodwork lattice that makes up so many little villages all across the continent.

And of course, who couldn't mention the Maison du Vin of Saumur, with its stain-glass map of Pays de la Loire, color-coded to wines and specialties by region!

A bridge.

Below is the Mairie; there's one of these at every town and city in France. It's like a city hall but not really a government function but a welcome place to the city. This one also doubled as the city hotel and it hasn't changed for the last half-century.

Looking back on Saumur as we headed back home, with the castle that sits on top of the city. Too bad it was such ugly weather.

WARNING - DISTURBING IMAGE!!
So this is actually pretty old news, almost a month, but in SVT we did a dissection, the first I've ever done. And of course, I just had to take a picture for you guys! This was my mouse, still in pretty good condition. After a little, my lab partner and I decided to go all out on the poor thing and ended with a pile of remnants of mouse and a skull, complete with brain! It was pretty awesome.

So, that's about it for now but there should be some new stuff in a week or two (or three, knowing me) because next week we're going down to Biarritz in the south for a couple days, which means I might get to test out the surf in France! 

I'll keep you all posted, à très bientôt!

Le Bac Blanc Français Oral- If you see it coming, run!

So this morning, after a nice long 2 weeks of vacation, I was forced by the almighty powers that be to wake up early and go to school during what is normally my free block to take a practice test of the living hell we'll all be put through at the end of this year. No problem right? So I'm not sure how much of this I already told you guys but what I did this morning was the Bac Blanc Oral in Français. This is a 10-minute oral presentation of a text that you have written a mini commentary about with a 10-minute question period about the texts and lectures you've studied in class. So I got to school this morning with about 40 minutes of nothing to do and decided to do some last minute cramming. Now let me explain to you what exactly it is that we had to study: for each "sequence" there is a guiding question for example "La quête de connaissance peut-elle aliéner l'Homme?" ("Can the quest of knowledge alienate Man?"). Then you have a series of texts for that sequence ranging from a couple short discours to certain scenes of a piece of theater to a series of poems. Then you have your documents complimentaires, which means that these are extra texts to study in order to understand the others. Then you have (not in every sequence) your lecture cursive, which means a piece of work you did, for example a book report about the connection between science and technology and the use of these to dominate mankind presented in 1984 by George Orwell or some other writing piece you did in class. Then you have your parcours d'ensemble which are the 4 or 5 lectures we were given during class about this particular subject. All that to study... x5 because there are 5 different sequences. That makes 15 studied text total, plus 16 supplementary texts plus 3 different writing assignments from class plus 24 lectures from class that you (hopefully) meticulously noted in your notebook and there are of course the books you've read for class. All that to study and for the actual presentation that pick one, just one, text with a question. Of course you have no idea which text and it changes with each student so you have to study all that.
So when the time came this morning I walked upstairs to the near-empty room and went in. The teacher (not one of mine- can't have biased judges of course!) gave me a paper with all the points that she'll be looking for in my presentation (more or less the rubric of the presentation itself) with the name of the text and the question written. I was then plunked down in the corner and given a half hour to prepare my little speech. Now, one might say, is it humanly possible to study almost all of those texts and then receive one of the only ones you didn't get around to studying? Well, yes it is, because that's what I got. The worst of it is that the two people behind me got questions about texts that I would have loved to get myself. Now you might be thinking, what two people behind me? Oh yeah, I guess I forgot to mention that while you're preparing your presentation, the next person comes in to the room and start their own. And then when you're in your presentation, a 2nd comes in to start theirs. I think it was every 20 minutes, it a rotation thing like that. So there are now two witnesses to the slaughter of French litterature I commited this morning.
Anyway, so once you've prepared you're mini speech (which has to have an intro, two axes complete with outside examples to support your ideas and a conclusion) you're called up to the front of the classroom. I sat down in front of the teacher and she marked some stuff on my paper and told me to start. Just like that. So I started which came out awkward at the beginning; ah bon, OK donc le texte étudié ici est La Dent d'Or par Fontanelle, de l'année 1687... and so on. I had to introduce the author, the era, etc. Luckily I knew almost nothing about the author and decided he was going to be one of the biggest philosopher, writer and scientist of the time- I think it flew just because in the 1600's famous people who write are generally also philosophers and scientists. So I moved on quickly hoping she would not notice if it wasn't right. Oh yeah, forgot to mention, this text is from the beginning of the year so when we studied it with the teacher was still when I understood very little and my notes in my notebook about this piece were... well let's just say they were missing quite a bit. So anyway, after the intro of author and setting I had understood in class that we were supposed to reread the text. I guess that was only for very very short texts or for an extract because I was a half paragraph in and she stopped me dead in mid-sentence. (By the way, the whole presentation section is timed- ideally you want to last 10 minutes.) So I continued on and read out my whole presentation, repeating myself way too many times, under-explaining many of my details and not connecting my explanation of the supporting texts I chose. All in all it was pretty horrific but I managed to last around 8 minutes- not bad! Normally they would take the last two minutes to ask you provoking questions to squeeze some more details out of you about your presentation and if you're stranded and dead at 4 minutes they'll pose you enough questions to keep you talking to the end. But the idea is to get there alone obviously. So I sat there for another minute and she wrote many things on a paper, usually not a good thing.... Then we moved into the questionnaire section where the teach gives you questions about the other texts studied in class and how the principle question (the one you wrote the essay about) can be applied to other documents. For this you have to have all the documents listed with you. So she asked and I did my best to answer up until we got to or rather a tableau, that I didn't have with me because it was glued into my notebook. I thought it was something by Pascal, turned out it was Galilée, turned out I had no idea what I was talking about. Probably more times than one.
So that was my experience with the Bac Blanc Oral. Now just to think that at the end of the year I'll be taking the real thing, much harder and longer. Maybe I'll go on vacation early....

I'm gonna throw on some random pictures here just because the last couple days it's been really nice outside, sunny and warm, which, if that how it works in France, is fine with me because the winter here is too short and too not-at-all-wintery that the sooner it's over the better.

 La jolie Louet

La jolie Louet from further down the river 

Some big French chateau/manor thingy

and again le Louet

Who would think that for such a small country, France would have such big mountains?!?

So one week ago I finished school for the February vacation (2 weeks long) and you know what that means: SKI! AUX PYRÉNÉES! POUR UNE SEMAINE! And yeah, it was awesome. 

We left Mûrs-Erigné Saturday morning at around 5:30 AM and joined up with the family Boucher at their house. OK let me explain: the Bouchers are like neighbors except that they live further away but we go to their house for dinner and they come here; they're very close friends of the family. Every year they go on ski with the Ligot's and they rent a chalet together at Saint-Lary. This year we rented a really cool house in a smaller community about 5 minutes from St. Lary. St. Lary is in the middle of a valley surrounded by the Pyrénées on all sides. It's not a very big village but it's packed with snow shops because it's more or less just a ski village- or at least that's what it's famous for. So Saturday morning we spent most of the day in the car with pit stops for gas, baguettes and lunch.  

We stopped at a park for lunch and I got my first view of the Pyrénées. 

 

Sometime in the afternoon we got to St. Lary and spent a fair amount of time lugging all our luggage up the two or three little streets it takes to get to our chalet. Because the stairs were so covered in ice, we had to hand all our stuff in through the window. But the view from the garden, holy crap, it was to kill for! The first day we got there, we were lucky to have crystal-clear skies and sun- what a change from Mûrs, where for the last couple of weeks it was alternately raining/extremely cold/cloudy and dark. 

The view from down the street. Pas mal, non?

So that Saturday evening we did a little tour of "downtown" St. Lary and got our ski gear from a rental store, along with the 50000000 other people who decided to do the same. We also got our "forfaits" or as you might call them, ski tickets. Here in France they do it a little differently from good ol' Shawnee Peak. Here you have a credit card type ticket that you just leave in your pocket the whole day and walk by a scanner to get onto a lift. It's so much easier, I don't know why they do the hanging slips of paper tickets at home... Anyway, we sure didn't waste any time getting to the mountain and Sunday morning we kicked off our first day of ski. Above you've got your's truly with my all my gear for the day. Oh yeah, that's another thing: in France everyone brings a backpack because when you go out to ski you won't get off the mountain for the whole day. So I got my first experience skiing with a backpack which I thought would be horrible but it's not that bad. Me, I'm used to going to the top of the mountain in under 10 minutes, skiing down to the bottom in under 5 and going back to my "chalet" in under 3. Here you leave St. Lary in a télécabine which takes 8 people at once up to the base of the ski area. From there you can take different lifts to different areas. There were more than 7 or 8 different sommets that you could go to et une centaine des pistes- comme en Amérique il y avais les verts, bleus, rouges et noirs, croissant en difficulté. 

No it's not the start of a race course, it was a flag with an accompanying sign warning about avalanches. But who cares about avalanches when you've got scenery like that?

Unfortunately, out of a possible 6 days of ski, we missed two because snow/fog that had descended into the valley. The first day it was more snow, as you can see above. It snowed like crazy and for everyone there (people who are accustomed to Anger weather) it was insane. For me, a Mainer, it was normal. We tried to ski but honestly coud not see more than 2 meters ahead of us and gave up after the first run. 

However, those two days of brouillard were made up for by other days where we had blue skies and sun. This one above is from the top of a trail looking straight over the mountains. 

This one is from the house looking across the valley: St. Lary is on the bottom left out of the picture and straight ahead are the slopes. 

In town there was a fountain but it was a little cold to see any real water running. But this actually defies reality because it was a hell of a lot warmer there than at Mûrs. Anyway, town was nice with tons of little sausage and cheese shops (typical) and your average souvenir shops with all sorts of stupid things. I also saw the first North Face shop I've seen in Europe, as well as Columbia. 

One week later, Saturday morning we were up and out again, on the road by midday. But we didn't go straight home. We went to Biarritz, right on the coast in the bottom left corner of France and it was... different. I'll put it this way: in the morning we were seeing mountains and snow and skis; 4 hours later we were walking on a sand beach in a mildly tropic setting with warm sun and short sleeves. It was weird... and the funniest thing was there were tons of people in the water trying to surf the minuscule waves. 

There were tons of rock formations and something called the Rock of the Virgin which is a natural monument dedicated to (I think...) the sailors who died at sea (maybe not, I think that's what someone told me but I forget). In any case, it was beautiful and strange to stare out on the Atlantic after a week straight of les Pyrénées. Oh yeah, we went down there to drop Aurélien off with the grandparents. They have an appartement there that we might stay at during the April vacation for a week.

On a totally different note, last night I made dinner for the family and it was pizza. Now those of you who know me, or just Portlanders, will know exactly what that is above. If you're someone else, allow me to explain: the famous mashed-potatoe, bacon, scallions (who were replaced by parsley) pizza of Otto pizza. I had to do a tribute at some point or another. Tonight, for Mardi Gras, Guillaume and I made crèpes for the family, who has extended now because the heating system at the cousin's house broken so they're here for now. 

So that was the start of my February vacation, pretty awesome I think. Now I have this week to go to a friend's party, probably hit town with some friends later and work, of course. The day I get back, Monday, I'm passing the Bac Blanc Oral in Français. I have study 15 texts we've gone over in class, plus many more documents complimentaires, plus all the lessons and lectures we've taken from the prof and Monday morning, at 8:35 they're going to assign me 1 out of the 15 texts. Me, I have to prepare a commentaire in a half hour and then present it orally to a judge. So yeah, I'm so totally screwed it's not even funny, but it should be pretty hilarious when I try to explain Pascal's love of God and critique of man or the complexity of César from le trilogie Marseillaise or Médée eternal anger and vengeance in Corneille's eternal representation of the sorceress. Or something like that. So we'll see how that turns out, should be interesting. Well I'll see you all later, I'm going to go figure out how to download X-Men in French for later tonight. 

À plus le monde! 

The legendary.... escargots!!!

So, as we all know here, I'm getting pretty paressseux with the keeping-up of my blog so I owe it to my French grandparents to post a note about the amazing meal we had with them a little while ago. For Laurence's birthday, we went to their house, and all the cousins too, and had a day-long feast. I'll write out the menu for you because it was... breathtaking!

Appetizers:

1st: a little cup of guacamole, gespaccio and lime sorbet. 

2nd: a celery purée with banana chips. 

3rd: boudin noir sausages, with a coquille Saint-Jacques (a special scallop) and Granny Smith apples. 

Entrée:

Escargots de Bourgogne (in the east, famous for their escargots)

Coq au vin with potatoes and a wine from Margaux

(Note: at this point, I was given lessons on how to drink fine French wines from Xavier- who would have thought there's a process to drinking wine??)

Cheese Plate:

Conté, Chèvre, Roquefort et Brie Munster. 

And after all that, there were, of course, two Buschs (the Christmas cake)! All in all, I can easily say it was one of the best meals I've ever had. 

 The amazing escargots, before being cooked. From what I understood, Guy (Laurence's father), who's the family specialist of escargots, prepares them with a sauce of parsley, garlic and lots of butter and olive oil. En plus, he prepared them in their shells, which is a lot harder, just for me- I'm so lucky to have host-grandparents like these!!! Only thing is, the pictures didn't come out so well....

Avant: moi, avec mes escargots.

 Pendant: un escargot, juste avant ma bouche!

 Après: évidemment, je les ai aimés bien! And then, cleaning up the plate a little with baguette for all that yummy sauce... They were so good, those escargots, not at all what one might think of when you think of eating snails, haha!

So now, just general catching up- 

Winter here: it's weird. There absolutely no snow, as you can see below. The closest it comes to winters in Maine, is that's it gets really freaking cold here too, but you don't have the excuse to wear snow pants when walking around. We get a little ice crustiness from time to time, but really, it just feels like early spring most of the time. For me, this is totally a new experience because coming from Maine, where we get a minimum of 2 meters every year (and a maximum of maybe 3x times that!), where school days are scheduled beforehand because of the Nor'easters that blow in, yep that's good old Maine... The other day, I got a notice from my high school there, that school had been cancelled due to snow, of course. I went to lycée and told people and they were shocked. But apparently here, if there is snow, they close school, even if it's just 5 or 6 centimeters because no one here is accustomed to driving in the snow and it's dangerous. Haha, if only they could see what we Mainers drive through on a daily basis between December and April!

Something else interesting is the Bac Blanc. Well not exactly interesting, like eating escargots-interesting, but worth noting. So, the Bac, for those of you who don't know, is like the SAT's but way more intense. The Bac is the giant standardized test at the end of Première and Terminale of lycée but it's something you're being prepared to do since collége (elementary, I know it get's confusing!). In all your classes, you're learning how to study for the Bac, all the leçons are centered around the content of the Bac, everything is working up to that. The test itself, is not like our wimpy SAT's: in the Bac, there's many many sections: sometimes you do dissertations, sometimes you're doing analysis, sometimes it's proving science theories and then of course, the dreaded Oral- a veritable discussion between the test-taker and the judges, where everything you say is counted and graded and it's all super intense! So that's what I'll be taking at the end of the year in Français and Histoire-Géographie. Tranquille, non? Anyway, recently we took the Bac blanc, which is just a short section of the actual Bac but for practice (like the PSAT's)- 4 hours, 4 different texts, 1 question de corpus over all the material and then a much longer, in-depth writing piece: either a dissertation, a commentaire or a "écriture d'invention", where you do your own thing, but within limits. All of this, without breaks, in complete silence, in a room with 30 other students for 4 hours. It was scary as hell! I did the écriture invention because the dissertation was too complicated (describe the relationship of the control and distribution of power in-between the characters of the four pieces, then do comparisons and contrasts and write a dissert about it- no thanks, not for me!) and the commentaire was over the one piece that I didn't completely understand and I couldn't find the axes of the argument. Oh yeah, did I mention, the four texts were all extracts from different French theatre pieces from the late 1800's and 1900's- and that was easy because on the real Bac they're all from Plato and Baudelaire and Corneille and Racine and all those old French classiques that I don't know. I got pretty lucky for the Blanc here though because I understood all the textes perfectly, with the exception of the last one where I didn't get some of the dialogue. So that was the Bac Blanc, just the preparatory Bac. And, unfortunately, I got my grade back: I scored a whopping 2.75 out of 20! Now we all know that the French grading system isn't like 10/20 equals 50%, it doesn't work like that but still, 2.75 is pretty damn low. Now let me explain myself: in France, all these different exam writing pieces; commentaires, dissertation, corpuses; they all have very very specific structure where every time you do certain things in each section otherwise you're not writing a real dissert or commentaire. For me, I'm used to doing your basic 5- or 7- (or more) paragraph essays and sure they've got a structure too but it's nothing like their French counterparts. So of course, I absolutely killed the structure for my question corpus and I guess I just didn't fo too well on that over all. Then for the écriture d'invention, which are notoriously noted the hardest and lowest out of the three options, I didn't notice that it said do a monologue, so I did a dialogue. It was kind of a piece of crap anyway, but I think I more or less lost all my points because it was a dialogue. Also, we didn't mark our names on the Bac Blancs, just our birthdays to identify after, and when I got mine it was covered in notes about "problems with basic French grammar" and giant questions marks in red pen. Maybe the grader didn't realize it was an American who wrote, therefore giving me a 2.75 but I guess it's good practice because at the real Bac, the graders aren't from your school so they're completely un-biased in terms of noting the work. Anyways, so that was my first experience with the Bac, definitely not looking forward to taking it at the end of the year but I hope I'll be able to grab a little more than a 3 the next time. 

Salut pour maintenant, à bientôt jusqu'à après les vacances février, quand j'irai pleines des photos et des histoires de vous raconter de la voyage aux Pyrénées pour faire du ski!