Catching Up

Apologies again for the lack of an update, but things have really slowed down this last two weeks and there hasn't really been anything exciting to write about! Let's see. Last week and this week are really just about trucking out. The only really big things right now are the upcoming papers that are due and the greves. If you've heard ANYTHING about France in the news, its about the strikes that are happening all over the country. Yesterday was the biggest day to date. Alison and I decided to go to the RU for lunch. When we got to Commerce, the center of town, we ran into what appeared to be a giant parade. It was all of the grevists, marching, singing, chanting, waving flags over a dozen city blocks, at least. I could hardly believe how many people there were, and we're only the 6th largest city in the country. I wish I could have seen some of them in Paris. Today things have died down a bit, the buses and trams are working again. The big problem now is still the trains. Service is inconsistent at best, and even those trains that do work are sometimes blockaded. I'm really worried about whether our train will get to Caen this weekend. This trip is the thing I have been looking forward to the most all semester, and if the trains don't work I will WALK to Normandy. To be a history major studying in France and to not see the D-Day sites would be near sacrilegious. I've also done a lot of math, and instead of going to Madrid I am now trying to get to either Brussels or Strasbourg. It would either be the weekend after this one or the following, because after that there's only one weekend left and then I am coming home! The trick is, before I get there I've got to get through next week, which is going to be a killer, then finals. Next Tuesday my Palestine paper is due, 2-3 pages on the effects of the Six-Day War on the Palestinians. Then Wednesday is my second grammar final, and I NEED to rock it. Thursday is when the evil killer Atlantic World paper is due....6-8 pages on "The French Presence in South America: Origins, Forms, and Destinies". The following Tuesday is my EU paper, 4-6 pages on Aristide Briand. These wouldn't be so bad...except they're all in French, and I still suck at writing French. Ugh!!
The bright spots on the horizon are tomorrow and this weekend. Tomorrow is our big "Thanksgiving" dinner through IES. All of the host families and their students are invited, I'm really excited to see how it will turn out. We're all getting dressed up, a couple of girls are singing, someone is going to play the guitar and Derek is doing something on the piano. I think it will be nice, at least until I have to get back to my papers! Speaking of which....


http://movies.aol.com/movie/the-other-boleyn-girl/26713/main

40 Days

Today its exactly forty days until I come home. I am enjoying my time here, I am, but I am ready to be back in Iowa, back at Wartburg. I have made some wonderful friends, I have an amazing host family that I hope I will stay in touch with, but I don't feel the same pull here that I do at home. This, for me, is not home. I had a really interesting conversation with Caitlin and Christine last night while we got gelato. They're both kind of feeling the same way. You always hear about the people who go abroad and whose lives are changed by the things they experience while they're gone. As of right now, I don't really feel like I've changed that much. Not that I've stayed stagnant, I feel more independant and more confident, but I just don't click here the way I hoped I would. I feel like there are so many things waiting for me at home that I've just put on hold for the semester to do....well I'm not sure what. I had goals that I laid out at the beginning of the semester, and I've achieved almost all of them already, but I still don't feel like I've gotten that magic sparkly feeling you hear about. Maybe it doesn't happen to everyone, I don't know. I just know that I want to go back where I can work with French Club and Alliance and Wartburg Democrats. I want to be back in band, and I want to give Deena hugs when I visit her in the Den and I want to use the "W". I want to impress Dr. Hagan with the fact that I can actually carry on conversations in French, comfortably. And most of all I want to get away from these feeling of being suspended in time while everything else passes me by. I have never been somewhere and had it not feel like home, and here just feels like an interesting place to be. Every time I step onto Wartburg's campus...the first time I was there or every time since, I've known that it was the place for me. Ankeny is where I was raised, it is where my family is, it is where my roots are. But here....here it's just kind of a holding tank, while I'm waiting to go back. It's a beautiful holding tank, but I just don't feel like this is where I am supposed to be, and it makes me wonder what I've missed, and where I WAS supposed to be at.

So maybe I'm not going to Madrid....

So last night at 6:18 I hopped on my train, which was completely packed with U of Nantes students going home for the weekend. We went one stop, and stayed at the station for what ended up being about two hours. After about 40 minutes, a conductor came through and said that there was a train going to Angers that people could hop on, and almost all of the students got off. I didn't catch his explanation, so after he'd walked through I asked the girl I was sitting with. Someone had either jumped onto the tracks or in front of our train, she wasn't sure which, so we had to wait for the police to come and take care of everything. Unfortunately I was trying to go to Blois to catch my train to Madrid, and the other train would stop at Angers. So, we waited. And waited, and waited, and waited. I got all of my homework done for Monday, read some from Deathly Hallows, and even got into my French Antilles book. After a little while another conductor came through and started asking if any of us had connecting trains. By this point, I had missed my second train, and we had only gone three stops. I gave the conductor my ticket, and she told me when I got to Blois they would put me in a hotel and I could take the first train in the morning. She moved on and I sat there thinking about it. That train left at 9:00 in the morning, and it is eleven hours to Madrid...which would put me there at 8:00 Saturday night, by which time everything I'd wanted to see would be closed, and I would have to find my hostel in the dark. I tried calling every phone my family owns, and, of course in true Peterson fashion nobody picked up, so I was on my own for the decision. When the conductor came back through I asked her what time the first train back to Nantes was. I decided to take that train (8:20) back to Nantes and to just try again another weekend for the Madrid thing. She told me to get off at the next stop, got off with me, took me to the station chief, and asked him to help me. She hopped back on the train and off they went, and away wandered my station chief. So I stood outside in the freezing cold for about half an hour, waiting for him because I'm sure he was busy, when one of his coworkers came by and asked me if he'd forgotten me. I told her that he might have, so she took me inside the station house (very cool, by the way) and helped me get everything organized. She told me when I got back to Nantes to take my ticket up to the window and they would reimburse me for my Blois-Madrid ticket, and then passed me off to the official head honcho. He called the neighboring hotel while two older train workers made jokes that I didn't understand, but they seemed friendly enough. Then said two workers walked me over to the hotel, explained the situation to the check-in guy, and left. He looked at me, and before I had even opened my mouth started speaking English. This really makes me angry, so of course I continued speaking in French. He first asked me if I was a tourist, I said no that I am here studying French and history and politics thank you very much. He gave me a room key, explained something about the key and the swipe card combination, and told me breakfast was at 7, on the house. I went upstairs and found that you use a regular key to unlock the door, but have to put the swipe-key thingy into a little pocket to get the lights to work. Those silly French and their lights. It was actually quite a nice hotel room, all things considered. Heated towel rack, bathtub, and tea by the coffeepot. I was happy. I relaxed for awhile, read some more Harry Potter, then crashed, hard.
Woke up this morning, showered and went downstairs for breakfast. It was traditionally French, so I had yogurt, a pain au chocolat, a boiled egg, some deli style meat and cheese, a pear, and tea. Ran back upstairs, grabbed my stuff, and went to the train station. The train ride back was quite uneventful, but I didn't mind. When I got back to Nantes I went to the ticket counter. They completely reimbursed both my outgoing and incoming tickets between Blois and Madrid, plus nobody every stamped my train pass. I did still have to pay for the hostel because it got cancelled less than 24 hours ahead of time, but that just means I basically paid $20 for a 7 hour tour of France by train. Haha. Came back home, explained everything to my host mom. She was FURIOUS!! Kept saying "ma pauvre", which basically translates to "you poor thing". I guess I don't really feel like it was a negative experience, though I can understand how people could see it that way. Right now I feel like it was just another adventure to put in the memory banks! Plus, there's some list I saw somewhere of things to do before you die, and one of the things on the list was to not know which city you wake up in...and I didn't!

Photo Contest

So this is random, and I'm sorry, but I am entering some of my photos from this trip and trips I've taken into the past into a photo scholarship contest. You get ranked by how many views you get, so please, look away!















If you like them, you an even vote for them (hint hint...)