Chocolate Chip Cookies

One of the most popular American dishes known in Europe is the chocolate chip cookie and everyone loves it. The chocolate cookie in France is more hard and crunchy than the soft chewy American version. My friend Coco [who is German] really wanted to learn how to make them, so one Sunday we got all of our ingredients together and attempted to make them.

 Mixing butter and sugar... French butter is probably the best butter I've ever tried!!

 Mixing up the dough

 Adding in the chocolate.. we added dark chocolate, milk chocolate and M&M's

 Before putting in the oven

 After baking

Mmmm gooey goodness

Carcassonne

On our trip we stopped at this small village named Carcassonne, and in Carcassonne is a small medieval "city" called Cité de Carcassonne. La Cité is a medieval structure that  holds a smaller tourist area today, but it's history is over 2500 years old and has had a lot of people walk through its streets. The city has about 3 km of wall, and 52 towers throughout its perimeter. We hiked up to the city when we arrived in Carcassonne from the train station, and when we finally enter La Cité the view was very amazing. I didn't do it justice with the photos I took. Sorry there are so many people present in my photos in this post, it makes me feel like I'm posting in facebook.

Les Vacances

We had our week of vacation the week of Oct 26, so of course every one left Poitiers. I took the week off and traveled a little bit in the south of France, Barcelona and Paris. It was a great trip, and I will spread out the trip in various post.. which I promise will be consecutive.

Our first stop on our trip was in Toulouse. Toulouse was an amazing city with lots of musicians and hipsters, everything was pretty there.

 One of the buildings in Toulouse

 Coffee/tea break we took in a cute "American" style café

Tea timer! (3mins, 4mins, and 5mins)

 A nice door in Toulouse

 Some ruins

 mmm.. art work!

 Someone's house

 We left Toulouse Sunday afternoon, and these are some pics of us waiting for the tram.. they are suppose to be a little nostalgic because we didn't want to leave. 

After Toulouse three of us left for Carcossonne, and Coco left back home to Germany for the rest of the break. I really love the ease of traveling in France/Europe, travel like this would be impossible in the US without a car. 

Where does time go?

Sorry for not updating my blog in a while! I promise that I will write a new post soon!
I have been on vacation for a while because we had a week long break which turned into almost a week and a half because today (Tuesday, Nov 1) is a national holiday so they gave us Monday as a break also..

Here a pic for the mean time!

Le Vegetarian Cooking series

I have been cooking Thursday nights with two girls who are vegetarian and we are on a quest to learn to make French dishes! 

We bought pre-made dough. I couldn't believe that they just sell it like this in grocery stores. 

 The insides.. creme cheese, creme fraiche, some grated cheese, a million eggs, and spices. We cooked the broccoli separate.  

 This is Coco. 

The dough in the mold. What's even more cool about this dough is that it comes in parchment paper and you can just slip it in place. 

 All the ingredients.. mmm :)

 Me and my awkward smile about to slide the pan in the little oven.

 The finished product (no flash)

The finished product.. flash

The Gardens of Villandry

During the quick one day castle excursion, our second stop was Villandry. Villandry is also a castle from the renaissance with gorgeous gardens that are still kept today. By the time we got there, the castle was closing for tours, but we visited the gardens which were some of the most beautifully kept organic gardens that I have ever seen. What is even more cool about this place is that people go there to buy their groceries. My favorite part was the walkway that encircled the gardens which was lined with grape vines. I am in love with French/Italian grapes, I have never eaten a fruit this good, I wish I could save that taste and bring it back home for everyone to taste. 

The garden area was huge and it has various ornamental gardens, vegetable gardens, a large pond, play area, and some mazes. Enjoy the pictures! 

  A small collage of some of the vegetables and a spider that looked like a bee

 All the vegetable gardens were very nicely arranged. 

 A grass tennis court! 

One of the ornamental gardens with a view of the castle from behind. 

Castles

Last weekend Samantha's host family invited me to go to the Loire Valley with them. The Loire is known for its wine, food, and castles. There are literally hundreds of castles in this area. This was my first time inside a castle and the first one I walked through is the largest castle in France.

This is Château de Chambord, the biggest of them all in France. My pictures of the actual castle didn't turn out that great that I might just post the postcards I bought on here. 

The King's pointing stick and crown.  

 One of the cool doors. The whole castle was really cold, I think the rocks make very poor insulators. I tried not to walk around with an engineering eye.. 

 The queen's bed.. separate from the king's bed.

 A stove like thing, it was next to the queen's bedroom, which I guess was used to keep her food warm when they brought it in. 

 On the roof! This is a closer look at the architecture. 

 A heating stove, I am not sure how effective it was during the winter, but there are fireplaces everywhere. There is at least one fireplace in each room, two in each hall way, and some random ones also. 

The king's bedroom. All the bedrooms had cloth on the walls which were used as insulators.. 

Many people lived in this castle, I couldn't keep track of the history because it took a few years to build.. like hundreds... 

I want to apologize for my poor memory of facts. It also doesn't helped that much that everything I read/hear is in French, so I retain very little of it... and I'm not that interested in the history of the wealthy.. I'm sorry :'(

Journées du Patrimoine

Last weekend was an awesome little holiday weekend in France, and in all of Europe actually. They have a holiday called Journées du Patrimoine, in which all the historical monuments and government buildings are opened for the public. I thought it was pretty awesome because most people go out and visit places they have not been inside of, and learn a little bit more about their government. This event is of course free, with the exception of a few places that have a low entrance fee. Today more than just government buildings are opened, for example in the region of Vienne (where I live) the nuclear power plant was opened for visits also. On Saturday I visited some of the places in Poitiers with some Oregon students. Here are some pictures!

To start off the picture section.. BREAD! Mmm, I can not describe how good bread is in France, and the neat thing is that you have it at every meal. I love love love it.

 We visited the Baptistère that I mentioned in an earlier post since it was free that weekend. Here is a picture of the little "pool", I don't know what it is called, but this is where the holy water was. This building, the Baptistère Saint-Jean dates back to the V century! This is the oldest Christian building in France, and according to wikipedia.fr, the central part was built in the years 360's.

One of the images on the ceilings. It was was very difficult to take pictures because you are not allowed to use flash.

After visiting the Baptistère, we headed to the museum, but unfortunately they were closing for lunch in 15 minutes when we arrived. French take a really long lunch break and everyone respects it. For example, the museum was closed from noon to 2, so during this time we visited the cathedral and grabbed lunch. This picture, above, is the door to the cathedral. 

The images imprinted/carved on the rim of the arch. 

After having a long lunch ourselves, our last stop was at the Palais de Justice. This was a palace in which many royal people lived in. I didn't pay very close attention during the tour, so I don't remember much, and it's been really hard to keep up with the names of all these kings, dukes and their timelines. Today the building is used as a court, with the rooms used as offices, and different little hearing areas.

 This is a picture of one of the wives of Jean I, duke of Berry.. She was in her teens when she married.. 

Charles VI, king of France 

Jean, Duc de Berry

School

Today marks the last day of my second week in school, and though I am here to study, this is the topic I least look forward to writing about, hence the procrastination on the posts. But here it goes.

French school system is a lot different than the U.S. First of all, students pay very little to study in the universities, they only pay a small fee (I think around 300-500 euro) each semester to cover something, I don't know what. Otherwise the government pays for it all, even health insurance for students. Great right? Because the government pays for school, it costs them a lot of money each year to keep students in school (degrees are 3 years long), so I think teachers here are a lot more rough and fail students often because it's cheaper if students just fail out of school. I think they literally fail half of the class.. it's a rumor I have been hearing. There are no office hours, no talking to your professor after class, professors tend to skip classes for reasons that I don't know of, and you only have each class once a week. Lastly, students take about 20-30 credit hours each semester, and there is no homework, just finals and some midterms.

The university in Poitiers has.. um.. probably one of the ugliest campuses I have ever seen, even the citizen's think it is ugly. The university is located on the edge of town and most students commute to school every morning. Unlike college cities in the U.S, in France the university is not the center of town. Students spend minimal time here, and there is not much that actually happens besides classes and some clubs. Every morning I take a bus into the city center, and from there I take a bus to the university. For me, it takes in between 40-60 minutes to get to school, which is quite a drag. I am used to biking onto campus in five minutes (with my strong cyclist leg muscles).

I have been prolonging the arrival of photos, but I know you are all curious.. so here it goes..

 There is a (sorry to be so negative) ugly pyramid thing in the middle of this quad. Behind it is a library, and to the left is the law building.

This is the building in which I take like 90% of my classes, it's the liberal arts building. I am sorry the pictures are not that great, but I was not too motivated to take better pictures.

I thought this image was cute, the little cigarette bud waste (name?) overflows every day. A large percentage of people smoke here. I hope I don't start smoking also, but it would be such a great conversation starter: "Do you smoke?" "Yeaaa, you?" "Yes, sometimes I find myself smoking all the time." ... and instantly, a connection with a stranger...

Sorry for not keeping the blog up to date. Have a great day everyone, don't be shy to leave comments, I love reading them and it shows me that people are actually reading my blog! For those of you in Oregon: enjoy your last days of summer and have a great weekend!!