i found out where my salt comes from


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Europe » France » Languedoc-Roussillon » Montpellier
March 26th 2007
Published: March 26th 2007
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with only four days remaining until my mom arrives, i am buckling down on my schoolwork and trying to cram as much as i can into my memory. i finished the fourth harry potter book, so i will have to buy the fifth one today. they are very helpful with my vocab retention, but more so with noticing all of the grammatical things that i am learning in my language classes, and therefore seeing how to use them effectively. and thanks to harry, i can be much more familiar with sorcerer-related vocabulary, which will hopefully come in handy in my everyday life down the line. reading occupied most of my weekend, and parts of last week as well. i made an apple pie last week, and attempted to make egg salad with a mayonnaise of my own creation. it turned out a-ok, and after putting the egg salad on sandwiches with other delicious items, any strange homemade mayonnaise taste was thankfully overpowered. my roommate was in paris for the weekend with a friend from home who is studying in italy, so it was just me, harry, and the fridge. the gilmore girls were there part-time as well, most notably last friday night when i made a stack of pancakes for myself, which i ate while watching the aforementioned gg. the stack grew shorter, i likely grew wider. on saturday afternoon i took a bus with my program to aigues-mortes, a small walled city in the camargue, not far from montpellier. the camargue was crawling with flamingoes, although since we only passed them while we were driving, i wasn't able to take any pictures. as a sidenote, it is silly that since i have been removed from an english-speaking culture, when i speak or write english i frequently throw in phrases such as "crawling with" that no longer make sense to me, but which i use before thinking about them. in aigues-mortes, we toured a small tower, i walked the ramparts, and tried to get close to a large pinkish lake which is cultivating an obviously cute species of algae. across the pinkish lake from me there was a mountain of salt, because the cultivate the salt of the area and bottle it up to sell. the company there, which is perhaps called baleine and uses a whale as a mascot, is the salt brand that i have on my countertop here in montpellier. even the salt here looks creative! i also avoided the temptation to buy all the chintzy touristy souvenirs, such as hanging dish towels topped by elephants in vests and suspenders. an interesting fact supplied to me by wikipedia: ernest hemingway's third major posthumous work, the novel the garden of eden, takes place in aigues-mortes. i don't know if that is true, but i will believe wikipedia without doubt. after viewing the town, we drove to a large building that sells products of the region. there we got to sample a syrupy sweet wine of sorts, and nibble on biscuits. it was a very short trip, but as it was free, i approved. after all, i need to save my energy for the extensive travels i have coming up in the next two weeks. hopefully my next blog entry will be approximately three weeks from now, so i will be picking and choosing*** my favorite pictures to post here. the week after i get back from spring break, i am going to barcelona, so be prepared for a barrage of good-looking scenery!

***picking and choosing, another strange phrase. is it necessary to both pick AND choose?


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27th March 2007

Whaaaaaaaaat....
Is that....bananas... that you are eating?
27th March 2007

what a neat castle-city. is the whole town still within the walls?

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