SNOW- okay, it might be slightly in convenient, or TBC is trying to ruin my life

One morning I woke up to this- I was thrilled

(This was mostly written right after that day it snowed, which was like erm, more 2 4 weeks ago)

Last night, I did what I do every night – after dinner I head into Bordeaux and hang out with Tristan at MacDo (the internet was broken though, it was tragic).

Anyway, at around 11:45, I was going to head back home. As we approached the tram stop I noticed something was off. Then I could read “service terminé” (I don’t need to translate, do I?). So my first reaction is to be like: did I lose track of time and miss the last tram? But that didn’t make any sense because it was Thursday and the last tram leaves the terminus at 1 am. And the sign stated quite clearly that it was 11:48 or so. Then it switches and shows an announcement, which we eventually translated as saying “the tram service is stopped after 10 pm because snow is predicted”).

This made (and makes) no sense for two reasons:

1)      There was NO snow; it had mostly melted away during the day.

2)      It had snowed that morning, quite a lot, actually, and the tram was running THEN.

So Tristan and I stood there in utter bafflement. (Tristan lives by this stop, so this only REALLY affected me- but he isn’t a jerk so he didn’t ditch me).

I’m not sure why, but we stood there for like 10 minutes. I think we were certain that there must have been some mistake. In fact, the tram was still running in the opposite direction.

Finally, I was like okay, this sucks, but there is also a bus that goes to Pessac (and that is actually faster) (I discovered this bus when I was stupid and missed the last tram- even though I knew when it was leaving). So we walk to the bus stop. When we arrive, a totally random man sitting there tells us that the bus service was also stopped. So now I’m all: great, I’m stranded in Bordeaux.

We went back to the tram as if we expected something to have changed. And I spent my time exclaiming “THIS MAKES NO SENSE. THERE IS NO SNOW!” etc.

In fact, I’m pretty sure this is why this happened.

Three TBC workers are sitting in the break room eating lunch. One is on his I-phone.

TBC 1: You know what sucks?

TBC 2: What?

TBC 1: Working. 30 hr weeks are too hard. I think we need to work less.

TBC 2: I agree work sucks.

TBC 1 & TBC 2: *pout*

TBC 3: Hey guys, it might snow tonight!

TBC 1: SO? It does that sometimes.

TBC 3: No, you don’t understand

TBC 2: DUDE, it’s not that complicated: white stuff falls from the sky. Happens every winter.

TBC 3: YES! I know- you see, snow is DANGEROUS. Especially for public transit.

TBC 2: No it’s not, STUPID.

TBC 3: You don’t get it- There is NO way we could keep providing public transit. It’s too dangerous.

TBC 1: Oooh!

TBC 2: I still don’t get it…

TBC 3: Let’s take the night off

All: YES

Anyway, I stood at the tram for a bit, waiting in vain and considered my options

a)      Walk for an hour and a half by myself after midnight in just above freezing weather.

b)      Attempt to procure a bike (the TBC has a nifty thing called Vcub where you can take a bike from one station to any other), however, this is likely to fail because it requires a European credit card- which I don’t have.

c)      Nick Johnson it (ie party it up until the trams start running again at 5 am)

d)     Call host family (hahaha NO)

e)      Take a taxi

Taking a taxi seemed like the best option, so we walked off in search of a taxi. We found a taxi stand, and I was lucky enough to share a ride with some others headed to Pessac, so I only had to pay 6 euro instead of 18, yay. Our cab driver was bit of a jerk though: “this isn’t a bus”. So I got off with the others, and walked the rest of the way (a bit farther than usual, but not much), and just as I turned on to my street the predicted snow began to fall softly.

…

Then, as a going away present, the TBC went on strike for my last two days in Bordeaux (canceling almost everything, particularly anything that could be useful to me). They probably did this to spite me for laughing at their earlier strike (“I have to wait 10 minutes instead of  6? OH NOES”). Therefore I had to take an actual train to get into Bordeaux, which was annoying, but not awful because I totally didn’t pay for it (they owe me—remember the 40 extra I shelled out because you wouldn’t print out my ticket, SNCF? I want it back). Then on Sunday, they canceled the one tram that was still running (the one Tristan was using to get to the train station), but it was kind of a legitimate cancelage, what with everything being icy and dangerous to WALK on. So I ended up walking halfish way to Tristan’s house, and then back to the train station with him.

THANKS FOR NOTHING ,TBC.

I’m going to miss you :( I love(d) that tram.

Once upon a time, I went to St. Emilion

Last Saturday (/a really long time ago, like 3 weeksish), I got to pretend that I’m one of the poor souls who lives 40 minutes away from the university, and got up at the awful early hour of 7 am. But unlike them, I did this to go to the train station, which I suppose beats going to the DEFLE. Because of this, for the first time since moving here, I ate breakfast with my host family, kind of. Honestly, I was beginning to suspect that they ate breakfast in the middle of the night, because all evidence of their breakfast eating (except two cold pieces of toast) has vanished by the time I go upstairs, no matter when I get up. My train left at “10ish” and the train station is about 1hr away by tram, and I hadn’t bought my ticket, and needed to go to an atm. Everything went smoothly, including a perfect of amount of time to get money from the atm before the next tram at my transfer, except it turned out that the train didn’t leave until 10:40, which isn’t really the same as “10ish”. I would blame Tristan for this, but really it’s my fault for always relying on him to know when things are. Also, he showed up way too early too, so I wasn’t waiting alone. At 10:40 all six of us were sitting on the train, and 45 minutes later we arrived in St. Emilion.

We started off the trip by eating at creperie, that had a beautiful patio that over looked the bottom part of St. Emilion. I had a crepe with jambon et fromage, and a delicious dessert crepe with mint chocolate filling, whipped cream, and mint chocolate chip ice cream.

St. Emilion, like most places around here, is famous for its wine production, but it is also home to the largest monolithic (For those of you who don’t speak Latin or know random architectural terms, monolithic means “one stone” or something like that- that is, this church is carved out of the mountain) church in Europe. St. Emilion supposedly was capable of healing people and performing other miracles, and it was his fame that led him to go to St. Emilion, where he hoped to live a more quiet life. He was buried in the catacombs at St. Emilion and rich people paid to be buried close to him. During the war between the protestants and catholics, however, his remains were thrown into a river. The catacombs at this church were reserved for those who were “pure” that is those who had never lived (still born babies), those who were important members of the church, and those who were rich enough. The church itself was dug out from the top down; it is believed to be modeled after monolithic churches that its builder saw during the crusades. Drainage pipes were dug underneath the church to prevent structural instability due to wet soil. These pipes worked fantastically until they were destroyed when rich people wanted to be buried right underneath the church. Over the years the water seeped into the stone, and today the churches pillars are held together by metal clamps, while scientists work on a way to restore the strength of the stone. Once a year they hold mass in this church, and this actually took place the weekend before we visited.

The last paragraph was brought to you by the 4 euro I paid to tour St. Emilion’s cave, the catacombs, and the church. These historical sites are privately owned, and therefore they cannot be toured independently. I don’t have any pictures of this, because the private owners are selfish jerks who want to be able to make as much money off of this stuff by selling pictures of it, or something like that. (rereading this post it comes off as very anti- wealthy people, huh…)

monolithic churches are more impressive from the inside

Later we visited a winery, and the caves in which they age their wine underneath it. The most fascinating part of this visit was the amazing silence of the caverns. If you were in one of the far corners and no one was walking around you the air was completely still – perfect silence. The winery offered free wine tasting, but they told us to come back in an hour, most of this time we spent at these ruins:

We sat on the wall surrounding the vineyard, and set a camera on self timer across the street in order to get a picture of all of us:

I haven’t fallen off the planet or anything, it’s just that my computer broke, so actually I take that back- I’ve been off planet.

The good news is that I have successfully resurrected my computer to thanks to the guy at FNAC who didn’t speak english, my handy new portable hard drive SHINEY, and the handy system restore function. There isn’t any bad news, except that I haven’t been writing any posts, but you knew that already, so it’s not really “news” per see.
Mostly I haven’t really done anything though, except Lisa and I went to Paris which was AWESOME, and then she visited me which was AWESOME. Basically it was an amazingly FANTASTICALLY awesome week. I’m working on a post about Paris, but don’t get your hopes or anything because the jury’s still out on whether or not it sucks. I also might write a post about Lisa visiting, or making fun of French bureaucracy, or French strikes, or how they FINALLY gave me my appointment time to get my carte de sejour a mere 11 hours before I leave the country for more than a week (I’m going to Edinburgh, BERLIN, and Budapest) and how about a week before I got this letter the program advisors were all “what do you mean you can’t leave the country yet? You can go to any shenegan country!” and we were all “that is TOTALLY not what you said before *you mean we’ve been prisoners in france for a month and half because you gave us misinformation*” (basically I just told you all of that story *check*), anyway the possibilities are pretty much endless now that my computer is alive again, yay!

It turns out Bordeaux is really famous for wine: the title of this post has almost nothing to do with it, in keeping with the random

It’s probably going to take me five times longer to type this because my fingers have been corrupted by a week of only using French keyboards – that’s right folks, I haven’t used the internet on my computer for over a week- I know this for certain because my antivirus is throwing a hissy fit: “OH NO! I HAVEN’T UPDATED MY DEFINITIONS FOR OVER A WEEK”, antivirus can be quite the drama queen.

This is an example of my favorite kind of french books- the kind of french books intended to teach english to french people, more specifically those purporting to teach them how to speak "like an english speaker". These books are always hilarious, whether they're right about what english speakers would say, or not. This one is particularly awesome in that it claims, not to teach one english, but to make one's boss THINK one speaks english. I would have bought it if it hadn't been 12 euro. Or if I had remembered to bring 8 euro with me before leaving to go to E.Leclerc (=supermaket), where I found this book and where I was planing on purchasing body wash and fach wash (this actually worked out, just barely)

Anyway, last week was pretty uneventful: I went to a bunch of DEFLE (have I explained DEFLE here yet? DEFLE = the department of French for foreign non-french speakers) classes that I’m not actually going to end up taking (maybe), I ate like 4 McFlurrys (French McFlurrys, like most “mac do” (pronounced “mac doe”) fare, are different than American McFlurrys – basically they are soft serve with a candy topping and “nappage” (which is like chocolate syrup or caramel, you actually have to pay extra for this, but it’s totally worth it :) ), I developed a habit of over using smilies and lol because of incessant texting, I read three books (they were short, okay!), and I started making a habit of going out at night (mostly this involved a lot of sitting at this monument and talking).

"this monument"

The weekend the before that, I spent my time being a cultured bordelaise because it was the weekend of Patrimoine, which is the weekend during which cool stuff in europe that isn’t normally opened is opened. I went to the Musee d’Aquataine (Aquataine= the region of france in which Bordeaux is located, this is a historical museum about its past (no kidding, right?)) - this is actually always open, we just happened to go. Then we walked through the Grand Theatre, which isn’t, “grand” that is. It was very pretty and cool to see, but large it was not. Tristan and I had a conversation while sitting in the theatre in which we pretended to be pretentious 19^th century british bourgeois while we waited for Claire to catch up with us.  That night we ate at Ed Wood Café which is like the Corvette diner only in France – yep, I traveled half-way around the world to go to an American 50’s style restaurant, go ahead and judge me. We had yummy milkshakes, and laughed at all the French people who ate their hamburgers with their forks. Then on Sunday we went to a free classical music concert in the Jardin Public. I don’t have pictures of any of this, I don’t know why.

CAT!

Something I learned (or really was reminded of) in my “Bordeaux Art” DEFLE class (which would me more aptly named “random French vocabulary pertaining to Bordeaux- and by random I mean you probably don’t even know the English word for this stuff”) is how lucky I got when I picked the name of this blog. So, you know, “chateau” is a French word that generally means “castle”, or “really gigantic house”.  But it is also used to name vineyards, after the presumably grand house that is part of them, in this way, wines are called “Chateau insert_name_of_house_here”. And this is the origin of the slang Chateau Lapompe, to mean water (la pompe meaning the pump). I more or less new all of that when I choose to use it as a name, what I didn’t know is that naming vineyards this way is actually a custom specific to Bordeaux. So, you win, me, you win. On the other hand I haven’t actually heard anyone call water anything other than l’eau.

Look familiar? I found this in my 3rdish day in france, just before finding E.Leclerc. Until I stumbled upon it again, I believed it to be from Eureka, CA, which would have been really oddly specific- it turns out it just says Eurkea on it because it's, yah know, the state moto. It says Pessac Automobiles on the seal. So still random, but slightly less so.