J-12

jour moins 12 - day minus twelve - Yes, I`ve finally reached the two week mark. I`ll have to think about that later - too much to do, people to see for my last few times, my favorite places in Montpellier, etc...all I can say is that while I`m looking forward to seeing friends and family back home, I want more time.

So how am I spending my last weeks in France?

Life is hard.

Last weekend, the weekend before my exams, I decided to throw a little caution to the wind and go on a canoe trip! We spent two days canoeing and a night of camping in the Gorges de l'Hérault, a stunning stretch of the river Hérault with cliffs, rapids, and beautiful scenery! Sure, I had to make up for it with a couple long, long nights of studying for my exams the next week, but I have to say: totally worth it!

Ready for liftoff!

It was very well spent, and I came back with aching arms (but feeling pretty buff all the same!). The time was passed between trying to help my newbie canoers navigate, especially the rapids, which were actually quite difficult for beginners, taking stops along the way to swim and sun, and getting into races/water wars. It was awesome, despite this one...uh...capsizing incident.

Yeah, life is really hard!

On the left - our noble steed.

But about those exams...victory! I studied really hard - hours, upon more hours - and it paid off! I went into those exams Wednesday and Thursday and showed them who's boss. They definitely weren't easy, but the studying paid off and I feel like I did really well.

In any case, now I'm free!! I've been out, to the beach, eating kebab and treating myself to pastries and such...watched the Barcelona final and was overjoyed to see them win!!

And now, it's time to go out and enjoy the beautiful weather! In between my training for Regionals, anyway. I'm getting quite tan here with all the time I'm spending outside! Until next time!

Photos!

Because I'm currently quite caught up studying, here are a couple photos (without much explanation) of random things in and around Montpellier, to show I'm still alive until I can get a real post up!

The Viaduc de Millau - Record-breaking bridge!

Place Albert Premier - a crowd is gathering on a lazy afternoon to listen to a reggae performance. I stop too.

Place de la Comédie, capoeira demonstration. If I have to be honest, I find it kind of silly...

My very first salade niçoise. Success!

My name, in Arabic, in the sand on the beaches of Rabat. Not from Montpellier, but more of a promise that I'll eventually describe my vacations in Italy and Morocco. Until next time!

The "final" countdown!

Alright! I'm in the home stretch. The exams at the French language institute went well, I'd say, and freedom is just around the corner! Except for those two beastly exams coming up, that is. (hence yet another slightly bad pun in the title). I have one on Wednesday and one Thursday, which wouldn't be so bad normally. After all, if I do nothing but study, I'd be pretty much guaranteed to get by without a problem - but is doing nothing but studying really how I want to spend some of my last few weeks here?

So, I'm trying to strike a balance. Squeezing studying in between errands, laundry, cooking, and so on. As previously stated, I'm constantly conscious of time running out despite my best attempts to slow it down, so I've been keeping pretty busy in spite of my desk space looking something like this!

Clockwise, from top left: geologic time chart, schema of lymphoid organs, physiology notebook, physiology packet, and geology notes underneath it all.

But that's slightly boring, so here's ore interesting stuff! This week has been a pretty fun one - on Monday, we had our last salsa/merengue course of the the semester (*sniff*), and I got a little sad when our instructor (and friend) talked about getting back together next year. A few of the girls I've met in this group have become such wonderful friends, and it definitely momentarily dampened my mood to think about there not being a next year for me- at least not here, anyway. But we danced, chatted, and here is most of us (with a few missing minus exams, and a couple camera-shy dudes =P):

Fiesta!

Of course, this isn't the last time we have/will see each other. On Wednesday, to celebrate the last of my French exams, I went out with Cécile to a salsa party/course, in which I had a partner who was about as coordinated as a rock but otherwise had lots of fun and ran into other friends that I hadn't seen since vacations, even though I had to wake up the next morning for...

hiking! Yahoo! A fellow exchange student from Alabama asked me if I had any information about hiking the Pic St Loup, the mountain just to the north of Montpellier. Given that I had recently finished that geology field day all over them there hills, I am actually surprisingly well informed on the geography and many of the small towns in the area - even better, I had a map! After asking if they'd mind one more person on their expedition (they didn't!), I went to the office of tourism to confirm my findings. As it turned out, the guy I talked to was an avid hiker and informed me of a place not too far off that he likes even better. It's the Ravin des Arcs (translated like it sounds, the Ravine of the Arches), a hike of equal distance, difficulty, and just as pictoresque as the Pic St Loup - with the added benefit of being pretty much deserted as so few people know about it, AND home to caves and natural swimming holes!!

Massive natural stone arch! Also right below, swimming hole filled with tons of little fishies :)

 The hike in total, minus our time spent frolicking and eating our lunches, was around 3 1/2 hours (I had a bizarre mix of scraps from my kitchen, making a tuna-mozzarella-tomato-cucumber-lettuce sammich, with a carrot and a peach on the side - not half bad!), and definitely was not a hike for the faint of heart...or small children. When they're talking ravine, they mean ravine! So to get to the point you saw above, you have to go up to the top of the ravine, then descend (steep!) to get down to the riverbed, then of course when you're done, continue back on up the other side. Half hike, half climb, all awesome! As it turns out this hike is part of one of France's many Grand Randonnées - great hikes - number 60, in fact! We were all careful, of course, wanting to get down to our happy little baignade in one piece. We had to remind ourselves to stop and look around every so often when we realized we'd been doing a lot of looking at our feet. Thankfully, though the trail could be treacherous, it was helpfully marked with what I called Mr. Rouge Blanche - a.k.a., our trail markers!

Bottom right - Yes! Top left! NO. It was like a nonstop game of Where's Waldo!

Something I also found kinda cool, when we hadn't seen our helpful red and white markers in a bit, I noticed a conspicuous pile of rocks on the ground with another, smaller pile to one side and got quite excited. Nerdy as it may be, I learned about cairns as trail markers from...yes, a computer game. Nobody else really knew what it was, and though we proceeded to start in the wrong direction (before quickly correcting ourselvses) beyond it, I was still quite excited to have some of that random knowledge I possess be applicable.

Not my picture, but that's an example!

Eventually we ran into a small group of hikers having lunch in the river - well, where it once was, anyway. Massive riverbed, completely dried out. It was quite incredible and a little bizarre to see, standing in the bottom of a river where if, there were water at that very moment, you'd have a severely reduced life expectancy.

Give you the idea. Note the black water line on the right side of the photo!

I believe that annual heavy rains (perhaps in fall) can fill it back up again, but we had fun crawling around, while noting that we felt like we should be in Jurassic Park or see a neanderthal around a corner. I got a little worried that there would be nothing left for us to swim in, as the other hikers told us something about there being nearly no water left...mildly apprehensive that I'd led our exposition to a swimless day, we continued on - and, though the first picture spoils it, hit paydirt!

Getting used to the chilly water before taking the plunge in the deeper water behind :)

Yes, found them ^^ Nestled at the bottom of the ravines, steep rock faces all around, with the sun hitting at just the right spot to make the cold water worth plunging into, with dozens of little fishies nibbling our toes (that was how, in the world of Marisa logic, we decided that the water was safe to swim in. Abundant aquatic life = passable!). Passed one heck of a fun afternoon, then dried off like lizards on the rocks above and took a short nap before continuing our hike and heading back into the little and terribly adorable town of St. Martin de Londres, where we hopped a regional bus home, pooped and pleased.

St. Martin's public water fountain

And wouldn't you know it, I was already booked to go out that night with the ladies for one of their birthday celebrations (couldn't miss that!), so I grabbed some munchies, water, and cleaned up for a night of fun. This time we went just a bit out of Montpellier to the town of Lattes (in the direction of the beach), where a lot of the BIG clubs are located. Coconuts is a reggaeton/zouk/hip hop ish club, and tafter being here more than once it hit me that I don't really know how to dance to American rap music anymore (did I ever?). Going home will be a bit deflating, I imagine.

Ok, well that's all for now! To continue with the outdoorsy theme, guess what I'm doing this weekend? A two-day canoe/camping trip!! I can't wait! Until next time, get out there and enjoy whatever weather you're having!

Bye bye vacations...hello, exams!

Hello! Anybody miss me? For any of you who follow, sorry for the extended absence! Got back from vacations Sunday of last week, spent the first couple days loafing around/recovering, then before I knew it, 'poof,' here comes exam time. Now, since I'm the motivated little one among the folks I know (I must enjoy pain), my exams are actually spread over a period of not one, not two, but three weeks, and that's if you exclude my physiology lab final the week before vacations. Here's the lowdown (some of which has already passed:

Week 1 (that was last week): Civilisation, Phonétique, Français des sciences, and Histoire de la langue française finals.
Week 2: Expression orale, compréhension orale, expression écrite, compréhension écrite, grammaire, and...wait no, I think that's it.
Week 3. (In freak out red because of the scariness): Histoire de la Terre, and Physiologie animale. The two monsters. They and their massive volumes of material are staring me in the face with that look schoolyard bullies get which might translate into words as "heh heh heh, we're gonna have some fun with you..." accompanied by menacingly rubbing their hands together or cracking their knuckles. You get the idea.

Okay, drama finished. I think if I apply myself, like I used to way back in the day when all my classes were science-based and therefore required intense studying, then I should do alright. It helps that it makes little difference whether I make an A plus, a B, C, or whatever unless my grad schools really care. And honestly, I think a geologic history of the earth and the physiology of the vertebrate/human system in a language you're still learning is enough to have them give me a little break, right?

Right. And now that I've had this experience - and really, despite the extra work it's given me, I'm intensely glad I did - I'd better be sure to keep an eye on any potential elitism that may emerge. I mean really, if I'm within earshot of anybody boo-hooing about how hard their political science course is (equivalently, insert just about any liberal arts course within reason here), or even about freshman bio, I'll...

...well, honestly, I'll probably not say anything, but walk away with a slightly smug, self-satisfied grin on my face. Let me elaborate - for starters, in addition to my car and good internet connection, I left multiple choice-type questions far behind in the good old US of A. If you come here for the hard sciences, don't get your hopes up. Instead, expect a few questions and a LOT of blank space. Not even a little blank space, either (though I did have to do some fossil species identification once)- no, on the exams I've seen there have mostly been the extended-answer type of question, which will involve not only being able to reproduce knowledge learned in the course but elaborate and expound upon it. And if you have a language handicap, what, you think you're special? The most you can get is to write something to the effect of how french is not your maternal language, and they'll be a little more forgiving on you for errors of grammar or expression (not of correctness - pity!). So though this has gotten easier as the semester has gone on, you may be able to imagine the fun I had. The flow chart goes something like this: understand what the professor is saying--> figure out what's important and write that down-->but don't forget to listen to and understand everything the professor is saying while you're writing-->develop your own bizarre french shorthand to speed up your writing and be able to keep up-->actually comprehend what the heck you wrote one week later-->study and research any terms or concepts you don't know (sometimes, no matter how good you are in the language, you'll just be out of luck here - though I will never again forget what the spleen is in French! The professor caught me dictionary hunting and stopped to ask if I needed help. I was slightly ashamed.)-->fully comprehend any and all processes and be able to reproduce them on exam day, in this language.

So, there you go. I have to say, I have definitely stretched my mind quite a bit while I've been here, and I can definitely feel good about where it's left me. I had a good laugh one day when I was reviewing "plaquettes" and couldn't remember what they were...in English. I actually had to look it up. I was slightly ashamed. (They're platelets, by the way!) And don't even get me started on the geology course; I doubt I could explain that to you properly in English since I've now only ever learned it in French.

I'm finished now. Sorry, I'd expect you would have preferred to hear about my vacations (which were absolutely astonishing and beyond anything I could have dreamed, for the record!), but all I gave you was this extended geek rant. Ah, well. Some things never change. If I don't have time to properly talk about my vacations soon, rest assured I will continue this blog when I come home at least for a month or two to recount all the stuff I didn't tell you about! (the rest of Barcelona, Germany, Paris, Lyon, Egypt, Sicily, Rome, Morocco, etc....) I will make one last note, before I go:

I have less than a month left in Montpellier. This thought almost continually torments me. Until next time, as I try to keep it together, here's a pretty picture!