South of France

Me on the rocks at the Meditteranean Sea!!

That's me, Tiffany, and Aileen sitting on top of the church in Stes Maries de la Mer.


OK, to add to the suspense of finding out how I got mauled let me preface this all by saying that for those of you who found my incredible frustration funny I recommend that you sit down because you’ll probably find my near death experience so utterly uproarious that being closer to the ground will probably make your fall easier. So here was my weekend in a nutshell:
Classes ended Thursday afternoon and Tiffany and I decided to make it a night out on the town with some other girls from school. 9:30 at night to 6:30 in the morning so it was certainly a night. A little Latin dancing lessons, meeting people from three different continents at the bar and some hard core dancing at the discotheque it was a most fabulous evening. Woke up Friday at about 4:00 so nothing much happened that day.
Saturday morning bright and early the whole CEA group met to go to the south of France for the weekend. On the way down we stopped at the Pont du Gare, which you may have heard of. It’s part of the old roman aqueducts that ran through France way back when.

That's the group, minus me and Tiffany qui prennent de photos.

There’s no mortar or anything holding those stones together, it’s all just a whole lotta physics holding it all up. I don’t really understand it because I paid as little attention in high school physics as humanly possible and now I avoid the entire side of campus that involves math and science, but it’s pretty cool overall.
Then it was on to Aigues-Mortes, which is a tiny little walled-in city on the southern coast. There was the finale of a month long celebration there last weekend and we were there to check it all out. The city has a definite Spanish and African influence though the residents are all most unquestionably white. We even got to meet the CEA kids who are in the Aix-en-Provence group.
Anywho… there’s bull running and an arena for people to “play” with the bulls and when we got there we all headed for the arena. It was just me, Tiffany, two of the girls from Aix, Mac and Phil. The guys were down on the arena floor and there really wasn’t anything goin’ on. No bulls were out so we were all just talking. Let me explain the arena a little. The bull pen was off in one corner and when they let a bull out there were two areas the bull could head for: the inner circle or the outer ring. A split rail fence separated the two so even if the bull was coming at you all you had to do was jump the fence and you were totally safe. Ok… let’s back this up a little and go back to a moment on the bus when Patrick (our on-site director) said “The bulls are all old and pretty scrawny and their horns are cut off, so it’s not really that dangerous. It’s not like you can get hurt, but officially I kinda have to tell you I don’t recommend it.” After considering this I present to you Exhibit A.

Perhaps my vision fails me, but I ask you if that bull doesn’t look really big, really horny, and incredibly frightening. Ok. So they let one bull out and he was runnin’ around and nothing was really happening so Megan, from the Aix group, and I decided to go down on the floor because when else in your life are you going to get a chance to say you were like a matador, right? So now down there we’re the only girls surrounded by a bunch of foreign tourists and drunken French guys… do we see where this is going? We get down there and we’re just watching this one already rather tired bull run around the opposite side of the arena when the announcer begins talking in rather rapid French (yes again dear God how I wish I spoke French…). We managed to make out something about letting out another bull and a finale. Next thing Megan and I know there’s another bull in the arena. Two bulls? We can handle that, there’s two of us, and two of them. Wait; wait… why are all the people in the stands yelling at us? Ok… apparently I need to concentrate on learning to recognize when someone is speaking about a singular article or multiples, because they had let ALL of the bulls into the arena at the same time for the finale. ALL OF THEM. We’re talking about 5 very large, very pissed bulls running around in an enclosed area where small children are setting off firecrackers and drunken men are waving shirts. Suddenly this had become, hands down no questions asked, the all-time worst idea I had ever had. And then it got worse. Megan and I are standing on one side of the fence and we see two bulls coming at us, but they’re on the other side. Unfortunately there are two equally large bulls coming directly at us on OUR side of the fence, so no matter which side of the fence we choose to panic on we’re screwed. (Pardon the language) Donc, I present to you Exhibit B (with thanks to Tiffany for worrying so much about my well-being that she caught part of the episode on camera).
I realize that this picture just makes it look like I’m spazzing out, but those two bulls running in front of us had twins behind them on the side of the fence I’m running around on. And the orange sweater I’m wearing? Yeah, like I said, it wasn’t one of my best ideas. Luckily the bulls decided I wasn’t worth mauling and they turned the opposite direction. Megan and I then ran faster than I thought I could run back to the stands and climbed as high as humanly possible where we sat together and shook for the next 20 minutes while all the French people in the stands laughed hilariously at us. Good times, good times.
The rest of the night consisted of more bull fighting, which I stayed away from though I heard that people were much more intoxicated and one man mooned the bull and the crowd while the announcer decided “C’est pas grave.” We’re not sure if he was referring to the situation or the general state of the man’s derriere, but either way it’s the best usage of that quite popular phrase we’ve heard. There was also a concert in the town center late at night. Everyone in the square was rather drunk and the band was all 30-somethings Frenchmen who played American music. Michael Jackson, Franz Ferdinand, Depeche Mode, the Killers… it was a really unusual combination and the music was so loud that a block away in our hotel room we could hear everything and the windowpanes shook with the bass. What a night.
The next day we went to Saintes Maries de la Mer for the Catholic religious festival to the Marys they had there. And while I have lots of friends who are Catholic and I in no way think the Catholic religion is lesser or anything of that nature… people here are a little creepy. I present to you, the readers, Exhibit C… creepy statue in weird costumes in the basement of a medieval church.
The best part of the day was that I got to see the Mediterranean. Not only did I get to see it, I went into it!!! Tiffany and I spent quite a long time just walking on the beach, and while the water was much much colder than I had expected, it was really nice once your feet went numb enough not to notice.

Me and Tiff in the water
The view from the beach

And that was my weekend. In other news, the French students are staging a grève this week because the price of university in France has been raised to 200 Euro a year. I feel like smacking them all… I’m pretty sure that students and parents in the US everywhere would celebrate if they just paid 280 USD a year for a university education. Oh, and here’s a picture of my framily (french + family = framily)… so see mom? They do exist.

Tiffany and I are off to Portugal tomorrow for a mini well-deserved vacation. We’ll be staying in Lagos so next week I’ll probably have more incredible stories to tell you all. Have a superb rest of the week and a fantabulous weekend as well!