look! je suis voyageuse!

So, I’d hate to be one of those people who nonchalantly says, “Yeah, I went to Spain the other day,” but I can’t help it: I did! Oh and I guess I’d hate even more to tell you all that I also went to Paris last week (yeah, a little change in plans…). But alas, I must!

Last Saturday morning, Michelle, Carly and I piled in Bertrand’s little Peugeot and drove to San Sebastián, which is about 2 ½ hours away from Bordeaux. It’s crazy that in driving such a short distance, you enter into a different country with a different culture and language (although since we were in Basque country, everything was actually written in both Spanish and Basque). When we got there, we stopped to wade in the ocean (yes, that’s right: the ocean! I was so pumped because it was my very first time ever seeing the ocean!), and then tried to find a restaurant to eat lunch at, but since lunch isn’t served until 1:00 or 1:30, we had some time to kill. What better way to spend that time than climbing up a mountain? Actually, Monte Urgull isn’t a huge mountain, and the view was spectacular from the top (see pictures below!).

After lunch (which was actually a mirowaveable pasta dinner…), we drove another hour to Bilbao, where we spent about 3 hours in the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum. The architecture of this building was probably more impressive in some ways than the works inside the museum, but that’s just my opinion. For supper that evening, we spent about an hour trying to find a place to eat downtown and then another ½ hour waiting outside for them to start serving dinner at 8:30. Seriously, why do they eat so late in Spain? And why were there so many little kids dressed so well in their petticoats that they looked like they were posing for a Sears catalogue? Yet another mystery we had to contemplate while we waited with growling tummies.

Finally we got to order and eat, which was interesting because we had trouble reading the Spanish menus and we also didn’t know what to expect in terms of the meals themselves. I guess Michelle and Carly decided to try something new and order cheese plates, and literally, that’s all they got: a plate of cheese each. At least Michelle got a few raisins and some walnuts arranged artistically on her plate along with her cheese; Carly got hers in a pile. I ended up getting a “combinado” which ended up being a rather filling compilation of eggs sunnyside up, some french fries, bacon that was half fat, a “tomato salad” which was actually just tomatoes, and some weird potato-ball-things. All in all an excellent day in Spain I do say.

I spent Sunday back in Bordeaux relaxing a bit and then hanging out with Michelle, planning our spontaneous trip to Paris. I’m kind of starting to like this spontaneity thing. It’s definitely getting me out of my comfort zone of hyper-planning but it also has forced me to see that things can really work out if you don’t stress about them months, weeks, or even days in advance. I want all my trips to be spontaneous now! Well, except maybe for that trip to Paris and Poland in February that I planned this weekend with Rachelle (my friend from Winnipeg who’s teaching English in Korea right now)… but I’ll get into that later.

So, Paris. Carly, Michelle and I were there together but Carly ended up coming later, on Wednesday afternoon for2 nights. So Michelle and I took the train on Monday morning and 3 hours later, we were in France’s capital, a center of culture and commerce for over 2000 years, a symbol of romance, revolution, heroism, and hedonism, a city twinkling with magnetic charm… OK I’ll stop now. And I must confess I got those phrases from my France guidebook. But Paris was amazing! Seeing all of the sites that I’ve seen hundreds of times in books and in friends’ pictures and on TV was surreal to say the least. We had a huge list of places to visit, and I’m happy to say that we got to see nearly all of them. We did at least one museum a day, covering the Musée Carnavalet (probably a less-known museum on the history of Paris, but it was free!), the Maison de Victor Hugo, the Louvre (and in mine and Michelle’s opinions, that museum is too big for its own good), the Musée d’Orsay (which was my favourite out of all them; it houses all of the impressionist and post-impressionist’s works), and the Musée Picasso.

As for other sites, we saw the Eiffel Tower (mais bien sûr!), the Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame, Sacré-Coeur, Place de la Bastille, Place de la Concorde, the Moulin Rouge, la Comédie Française, and walked along the Champs-Élysées. We walked a ton—I don’t think I’ve ever walked so much in my life! We also went to the Cimetière Père Lachaise, a humongous cemetery where a lot of famous people are buried, including Jim Morrison (this is how many people know this cemetery). Unfortunately we couldn’t find Morrison’s grave, as we didn’t know where to get maps and had to keep relying on our wandering skills and the other people we kept stopping to ask for directions. In all, we found Molière, La Fontaine, and Oscar Wilde’s graves, the latter which is covered in kisses (I’m not sure if you can consider that defacing a tombstone or not…). You can see a picture of it below. Something that Amélie fans will find cool: we found the Café de 2 Moulins, the café Amélie works in in the movie, and went inside to eat, but changed our minds upon seeing the prices, even though there was a sign that offered a free drink to anyone who answered 5 questions about the movie correctly. FYI, it’s actually a lot smaller than it seems in the movie.

Our hostel was nice enough too. We had a private room with a wash corner and a double bed (pretty good for 16,67€ each a night for downtown Paris). We bought fresh baguettes, cheese and fruit every morning for breakfast, took the leftovers with us for lunch, and ate out for dinner each evening. Oh and did I mention all the walking we did? We bought a week pass for the metro when we got there, but didn’t even end up using it enough to get our money’s worth because sometimes it was just easier to walk places. Plus we got to see Paris above ground, and that was a beautiful site too.

So, all in all, my trip to Paris was amazing. I’m so glad I went before school started too. I had a mission in my time between when I arrived and when school started, and that was to travel at least a little bit. I think I accomplished that. I hope to do more traveling on the weekends while I’m in school and there’s the winter break at the end of February, when I’m going back to Paris for a couple of days (to do some things I didn’t get to do while I was there last week). From Paris, Rachelle and I will fly to Krakow, Poland to stay for 3 nights. Now you may be wondering, “Why Poland? That’s kind of random,” and you’re right. However, in a conversation Rachelle and I had last week, we discovered that we both have been for years harbouring a dream to see Auschwitz-Birkenau, the concentration camp-turned-museum not far from Krakow. It turns out that both of us were thinking the exact same thing: “But who on earth would ever come with me to see a concentration camp?” Well, it seems that we are that person for the other (awkward sentence… you understand what I mean though!). So, we found a reasonable flight from Paris and we’re going! Krakow is also apparently a beautiful city, so that’s going to be awesome. Bonus: we get to learn some Polish phrases and try them out!

But before I can continue my galavanting around Europe, I must start what I came here to do in the first place: SCHOOL. Vacation’s over. School is starting on Wednesday. I’ll be going around to the different departments tomorrow to check out the course offerings to make my schedule up and on Wednesday I’ll also be writing a placement test for DEFLE, the school I’ll be taking evening FSL (French as a Second Language) classes to improve my oral and written French. I’m a little nervous for all of this to start since I don’t know what to expect in terms of the school system. But, if I’ve learned anything in my 3 weeks here, it’s that I can adapt to whatever they throw at me. I’m ready! I think…

Anyway, below you’ll find some pictures of my trips and an extra one that has nothing to do with traveling, unless you count the fact that the parmesan cheese traveled with me all the way from Winnipeg (long story). It’s especially for Leanne and Alannah (and you’d thought I’d forgotten!).

The first three photos were all taken in San Sebastián while we were by the ocean. The next one is us walking up all those steps up the mountain, and then us on top of the mountain (Michelle is on the left and Carly is on the right in the picture of the 3 of us). Don’t the trees look like the Whomping Willow from Harry Potter? The next 3 were taken at the Guggenheim Museum—I thought the giant flower dog was kind of funny. After that, there’s my spaghetti dinner with the cheese, and after that all the pictures are from Paris. The grave is Oscar Wilde’s and there’s me eating my first Kebab (very popular Middle Eastern food here). Michelle has no arms because she’s pretending to be the Venus de Milo, and I’m pointing to the Mona Lisa, even though you can’t really tell. My expression is supposed to be saying “That’s what all the fuss is about?” In the next one, Carly is supporting the Eiffel Tower on the palms of her hands (I know, amazing feat!) and the last one is one of my favourite moments in Paris. We actually found a street called rue de Steinkerque!!! Imagine my surprise when I was looking on our map for the street where the Moulin Rouge is found, and I stumbled upon a street with my name in it! So, we tracked it down and took this picture. I was doing something kind of illegal in the picture, climbing on the gate to get closer to the sign, but shhh…. don’t tell the French police! (I don’t really think it’s that bad I guess, and we could always have played the foreigner card). Till next time!