The Heritage of Bourges

I am truly in a town to make any history lover's cup runeth over. And I don't just means with happiness- there is actually too much history here for any given cup to feasibly contain. I bring this up because this weekend is, in celebration of the region's patrimonie (or heritage), a weekend of free entry to all the city's historical sites. So today with my host family I finally climbed to the top of the Cathedrale de Saint Etienne, to see the magnificent view...

I have actually visited the cathedral several times before. I can't even begin to express what it feels like to live in a town with these sort of things available everyday. For instance, after school on Tueday, I decided to take an hour to for myself after school, and instead of taking the first bus straight home, I walked through downtown to the cathedral. On the way, I bought my first macaron (au chocolat, and absolutly delicious) and ate it in this garden...

(a study in espalier trees, just for you, Dad)

After my "culinarly cultural expirience" (which is how I now refer to delicious indulgences), I entered to the Cathedral, just to sit and admire until it was time to catch my bus.
Inside the cathedral:

But back to today...
On the long walk up to the tower, I was impressed by the graffiti on the walls. Now I am general not in favor of defacing world heritage sites, but as I puffed by way up on the heels on my host sister, I started to notice the dates carved next to the names. This one, if you look closely, was carved in 1647:

As I looked at these dates, I was reminded how people share history, even as they live through it. There were tourists who came to admire this cathedrale even during the Renaissance, on the brink of WWI, and during the reconstruction of Europe after WWII; the dates streched right up to today.

After leaving the cathedrale we took a tour of the centre-ville, or downtown, on the little motorized train which can always be seen einding its ways through the streets, filled with tourists. This was actually fascinating, because I learned than many of the building I see everyday on the way to school were built long before George Washington was born, and have fascinating enough stories behind their walls to make me want to visit all of them in detail.

One of these sight which we did visit today was the Palais Jacques Coeur, or Jacques Coeur's palace. Jacques Coeur was a prominent renaissance merchant, politician, and town figure. Important enough, in fact, was he was able to build a mansion/palace in the middle of downtown. The tour was impressive not ony in its information and presentation of such a magnificent building, but also in that I had walked by this palace a number of times and hardly even noticed it was there, simply because sights like a stone palace replete with towers is a normal part of the landscape.

The tomb of M. Coeur on display (or at least I assume that's who it was, it wasn't labeled):

And just to contrast with the dignity of such a shrine, there was also this inexplicable piece on display, totally unlabeled:

I'll let you puzzle that one out for yourselves, because right now of have nothing to say other than- Good Night!

The Red Chateau

There will be more pictures to come when I have the time, but in the meantime I wanted to post something, even though I don't have much to say.

Here's a short story about what its like to be here. Amazing an expirience as it is, exchange students are continually reminded that feeling homesick is to be expected. To that end, I was feeling a little bit down this afternoon (not badly and not because of anything specific), so I went for a run. Basically, I like to run until I hit a farm field, which doesn't take very long, since Saint Doulchard is very small. Then, if possible, I walk out into the enpty country side and enjoy the combination of exercise induced endorphins, open space, and solitude. I find that bird calls and the flittering of butterfly wings have a crisper reality out there than when I'm bustling about my day.

Today, however, I happened upon a chateaux placed on the edge of town. As chateaux go, it's very small (more like a mansion than a palace), bright red, and surrounded by a large and carefully manicured garden. I don't know about you, but I have never just happened across something like that before- I don't think that ever happens in the US.

It was just reminder that if I ever start to feel sorry for myself about being here, I should take another look around!

Stop! Read the Last Post Before Reading This One

If you read the post "I Have a Camera" first, then this post will make more sense.

Here is the street on the way to my bus stop- do you see the church steeple?:

My bus stop is next to this old church's parking lot:

Sorry about the orientation- I'm still figuring out how to post pictures!



Across the street from the Church and bus stop is one of my favorite things about this intersection... the local bakery/patisserie! (It's no wonder they say exchange students gain weight, if all foreign countries place shops like this at every corner):

The bus stop itself:

My bus card, a necessity for the school year:

On the bus itself- as it fills with students in the morning, the new arrivals walk to the back, greeting the other students they know on either bus of the bus with kisses on the cheek:

Here is the bus station in downtown Bourges:

And from there, I have some snapshots of the remaining walk to school:

It may be difficult to tell in these pictures, but the roads are quite a bit smaller than at home, and a large number of the building in the downtown were build long before the town of Davis, California was even founded!

I Have a Camera!

This is going to be a photo oriented blog to make up for the lack of earlier photos. I bought the memory card yesterday and today I went into town with my host sister to take pictures. I also bought a watch (I mentioned the lack of clocks in an earlier blog, I think) and a pocket French-English dictionary. Probably something I should have thought to bring ahead of time, but there you are.

So to start let me introduce you to my host family...

My host mom, Christine, and me:

And my host father Michel (sorry, I know it's not the best picture of him) and host sister Laurie:

And the dog, Oupie (not sure about the spelling of the name)

Now let me show my trip to school in the morning...

Here's the house as I leave:

 I'm going to put the other photos in a second blog, in the hopes that the website will be able to load the pictures faster.



15 min post

I have 15 min before I leave for school so I thought I'd post something quickly. As you may be able to tell, school has very quickly eaten up a lot of the time that I would otherwise spend blogging...

But I wanted to describe the school cafeteria to you! So I aldready mentioned that lunch is a big deal here (as I side note, another exchange student recently contested with me that dinner may be as big as lunch here, but regardless I'm not used to much ceremony while eating in the middle of the day). So on my first day I was wondering what that would mean for school lunch. I knew that most people ate at the cantine, rather than bringing sack lunches or going out like most students do at home. As I was asking around about the school food I didn't get very enthusiastic reponses. The ubiquitous answer was "all right" but not "good". Comeing from the land which invented cafeteria mystery meat, this gave me a sense of foreboding.

However, on arrival I realized that their responses had no idea how low my expectation were! Walking though the line, I filled my platter with a salad, a small package of brie, and chocolate mousse. The main dish was hot roasted chicken, coucous, and ratatouille... all eaten with the fresh bread taken from massive bins at the end of the line. All in all, a far cry from the microwave pizza I never had the courage to touch at home!

The cantine is large, with tables full of kids talking, laughing and eating. Water pitchers are placed on the table as the beverage, to be refilled as needed. And I've even been lucky enough to be invited to eat everyday with different people in my class everyday... though after paying such close attention in classes I can't say I make a great conversationalist. Lunch is a wonderful thing here at my lycee, but it's also a much appreciated chance to let my brain relax!

(Again, apologies for typos as I'm on my way out the door...)

Catch-Up Post

This is going to be a quick post, since it's really time for me to be going to sleep, but I don't know when else I'll get the chance to write about the last week.

My first week of school went really well. As disoriented as the first day was, each day has gotten easier and I've moved from trying to make contact with people to actually a number of my classmates who I genuinly enjoy spending time with and I really look forward to getting to know. I'm able to follow all of my classes. It helps that I have so many classes in English and the history class is review for me. So far, French is the most challenging classes, but that said, I haven't had my physics class yet, which I look to with apprehension.

I actually consider myself lucky that I'm already integrating with the system with success, moderate as it may be. That's because I spend Saturday and today (Sunday) meeting all the other inbound students in my Rotary district. They are from all over the world, and absolutly wonderful! I say that I consider myself lucky, because after meeting the other inbounds, I realized that I'm starting off with really good language skills compared to many exchange students. We're all struggling to communicate and make connections, so it was both really relaxing and really exciting to be surrounded by people who knew how it feels to think at two thousand miles an hour but only speak at about two words a minute.

However, communication was really pretty easey between most of the exchange students because those who weren't native English speakers (and between the U.S., Canada, and Australia, there were a lot of us)  had learned English primarily before learning French. In fact, it was pretty impressive how nearly fluent the Taiwanese, Argentinian, Swedish, and Mexican kids were in English. On the whole, it was one of the coolest expiriences I've ever had to be surrounded by people who were switching off between first, second, and third languages (with varying degrees of success) as they changed from group of people to group of people; and the absolute best part was being able to participate in it. I love the feeling that I can switch between two different languages at will. I'm nowhere approaching fluency in French yet, but I'm proficient enough to say anything I want and to understand everything said to me... and what a difference just these past two weeks have made!

In fact, we were all so busy talking to each other, comparing expiriences, comiserating and exclaming that I think we barely noticed we were in Paris at all for the entire journey from the train station to the hostel. As the rest of the day continued we did most of the really touristy things in Paris- climbing the Eiffel Tower, seeing the Mona Lisa and the Venus di Milo, taking a boat tour on the Seine. To be honest I was impressed by all the sights, but I was really taking mental notes for things to come back to sometime when I can visit Paris outside of a massive group of other students. At one point we were walking through the Louvre together, talking and laughing, when we were briefly distracting by the huge portrait of the Coronation of Napoleon (I'm sure you'd recognize it if you saw it). We stopped momentarily to gaze at the enormous canvas, the original of an image which all of us had seen in countless textbooks, and then recommenced our discussion on how much we missed peanutbutter.

Sometime soon I will describe my school and school day, and you may be lucky enough to find it includes pictures! I have, after far to many unimmortalized expiriences, finally purchased a camera. Unfortunatly, it turns out you have to buy the memory card seperatly... Who knew?

Please excuse my typos in this blog as well as in the last several. I hope you'll understand that when it's between sleep and proof reading, I have plenty good motivation to choose sleep.

The First Day of the Rest of the Year

Today was not only my first day of school, but also my first weekly Rotary meeting. Both went absolutely wonderfully, and I look forward to attending both of them for the next ten months!

I took the city bus to class in the morning- it was incredibly easey since there was a mass of other students all heading in the same direction. As we waited outside the gate I was able to strike up conversation with a few other students, a littly bit haltingly, but altogether friendly. My Rotary counselor is also the prof du sport, or PE teacher, at my lycee (high school) and he met me outside in order to help me become a little more aquainted with the school. He introduced me to my professeur principale, who is similare to a homeroom teacher and is also my English teacher, and to two girls in my class. They were kind enough to take me under their wing for the day, which, pleasently enough, ended by noon,

The intervening time was spent with my classe (who I will have most of my classes with for the rest of the year) in our professeur principale's room. She told us our electives and then wrote the schedule on the board for us to copy down. To be honest, it was a lot to take in (everything from the lined paper to the handwriting is just a little bit unfamiliar), and it didn't help that the teacher was so pleased to have a native speaker in her English class that she singled me out rather frequently, invariably drawing the classe's attention to me whenever I was attempting to decipher some cryptic new piece of information. However, I was bolstered by the help of my classmates sitting next to me, and I look forward to getting to know even more of my new classmates tomorrow.

I am in the equivalent of junior year here, and though I'm a good two years older than my classmates I don't think it should make too much of a difference, since I'm playing catch-up on a lot of skills they take for granted (like being about to talk). I'm in the literature (L) track, as opposed to the Science, Math, or Economic/Social Studies tracks. What that means is that since I didn't choose math as an elective (because I didn't choose any of my electives) I actually don't have a math class this year. I'm sure I'll enjoy that for now, but we'll see how college level math goes next year once I'm out of practice! On the other hand, I do have a science class, once a week, and French, Spanish, History/Geography, and Government/Social Studies. I also am in no less than three English classes. I'm not entirely sure how that happened, but I think that in addition to the mandatory English class and the mandatory Foreign Literature: English class I was given supplementary English instead of another elective. At least those are three classes I won't have to worry too much about!

As for a description of the school itself, it is actually built in two distinct parts, seperated by a city street. The most visible part is the old building which house the girl's school about a century and a half ago. While the interior is renovated, the exterior makes quite an imposing impression on a girl used to schools built well into the 20th century. Just across the street are a colection of modern buildings which contain classrooms, the gymnasium, the caffeteria, etc. There is quite a bit of open courtyard space in between the buildings, which is pleasent as can be right now, but I'm hoping won't be regreted too much by winter.

On the whole, I'm really pleased by the school, and I think that I can look forward to the coming challenge!

As for my first Rotary meeting, I really enjoy being with such genial host Rotarians. Of course, there was pleanty of business at the meeting which had little to do with me, but it was offset completely by the different Rotary members who spent the evening good naturedly teasing me in between the club affairs.

It's late enough to sign off, but thankfully I don't have to be in class tomorrow until 11:00- and Wednesday afternoons are entirely free. Though that good new may be offset slightly by the time Saturday morning rolls around... and I have a class at 10:00!