hi

Am alive. More updates as events warrant.

off

Classes are done, I'm going to Greece, will not be near a computer, see y'all later!

on african presidents

Yesterday there was a fair amount of noise coming from the courtyard. Monsieur motioned for me to come over to the window and pointed downward. See those kids? he asked. There were four or five little girls playing in a circle, with a woman standing over them.

They're the family that just moved in on the second floor. It's one of the wives of the president of Republic of the Congo. (Actually he called it "Congo-Brazzaville," which was its name when it was a French colony.) They redecorated the apartment ... pharaonically.

This is true. I walked by their open door one day. It's all in gold and crystal and marble, and it's blinding. I am unsurprised to read in the Wikipedia entry on Sassou Nguesso this: When Sassou Nguesso attended the United Nations General Assembly meeting in September 2006, almost £14,000 of room service at the Waldorf Astoria was added to his bill during another five-night stay. His entourage, including several members of his family, occupied 44 rooms which together ran up a bill of £130,000. The bills on September 19 included two bottles of Cristal champagne charged at £400. This was pointed out by the British newspaper The Sunday Times to be "comfortably more than the £106,000 that Britain gave the Republic of Congo in humanitarian aid in 2006."

Monsieur also said that Sassou Nguesso "came to power after killing thousands of people." It's not quite that simple, but it appears that his government is not entirely aboveboard, shall we say. And it's true that quite a lot of people have died in the Republic of the Congo for political reasons and fighting between opposition groups, and he appears to have been in the middle of most of it. Sassou Nguesso was, technically, elected, but conveniently, "Sassou Nguesso won with almost 90% of the vote, his two main rivals Lissouba and Kolelas were prevented from competing and the only remaining credible rival, André Milongo, advised his supporters to boycott the elections and then withdrew from the race." Nice.

i like my apples with peanut butter, thanks

I am greatly entertained by this comment I just received on my "Sarkozy" post, below:

A little education is a dangerous thing whether in the USA or in France. Sounds like you need to educate yourself about those "poor Arab youths." You might be shocked to discover that "racism" is not the Rosetta Stone of Western Civilization.

How do you like THEM apples?! You can't handle the truth!

Indeed.

holly wood

... roommate, housemate, hedgehog mommy, scrapbooker and cookie baker extraordinaire, now prestigious scholarship winner. Not like I'm surprised.

benefits of being farther north than new york city

9:30 pm: Daylight.

american history

Every Thursday, I go to a junior high and high school just over the eastern edge of Paris, in the banlieue, to work as an English-teaching assistant to a professor there. I sit in on one class of sixieme (equivalent to American fifth or sixth grade, there's an age difference thing going on here that i haven't exactly worked out) and one class of terminale (last year of high school, but they're one year younger than Americans in their last year of high school). Well, I used to go -- today was my last day. I have a lot of complaints about it -- mostly having to do with the French educational system, which is nothing if not rigid and conformist -- but I don't particularly feel like going there. I just wanted to note something that happened today in the terminale class.

They're studying the American civil rights movement; segregation, Rosa Parks, the Ku Klux Klan, Martin Luther King and his "I have a dream" speech. Today they were looking at the text of that speech, and the teacher was trying to direct them to talk about the Pilgrims and how they came to North America looking for religious freedom (so she could segue from that into the religious aspects of the speech, and mentions of freedom, separately and together). She kept asking: Who founded America? Who were the first people to America? (Let's ignore mentions of, say, Jamestown, right now, and skip right to the Mayflower.)

No one was answering. The teacher was getting frustrated. Who founded America? Who were the first people? Come on, who founded America?

Some boy in the front row said, as if it had come to him in a flash of insight -- "Henry Ford!"

I laughed and the teacher smirked a little. The kid tried again: "Rockefeller?"

"Pilgrims" came eventually, but it took a while.

romney on french marriage

Wow, I missed this one. Mitt Romney apparently lives in a parallel universe.

"It seems that Europe leads Americans in this way of thinking," Romney told the crowd of more than 5,000. "In France, for instance, I'm told that marriage is now frequently contracted in seven-year terms where either party may move on when their term is up. How shallow and how different from the Europe of the past."

I'm sorry, what?

There's speculation about where he got this. Some people think it came from an Orson Scott Card sci-fi novel. Others believe it's from a 2003 French romantic comedy. Regardless of where he came up with it, it's pretty inexcusable that the Washinton Post printed this uncritically, without noting, "Hey! Romney pulled this one out of thin air!" How many poorly-informed Americans now hate France even more?

Romney, quit pandering. Everyone thinks your religion's a cult; you have a less than zero chance of winning the nomination for what has become, essentially, an evangelical Christian party. I'd say quit while you're ahead, but I think it's too late.

(There's also no possibility of excusing this by saying, Well, he screwed up, but it was an off-the-cuff remark. It was a graduation speech. He planned it, wrote it down and gave it. The man meant to say this. I just cannot fathom his mental processes. For a moment I thought maybe he was trying to criticize the PACS system -- essentially civil unions -- but, good God, just criticize the PACS and not some mythical seven-year marriage of your own creation.)

sarkozy

In slightly less cute news, allow me to tell you how utterly unsurprised I am that Sarkozy won.

Veeeeery unsurprised. Very, veeeeeery unsurprised.

Sarkozy talks pretty big, but a Sarko regime after twelve years of Chirac doesn't promise to change much. I'll bet you would hardly even notice, unless you're a poor Arab or African kid in the suburbs. In that case, well, you're screwed. That's who he's going to crack down on, because they can't really fight back, and it makes him look like he's doing something to appease his base (which includes a large group of Front National members, the hard-right extremists led by Jean-Marie Le Pen, as well as garden-variety racists) as well as the general "we have to do something about the banlieues but I'm not sure what" population. Still, I'm with Matthew Yglesias on this one. (The comments thread has some interesting points, if you can put up with it.) People who keep talking about "how much France is going to change under Sarkozy" seem to be living in a parallel universe, where France has been under socialist control for the past decade or so leading to their welfare-state situation, which Sarkozy is going to change! Economic initiative! Onwards and upwards! Oddly enough, a Sarkozy UMP-party regime is ... a continuation of a Chirac UMP-party regime. The French welfare state thrived under Chirac, who has the same basic affiliations as Sarko. It's not like Sarkozy has suddenly defeated some staunch socialist like, oh, say, Mitterrand, who was the last socialist to be president in France, and that was from 1981 to 1995. It's been twelve years under the Chirac UMP, and I can't say I think the Sarkozy UMP is going to be much different.

Except, again, for Arab and African youth in the suburbs. Chirac at least threw a bone to the idea that maybe there's something going on here that has deeper implications than just a bunch of kids being unruly (racism? institutionalized discrimination? unemployment? unemployment because of said institutionalized discrimination? assimilation problems? the complete unwillingness of the entire French country to admit that racism is, perhaps, an issue?), Sarkozy has a much deeper affection for riot police. I wouldn't want to be in the banlieue right now.

edit: In American race and politics news, have you heard about this?

Today CBSNews.com informed its staff via email that they should no longer enable comments on stories about presidential candidate Barack Obama. The reason for the new policy, according to the email, is that stories about Obama have been attracting too many racist comments.

"It's very simple," Mike Sims, director of News and Operations for CBSNews.com, told me. "We have our Rules of Engagement. They prohibit personal attacks, especially racist attacks. Stories about Obama have been problematic, and we won't tolerate it."

CBSNews.com does sometimes delete comments on an individual basis, but Sims said that was not sufficient in the case of Obama stories due to "the volume and the persistence" of the objectionable comments.

Regardless of whether you think turning off the comments was the right course of action, this is hideously, hideously depressing. Can't we get over this crap by now? Find some other way to make yourself feel better than other people, commenters. Preferably one that doesn't involve speaking to anyone ever again.

i am developing a definite affection for dachshunds.

LOOKIT 'EM WIGGLE!

mont st. michel

Finally I am catching up!

So. Last weekend (really?) I went on a horseback riding trip to Mont St. Michel, which is somewhere on the border between Normandy and Brittany (disputed, although the few people who live on the island itself tend to be loyal to Normandy). The organization that ran the trip was called RandoCheval (randonnée means hike, trip, excursion; cheval means horse), and they do riding trips all over the world, America included, actually. Anyway, I went with Kat (from Bowdoin) and Andrea (from Amherst), who are both on my program; Carol, an English woman who has lived in France for a long time; and Cecile, Fanny, and Aurore (I think? I was never really clear on her name), French. Also one guide from RandoCheval, Jean-Louis, and another man named Michel whose job it was, apparently, to ferry our bags around in his car and open gates for us occasionally.

So we spent the first day riding around the bay of Mont St. Michel, for about eight hours. There were sheep everywhere. Sheep! There is a special breed of sheep in the area, named le mouton pré-salé, and they can only live in this area because the local herbs they eat give the meat a special flavor. The kicker is this: the herbs are sort of salty, because the area is routinely flooded by ocean water; and pré-salé means pre-salted.

Pre-salted sheep. I hope those sheep don't speak French so they don't know what they're being called.

These are photos of the first day. We collapsed in a field (sheep included) for lunch. That's Andrea in pink.



Michel brushing a horse butt.




Mont St. Michel in the background, and pre-salted sheep.



Horses.



My horse. Her name was Idélia, which seems to me a pretty fancy-shmancy name for a crabby little horse. We got along pretty well by the end of the second day, but she was kind of a pain. She had exactly two speeds: slooooooooow walk, fast trot. My knees were killing me (a combination of them being horrendous to begin with, and me not having ridden for a couple of years), and to get her to walk at a pace exceeding that of a, well, lazy bum, I had to be constantly working; and my knees hurt too bad for me to be doing that. So we let everybody get ahead of us, then we'd trot to catch up, let everybody get ahead, trot to catch up ... The only time she was actually with the group for any amount of time was when we cantered, which only happened a couple of times, because the ground in and around the bay is soaking wet and unstable. We did canter once, and it was great; this is where the gravel road comes in. We took off, I mean, we were flying. It was fabulous. It was then that Idélia decided she wanted to be in front, and now; the only time all weekend where I actually told her to slow down instead of speed up. All the horses were ex-racehorses that had been saved from a glue-factory retirement, which probably explains why the canter turned into a race. It was pretty great, though.



Carnage in the field at lunch.




Second day. The first day, we walked around the bay; the second, we went on through it. First through these fields, approaching Mont St. Michel; then we had lunch at the island, and explored it for about an hour, and rode back to our starting point through the bay again, but this time sand.

That's Andrea again right in front of me.



I like this picture. It's tilted. I was on horseback. Give me a break. You can see our spacing problem.



Mont St. Michel. We rode right up to it through the parking lot, which was entertaining, not least of all for the people who dropped their jaws to stare at us.



Parked. Fanny and Cecile debate what to leave behind as we go up to the town.



These are all of Mont St. Michel and looking down at the bay. I asked if those people on the sand had crossed the bay on foot; Fanny said, Yes, we call them fools.







Horses parked in the parking lot. They attracted a lot of attention and accepted it graciously as their due. I was surprised how many people just walked right up to them and started petting them, with no idea of how friendly they were or if they bit, or asking permission. The horses were very good about it; until one of them got edgy and snapped at Carol, when we started warning people off.



Mont St. Michel from the sandy part of the bay.



From here on I have no more pictures, because it started to rain. We were crossing the bay behind another guide, a man who knew all the ins and outs of the bay, where the quicksand was (!) and so on. It went pretty well for the first hour or so, and then suddenly the temperature dropped and a storm started to come in. I was the only person who had bothered to bring a raincoat, since the weather had been so nice all weekend. The wind was starting to blow and the sky got dark, and we were out in the middle of the bay; I looked at Andrea, and she said, I hope it doesn't start to storm.

Cue lightning. The horses perked up a little bit, to say the least; they didn't want to hold still anymore, they wanted to get home. We were approaching a river running through the middle of the bay. The guide warned us: okay, get in a V formation, don't follow too close but don't get too far apart, be aware that the current is fast, don't follow in anybody's tracks because it's unstable, be careful. He went through the river and crossed back to check out the bottom of it, and then we followed him in. It had just started to rain and the whole setup was so ominous we were practically laughing.

Halfway across the river, the guide's horse stumbled into a trough. He smacked it and it leaped out, but Fanny couldn't get out of the way in time. Her horse fell in, totally fell down, on its side in the water; Fanny shoved her way off it and was far enough away from it that it missed her while flailing and got back up and trotted out of the river. Fanny was soaked, but she was fine. It could have gone so horrendously wrong -- she could have had a broken leg, she could have been trapped under it -- but she got really lucky. They caught the horse on the other bank. The rest of our horses were thoroughly freaked out by this, and while we waited for Fanny to get back on, we kept circling and circling. Then it started pouring.

The rest of the ride back (about another forty minutes) was so miserable, Andrea and I actually laughed. There was nothing else to be done; it was so over the top. It was pouring, lightning and thunder, the horses were freaked, we were trotting fast and we were all so tired we could barely post. My boots filled up with water within the first five minutes, and it was splashing out the top. I was the only person with a raincoat, and the water was coming down my neck anyway; it was raining so hard it actually hurt. The horses knew we were almost back, and they wanted to get there. So we let them. It was a nearly surreal forty minutes.

Kat has an aftermath photo somewhere. We are all completely soaked and laughing in a semi-demented sort of way. I wish I had a copy, but oh well. We had a four-hour train ride after we got back, and the entire time, we were completely loopy. But it was awesome. Definitely one of the coolest and one of the most painful things I've ever done.

aix-en-provence, concluded

Finally got Blogger to like me again!

We walked outside of town to Paul Cezanne's workshop. Couldn't take photos inside. It was just one room, but all the stuff inside was preserved as it was at his death; objects for still lifes, coat and hat hanging on the wall, bag for his lunch. I was impressed. Of course, I know less than nothing about Cezanne, but I didn't let that get in the way of the cool. Then we walked (and got lost, and got lost, and finally found it, and I don't want to talk about how obvious it was really) to this lookout spot from which you can see this mountain that he painted a lot. A lot a lot. Like, 80-something times.

Also, there was this dude sketching a cat, who really couldn't have cared less that he was becoming a muse.







We also took a bus (for free, sort of by accident, but the driver seemed to like us, so it was just as well) to l'Oppidum d'Entremont, which is a Celtic-Ligurian settlement on the top of a hill a few kilometers outside of Aix. I appreciate greatly Mom putting up with my archaeology-geek excitement about this whole deal. Ruins!!! And a grape press, seriously. Walls, stairs, remnants of the town. We almost missed these stairs, but when we saw them, Mom said, We have to go down them. They're really old. So that's that.

Oh! This photo of a blank room with square blocks running down the center. It's a room called the Porch of Skulls, I kid you not. The inhabitants of the town used to display the decapitated heads of enemies on it. What I find most amusing is that the porch of skulls is right in the middle of town, not, say, on the edge, or near the entrance particularly; so who, exactly, are they trying to intimidate? Their children? People windowshopping down the street?









This is a candy shop, clearly. It was a candy shop taken to the nth degree, though. They had baskets and baskets of cookies, a wall of chocolates, hard candy, caramels, buckets of things, oh, I don't even know. I wish I had a better picture of it. It was almost a caricature of itself.



Fountains. I like this one with the moss. The other one is the Fountain of the Four Dolphins, which is in the middle of the Quartier Mazarin, the 16th century (I think?) part of town.





We had a picnic for dinner, in our room. We had singularly bad luck with dinners -- everything was closed, or not serving dinner today, or crabby. A lot of crabby. Please ignore Mom's hair. She'll hate me for posting this.



And then we were back in Paris for a day, running around Montmartre, Sacre Coeur, the Eiffel Tower, and then Trocadero at night to see the Eiffel Tower from across the river. Mom sent me some of those pictures, but I'm too lazy to find them.



And then she went home, and I sobbed. Figures.

technical difficulties.

I have no idea what's going on here, but Blogger isn't allowing me to upload any more pictures. Maybe I have reached some sort of heretofore unmentioned, unspecified limit? Anyway, I'm going to load them to another host and then put them up here, but that'll have to wait until after I've gone to the Bibliotheque Publique d'Information at the Centre Georges Pompidou to do some research for my medieval archaeology presentation.

My host family's telephone has the most annoying telephone I've ever heard. Just sayin'.

aix-en-provence, part the first

So I have a great backlog of photos to post. I'm going to go in order, I suppose; so here's Aix-en-Provence, from when Mom came to visit me in mid-April. We took the TGV to Aix, which is, oh, not particularly far from Marseille, but inland in Provence. It was really quite beautiful, fountains every other block, smelled like lavender.

Sorry for the sideways. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

The chambre d'hote (guest house) we stayed in was really, really cute. I was nervous about it, because I hadn't even seen pictures of it when I made the reservation; instead I called the Aix tourism office, and they found me a room (for an extra one euro fee; I figured that was money well spent). Turned out to be fabulous, and in the middle of town, no less.

This is some chuch. And its 4th century baptistere. And its cloister. Buildings and fountains.







Fountains, buildings, markets. Tuesdays and Thursdays there were markets everywhere, and they were fabulous. Flower market over here, vegetables over here, down another street local olive oil, honey, herbs, pottery, cheeses. Mom and I bought a bunch of things. There is also a photo here of the Cours Mirabeau, the main street of Aix, with a statue of King Rene (Provencal or Aixois king, I forget) who brought the muscat grape to Aix. He's holding a bunch in his hand. Also, the big fountain at the opposite end of the Cours Mirabeau.







Hmm. I have a bunch more to go, but Blogger isn't letting me upload any more photos. When I can work it out, I have pictures of: Cezanne's workshop, a mountain, ruins of a pre-Roman settlement, and a cat.