Mountain Hike

Today, I decided to go on a hike to explore more of Chambéry (and to justify the pain au chocolat that I had for breakfast this morning). Typically, whenever I go somewhere, I go the same direction (towards the elephants). Today I decided to go in a different direction from my dorm and see where it took me. I walked for a bit and then I came to a staircase, which I remembered Hal had told me about. He said he'd found some nature trails up there so I decided to head up.

When I got to the top, I found some signs that told me I was going towards the house of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (a philosopher that influenced the French Revolution). I kept following the signs and I kept going higher and higher. I never actually found his house, but I did find some unspeakably beautiful views (and so I will let them speak (mostly) for themselves).

Above the city:

At the top of the first stairway:

A rest stop along the way:

my favorite mountain, of course a cloud was covering the tip the whole time I was up there

a snowy meadow-type area where I could see all of the taller mountains all around me:

my favorite mountain again:

School

School in France can be a very frustrating affair for a study abroad student. The major reasons being due to lack of organization and lack of computerization. When french students go to the university, they pick a major and all of their classes are picked and scheduled for them. There is rarely such a thing as an elective here, therefore each department selects all of its own classes for its students to take and not all departments start classes at the same time.

For us study abroad students who take classes from multiple departments (I'm taking them from the Literature, Histroy, DRI (for foreign students), and English departments), it is hard to line up a schedule that works. Also, every thing is done by hand. I mean, stuff is typed out and everything but there are no university-wide data bases or online records. Hal told me that, as an engineering and french student, having to take classes on two different campuses within the Université de Savoie, he had to register with each campus separately because the data isn't shared. Anyway, enough complaining, now I will tell you how my typical school day is.

I have classes four days a week, Monday through Friday. It takes me about 35-40 minutes of walking to get to class, depending on what building my class is in and how fast I walk to get there. Also, it's located at the top of a very large hill/small mountain accessible only by many hundreds of stairs and steep paths, just to make sure that you actually really want to be there ;). The picture above shows the view from campus. If you put your mouse on the very center of the picture, that is right about where I live and where I walk from everyday.

The classes that I'm taking this semester include 17th century french history, history of religion, reflexion on contemporary art, thème (which is translation of french text into english), 19th and 20th century literature with a focus on theatre, french civilization, and french linguistic perfection. All of my classes meet only once a week for about two hours a week. This can get very long. It may seem like I'm taking a lot of classes but I have to take about 2 credits here for every 1 credit I recieve at home. Most of the buildings are connected by a covered walkway and, what else of course but more stairs:

Most of my classes are pretty big. History and english classes started the first week that I was here and then literature started just this last week and the DRI classes (civilization and perfection) will start this week. I don't have a problem understanding most of my professors but there is one with a peculiar accent that gets really excited and talks really fast when he's lecturing making it almost impossible to pick out but a few words. I've found that I have most of my classes with other people that I have met from England or the U.S. which is helpful.

I've already missed a class because it was moved to earlier in the week and I didn't know it. On Thursday I went to my History class and nobody else was there so I went up to the main office area and sure enough there was a tiny little sign that said it had been moved to Tuesdays. Back home there would've been an e-mail sent out about this which makes it all the more frustrating. Of course, nobody registers for classes here until they take the exams, so I suppose they wouldn't know who to send it to.

There are hour and a half lunch breaks here every day from noon to 13:30. I usually spend them hanging out in the library (which is actually very small compared to any other collegiate library I've ever seen). This picture is the grafitti on the side of it:

Grafitti is very common here. The picture below shows it on the athletic center too. On the library is says "All Equal". I've heard that there is a grafitti story painted sequentially on the back of the stall doors in the girls bathroom, so maybe i'll have to go check it out sometime.
I had the placement test for my linguistic perfection class on Thursday. I thought it went pretty well but I imagine that I will be placed in group 2 (out of 3 groups). The results for that go up on Monday. Most of the people that I've met so far and have talked about on this blog were there to take it and we also met 2 girls from Finland named Aino (pronounced like "I know") and Ella. After the test, Alex, Hal, Aino, and Ella went to a café and got some crêpes. Mine was a chocolate crêpe and it was completely delicious!! Then we went to a meeting called "Tour du Monde au Ménage". It was an informational meeting about a program where we make a booth to represent our country for an international festival type of thing in March. I wasn't planning on going but Alex, Hal, Aino, and Ella were going, plus I thought maybe it could be a good place to meet other people. They told us about it and then had us sign up for our individual countries. Hal and I met some other Americans from St. Louis, somewhere in Colorado, and University of Missouri who we will be working with us on our poster. Below is a picture of Alex, Aino, Ella and me on our way to the meeting:

On Friday, I wandered around town and looked in some stores. I decided to take some pictures of things I haven't talked about yet. This is the Fontaine des Éléphants. It's basically right in the center of town and I walk by it for almost anywhere I go. According to Reed (who has been researching to see if he wants to come visit), it was built for a guy who went to India, got very wealthy, and then came back and donated a lot of money to the town.

The following picture is from when I was shopping. I thought it was kind of a pretty street with a mountain at the end of it. While I was shopping, I ran into a girl I met at the meeting the previous night. Her name is Lani and she's from Durango, Colorado. We went in a few stores cute stores that I'd been wanting to check out. She knew where to go because she's been in Chambéry since October.


Other exciting things include the fact that I have successfully talked both Ali and Reed into visiting me here (well, Ali didn't take so much talking, she's the one that asked me if she could come) so that's exciting!!!

Also, next weekend, I'm signed up to go skiing in the Alps. I might snowboard though instead of skiing, but I've heard that's a really touristy thing to do. I don't think I care though because I like snowboarding better.

Finally, I have decided what I'm doing for my week-long break in February. I am going to visit Bruges, Belgium; Brussesls, Belgium; and Amsterdam, Netherlands with Alex and a girl from her dorm that I've met before named Jen from England.

Tour of my room

Yay!!! It finally worked! The room tour is up and running. Sorry if it's kind of shaky and weird but I thought that a video would be the best way to see what my room looked like here. :)

Shopping!

Because some of my classes haven't started yet, I have a four-day weekend this weekend and it has afforded a lot of quality shopping time. On Friday, I went out looking for a hat because my ears always get cold when I'm hiking up the mountain to class. I walked around for a bit and then realized that its really no fun to shop alone so I had Alex join me. She is a student I met at the class registration stuff from Ontario Canada. Anyway she came to shop with me, and right now in Chambéry is a great time to shop! All of the stores are having major sales, trying to get rid of all their winter stuff to make room for spring and summer merchandise. We wandered around for a bit and ended up looking at shoes (of course, not what I needed). I found a cute pair of black boots with a shorter heel than the ones I already have, thus making them easier to walk in and more wearable to class. They were shorter than the ones I have but very cute to wear with tights and leggings especially. She found a cute pair of shoes too but didn't end up buying them (yet...). Afterward, we went and got some snacks to refuel after lots of walking. We're enjoying them in the picture above. I had a pain au chocolat which is essentially a croissant with two or three sticks of chocolate running through it. She had something with vanilla pudding that she really liked called a millefeuille. Mine was delicious!!!

The following day, I made plans to go to the outdoor market with Alex and Hal. Hal is a chemical engineering student from Kansas and lives in my building. The outdoor market had a lot of food. People there sold all sorts of breads, fruits, vegetables, fishes, meats and even non-food items. We saw things like chairs and cough drops and other such strange things to see at an outdoor market. Then we went to a crèperie for a little break and some crepes. They had some chocolat chaud (hot chocolate - which is actually much more bitter here than there, so it also came with two sugar cubes). The crepes tasted very good. Alex got a crepe with chocolate sauce and some sort of slightly orange flavored ice cream. Hal got one with apples and liqueur, and of course I got butter and sugar on mine (yes, I know I'm boring). Then we went out and hit the stores again. I ended up finding a coat which will help me to blend in a bit better I think (seeing as french people don't really wear coats like ours at home often are; they prefer wool, button-down, belted coats that are very fashionable). Anyway with the sales going on, it was a great deal! I also got a scarf at the same store which doesn't actually work with the coat but I loved it and it only cost about 2 euros. I also did end up finding a hat later on that was also very cheap and matched some of the fibers in the coat. Here are the spoils of my day (well at least my coat and hat):

I'm thinking about buying some yarn and knitting needles so that Alex can teach me how to knit. Then I can make a scarf to match my hat or my coat. Alex ended up getting a coat and a fedora-type of hat. She, like many other people have discovered, claims that I'm very good at getting her to spend her money. Hal also found some clothes while we were out, with Alex and I acting as his personal fashion consultants. All in all, it was a very fruitful day for all. Hopefully I don't buy that many more clothes while I'm here. I'd rather spend my money to go places and see things. Right now I'm thinking about what I want to do on my week-long break in February.

Fondue!

Lately, I haven't really done that much except try to get things all set up with school and classes. It is very frustrating and later I'll have a post about it.

Last night, I went out to dinner with some girls on my floor. It was at a restaurant with about 30 or more other study abroad students but it was a goodbye party, so many of them are leaving in the coming weeks as they were first semester students. It was really fun. We basically had a whole room to ourselves and I met a lot of people. There are a lot of British people here.

The restaurant served traditional Savoyard dishes: Fondue and Raclette. I shared fondue with two of the girls in the dorm who are staying here for the whole year, Sondra and Megan.

I actually really liked the fondue. It came with a salad that was pretty good and then some bread and meat to be dipped into the cheese. I didn't have any of the meat but the bread was good.

Some other people there had Raclette. Basically for that, they put a giant contraption right near your table that slowly melts a half of a wheel of cheese and it was a big wheel, probably like 8 inches in diameter. Then (and this is eaten by a group of people), people scrape off the melted cheese and put it on little potatoes with a bunch of other toppings they give you to put on it including some variety of little pickles called gherkins which I think is a funny word. After dinner one of the guys played guitar and everybody chatted for a bit. As is typical in France, it was a very long dinner. We got there around 8pm and we didn't end up leaving until 11pm, but it was a lot of fun and I'm glad that I got to go.

Oh! I also took more pictures of my favorite mountain on my way to the edge of town. I found out that it has a large cross on the top of it called the Croix du Nivolet

This is the picture that I took

This is the zoomed in version

P.S. I've been trying to get a tour of my room up but I've been having difficulties, so hopefully expect to see something like that soon! :)

First Impressions

My Favorite Mountain

Today, well yesterday technically, I arrived in Chambéry. It was a very long journey. I got up nice an early on Friday to get everything ready and then head to the airport. Luckily my mom and I were accompanied by my aunt and cousin to Chicago. The plane left around 5pm so

they served us dinner (chicken and rice - nothing very good) and then we were supposed to sleep which would make jet lag much easier to deal with. Of course, nervous/excited as I was I couldn't sleep so I watched Monsters vs. Aliens and the Office. All in all I probably got

about two hours of sleep. Then they served us breakfast and we arrived in Brussels, Belgium at 8am their time and 1am my time. Then after

some difficulties getting through security I got on my next flight. Both of my flights were only about half full and so I had empty seats next to me on both of them which was nice for spreading out. On that flight I met a girl studying abroad for the whole year in Lyon from Toronto, Canada.

She was very nice and

helped me find the right bus to get on for Chambéry. The bus ride was about an hour long and it was very nice. I think you get to see a lot more driving on the road with the big bus windows. It surprised me that the cars weren’t as small as I’d remembered from last time I was here. It seemed like there were quite a few vans and SUVs on the roads. We also saw a traveling circus complete with actual camels that were wandering and grazing. At first, near Lyon, I was pretty unimpressed with the mountains. They looked like they were about the same size as the hills I drive through in western Wisconsin to get to Iowa but as we got closer, the mountains grew bigger and were all

The View from my bedroom window

covered in snow. We drove past a lake and it was especially beautiful to see them reflected in the water. Sorry for not having pictures of that. I really was too exhausted to do anything. On the bus, I met a nice girl from Virginia named Claire also studying in Chambéry (she's in the picture above). We arrived in town around 1pm but neither of us could pick up our keys until the night watchman arrived at 6pm so we wandered

around town with our luggage. It is a very beautiful city but it amazes me that they can have so many stores full of useless little things but I still haven’t figured out where there is a grocery store

or where I can buy a pillow. Claire was lucky because she was not as jet-lagged as I was since she came from England where her parents live. We went to a Quick (the french version of McDonalds) because t

hat was the only free internet we could find and sent some e-mails home. We went to a fruit market and a boulingerie (a bakery) to get some fresh fruit and delicious french bread for lunch/dinner and then we came back to the dorm building and waited until 6. The room is nice. Its small but seeing as I only had one suitcase and a carry-on, I don't have enough

things to fill it anyway. I am kind of sad that it didn’t come with a pillow which is why I’m now sleeping on my lumpy coat but the desk and shelving area is very nice and I have my own ba

throom all to myself. We met a few people that also live here and they seem like cool people. We met a Brazilian and a German person who told us that there were all kinds of nationalities living there but only a few Americans which is less than I expected. That’s all for now... off to bed...