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!!

Bayonne

Before heading back to Poitiers, we spent our day in Bayonne, which is a city north of Biarritz. We took the bus and ended up in the centre ville in less than 15 minutes. Bayonne is a lot smaller, and has more of a French feel to it. Here are a few pictures that I'd like to share; my camera's battery died early in the day so I didn't take many.

That morning I oogled over a surf instructor... and I took a picture from far away.. I don't know if this is legal!

A castle/restaurant in the middle of Bayonne. I think it may be a hotel also.. but I am not very sure.

Please ignore the bright sun in the corner of this picture.. this was the only semi good picture I took of the cathedral. 

Inside the cathedral's courtyard.... a little bit empty, but it's still has a nice courtyard with nice grass. 

The walkway surrounding the courtyard. 

A little peek into one of the streets. This street has Spanish banners draping from building to building. 

After exploring and eating ice cream, we headed towards the train station to wait for our train and parted home. It was nice to feel that "going home" feel, I thought I wasn't going to have it because it's not really home for me. It made me feel like I had began to adapt to the French way of life.

Biarritz Day 2

The next day in Biarritz was a lot of "playing tourists" and we weren't ashamed of doing it. We stayed in a youth hostel which was about 300m from the beach (I think). I've been eating a lot of bread in France, but I don't feel too guilty because it actually is kinda healthy.

Wednesday morning on the beach there was a couple taking wedding pictures. They were a bit ridiculous, and cheesy. Towards the end of their shot they both were in the water, the groom on his surf board and the bride was pretending to care about his hobby. This is one of the many couples that I have seen where the lady was taller than the man. I think that is pretty common here though.

Here is a little collage of the buildings in Biarritz. The architecture from building to building is very diverse. You can see that there is a lot of Spanish influence on the buildings, but we also saw German influence and American (in the casino). 

There were so many pastry shops in the city that we couldn't resist stopping every hour to buy something. This little dessert is a lemon meringue treat. 

 That day we visited some churches and cathedrals, I didn't take many photos of them. They are all very dark and have dramatic architecture. In one of the cathedrals, I was snooping around and I peaked into one of the confession booths, and out of nowhere, someone's head popped out and it freaked me out. In another church, one of the doors randomly opened right in front of me. I know many will think that these encounters are signs that I should go to church...  On the bright side, here are some bright pictures of the ocean. The water was warm, and would be considered very warm by those of you who are from Oregon.

To end this wonderful post, I'll leave you with a delicious picture of a crêpe that I ate.. peaches, raspberries, currants, a slice of kiwi, whipped cream, and a scoop of vanilla ice cream... mmmm :)

Some pre-school traveling

As it turns out, apparently, we didn't have classes this week. The only students who did start this week were the law and science students, but I am not taking either of those materials so I didn't have to go to school. Instead of lounging around in Poitiers, because it has already started becoming a little boring, two other girls and I went to a beach city called Biarritz in the the south west of France. The place was amazing, and great for surfing. This was probably the nicest beach I have been to, and it was by far the most "chic" beach I've ever seen.

 On the way we stopped in a city called Bordeaux and we explored for a while. The picture above is a door with mail in the mail slots. I thought it was pretty cute.

The Bordeaux city sign.. inside of the train station. 

We were all excited when we got there and were taking pictures of everything. This is the main beach where a lot of people swim, surf, and boggie board.

 This is one of the streets at night.

 These are Emily and Madeliene, the girls I was traveling with. We ate a lot of ice cream on our trip.

A tunnel that we walked through. There were a lot of trails built for walking along the beach side.

Exploring Poitiers

On Friday we had a "cultural excursion" in Poitiers, which was really nice since I hadn't really explored the city. The levels 3-5 students all participated and we had a two hour lunch that day. I had lunch in Poitiers, a sandwich and a chocolate croissant... and bottled water.. I've been buying bottled water because everyone here does it, not even the citizens drink out of the tap. I was drinking from the tap the first week I was here but then I stopped because I got a little scared that no one else did it. I should look into the water though, because plastic bottles are no good.

The class met in front of the Baptistère Saint-Jean, which is an old baptistery from the V century. In the old days a person could not enter a church if he/she was not baptized, so to get around this rule, the church performed baptisms in other buildings. This is the Baptistère Saint-Jean which was built to baptize people. I did not go in because you had to pay 2€ to go in, but there is basically only a shallow pool type thing in the middle (empty) and some posters to read. The architecture is pretty cool though, on the outside that is. 

I didn't take many photos of all the buildings that I went into, I keep forgetting to bring out my camera until the end, I'm just not that used to it. We basically did a scavenger hunt with all the students. The teachers made groups of three with people from each level. I was in a group with a girl from Switzerland and a boy from Spain. The guy is a history major which made the excursion really awesome because he knew the history behind all the buildings and would tell us about them. I really enjoyed working with my group, we were a very good team (and we also spoke French most of the time, all the exchange students speak English and use it to communicate with each other).
This was the first time that I had ever enter a building that were hundreds of years old. I went inside a church which houses the tomb of some saint (I forgot the name), and walking inside gave me the chills because I realized that these buildings are old.. very old. It was very weird.. and I also feel that catholic churches are actually very creepy. They have this very eerie feel to them. 


When the excursion was finally over, I walked around town with Clara and Madeline, and I finally brought out my camera. It is really hard to take pictures because of the buildings blocking most of the sunlight on the streets. But I did manage to get a semi good one of Madeline. 

And this final picture that I will share is one of me (with another bottled water) in front of the Cathédrale Saint-Pierre. 

The buildings are a little hard to photograph with my little camera, but I'm trying and learning as I go.


Actually, I'll leave you all with this picture: Un Chat Français (sleeping on a government building)