Hello all. I’m singing a familiar old song. Meant to post this last night (Sunday, December 2), but I’m learning that the free Internet at my « foyer » often decides to be a very devout Christian that doesn’t work on Sundays. So I had to wait until Monday to see if it would be available. By the way, this was especially traumatic because I wasn’t able to learn the final outcome of the SEC Championship game upon waking up on Sunday morning. I had watched the first half live at a Canadian bar with a fellow Bulldog (shout-out to Isha!) and as well as some Alabama fans (the rest of the bar was watching a soccer match that meant nothing to us), but due to the lateness of the hour, my fellow Bulldog fan and I left at halftime (just before midnight). I wanted to make it home (about 40 minutes away) at a decent time, and I knew that if I stayed for any of the second half, I would want to stay for all of it. So when I went to bed around 1 due to fatigue, there were about 13 minutes left in the half according to espn.com and the score was 25-21 with Alabama ahead. Thankfully, my Dad gave me the play-by-play over the phone on Sunday afternoon (for him)/evening (for me) to answer this burning question I’d had for several hours without Internet. I’m still proud of my boys, and I was glad to be the only person wearing a Georgia Bulldogs shirt in the bar and talking to my boys in red and black on the TV screen in the heart of Paris, France where most people have no idea what the letters SEC mean. Then again, some of you who are reading this probably don’t know (or care) what they stand for either… ;)
I’ve got one more of these Bordeaux posts up my sleeve before I create something of a November montage that covers my top memories from the rest of the month, Lord willing. Every time the weather changes (as in, the temperature drops more and more), I seem to catch a cold, so I’ve been doing a whole lot of sleeping lately. I apologize if you’ve been waiting expectantly for posts. I hope that you enjoy this photo-filled post and that you will pay close attention to the words that are contained in it as well, because I can guarantee you that many of them are not my own. Just read on to see what I mean.
Peace and love, Morgann :)
Thursday, November 8 – Not the captain of my own ship + Physics + Mirror lake + « Gosiers » + #6 + Vocabulary acquisition project + Stone Bridge + White and red + Happily ever after
Written on Thursday, November 29 & Saturday, December 1 & Sunday, December 2, 2012
Watching a morning news talk show on Canal + (one of the major television networks here) reminded me of some of the antics I’d seen on one of these sorts of presentations in Guatemala. “¡Levanta-te!” was the name of that show, I think. (Wow, haven’t used Spanish spell-check in forever. Hope I actually got it right!) I don’t know what this French one was called, but both shows were a little sillier than “Good Morning, America” or…whatever all those other American morning shows are called that I’m currently blanking on. Of course, I couldn’t understand all of the words on the French- and Spanish-language shows, so I had to rely on body language a little more heavily than I do when I’m watching English-language TV. So there could be bias there. But…I still think they were a little on the ridiculous side at times.
And speaking of ridiculous, I am fully aware of the fact that I probably sound ridiculous as I make this comparison between a TV show that I’m watching at age 22 in France and one that I saw at age 20 on a fully-funded trip to improve my Spanish in Guatemala – thanks UGA Foundation Fellowship! – when there are many people two or three times my age who haven’t been to half as many countries – 12, as summarized below – as I have. All I can say to that is that God is “…able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us” (Ephesians 3:20). Many of you know that I wasn’t always headed down the path to accepting a scholarship at UGA, for example, which is how I ended up taking academic trips to:
- New York City + Washington, D.C. (group spring break trip, business + politics, 2009)
- Oxford, England (country #4, chronologically speaking, on my list of 12) (group Maymester, modernist literature, 2009) [+Ireland (5) and Greece (6) on vacation]
- Berlin, Germany (7) (group spring break trip, Holocaust + art, 2010)
- New Haven, Connecticut (individual conference attendance, public health, 2010)
- Abomey, Bénin (8) (individual summer trip, French language immersion/homestay/hospital volunteer experience, 2010)
- Xela or Quetzaltenago, Guatemala (9) (individual summer trip, Spanish language courses/homestay experience, 2010)
- Agra+Udaipur+Delhi, India (10) (group spring break trip, history + architecture, 2011)
- Montréal, Canada (11) (individual summer trip, French language courses/homestay experience, 2011)
- Washington, D.C. [again] (summer internship as part of Honors Program cohort, Office of Congressman David Scott [GA – 13], 2011)
- Brooklyn Center, Minnesota (individual conference attendance, foreign language education, 2011) [notice a difference between the New Haven conference topic and this one?]
- Macon, Georgia [least complicated journey from point of origin to final destination…] (individual conference attendance, school counseling, 2011)
- and Marrakesh, Morocco (12) [+middle-of-nowhere-Sahara-Desert] (group spring break trip, Islam + Arabic, 2012).
- Prior to enrolling at Georgia, I’d traveled to the Bahamas (1) twice (family vacations); Tijuana, Mexico (2) for a day(during a family trip to San Diego) [and, yes, I actually remember this “trip” because I begged my Dad to buy a flute from this very poor woman in a crowded marketplace]; and to Paris, France (3) for a month through a study abroad program for high school students called International Seminar Series –Service Learning in Paris (2006). This was a wonderful program, by the way, and I’m pretty sure it exists in Spain as well if there are interested younger parties!
So why am I telling you all of this? To brag or boast about this long list of travels? Well, remember how I started this…digression from my story about my day in Bordeaux, France: by telling you that I recognize that I am not the captain of my own ship. I don’t know what your Bible says, but mine says that…lemme stop preaching. The Bible says: “Let him who boasts boast in the Lord.” It’s in I (First) Corinthians 1:31, but the footnote indicates that Paul is referencing Jeremiah 9:24, which states (beginning in verse 23): “This is what the Lord says: ‘Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom or the strong man boast of his strength or the rich man boast of his riches, but let him who boasts boast about this: that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord, who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on earth, for in these I delight,’ declares the Lord.” So the only “bragging” I do will of necessity involve sharing what my God has done for me. Giving my testimony, to use churchy language.
To summarize my choice during my senior year of high school to attend UGA rather than my “dream school” at the time, for example, I’ll give you three more Scriptures before returning to my Bordeaux narrative. (And by the way, while I know the core of a lot of these Scriptures, I’m definitely using a concordance to help me locate the ones I need when I need them.) Jeremiah 29:11 gives us God’s perspective on the trajectory of our lives: “‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’” I knew this verse very well as a high school senior, but I also knew the plans that I had for myself. The deal was that I needed to get on the same page as the Lord, because He truly knew – and still does know – what was/is best for me. In fact, I Corinthians 2:9 tells us that “‘No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him” (Old Testament reference – Isaiah 64:4). So, even though this is hard for me to imagine or accept, being the control-freak that I am by nature, God’s plans are even better than mine…by a lot (see Isaiah 55:8-9)! Thus, I had to take a faith-leap by forsaking the post-graduation path that I had originally planned to take and venturing in a new direction that didn’t make as much “sense” to me (see I Corinthians 1:18-25). But I could – and can – take comfort in the promise of Psalm 37:4: “Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart.” And let me tell ya, I got all that my heart desired and more out of my college experience! But I couldn’t see that from the get-go; I just had to trust God. And, to quote the movie The Preacher’s Wife just as the Whitney Houston song “Step by Step” from the soundtrack comes up on my playlist, “That’s what we call faith.”
Now, to be clear, just because I’m a believer in Christ doesn’t mean that everything in my life just goes swimmingly at all times. I’ve told you in this forum, for example, about my migraines and about my (relatively mild) financial woes as a young person just entering the workforce after college…in one of the most expensive cities in the world, with one of the lowest-paying jobs. But because of my faith, I have a different perspective on life and the troubles that it may (and will!) bring than non-believers might have. To use the familiar expression, I “don’t sweat the small stuff” (or, at least, I try not to) because in the grand scheme of things, I was created to praise God and to help draw others into His kingdom. That’s my ultimate purpose. Because this life that we’re living right now…this ain’t it! So my life is guided more by an eternal outlook than one centered on the day-to-day happenings of November or December of 2012. And even when I look at all of the little things that seem to “go wrong” in my life, when I think about the many millions – or even billions – of people who are living under circumstances that are much more dire than my own, I realize that I have nothing about which I can (or, rather, should…I’m not perfect!) complain or get upset.
Not even…the awkward moment when I broke a pitcher of orange juice at the hotel breakfast buffet on the morning of my first full day of vacation in Bordeaux. I still don’t quite know how this happened. I literally lifted the pitcher off of the table and then, within a split second, I heard a loud crash, felt something fall on the edge of my boot, and saw shards of glass and orange juice everywhere. The only theory I can come up with is that I lifted the pitcher off of the table too quickly such that the liquid within it rose, hit the lid, and fell very fast, hitting the bottom of the pitcher with great force, thus causing the pitcher itself to accelerate downward, out of my hand, if that makes any sense to my physics-minded folks. Or you could just say that I dropped it, but I’ll deny that before any and every court of law. Regardless of how it happened, there I stood, absolutely speechless since I didn’t know what to say in French in such a situation other than saying that I was sorry and that I didn’t know how it had happened. I was so dazed and confused at the moment that I hadn’t even noticed that I had OJ on my jeans, so the hotel staff, being the kind souls that they were, actually suggested that I go clean myself up. They didn’t charge me for it or anything. The only rude party involved in the event was a British hotel guest who came in later to join his colleague (I had been the only guest eating at the time of the spill because I’d gotten up pretty early) who said very loudly to his colleague upon entering, “I see you’ve already torn the place down” or something like that when he saw the newspaper on the floor covering the spill. I guess he thought no one else could understand English in the room.
Speaking of English, the 2-hour walking tour of the city in which I participated that morning after taking the tram from my hotel to the Office of Tourism was given by a bilingual guide. She gave us a very thorough history of the city including explanations of the principles and ideals of the Girondins (what the people of Bordeaux were called in the past, which is what their soccer team is now called) as represented in a grand fountain; identifications of some of the past leaders (all mayors, I think) of the city – Montaigne, Montesquieu, …someone else? – whose names I’d definitely heard in French classes before; descriptions of where ancient castles used to stand, which defined the current city layout; distinctions between architectural styles of the buildings; and, my favorite part, a photo op in front of the famous mirror lake where one of the downtown business districts is reflected in a pool of water across the street just alongside the muddy-brown Garonne River that runs through the city. The pool of water appears and disappears at random, which means that the spectacular reflection magically appears before your eyes if you are standing there in an empty cobblestone plaza, not expecting anything like that to happen. (I guess this also means that you could end up with wet feet/ankles if you really didn’t know that this was an area where a pool of water was going to spring up at any given moment.) Apparently this area was modeled after Versailles (famous palace, most commonly associated with Louis XIV and Marie Antoinette, that still stands to the west of Paris) because you have sections of water, plants, and trees side-by-side in a garden. I was glad to have someone else in the tour group take my “proof” photo in this spot.
That’s the one bad part about traveling alone – not being able to take good photos that show you in the places that you visit. But, as you probably noticed in the list I made above, I’ve done my fair share of “ridin’ solo” in the past (although I didn’t normally “[put] on shades to cover up my eyes,” like Jason Derulo in the hit song of the same name). There are definitely advantages to this sort of configuration because you get to know yourself really well and become very self-confident. [Note that the latter is only an advantage if you avoid becoming overly self-sufficient, meaning that you lose your sensitivity to your need to belong to a (or many) community (communities), which I’ve struggled with, for example.] Also, speaking somewhat jokingly, you don’t have to come to a group consensus for anything, which saves a lot of time and effort! After I finished my walking tour in the freezing cold, I felt like eating some lunch (I should’ve mentioned that the breakfast buffet was very light. After all, I was still in France!), so I just wandered back to a street that we’d been down on our tour and chose a restaurant that advertised its menu as being typical of the region. Of course, this could have been just a tourist trap, but it worked for me! I had a salad topped with something called « gosiers » for my « entrée » (which means first course, or appetizer perhaps, not what we refer to as an entrée or main dish) and « canard » for my « plat » (main dish/course, or what we call an “entrée” ; I guess the complete phrase is « plat principal »). I knew that « canard » was duck when I saw it on the menu, but I wasn’t sure about « gosiers ». The waitress didn’t know the exact word in English, but she said it wasn’t a vegetable and started pointing to the region around her stomach. I asked if it was a body part, and she said yes. So I just decided to take a risk. (Oh, and the only definition I’ve found for the word « gosier » so far is “throat,” so I still have no idea what exactly I ate.) Both dishes ended up tasting really good! And I hope that they really were authentic, regionally-speaking.
Oh yeah, I think I forgot to situate you geographically when I first talked about going to Bordeaux. Just to put this in perspective, it took me about 3 hours on a high-speed train (TGV = « train à grande vitesse ») to get to this city in southwest France from Paris, which is waaaaay up in the north-central part of the country. It wasn’t a direct train ride, but we only stopped about 3 times, I think, so it was still a lot of distance to cover. And in terms of why I chose this city, one of my goals while I’m here is to see the rest of the country of France outside of the city of Paris. As I told you above, I visited Paris for one month in 2006 as a high school student and fell in love with the city, which I pretty much mistook for the entire country of France. It would be kind of like someone visiting New York City and thinking that they’d seen “America.” Don’t get me wrong – I love being in Paris and requested to be placed here (or in the suburbs, really) as an English teaching assistant because I enjoy working with students of color and/or low-income students. But I would like to see as many of the other major cities of France during my stay so that I don’t get distracted by the Eiffel Tower and forget about the diversity of the country as a whole.
So I looked up the top 5 regions in France by population after Paris (#2-6)…actually I made a list of all of the regions of France, of which there are 22 in “Metropolitan France” (the hexagonally-shaped part that lies within continental Europe that you and I usually think of when we say “France” + the island of Corsica…is that what we call it in English?) and 5 in “Overseas France” (Guadeloupe, Guyane, Martinique, Réunion, and, as of 2010, I think, Mayotte) with their capital cities and population rankings so that I could refresh my memory on the political divisions of this country that I currently live in. [This would be the equivalent of a new resident of the United States making a list of all 50 states plus D.C. and Puerto Rico (and maybe Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands etc., but I’m not sure that these places have a status equal to that of the overseas departments of France) and comparing their statistics.] So after doing that, I chose regions #2-6 (after Île-de-France, which is the most-populated region in which I live and work) as the places that I would most like to visit. I thought that it would make sense to visit their capital cities. So Bordeaux is the capital of the region of Aquitaine, which is ranked #6 in terms of population according to the Wikipedia article I consulted, which I think uses 2008 population figures. I don’t know exactly why I started at the bottom of the list with #6, but hopefully I’ll work my way up to the top and see Nantes in Pays de la Loire (#5); Lille in Nord-Pas-de-Calais (#4); Marseille in Provence-Alpes-Côte-d’Azur (#3); and Lyon in Rhône-Alpes (#2) before the end of my time here, Lord wiling. I’ll just have to be very smart with my money if I’d like to take overnight trips to all of these places. And I’ll definitely have to pray for a miracle in terms of being financially stable upon returning home. Because at this rate, I’m doing alright from paycheck-to-paycheck over here, but it’s looking like “Hello, Mom and Dad’s basement” until graduate school begins either in the summer or the fall :)
So that’s why some of my activities in Bordeaux were free of charge, such as visiting the Musée d’Aquitaine (I just told you that the name of the region – think “state” in the U.S. – in which the city of Bordeaux is located is Aquitaine, so this is the museum of the region), which was touted as a must-see site in the city by the tour guide, the free magazine I picked up at the Office of Tourism, and the Wikitravel page I’d consulted in advance. It definitely wasn’t very technologically-advanced as far as museums go, but that was probably because it had free entry, unlike the WWII museum I’d visited in Caen about two weeks before, which had charged admission (that the American Church in Paris had generously covered for us since those of us who had ventured out to this neighboring city during our retreat in Houlgate were poor young adults) and had included lots of video/sound clips, interactive modules, and very professionally-presented material for learning about the war in three different languages. This museum, on the other hand, looked very worn-out and dreary, and everything was in French only. Still, I wanted to take full advantage of the opportunity to learn about the history of a region that was so far away from Paris and to practice reading French. In fact, in the first room that covered the pre-historic (think “cavemen”) era, I encountered several unfamiliar words on the descriptive panels (names of tools etc.) and took out my notebook to write them down. From there, my journey through history in the museum became a quest to find new words or interesting/unfamiliar phrases that caught my eye within quotations from historians, for example. As you can imagine, this vocabulary acquisition project became tiring after a while, but I was still proud to have found a way to make this museum visit worth my time. After all, I’m in France to improve my French, right? I decided that I would try to come back to the museum the following day (I was spending one more night in Bordeaux with an early evening train departure on Friday) to finish up some of the exhibits that I hadn’t yet seen since I stopped at the section that covered the introduction of Christianity in the region.
Since I’d been cooped up inside for a while, I walked around town a bit to get some fresh air and to get a feel for the vibe of the city. I didn’t have anything on my “schedule” until that evening when I had a ticket to a play (in French, of course). A couple of my favorite “sights” – as in, things that I literally saw – were the pedestrian-only St. Catherine Street with all of its brightly-lit storefronts and restaurants as well as the Pont de Pierre [Stone/Rock Bridge…or, possibly, Peter’s Bridge for all of my Bible/linguistic scholars who see how this could be translated differently; upon Simon/Peter’s confession of Jesus as the Christ/Messiah, “Jesus replied, ‘Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven. And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it” (Matthew 16:17-18).] This bridge that traverses the Garonne River (I just taught the student I’m tutoring in English that the verb « traverser » in French means “to cross” in the context of borders between countries as we discussed immigration in America on 12/1) was simply magnificent to me, especially when there was a tram going over it from one side of the city to the other. A lot of people were jogging or biking across it as well. It was a pretty good little trot, too! I had walked across it on Wednesday evening to get to the circus on the other side (why does this sound like the “chicken crossing the road” joke?), and I made the trek back-and-forth again on Thursday for some photos as it was starting to get dark.
Oh, I guess I forgot one important part of my afternoon that relates to the culture of Bordeaux. Some of you probably thought about wine right away when you saw the name of this city, as did my father. While I didn’t have the money or time (or, honestly, the desire) to go on a wine tour at a castle outside of the city, I did purchase an add-on wine tasting with my walking tour ticket that allowed me to sample a white and a red wine at the city’s wine bar, which turned out to be something like a bartending school, but only for students of wine, it seemed, as opposed to all types of alcohol. So I went there between lunch and the museum. One of the students explained to me in great depth the context of the two wines I was going to sample from the region. I nodded and smiled as politely as possible, even though I already don’t possess a very strong appreciation for wine culture plus he had given all of the information in French, of course. I took my seat in the room with the other tourists, I presume, and “appreciated” the regional varieties while skimming the free magazine from the Office of Tourism that I had just picked up that morning to make sure that I knew exactly what I wanted to see during my time in the city. I definitely preferred the white wine to the red one, but I probably could’ve told you that without sampling them. (And I apologize to any of my Baptist brothers and sisters who have committed to abstinence from alcohol and who feel disappointed upon reading this. While I have been raised in the Baptist tradition, I have not taken such a vow. On the other hand, I can guarantee you that I don’t abuse alcohol. Mainly because…it costs money. And I don’t like it enough to spend my precious dollars/euros on it.)
In terms of things I do like to spend money on, I love buying crêpes for dessert, especially when I’ve had a light dinner, as was the case on this day, when I’d eaten a fast-food type of dinner after having such a high-quality lunch. It was interesting that the television in the restaurant where I stood while waiting for the guy to make the crêpe (which required him to run next door to buy some bananas, I think…I got a discount for having to wait for this) was showing the snowstorm in New York City, which occurred just in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. With the exception of hearing about the election in the days leading up to November 6th, I don’t often encounter news from “home” unless I actively seek it out on my own. I ate my dessert while walking around the corner to the theater where I saw a production of Impair et Père [This is a big play on words in French, so you don’t get the full sense in a direct English translation. I already knew that « impair » meant “odd” as in “non-even numbers,” which is already funny because the word for even (« pair ») rhymes with the word for “father” used in the title: « père ». On top of that, I learned that « impair » can also be a noun that means “a blunder” or, as we borrow the French phrase in English, “a faux pas.” So, I don’t know, maybe it would have to be something like Bad Move Dad to keep the rhyme and the meaning? That’s all I can come up with at the moment. ]
The play was a comedy about a top-notch medical doctor who is preparing to deliver a speech in an hour or so to help the hospital gain more funding when a woman enters the doctors’ lounge and presents herself as an old girlfriend who announces to him for the first time that he’s the father of an 18-year-old boy. Apparently she has told their son about his father’s identity (career, place of work, but not his name) as a sort of 18th birthday present, and now he’s at the hospital, tearing the place apart demanding to meet him. So a lot of chaos ensues, especially because the doctor’s wife comes to the lounge and wants to know who this woman is, so they invent some elaborate story, which is different from the lie that they’ve told to another doctor who was in the lounge earlier, which leads to a lot of confusion when this doctor and the wife are in the room at the same time later. It was a funny play, and I felt like I could understand the French very well (part of the reason I’d chosen a comedy), but it kind of dragged on a little too long. There were lots of plot complications that I thought were a bit unnecessary. After a while, I just wanted resolution.
Which may be how you’re feeling with regards to this blog entry. So perhaps I’ll end it here and tell you about my last day in Bordeaux in one final entry. That way I won’t overwhelm this one post with so many photos anyway. But overall this Thursday was really great, and I felt like I got out and about a good bit. Oh, and in case you’re wondering about how the play ended, the main character ended up telling the son that another doctor (who was perpetually/unhappily single and happened to have a crush on the ex-girlfriend, who had previously been a nurse at the hospital when both of these doctors had been residents, I think) was his father. So the boy had a father, the other doctor had a family, and the girlfriend had a solution to the crisis that she’d created in telling her son that his father wasn’t actually dead, according to the lie she’d told for the past 18 years. Whew! Not exactly a Disney plotline, perhaps, but we were led to believe that they all lived happily ever after ;)
P.S. If you have questions about any of these photos, feel free to leave a comment on the post and refer to the paragraph above or below which the photo is located. I'm sorry that I don't have time to add captions to them all; it takes long enough just to sort through the hundreds of photos that I have and upload a few of them! But it's worth it to share them with you ;)
No comments:
Post a Comment