One more thing: the Icelandic sweater.  From the first time I read about it in Mallory's blog (yup, that's right Mallory, I'm still creeping on you even when I'm IN Iceland) I wanted to make one.  I found out in the National Museum that they are not that traditional as I had thought, but people started wearing them in the 1940s.  Whatever, new traditions.  So yeah, everyone actually wears them!  All the time.  After being all over europe and hearing little kids speaking all kinds of foreign languages you would think it would get old but this is actually the cutest thing ever: little kids running around talking to each other in Icelandic and wearing Icelandic sweaters. In Iceland.  So much cuteness and Icelandicness. 

Icelandic hipster in an Icelandic sweater in a hipster bar

Midnight Sun

So, the summer solstice is a month away, so there are technically only 19 hours of daylight (with sunset at 10:56pm and sunrise at 3:52am), but that does not mean it is actually dark during the "dark" hours.  It is never dark here!!  Even when the sun sets, it's so close to the horizon that it is still light.  It's crazy!!

Example: last night, I went into a concert around 11:30pm.  It was light out.  I came out around 3am.  It was light out!  The only time it gets reasonably dark at night is when it's cloudy.  It's kind of cool to see for a week but I could not imagine living with that, it really messes with your head.

Land of Fire and Ice

Current location: Reykjavik, Iceland


Though I haven't yet seen any fire or ice, I did learn in the National Museum yesterday that they are represented on Iceland's flag : when they were designing the national flag, it was originally going to be just a blue background with a white cross, to represent the glaciers, but they decided to add a red cross to represent the fire from the volcanoes! Cool!

Note: I will no longer be uploading photos to to my blog because blogger decided to install some new, "better" system that doesn't work! Thanks a lot!!

foooooooood.

Since I can't put my pictures on my computer to upload them to my blog, I'll just give you a little taste of Nice.  Today I went to Fenocchio, a famous ice cream place in Nice which is known for its weird ice cream flavors, like beer, tomato-basil, and various flowers.  I picked avocado and rosemary.  The rosemary didn't have too much flavor--it definitely tasted like rosemary but in a pretty mild way, and it was a little bit sweet.  The avocado, on the other hand, was heavenly.  It was also a bit sweet, but so creamy and delicious, with a really mild avocado flavor but a great texture.  I will try to make avocado ice cream this summer but there is no way it will be as good as this.  My sister and I tried an avocado chocolate in Bruges, just because it seemed weird, and it was also great.  I never would have guessed avocado would lend itself so well to sweet things, but I want to experiment with all kinds of avocado desserts now!

I also tried another niçois specialty the other day, socca.  It's basically a chickpea pancake--they use chick pea flour to make a great big flatbread that they fold up and cut into pieces and you eat it as a snack.  They don't put anything on it, and chick peas don't really have that much flavor, so it really only tastes like salt but it was a great snack.

It's my last night in Nice and for dinner I will be enjoying a delicacy of pasta with pesto and tomatoes--back on the poor diet since my parents left!  And tomorrow I'll be heading north to spend a few days with Ginger in Paris, which will be lovely and relaxing, before I head really really north to Reykjavik.

Whoops!

So I realized I haven't posted anything in a while.  I can't really post about Basque Country with my parents until I put my pictures on my hard drive, which could take a while since there isn't enough room in my hard drive for my photos... Also blogger changed its photo uploader so I probably wouldn't figure out how to do it anyway.

BUT, Basque country was really really lovely and I had the best time with my parents.  We stayed in Bayonne, the capital of French basque country and did day trips to Biarritz, St-Jean-de-Luz, some inland Basque villages, and San Sebastian, in spanish basque country.  The villages were beautiful and San Sebastian is an awesome beach town.  I found Biarritz to be kind of boring, it wasn't beach season but it still seemed like there was absolutely nothing to do there besides the beach.  San Sebastian, on the other hand, was beautiful and really fun and lively.  It was packed with people,  and there was an important soccer match that day so there were tons of people drinking and shouting in the streets.  Even though it's just across the border, it definitely felt not French.  I would love to spend a few days there in the summer, but it was still cool to see just for a few hours. We went to the Basque Museum on the first day in Bayonne to learn everything we know about Basque culture

On Sunday, we drove from Bayonne to Toulouse, spent a lovely last afternoon and evening in Toulouse seeing impressionist art, drinking wine, and enjoying our last meal of duck, then on Monday they headed to the airport and I headed to the train to come to Marseille to meet up with a friend.  I'm still there now and we're heading to Nice this evening.  I've been staying with a friend of Molly's in Marseille is really nice and fun and has been hanging out with us, showing us some stuff in the city, and introducing us to some of his friends.  I really love Marseille so far.  There are tons of immigrants, so it's really diverse and interesting, and it's also on the Mediterranean and is really beautiful too.  Unlike many other French cities, it's a little bit dirty and loud, which I love.  It reminds me a lot of Rome--not the cleanest city, but it has tons of history and character. 

I'll try to update where I am but I'm gonna be on the go until the end of May so I probably won't write very much.  sorry in advance!

Travel with parents, part 1

I finished teaching last Friday.  My parents arrived in Toulouse on Saturday!  After a great last night with my friends, I slept a whopping 4 hours then got a ride to Toulouse with Birgit and her boyfriend in his awesome Volkswagen camper van to meet my parents at the airport.  Spent Saturday night in Toulouse, showed my parents some of the sites in town and ate in a awesome restaurant.

Sunday, we got up and picked up our rental car then headed out of town to Albi.  It is beautiful.  Despite it being Easter sunday, the town was hopping and most things were open.  It is the birthplace of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec so of course we had to see the Toulouse-Lautrec museum and the city's really impressive cathedral.

Albi cathedral

We spent the next few days visiting some of the Cathar castles in the region around Carcassonne.  In order not to clutter up my blog with a poorly researched history of the Cathars, I'm just going to link the New York Times article that inspired the trip. (even if you don't read it, I suggest looking at the slide show because his photos are way better than mine) Anyway, to make a long story short, the Cathars were persecuted by the Catholics so they built fortified castles in really hard-to-reach places, i.e. on the tops of rock cliffs on the tops of mountains, so each visit requires a steep hike but offers awesome views across valleys and they look super impressive and mysterious especially in their crumbling state.

Chateaux de Lastours

Chateau de Quéribus

Chateau de Peyrepertuse

We did the hikes for some of the chateux and chose to photograph some from below.  There really isn't much once you get up there--they have mostly been left as they were after they were attacked, so they are pretty much just piles of rocks. They still look really cool!

Tuesday night we ended in the city of Foix and spent the night there, right under its castle.  These pictures were taken from the skylight of our hotel room!

We got to Tarbes yesterday to spend the afternoon and evening there.  I got to show my parents all the sights (LOL) and have a great dinner in a restaurant that I never could have taken myself to, and they got to meet some of my Tarbes friends.  This morning we went to Tarbes' awesome farmers' market to get some local wine, cheese, and produce, and then we headed out of town.  We're now in Bayonne, the capital of French Basque country and will spend the next 3 days seeing all the good seaside towns including Biarritz and some great little villages.  As I say about every place I've ever been in France, this one is the best!!!

Reflections

My time as a teaching assistant has officially come to an end.  I still have lots of exciting travels planned before coming home, but I wanted to take a few minutes to reflect on my year teaching.  In January, I made my first ever New Year's resolutions, which were basically goals for the second half on my time here.  They hung next to my bed for four months, reminding me of what I wanted to accomplish.  Some of them, like cleaning my room every two weeks, were just way too optimistic, but I would say I accomplished all the important things I wanted to. 

The most important resolutions had to do with learning French: make more French friends, and read more in French.  I definitely made more French friends and although I still haven't done that much reading, more than half of it was in French.  I don't know at what point, but sometime along the way I decided I could start saying I'm fluent in French, which I definitely wouldn't have before.  I hung out with a lot more french people and I feel really comfortable speaking French now.

I also resolved to give better lessons and like my students more.  I don't know if my lessons were better, but they were definitely more fun after the Christmas break, both for me and for the students I think.  And I did really start to like some of my students.  Obviously, you can't win them all--there were some classes that were just as poorly behaved and disinterested in my lessons, but most of my classes were made up of really nice and fun students.  For the second half of the year, I mostly just played games with them as opposed to trying to teach them stuff, which turned out to be a fun way to get them to speak and hopefully once they realized they were having fun in English class, they would be more interested in the actual lessons.  All in all, the second half was way better than the first, and I was pleasantly surprised by some groups of students that turned out to be both interested and interesting.

Unrelated: I forgot to write about this when it happened, but a couple of weeks ago my school had its "Carnival".  Most schools in France do this, and since real Carnival (Mardi Gras) is during the winter break they do it a week or two after the break.  This was the Wednesday after I came back from London and it's basically just like Halloween--the students all dress up in costumes and classes are cancelled between 11 and noon so they can have a costume competition.  I was really impressed by some of their costumes- they were really creative and got really into it.  Here's a photo of me with some of my favorite students in awesome costumes: