Another cultural peculiarity here is la grève--or the strike. I've been fairly lucky in not getting hit with them too much this year. There was one instance in which my vacation to Brêtagne was delayed because of transportation on strike. Today, however, is a strike for. . . everyone? Because nobody likes working? Miraculously, none of my classes were cancelled. (Normally I'd be happy to skip out on class, but since this was my first week of classes, I really wanted to know how they'd be like.) On Monday (as a european way of celebrating Groundhog's day?), universities specifically are going on strike for an undetermined period of time. This means that if the strike is a month long, I have to stay here for an extra month until exams are all over with. Oh well. I don't think an extra month in southern France would be that bad.
The rest of my classes went swimmingly. On Tuesdays I'm taking an opera class that looks promising, I've got no classes on Wednesdays, and Thursdays have a developmental psych class and a psychology of music class on the schedule. No class for me tomorrow as I have again ingeniously arranged my schedule to have no Friday classes. This weekend I am going with my program on a trip to Saint Paul-de-Vence. Should be lovely. Next weekend, I'm going with my friend Elizabeth to Bologna and Revenna to experience firsthand the history and byzantine art-filled country that is Italy.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Piano lessons and pics
The beginning of our epic walk
Some kind of water system where residents would lift up this little door thing to let water into their property. There were certain days where this was permitted for specific households. This system led to water battles between greedy neighbors.
Elizabeth and Laurie. We're not lost!
That was a gorgeous day. Laurie is one of my friends (French--yes! I made a French friend!) who I met in my cognitive psych class last semester. She's pretty amazing and takes us to beautiful places.
And now for a glimpse into Christin's provençal life:
On Wednesdays, I volunteer at the Centre Socio-Culturel, where I teach piano lessons to four children ages 5 to 10. Sounds charming, right? Basically, it's the worst hour of my life every week. The kids have big differences in their individual levels of piano ability given their wide age range, and I have to teach all of them in the same room at four different keyboards in the same hour. Usually the two younger ones have an attention span of around five minutes each on a good day. I think in the U.S. they would be diagnosed with ADHD and given medication. I used to be against that until I met these hooligans. Just kidding. I have always been all for giving children chemically altering drugs. Just kidding, again. I hope all of this helps me get over my phobia of a large proportion of the world's population.
That was a gorgeous day. Laurie is one of my friends (French--yes! I made a French friend!) who I met in my cognitive psych class last semester. She's pretty amazing and takes us to beautiful places.
And now for a glimpse into Christin's provençal life:
On Wednesdays, I volunteer at the Centre Socio-Culturel, where I teach piano lessons to four children ages 5 to 10. Sounds charming, right? Basically, it's the worst hour of my life every week. The kids have big differences in their individual levels of piano ability given their wide age range, and I have to teach all of them in the same room at four different keyboards in the same hour. Usually the two younger ones have an attention span of around five minutes each on a good day. I think in the U.S. they would be diagnosed with ADHD and given medication. I used to be against that until I met these hooligans. Just kidding. I have always been all for giving children chemically altering drugs. Just kidding, again. I hope all of this helps me get over my phobia of a large proportion of the world's population.
The epic walk!
Our picnic spot. This was the first nice day we've had in a while. 
Blue skies and bamboo-like plants
The old windmill
At the end of our epic five-hour walk, we found a friend napping in some hay.
The sun over les salins, or the shallow pools where they let the Mediterranean dry up to extract the salt.
Weekend adventures!
A mountain of salt in Camargues. We wanted to go sledding, but decided that if we wiped out, that would be unpleasant, and that it would also be unpleasant to get fragments of salt-balls in our eyes, so we also refrained from making those.
Les cygnes. Can't believe Saint-Saëns wrote such beautiful music about such mean animals.
When we were driving along the salt farms or whatever they're called, the water was so still that the sky reflected perfectly. I felt like I was in an airplane.
Flamingoes!
A port
Monday, January 26, 2009
New year, new semester
Hello all. Well, I've been pretty terrible at updating this blog. Especially with anything other than pictures. Oops!
Today marks the first day of the new semester, but a little bit on the last semester first. . .
As you've seen, Aix got hit with some pretty intense snow a couple of weeks back. This made final exam week a little more interesting. I think two of my finals went ok (one was a survey class of linguistic sciences and the other was a cognitive psych class). . . Still waiting to hear about the results. The grading scale here is way different than what I'm used to. Everything is on a scale from 0 to 20, and scarcely nobody gets above 16. So when I heard about the 11 I got for my literature class first semester, I was bummed, but according to the credit transfer scale with IU, that corresponds to a B+. I can definitely deal with that. This makes it hard to judge whether or not I did well on my exams--if I'm just shooting for slightly above a 50%. Who knows if I succeeded in that or not. . .
And as for my last exam. . . I completely missed it. And in the world of education, missing a final exam is about as big of a snafu possible. This is how it transpired:
Professor announces exam date and time in class. Thursday, January 10th, 2009. Yes, it is true, this date did not exist for us this year.
I go to check the big schedule of all the final exams to confirm this date. It is not there. I go with what he said in class--January 10th.
January 7th rolls around. SNOW. Exams on the 10th are rescheduled for the 22nd.
January 21st rolls around. I go to the music office to confirm that my test is the next day.
Confirmation denied. Test was actually on the 15th. Shit.
I'm still waiting to hear back from the professor on what's going to be done about all of this. It's hard to get a hold of him because he is a professional musician, and this teaching business is just kind of on the side (the class was History of the Music of the Middle Ages). Most probably I will take an incomplete until June when the next round of exams are and just take it then with the next crop of students. If the department doesn't agree to that, I get a one-credit hour class F configured into my GPA. That would add character to my GPA, right? Grad schools will be impressed that I have that badge of character. Maybe I should start working on my cover letter now.
Classes today went well. First I went to a comparative literature course about the literature of central Europe in the 1970's. Should be interesting despite that everything I read in that class will be translated from another language. Only five students came to that class today. Maybe more will come next week, and maybe not. Out of these five students, only one of them is actually French. Other than her, there are two Austrian students, one student from Luxembourg, and me. The professor herself is Austrian, so she speaks nice and slowly. Hopefully, this class will transfer over to some 300 level comp lit class at IU, and I will be three-fifths done with a comp lit minor. That's right, I added another minor. Why the hell not? My second class of the day was a French lit class about farce and comedy in theater from the middle ages to the beginning of the 18th century. The professor is very animated, and despite the fact that he speaks very quickly, I don't have a problem understanding because he enunciates.
I find that I do not, in general, have problems with the majority of the French speakers here. I'm getting pretty damn fluent, if I do say so myself. The real problem is with guys with really low voices who mumble. But it's not like I would be able to understand them if they were speaking English.
Other classes on the table for this semester include a developmental psych class, an opera appreciation class, and a class about the psychology of music. All classes right up my alley.
Yesterday, my friend Laurie, who I met in my cognitive psych class, and Elizabeth and I went on a bit of a road trip. Pics to come soon. We went down to the region of the Camargues, started the day off with an epic walk and picnic, saw a few mountains of salt from the Mediterranean, and returned tired and happy.
That's the news for now. I hope what loyal readers I still have are all doing well.
French word of the day:
les flamants roses ( lay flam-on rose) = the flamingoes
Hier quand nous étions dans la région des Camargues, nous avons vu plusieurs colonies des flamants roses.
Today marks the first day of the new semester, but a little bit on the last semester first. . .
As you've seen, Aix got hit with some pretty intense snow a couple of weeks back. This made final exam week a little more interesting. I think two of my finals went ok (one was a survey class of linguistic sciences and the other was a cognitive psych class). . . Still waiting to hear about the results. The grading scale here is way different than what I'm used to. Everything is on a scale from 0 to 20, and scarcely nobody gets above 16. So when I heard about the 11 I got for my literature class first semester, I was bummed, but according to the credit transfer scale with IU, that corresponds to a B+. I can definitely deal with that. This makes it hard to judge whether or not I did well on my exams--if I'm just shooting for slightly above a 50%. Who knows if I succeeded in that or not. . .
And as for my last exam. . . I completely missed it. And in the world of education, missing a final exam is about as big of a snafu possible. This is how it transpired:
Professor announces exam date and time in class. Thursday, January 10th, 2009. Yes, it is true, this date did not exist for us this year.
I go to check the big schedule of all the final exams to confirm this date. It is not there. I go with what he said in class--January 10th.
January 7th rolls around. SNOW. Exams on the 10th are rescheduled for the 22nd.
January 21st rolls around. I go to the music office to confirm that my test is the next day.
Confirmation denied. Test was actually on the 15th. Shit.
I'm still waiting to hear back from the professor on what's going to be done about all of this. It's hard to get a hold of him because he is a professional musician, and this teaching business is just kind of on the side (the class was History of the Music of the Middle Ages). Most probably I will take an incomplete until June when the next round of exams are and just take it then with the next crop of students. If the department doesn't agree to that, I get a one-credit hour class F configured into my GPA. That would add character to my GPA, right? Grad schools will be impressed that I have that badge of character. Maybe I should start working on my cover letter now.
Classes today went well. First I went to a comparative literature course about the literature of central Europe in the 1970's. Should be interesting despite that everything I read in that class will be translated from another language. Only five students came to that class today. Maybe more will come next week, and maybe not. Out of these five students, only one of them is actually French. Other than her, there are two Austrian students, one student from Luxembourg, and me. The professor herself is Austrian, so she speaks nice and slowly. Hopefully, this class will transfer over to some 300 level comp lit class at IU, and I will be three-fifths done with a comp lit minor. That's right, I added another minor. Why the hell not? My second class of the day was a French lit class about farce and comedy in theater from the middle ages to the beginning of the 18th century. The professor is very animated, and despite the fact that he speaks very quickly, I don't have a problem understanding because he enunciates.
I find that I do not, in general, have problems with the majority of the French speakers here. I'm getting pretty damn fluent, if I do say so myself. The real problem is with guys with really low voices who mumble. But it's not like I would be able to understand them if they were speaking English.
Other classes on the table for this semester include a developmental psych class, an opera appreciation class, and a class about the psychology of music. All classes right up my alley.
Yesterday, my friend Laurie, who I met in my cognitive psych class, and Elizabeth and I went on a bit of a road trip. Pics to come soon. We went down to the region of the Camargues, started the day off with an epic walk and picnic, saw a few mountains of salt from the Mediterranean, and returned tired and happy.
That's the news for now. I hope what loyal readers I still have are all doing well.
French word of the day:
les flamants roses ( lay flam-on rose) = the flamingoes
Hier quand nous étions dans la région des Camargues, nous avons vu plusieurs colonies des flamants roses.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Oot and aboot
Musée d'art contemporain in Nice. Niki de Saint Phalle (sp?)
Celina and I in Madrid. I look so happy because I was recovering from the stomach flu.
Rachel and I Madrid's equivalent of Central Park
Madrid!
Rachel told us that this building used to be the post office until they realized that it was a little excessive to deliver mail.
Madrid is pretty.
View of a church from a little window in the palace.
Another view of the church.
Madrid is crowded! This was not New Year's Eve, but looks like it should have been.More pics from break
I think I've spent more time in Père Lachaise than in any other spot in Paris. It was colder this time, with a light dusting of snow, but the sun was shining nonetheless. This is out of order--Paris was the last leg of the journey.
This is the upstairs part of the club Celina and I went to in Paris to go swing dancing. A guy we met there: "So what brings you to Paris?" Me: "Just swing dancing, really." It was fun, and then a 60 year-old man gave me his number. 
Churros in Spain! Our first "meal" of the new year--maybe around 1am.
New Year's in Madrid
I wandered around the botanical gardens for an hour looking for plants that were still alive while Celina and Rachel got their hair cut.Aix in snow!
So, for the first time in 20 years, there has been an accumulation of snow in Aix. Last Wednesday morning, I woke up to the view of eight inches of snow piled up in my courtyard. The city just did not know what to do with all of it. My university was shut down for a good five days, meaning that my final exams were moved from last week to next. It all melted in about 36 hours, but they still felt it necessary to keep school cancelled. I was not opposed to that. Everyone love's a snow day. Or five.
Steven in the snow!
Celina in the snow!
My courtyard in the snow!
My courtyard when it's not in the snow!
We made a new friend--in the snow!
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