Oh, Que C'est Beaune!

Hello hello! This has been a jam-packed weekend, or at least it feels that way!

On Saturday we went to Beaune on our first excursion! It was fun from the very start, when we got on our tour bus and each had a row to ourselves. We drove through the French countryside, which caused me and Emily to be in awe of the fact that we were actually in France like we'd planned for so long driving through the French countryside. We saw lots of vineyards, which are pretty in the way that vineyards are pretty. It was all much flatter than where they grow grapes at home.

First we stopped at the street market, which was lovely and charming, with so many colorful fruits and flowers for sale. Then we went to some wine caves for tastings! It was really cool to be in the caves. Each bottle to taste was lit by a candle, and it made the caves really pretty (although it didn't improve the flavor of wine at all). We had fun running around and taking lots of pictures, and we even got souvenir wine tasting cups, which are special metal cups that are very shallow.

We ate lunch at a fancy restaurant which was also in a cave. It was really fun, but the food was too gourmet/fancy/rich for me. Then we went to les Hospices de Beaune, the afternoon's main attraction. It was founded in the 1400s and was used all the way into the mid-20th century! The buildings were beautiful, as was the hospice itself. I tried to imagine what it would have been like to be a patient in one of those beds, looking up at the ceiling covered in beautiful art and tended to by the nuns (although hopefully nicer than the nun mannequins they had posed everywhere, which we comically creepy). After learning a little about how medieval surgeries were performed, however, I stopped trying to put myself in the shoes of a patient!

les hospices!

The day was really fun and made me excited for future excursions. Today I slept in and then I did homework! What a novel idea. The homework actually wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. The hardest part was understanding the instructions-- some of the exercises are really stupid-- but once I figured out what to do, I didn't have much trouble, which was reassuring! This evening, my host mom and I went to see The King's Speech (le Discours d'un Roi) with her friends Carmen and François. I had already seen it at home, but I was glad to see it again, and it was really interesting to read the French subtitles. I feel like I learned a few new words! Sometimes, though, there would be a joke that the French would miss, and then I had to not laugh because no one else was laughing. The best part was that most of our colloquial phrases such as "What on earth..." or "For goodness' sake" or anything along those lines, even ones that don't contain any religious reference, are translating using the words "God" or "devil"-- so at one point, the archbishop kept saying, "What the devil!"

The French are very attentive audience members. They are such an interesting mix between impersonal and friendly. I haven't been able to figure it out yet. They definitely fulfill their snobby, distant stereotype at times, but at other times I feel like they expect people to be so much more personable than Americans do. Before the movie started (there were no previews, by the way), a couple came back in the theater with an usher because they had dropped a cell phone. The usher made everyone in the row get up so that he and the couple could look for the phone, and it was like a show was going on. Everyone in the theater turned to watch, and they kept watching the entire time. The woman in front of me yelled out, "What do we win if we find it?" When they finally found it, the theater applauded.

I also had an interesting adventure on Friday. Before lunch, I set out to try to find some boots. I left my house undaunted by this task; we've been going to restaurants and stores for weeks and French salespeople are no longer intimidating. It was the first time I was going shopping alone, however, and I soon realized how much confidence I gain from being with other people who are making mistakes and acting foreign right along with me. I tried to go in a store and the door was locked, and then I passed up a pair of boots I really wanted at the street market because I didn't know how to ask to try them on. But that wasn't so bad compared to what happened when I went in the Galleries Lafayette. (For those who don't know, it's like a huge mall but it has lots of stalls instead of stores-- think the makeup section of Macy's except for clothes and shoes and everything else too. It's mostly designer stuff so it's pretty pricey, but I thought there might be a sale.) When I went in, I set the sensor beeping for some reason, but I didn't think anything of it since that just happens sometimes if a store has a funky sensor. I walked around for a minute, didn't find any boots, and went to leave. As I was passing the makeup, a man came up to me and said something very quickly that I didn't understand. I thought he was trying to sell me something, and he was dressed in regular clothes so he didn't even look like he worked there, so I said, "Je ne parles pas francais." (I don't speak French.) I never do stuff like that, but I didn't want to ask him what he had said and then have to deal with a sales pitch, and it just kind of popped into my brain. I walked away sort of laughing that I had done it and it had worked. I started to leave, and the beeper went off again. There were two women who had been standing there when I walked in, and one of them said, "It's you that's beeping," in French, and she told me I needed to search my bag to find out what it was. Obviously I knew there was nothing in there, but I kind of hovered for a moment because I didn't want to look like I was stealing something, since it is an expensive place and I figured security would be tight. I kept conversing with this woman for a minute, and then who walked up but the man who had spoken to me earlier. He was the security guard! He proceeded to look through my bag, but I couldn't really say much because I had said I didn't speak French! He then had a conversation with the woman, who told him that I had something that wasn't demagnetized and he should find it and fix it for me because otherwise I'd set off alarms in every store I went in. He replied to her that I was a foreigner and didn't understand what was going on. Of course, I understood every word! Finally I said, "Est-ce que je suis...?" and motioned towards the door and he told me I could go. It was a pretty funny experience!

After lunch, we had our first literature class, which was not literature analysis but was literature history, which was actually art history and was taught by a professor we couldn't understand. After about a half an hour, all three of us had decided that there was no way we would be going back to this class, so we checked out and I wrote a story in my notebook. Some of the girls came over after class and it was fun to talk and eat Nutella in my kitchen for a couple hours.

That was my weekend! Next weekend my host mom and I might go to Paris! The weekend after, I am hoping Amber will be able to visit, and the weekend after that we have an excursion to les chateaux de la Loire! I am enjoying myself more and more every day I'm here. But for now, it's back to school tomorrow. Hopefully this week of classes goes by more quickly than last week!