Foraging in France

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I believe I have finally gotten a schedule fixed for myself at University. This is good, considering that University started yesterday. I am enrolled in 16 classroom hours at Nanterre (Paris 10), which should transfer back as 16 units in the states. I hope. Pretty much everything I've been doing is done on a wing and a prayer and the blind hope that it will all work out just fine. So far, so good. I mean, I have a roof over my head and food in the fridge, what more does one need?

So this last weekend was amazing. Guillaume took me out to a forest north of Paris with his friend. As he told me about it over the phone, I thought we were going to be having a picnic, as I heard the word "sac" and something about food, but that was not it at all. Instead we went to collect chestnuts! It felt like fall, the leaves starting to turn, the air crisp and fresh, as we foraged around in the forest, cracking open the spiky chestnut shells to pluck out the nuts within. French forests are different from the ones I am used to, primarily because there is nothing in them that can harm you. No rattlesnakes, no black widows under old wood, no scorpions, and best of all, no poison oak! There most harmful things around were the prickly chestnut shells, but it's not like they have toxins or anything. People can actually frolic in French forests without worrying about a thing! And you can find edible things everywhere. Guillaume showed me which mushrooms were good to eat, but he said it wasn't yet the season to harvest them, so we stuck to chestnuts.
Once back in Paris, we stopped at a grocery store to pick up some items for the dinner Giullaume had planned for us. I find it slightly amusing how even the in-an-out proxi marts here have to have a wine isle, and an assortment of cheeses, of course. So French. Back at Guillaumes apartment his sister was waiting for her friend from Marseilles to arrive so the evening could begin. We sat around drinking wine and shelling chestnuts in the mean time. Once the friend arrived we played Belot, a traditional French card game hailing from the south. As the game requires four players and there were five of us, Guillaume and I teamed up. This was for the best, as for the first five or so rounds I had absolutely no idea what was going on. Once I had a handle on the game, he left to prepare the chicken and chestnuts, which was amazing. Carol, his sister, told me that it's true that most French love their food, and that was perhaps true for this family more than for others. He whipped up some sort of sauce for it all that was fantastic, and there were green beans on the side. His youngest sister came home during the after dinner bread and cheese, and she had brought desert.. macaroons from Laduree bakery. For me, the night was a quintessential French evening, good people, good wine, great food, and not a word of English to be heard!

After dinner Guillaume and I headed out on the town to see what the "Nuit Blanche" was all about. I had seen the advertisements up, but didn't really know what it was supposed to be. The ads made it sound as if all of Paris was going to be up till 6 am with music and dancing and art, but it wasn't that exciting. Very chill, the "Nuit Blanche" is a yearly event where artists install their work all about the city and people can walk around and look at it. So that is what we did. Starting at Gare du Nord, we walked all the way down to Notre Dame, looking at the various instillations until 3:30/4 am.

Sunday was free museum day again and we checked out the Musee de Rodin, which is lovely. It was nice to have a relaxing day before the chaos that is French University began on Monday. I'm still in the process of signing up for classes, but at least it's a good excuse to meet people. I've met so many other exasperated ERASMUS students, I'm really not worried about making friends abroad! You hear someone speaking english and then the next thing you know everyone around is a foreign exchange student and we are all as equally confused and frustrated with the French system. I'm not sure if France has just not grasped the idea of the internet as a tool yet, or if they just like everything to be a complete and utterly confusing mess. Apparently every other country in Europe offers course listings, descriptions, online enrollment and syllabi to their students, but I guess France just decided they were above such petty conveniences. Literally every other student I've met, including normal french students, has agreed that you pretty much just gotta shrug your shoulders and laugh, or break down in tears, because that's just how the system here works. At least it creates a sort of "we're all in this together" camaraderie which makes all the students super friendly with one another. If you can't tell, I'm one of the people laughing about the whole situation, that way it's easier to approach people with a smile than with tears. And I find it absolutely hilarious. I mean, here I am, a little lost girl wandering around a foreign campus, being told to wait in a line in order to make an appointment to be able to wait in another line to talk to someone who will assume you know what your doing even though it is impossible to know what your doing without talking to that person in the first place. It feels like a Kafka novel at times, the impossible bureaucracy, I'm just glad my advisors back home can bear with me and will accept the classes I've managed to find. I've been searching Nanterre for classes the last week and a half, and will be there again tomorrow, hopefully to finalize my schedule once and for all. And to think I get to do this all over again in January, oh the never ending excitement of living abroad!

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