Leap Day!

Well everyone, I like to refer to this as my free extra day in France. Way back before I left the US I realized that I would get to spend leap day in France, and I thought that that was pretty cool. Even cooler, I actually had a library book due today so it was stamped with Fabruary 29th. Nice.

However, I really just wanted to let you know that yesterday, the 28th of February, was the day I officially received my stipend money from the Université de Savoie. That is two months I have been at this school's location and they only just now got around to finally paying me. This caused a huge problem because I had an automated payment set up with the internet company, but because the university had never paid me that payment got rejected and consequently the bank charged me 20E and they did this a second time (so I was minus 40E) and this all happened in a matter of days during my school's vacation so I no one at the university was responding to my e-mails and I didn't fully understand what was going on because the bank was communication with me BY MAIL! (not anything efficient, the mail) And as a side note, they sent their notifications in these high-security sealed-up envelope-letters (where the envelope and letter are a single entity) and you have to fold in a million places to get the letter open, and the first one that I received took me at least 5 minutes to figure out so that I could read the letter. At one point I was actually fairly certain there was no letter to read because I was having such a difficult time finding it! But anyway back on topic. The slow French bureaucracy caused me a problem with my bank, and after the vacation I went there to talk with bank and they were really understanding and dropped all the charges. But I was still in a really bad mood. I cannot believe that my university said that I would have my stipend by the beginning of the month and it got delivered to me on the 28th of February.

On a brighter topic, I did just find out that my mom will be able to visit me AGAIN in France this semester, and she will be coming out during the April vacation period. David and I are super excited and we are in the process of planning a little excursion in addition to some hikes around the Chambéry area. This is a wonderful surprise for the two of us, and we are really looking forward to our next vacation!

Also I feel like I have finally got into a schedule with my classes this semester, and I have also really enjoyed some of my business-related classes to the point where I think I understand better what career I would like to have in the future. I really like the idea of working for a marketing research firm that is hired by a company (or situated within a large company) which studies markets to help with successful product introduction of amelioration of the company's "bottom line". Anyway, I have lots of classes more or less on that subject this semester and I find them very interesting.

Well I do not have anything else too exciting to share today, but since it is a "normal" day, I will leave you with a picture of the sunset that I took yesterday... It is just gorgeous here in Chambéry. (and PS it was about 60 degrees outside today!)

Our Trip to Saint Sulpice

David and I did another bike ride today, to visit the town of Saint Sulpice where after we followed one of our marked trails and hiked for about 3 hours. I'll let the photos below do most of the story-telling, but there is one peculiarity that I would like to let you know about. So the bike ride to get to the hike "start point" (Saint Sulpice) was almost 10 km away, not too big of a distance. Actually David and I chose the hike because it seemed like it would be a little more relaxed. What we forgot to take into account was the massive elevation change in such a short distance. We climbed more than 2000 feet, meaning that we averaged an incline of 3 inches a meter during our ascent. And that is especially impressive because the parts in Chambéry were more-or-less flat and there were some portions of our mountain trek that were even downhill. Therefore we ended up walking our bikes almost the entire way up the mountainside to reach our hiking spot. This took us a little over an hour and a half. Then we hiked 3 hours, and then we headed home. From the time we left the spot we parked our bikes until the time we had them locked up behind our apartment complex, only 25 minutes had passed. And to make that time even more astounding we stopped on three occasions to snap some pictures of the lovely countryside! Plus we were braking throughout to keep ourselves from going too quickly. In my calculations I subtracted 5 minutes, which is what we figured for the stops, but so that you can imagine it, we averaged about 15.6mph, and there was a slight uphill portion to our trip, and a level bit in Chambéry. Needless to say, that is the fastest I have ever gone on a bike!

Here are some of the photos that we took for the day:

Ok so we are officially two-for-two. Two hiking trips, and two slightly unusual animals. Last time it was a legitimate donkey, and this time it was a "corse" or a "how" we are not quite sure which one. It was this really short, incredibly stocky horse with a total cow head. I know the picture isn't great but don't forget that you can click on it and then you can zoom in and stuff (at least if you open it up in another tab on your computer) I just wonder how that happened...

This is the first picture I took as David and I set off toward our hike. You can see how close we are to our city (that is Chambéry and it's outskirts). And later you will see some pictures that can give you perspective on how far away and how high up we really went during this trip.

This was a welcomed sight because it was the church that marked the start of our hike. At that point we had basically climbed straight up a mountain while walking our bikes for an hour and a half. Phew! Plus, it was a gorgeous little church!

This is just when we started out on our hike (haven't climbed the ridge yet) but you can see the city of Chambéry way off in the distance... It was a seriously lovely day.

Obviously you can tell by the grass at the bottom of the picture, that this was taken by my camera's timer function and the only thing I could find to balance it on was a chunk of nearby grass. But either way, here are David and I starting out our hike.

David and I took a picnic lunch break on one of the boulders. It was a typical lunch of ham, swiss cheese, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches with a Panaché to drink. I think David's blog told you about Panaché? It is a drink that used to be about 50% beer 50% lemonade, but recently is just slightly malt-flavored lemonade with less that 1% of alcohol. Surprisingly they taste quite delightful, and the best part is you can buy a pack of ten for 1.4€ so they are quite cheap.

Me rocking out in one of a string of about 8-9 caves. There were some caves that were absolutely massive too (you will ave to check them out when David does his blog post sometime later in the week: http://francedavid.wordpress.com ) These caves are famous because the king of France, François I, and a troupe of his men had to take shelter in them one night when returning from Chambéry for an important mission due to a violent storm. Here I just decided to take a great Facebook profile picture...

This is one of the infamous pictures for which I stopped during our downhill decent to the city after our hike had been completed. It was almost a sunset and the fields were aglow, but the mountains were still sparkling in the background. So beautiful.

Ok well that is all I am going to say in today's blog post, except that yesterday's Banana Bread turned out fantastically, and even served as our dessert for today's excursion! 

A Taste of Home

Well I have three general updates that I am going to put into a relatively short blog post:

1) I am making Banana Bread with my recipe from home and it is baking in the oven right now. Woohoo! David and I are really excited. Of course it is kind of experimental Banana Bread because France doesn't sell baking soda or baking powder in their stores (at least not the three I checked) but according to my translation program I did find some flour with the baking powder included... so hopefully that will be good enough. In addition, France has different nut preferences than the US so I couldn't find any walnuts or pecans in the nut isle, only hazelnuts almonds and pralines which do not work very well in Banana Bread in my opinion. So it is nutless Banana Bread for which all the ingredients were measured by a legitimate cup (we used google to figure out that 24.2cl of a liquid = 1 cup. Therefore we used an empty beer can (25cl) to figure how much a cup was in one of our drinking cups. Then I used that mark to estimate the 1 3/4 cup of flour and the 2/3 of sugar and I just eye-balled the 1/3 cup of butter. But in the end it seemed to have the right consistency and it smelled delicious. I'll let you know how it turned out!

2) I made crepes about two days ago. This was another culinary adventure and it turned out brilliantly. It was cool because I made something that was traditionally French but something that I associate with being home. They were so good that we are thinking about making some dinner-style crepes this upcoming week with ham and emmental. Speaking of emmental did you know that you can seriously only buy two types of shredded cheese? (at least in your typical grocery store). You can buy emmental and gruyère, which are both swiss cheeses, and sometimes a compté. I do not know how these people live without a good sharp cheddar. *sigh of longing*

3) I heard back from Miami two days ago and the ridiculously long set of essays that I had to write to attempt to receive honors credit for being abroad last semester have officially been approved! I am very excited. Of course I will be even more excited when I receive credit for my second semester (because I can receive one credit of each type - category A and category b) meaning that I will have fulfilled 9 of the 10 necessary "experiences" required to graduate Miami with Honors. That means at this point, with my recently approved credit for my last semester at Le Havre, I am at a very proud 7 completed experiences. I am not sure if it will actually matter to my future employer that I completed the Honors program, but I just couldn't let this one thing go uncompleted, though getting all seven of those experiences has been an extremely cumbersome task so far.

Also, David and I have recovered from our big bike trip last week, and we will be heading out on a new hike tomorrow. At this point we haven't decided on which one, so I will try to give you a post tomorrow and let you know about our hiking experience. Winter is rather quickly transforming into spring here in Chambéry, and we are now having days even as high as in the 50's, and quite a bit more sunshine, in addition to birds singing. Still no flowers yet though...

Bike Trip to Lac du Bourget

David and I had quite the adventure today as we completed #10 and #12 (our second and third respectively) hikes from our touring hike book for the Chambéry area. Each hike is labeled, and at this point we have completed three of the fifty, #1, #10, and #12. Some of the hikes, about 5 of them I believe, we most certainly will not be completing because there is no way in the world we can possibly bike to them, and there are a few that do not interest us completely, but we would love to get at least thirty or so hikes in before we leave this region of France. Therefore we are 1/10th of the way there. So back to today's story.

David and I knew because we were told, that a special bike route existed to get from Chambéry to Lac du Bourget. We also thought we knew where it was. Well we were wrong and we followed some other sign that led us up a nearby mountainside (killing both of our quads, though permitting some lovely views of rural landscapes) and were nearly completely lost except for a last-minute bus sign with a map that allowed us to get back down the mountainside and successfully arrive at our destination. Other than that ultimately 4 mile detour, we were very successful at navigating the hikes in our book, and we visited two chateaux, saw a beautiful lake (for the second time but from a different angle and with much better weather) and had an absolutely splendid afternoon. To save time since you have also most likely read David's post, I will supplement with some additional pictures, and some same pictures with my own interpretation. Hehe.

While we were on our detour, we passed a lovely country farm and there was this donkey just standing there. We stopped just so I could take this picture, and two others actually, because I thought this dude was just too cool. Plus you can see how picturesque the landscape was.

I skillfully managed to take this picture of us while riding my bike and got both of us in the picture! Go me!

Sadly enough, while standing on of the bridges we crossed over, I couldn't even manage to take a very good picture of the two of us as I cut off some of David's head. But you get the idea. That was a really pretty river behind us by the way. And the bike path that we were supposed to take (and did take on the way back) runs alongside it for about 7-8 kilometers. 

This is the entrance to the ruins of the Chateau Thomas II. There were in the process of being restored I guess, and therefore there was no way to enter. Oh well. We feel like we saw everything anyway because it seriously was just ruins except a cool tower from here to there and some archways. 

We balanced my camera on the gate to the chateau and shot this picture of the two of us on our bike so we can remember them forever. Mine is #488 and David's is #582. 

Mom I included this picture for you because this photo is definitely going in my "ensemble of 6" when I get back to the US. I find this to be the perfect swan picture, and on such a beautiful lake!

This is the second chateau that we saw today, and it is a privately owned masterpiece. Please notice the perfectly manicured vineyard growing around front. Unfortunately because it is privately owned there are no tours, but I was pretty proud of my picture none the less. Stunning location. 

I also wanted to include the picture of David and I in the cave. This is another timed photo masterpiece, which was taken with my camera balancing on a boulder. Though the caves were quite small, we felt so lucky to get to see them because the tourist map in the city didn't mark the caves, and the path to get to theme was rather ambiguous itself as well, so I don't think we ever would have discovered them if it weren't for our little hike book.

There was a really cool boulder formation jutting out into the lake and I posed Egyptian style. I think the photo turned out quite nicely. 

And this is part of our hike to get to the caves. The narrowest, tallest, most ancient-looking stone set of stairs I have ever encountered. They were beautiful, though admittedly you did have to use tree roots to descend that last part. It was such a quaint little escapade. 

Overall I think I will summarize this day in two ways: 1) I feel great because we had such a wonderful day of sustained exercise and we got to do fantastic cultural things at the same time and 2) I feel ridiculously sore everywhere and I cannot promise any movement tomorrow due to the activities previously listed. I do not think I have ever biked 26 miles before. Ever.

A note about school to keep you all up to date. This week of vacation has been a wonderful break from routine, though hardly all fun. I have had quite a bit of homework for my XVIII literature class, and I am proud to announce that I have read the required play, and am even thinking of reading a supplementary play so that I can make more astounding comparisons. Apparently we have some sort of oral exam on Wednesday (our next lit class) and I want to be ready to impress. So I have a bit of homework there, so that I can prepare my observations, and in addition I am very busy trying to prepare some of my documents for transfer credit back at Miami. Let's hope that all of that goes well. It will probably be months before I know anything definitely, but I'll certainly be keeping you up to date as far as that is concerned. Other than that I have just basic coursework to keep up with, which I am actually not very "kept up with at the moment" so most of the remainder of this break will be spent doing homework. YAY!

Oh and a final update: David and I's heating shut off two days ago, and we have no idea why and I contacted the owner but he hasn't gotten back to me. Our first theory is that the gas has been turned off due to the construction below us (we are not exactly sure where this construction is but it does wake us up nearly every morning) and our second theory that for some inane reason they turn their heating off on February 15th. Needless to say it has dropped to a below satisfactory temperature in our apartment, but hopefully everything will soon be worked out. Much love from Chambéry!

Happy Valentine's Day

Hello to all my family, I wish you a wonderful holiday of love!!! David and I have been doing very little with our computers (like blog updates) because "Old Reliable" (our nickname for my old laptop from high school) gave up the ghost - well actually just it's battery pack- so until we get our replacement, which is in the mail, we have only one computer which is proving to be very difficult at this day and age.

I just wanted to update you that David and I had a wonderful day excursion to Aix-Les-Bains which is quite close to Chambéry and sits on one side of the Lac du Bourget, the biggest natural lake in France. Although it was a very cold outing, it was a wonderful trip. We went for a walk to explore the city, walked beside the lake, and went into an aquarium museum (or do you just say aquarium?) which ended up being the highlight of our trip, as I'll explain below with the pictures.

We hiked all over the city and all through a park to get to this chateau that we spotted when arriving into the city by train, only to finally get there and learn that it was an apartment complex. Lucky renters I guess. But it was still a gorgeous building with an imposing facade over the city. 

These are the trees all trimmed up for the new season. I just thought they looked a little funny.

To remind you how cold it is here right now, here we are in front of a mini frozen waterfall. Sweet.

This is us beside the lake. Of course, the lake wasn't quite frozen but it was prolly around 20 degrees outside so all of our pictures have a supreme mist in the background from the lake. But no picture can really do this view justice. It was absolutely gorgeous there. 

Here is another picture from a slightly different angle. It was also really interesting how beautifully clear the water was. You could easily see to the bottom of the two meters of water that were right off the dock. 

This was the massive crawdad in one of the aquarium's tanks. He was enormous. 

And this video shows the reason that I had the best time ever in Aix-Les-Bains. They had a "tactile tank" where kids could touch some fish (enormous gold fish and carp... and some others but I forget) but the coolest part was that the fish were trained to give hands "bisous" which is the French word for kiss. The aquarium caretakers would always feed the fish by hand, so if you stuck your fist into the water, the fish would all swim up and give you a big suction kiss. Then, normally they would swim off because they realized that you didn't have any food. Well the guy in charge of the tank came up to us and gave us a few pieces of food and I got to get my hand massively "kissed" by a lot of fish at the same time! It was hilarious and it tickled like crazy, but David filmed it so here it is for your viewing pleasure. I would also like to comment that I was the first one (between David and Nicole and I) to actually put my hand into the tank to get a fish kiss. Admittedly I did jump when I got my first bisou because it was quite startling, but I am so glad I did. All of us spent the rest of the day with large smiles on our faces, walking around making fish kissing sounds. Truly fantastic. (NOTE: Apparently you have to actually view my blog, and not just its e-mail version, to view the video. There should be a link at the bottom of the e-mails)

Finally, just a really exciting update for today. David and I went and rented city bikes for the next 4 months, in other words for the rest of our semester here at Chambéry. It was only 20 Euros per person for all four months because we are students, and I am really looking forward to being able to bike all around to the nearby hiking locations, chateaux, lakes, and even the grocery store. And I am proud to say that we rode them from the gare to our apartment without any trouble at all. They are great. Tomorrow we are taking them out again to run some errands because I have a book that I have to buy for a class, I have to go to the library to rent a book, and we are going to go to the tourism office and buy a book that I found recommended online by the tourism office of Savoie with 50 hikes and hike ideas for the Savoie area. David and I are really stoked about the prospects of more independent travel with our bikes. 

Happy Valentine's Day!!!

The funniest thing....

So I was surfing Facebook and I found a link to the University of Le Havre's new welcome video. It is a video that is supposed to attract new students to its campus. Well, I watched it and you are never going to believe this but I am in it writing Chinese on the blackboard of my Chinese classroom. Hahahahaha. The link to the video is: http://webtv.univ-lehavre.fr/spip.php?article51 but I don't think you would be interested in the whole video since it is about 10 minutes long and all in French, but, I took a screen shot of one of the frames of me writing so that you could see: what an achievement! I left my mark on that campus!

Other than that I do not have class tomorrow (Friday) so that means I am on vacation for a week!!!! Woohooo! Actually, David and I aren't planning on doing much this trip, but I am going to get a ton of homework done for back in the US, where there isn't this silly little holiday.... hehe. 

It's Been A Long Time

I feel like it has been too long since I did a blog post, about 8 days to be exact, so I wanted to make sure that I kept all of you in the loop. Unfortunately there is really nothing that exciting going on which is why it has been such a long time since I posted. And actually, on there other hand there has been a lot going on with me and my courses, and working with my French professor back home to receive transfer credit (which Miami is extremely unwilling to give for anything except literature courses - grrrrrr I AM SO SICK OF LITERATURE). And also I just spent two days writing my honors petition for honors credit for my first semester of study abroad which reached a massive 3,500 words, which is basically an extended essay from high school, for those of you familiar with the IB extended essay required during my senior year.

Now my Miami-related homework is going to be preparing syllabi for my business-related courses and contacted the head of the marketing department and hoping for better luck with my transfer credits there. Actually I'm thinking that "hoping" isn't going to be quite enough....

My courses are going fairly well out here, though I am struggling to find motivation for a lot of my classes since I am really not achieving the material that I need to graduate and I am really starting to look forward to graduating and I think I am kind of just ready to be back in the US efficiently finishing up my degree. On the bright side I do have several very interesting business and marketing courses to which I enjoy going. And also my FLE language courses are quite informative, and there is no denying that my French is always improving, it just boils down to the fact that I am ready to graduate and I do not feel that I am most efficiently working toward that goal here in France. But at least I am bilingual!

I should mention that I am still in the change-around-course stage, so I am still not 100% sure what classes I will be taking, though I am fairly certain. I have dropped my translation and grammar courses (although I found both, and in particularly the grammar course, interesting, they were not going to transfer as anything back in the US and yet they were still adding to my homework load. I also dropped statistics because in order to hopefully get a French credit back at Miami I have to take a course of XVIII century literature and the times conflicted with stats. On the bright side I have already checked out the classes offered by Miami this summer and there is an online stats course, so I'll definitely be taking that. Oh and speaking of summer courses, I forgot to update my blog, but I received a summer tuition waiver back in Oxford through the Honors program, which will waive 90% of my tuition fees for this summer. This is of course a huge blessing, but also explains why I haven't been posting as much as usual because I was busy typing up three massive essays explaining why I should receive a summer tuition waiver... woot.

Finally, David and I have a "winter vacation" coming up at the end of this week, so that is exciting. We are not really sure exactly what we are going to do during it because we are saving our money for more travel at the end of a semester, but we are thinking of checking out several of the nearby towns, doing some little day trips and possibly even a bit of skiing, since we have yet to make it up to the mountains. One thing most certainly on the list is a visit to the Lac Bourget, a very huge and nearby lake. There is a bike path from Chambéry to the lake so we would like to rent some bikes and go up, see the lake and visit the the Tombs of Hautecomb within an abbey, where the royal members of the House of Savoy are buried. Of course, we may hold off if it stays as cold as it has been because no one can go for a bike ride in -10 celcius. You simply can't breathe!

It has been absolutely frigid here in Chambéry since last weekend, and supposedly it should start warming up around Sunday, so we are all hoping for the best. It has been unbearably cold. Around -18 some nights! On the bright side though, the bitter cold has allowed the snow to stay around in some places, meaning it has stuck for 9 days which is pretty impressive.

Ok well actually I am going to get back to work now, but I just wanted to keep you all up to date. And at the end of the week I will give you an updated class list so that you can follow along with my schedule. Bisous!