One of the questions/pleas I find myself shouting to nobody in particular these days: HAS ANYONE SEEN MY SEMESTER? I DON'T KNOW WHERE IT WENT. Seriously, folks, can it really be that in just three weeks I will be stepping onto a plane, the memory of study abroad tucked neatly into my back pocket--not disturbing the secret compartment I have sewn into my jeans for the safekeeping of Kinder Bueno Bars? It is hard to believe that day in and day out, for the last three and a half months, I have trekked out to Pessac and tried my darnedest to understand what those dressed-up people in the front of the room are saying. The Université de Bordeaux III's campus, apparently designed by an angry four-year-old, is an image I will never forget--a bastion of scholarly wisdom and reasonably priced cafeteria food. I seem to have developed a sort of Stockholm syndrome with regard to my school here, and although its inability to balance a budget of 500 euros has caused an embarrassing administrative overhaul, I think my colleagues will agree with me when I say, "UB3 is the place to be."*
On one of the other hands, the semester has certainly had its enterprises of great pith and moment, as Guillaume would say. What I mean by that is it hasn't all gone by in a blur; why, just yesterday I said goodbye to my sister, whom we'll call "Sarah", concluding a whopping six-night visit (!) to Borland. She was joined by my mother Mom, who only stayed until Tuesday morning. Despite a 24-hour period (not saying whose!) of evacuation and solitary confinement that may have been an homage to Steven Soderbergh's Contagion, the visit was barrels of fun. And barrels of wine! Literally, we went to a chateau in Saint-Émilion, got the private tour of the property, met the owner, climbed into the presses, played a drinking/"smelling" game, learned how to spell vinification, and other sweet--if you will--activities. Sarah and Mom both walked out of the place with bottles on bottles. We also hit up the Dune du Pyla--study up with this vintage LVEB post--and enjoyed the crazy jungle-forest-ocean-desert view that only this joint affords. My mom doesn't have the world's highest tolerance--not that she ever claimed to--so her wine experience was not as grapey as it could have been, but she still got a chance to get her fair share of the white stuff (that means white wine here*) and swore to my host mother never again to drink chardonnay. (Sorry, Big Sean.)
Sarah and I had a great time traipsing around the city, exploring really weird modern art exhibits, making friends with shopkeepers on my block, watching a guy who looked like Yosemite Sam perform at a jazz bar, Hoovering delicious foods as varied as chicken shwarma with fries and entrecôte ...with fries, and trying to get a patent on a Pineau drip feed. Yo, one word about l'Entrecôte: incroyable. I got in an argument last night with a French waitress (off-duty) about it, and she's all like, "I don't find the meat to be of a good quality and it is too expensive in relation to the morsels that they serve you and the line is of such a length and the women who work there are paid by how many tables they sell so they do not appreciate you and" and at some point I just tuned her out because, really, fuck ça. L'Entrecôte is like God's buffet line. It makes sense that people would want to queue up for that shit. Sorry you can't handle a little deferred gratification.
I was sad to part ways with the family, needless to blog. In fact, the weekend before last I got a little surprise visit from my dad, Dad, who flew in from a three-week business trip to spend limited-quantity but maximum-quality time in the City that Never Wakes Up. I don't want to rehash the laundry list of meals that we managed to pack into 24 hours, but let's just say that if ducks could talk, they would say, "Adam and his dad ate lots of our friends."
The ducks would also decry the abuses of the French Southwest in general, whose singular mission it is to make all parts of the duck edible, and all ducks unhappy or dead.
I would like to point out the bizarre phenomenon that is the average French body type. On the whole, Pierre and Aurélie are shockingly thin considering their relatively decadent lifestyle. This sounds extremely offensive, so let me explain.
1. Exercise. What is that? They don't have that here. The extremely small number of people you see running in the mornings in the public gardens? They are immigrants. As WSJ previously mentioned, why run when you can scoot?
2. Diet. My host mother doesn't believe in drinking water during meals. However, she strongly promotes the liberal consumption of bacon, which here is appetizingly called lardon. Also, the mayor of Bordeaux is a wheel of cheese. (Pictured below.)
3. Alcohol. I have seen a full wine rack laid bare in the span of four days. My host brother is a cross-between whoever taught James Bond how to drink, and the guy who taught that guy.
4. Cigarettes. This is an easy one. Cigs are like girls in that Beyoncé song: they run the world. The school system is organized completely around smoke breaks. You had a two-hour class? Sacré bleu, I hope you got that petite pause! Yesterday I literally saw a baby smoking two cigarettes at the same time.
Do you see what I mean? You gotta wonder how the youth stays so trim. Must be the white stuff.
Then again, they don't have Thanksgiving. Isn't that funny? You would think that the French would jump at every opportunity to stuff a bird with bread and eat foods that are healthy in theory but not in practice/compiled into a mass of indiscernible, belt-loosening sadness. In reality, we Americans don't get a lot of love for this holiday overseas. I spent my Thursday night sitting down for a meal with my old colonizers, the English. Only then did I fully realize the oppression that American Indians felt in those awkward early settlement years. When we gathered at the table for a poker game, the Brits initially didn't accept my money, and I eventually had to stop playing with them for fear that they would tar and feather me. On an occasion dedicated to putting beside cultural differences and accepting diversity, I was hounded with jeers like "bloody Yank" and "Dr. Yankenstein" and "fat". They did, however, show some sign of reconciliation by playing this vid for me. So I guess my Thanksgiving was comme ci, comme ça.
Anyway, the sun is setting on what has turned out to be a very unproductive day for me. Apart from ending my brief observation of No Shave November two days late, I can't say I've used my time effectively today. La Vie en Bros, I've come to find, is a bit of an addiction. Do you agree? The numbers say you do! Last week we hit a milestone, crossing the 300,000 pageview threshold. I know, I know, it's not Kanye Twitter figures. But thanks to our extremely advanced capabilities in social media platform web technology algorithm functions, as well as yet another shout-out from Wesleying--although we were mentioned off-handedly and I kind of fucked up tipping Melody off about a false rumor, so the article was deleted--we now enjoy the kind of visibility I could only dream about on Xanga. So thanks, Melody! And mille mercis to all of the LVEB D-vo-Ts.
Alain Juppé's college days. Bye!
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