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more Avignon

The rainstorm of two days ago brought Le Mistral, an extremely powerful wind that comes up through the Mediterranean. To me, it’s nicer now with the wind because it’s not so hot, but it is so strong that it knocks over tables and every few minutes you have trouble hearing the person next to you as it peaks.

We’ve been meeting a ton of actors and directors of the shows that we’ve seen, which is really neat. We’ve been able to ask them questions directly about their work, their shows, etc.

After a tour of an old monastery the other day

Last night after a show we had a picnic dinner in the garden of the Palais des Papes overlooking the Rhone River, in exactly the spot where David Graham and I were a year ago.

Walking up to the garden

Afterwards, we wandered down to the city square around the palace and watched some of the street performers.

Avignon by night

There are all kinds of people doing all kinds of little skits and acts. We decided that we could play at this game, too:

Pyramid, phase 1

Et voila!

Unfortunately, no one gave us any money. :( And we even had some people juggling, too. Can you believe it?

I’m learning to speak Arab. I can even have a little conversation, as long as it follows an exact script:

Good morning/ good evening! You are well? Yes, well. Thanks be to God.

And that’s it.

Currently it’s Sunday… I can’t believe I’ll be home on Thursday! I feel like being home was months ago, but at the same time, all this has passed by so quickly. I can’t remember when I’ve had this much fun…. the only problem is that this program is suspiciously lacking in David Grahams…

le Festival d'Avignon

We are staying at an elementary school.

That’s right, a school. We sleep in the classrooms, which have been outfitted with hospital beds. The classrooms snake around in a square to form a big courtyard where we hang out and eat together.

Bathrooms (= a row of sinks, another of toilets, another of showers) are on the other side of the courtyard. Let me just go ahead and say that the water heater doesn’t last very long for 50 plus people, and that….is…some….coooold… water…in…those…showers.

My little corner

When we got here, the first thing we did was to play a few games to get to know each other. First, we drew a giant world map in chalk in the courtyard and everyone stood on their countries. Next, we partnered with our fellow countrymen to perform a little skit/ tagline to represent out country in some way. The other American (Brendan) and I put our heads together and quickly decided to be "obese monolinguals. "

Brendan and I, doing our country proud

The Greeks, who attempted to resume all of Greek history up to the present financial crises in about 60 seconds

We eat really well here; we have an entrée, a plat, and a dessert for each meal (so three courses, plus bread and sometimes cheese).

Sample meal: they called this a “barbeque”, a term which they apply to anything that came off the grill (I say there’s green in the picture, so it’s not likely to be BBQ.) Sausage, salade with mustard-based vinaigrette, marinated tomatoes, cucumbers + mint, boiled potatoes + crème fraiche (kind of like sour cream).

So the city of Avignon hosts this theatre festival each year. More than 800 shows are being performed each day around the city. Most of the theatres are tiny and seat only 50-100 people. I’ve seen two on my own and really enjoyed both. An aspect of the summer theatre-going that is not quite so enjoyable is the lack of air-conditioning. But you can’t have it all, right?

Our first show to see all together was Spartacus. If you aren’t familiar with the movie/ story: Roman slave turned gladiator rises up against his captors, escapes, creates army of former slaves to escape Italy, wins tons of battles against the Romans, starts to become legend, gets betrayed by pirates, has to march on Rome, loses, is supported by his men to the end, is crucified. However, wife and son survive and are free.

The theatre was a little bitty coliseum that they had built for the show outside. When you walked in, it was to the sound of a gladiator fight, as if you were the crowd in Rome a thousand years ago. The arena floor was quite small, so I was wondering how they were going to give the impression of grandeur, show all the action, etc. Well… they did this by constructing hundreds of iron machine props that had joints and hinges and moves realistically that they wheeled in and out of the arena.

GIANT ELEPHANT!!

Click here to see a little video clip with the props (it's in French, but it doesn't matter, you get the idea of how intricate everything is)

Last night we went together to see Richard II in the Court of Honor in the Palais des Papes. Remember, it looks like this:

So we were all eagerly anticipating this big show, but guess what…. it was an unqualified disaster! How can I even explain? I’ll make a list:

- Most of the characters were clad in period clothes, but there was a random dude wandering around in a patchwork skirt and pink jacket. Yeah.

- There was some sort of life-size puppet, maybe a wax doll or something, that just sat in a chair on stage the whole time. Sometimes a character would walk over there and whisper in its ear or pat its head. ??

- This drove me crazy: Many of the characters stayed on stage most of the time (even though they weren’t in the scene) and wandered around. Yes, they just wandered. They would stand somewhere random, then, inexplicably, just move somewhere else. Among the cardinal rules of theatre is that you don’t move without a reason. You don’t just plow through your blocking without any purpose. WHY, wanderers, WHY?

- And the absolute worst: at each scene change, we were BLASTED, and I mean BLASTED with sudden music that was literally SO LOUD that it hurt. When Richard would say, “Hark, hear the trumpets?” that was the cue to plug your ears fast because, you might go deaf otherwise. At the change of each act, there was this horrid, earsplitting, screeching crow call. You might think it was some kind of technical malfunction, but one of the guys with the team that organizes our stay for us said that no, he went two days ago, and it was just like that… so much that a lady literally had a break down and fainted because of the sound, and that the paramedics came. ?!?!? Another cardinal rule of theatre: don’t hurt your audience!

So literally, it was so bad that each time one of those bloodcurdling shrieks came on, rows of people got up and left the show. I loved being in the space and definitely was glad to be able to go, but we all agreed afterward… it was a disaster!

On an unrelated but awesome note, I went to buy some children's books yesterday and ended up getting a huge pile of them for free, because there had been a sudden rainstorm and some of them were wet. But I dried them out, so now it's cool.

More to come...

On being an American in Paris

Haven’t had consistent internet access at all, so posting has been difficult.

Saturday: Lots of walking, then met up with my friend Lindsey, who I met on a study abroad program in 2006, and who now lives in Paris with her French husband. We had a very nice long chat catching up on the last year. Lindsey has an awesome blog that I follow.

No pictures of this day because I didn’t realize that my SIM card wasn’t in the camera! Rookie mistake.

Instead, I can provide you with a funny sign I saw the first day. This says: Long live striking! They get fat off our earnings, they pollute, lie to us, exploit us, they give us nothing, they give in. Strikings is a tool to defend and conquer. It's a right! They don't mention whom they are striking against. I guess it's just The Man. The Establishment. Yes, well, those social programs do have a cost, you know....

Evening was dinner with Fred, Charlene, and my friend Kat from my master’s program at Auburn. We ate at a place right below Fred’s new apartment; sat outside and the evening weather was divine (unlike Auburn where it’s still 90 degrees at 8:30.) I had terrine de queue, which is a pâté like fois gras, but made with beef and we had a lovely rosé from Alsace (how pretentious is that sentence?! Guess I should add, Mm, yes, bring the car around, Jeeves.) Fred and Charlene were tired out from doing work in their new apartment all afternoon, but they are thrilled about the new place (I’ll post pictures when I see it next week, all finished!)

Sunday: attended mass at St. Sulpice.

St. Sulpice

Cathedrals like these in Paris always catch me off guard. In the midst of teeny studio apartments and somewhat cramped grocery stores, suddenly is this HUGE space. I have found Parisian masses to be rather lonely; in the past it’s been pretty much just me, an ancient parishner (sp?) or two, and the priest. I mean, I once was asked to serve wine at communion because there was no one else there to do it. Here there were more people, but many of them were tourists, too. As always, you could tell the Americans… the fanny-pack clad mom was taking pictures up until right before the service and the girl was knitting. I’m not lying. During the service. I mean, you know I’m all for industry and productivity and whatnot, but could you at least confide your personal activities to your own church instead of turning someone else’s into recreation hour? But just so you know, this is why Americans have bad experiences in France! People are mean to you either because you are being extremely rude, or enough extremely rude people have come in front of you, and they assume you're from the same mold.

St. Sulpice from the inside (from Google images, so minus the fanny packers).

Met up with my group at the hostel Sunday evening. I think this is going to be a really great program. They are super-organized and apparently they are paying for everything. They even gave us two metro tickets (only about $1.20 each, but I thought we would surely cover little things like that on our own).

The group is comprised of about 40 people in their 20-somethings from all over the world. Here’s a list of the countries:

Algeria
Myanmar
Morocco
Luxembourg
Brazil
Canada
Hungary
Kirghistan
Romania
Belarus
Belgium
Greece
Israel
Russia

There is one other guy from the states (from Boston and goes to Brown). Isn’t this cool? When in the world would I have ever met someone from Belarus or Kirgizstan or Myanmar? So this is basically the total opposite of the typical “study abroad trip”, where you tend to just stick with the Americans from your school. I’ve already learned a ton about all these countries and we don’t even know each other’s names yet. (Yeah, we all have foreign names to each other, so we’re having a hard time remembering!)

Funny story about perspective: a girl from Toronto said, “Oh you must have a nice English accent.” I had to ask what she meant, because of course English is my native language, so I don’t have an accent like foreigners speaking it. But then she said she meant because I was from the South! It was a funny experience to have a non-American thinking of me of having an accent, because I don’t think of myself as having one (although I definitely do on certain words, at least.)

I’m typing this on the TGV (the high speed train; literally translated TGV is the train of big speed) on the way to Avignon. We are passing hay fields, sunflower fields, little villages, etc; it is quite picturesque. Every little village has a church that was probably built in about the 11th century.

There are several aspects to being in a country like this on a program like this that make you think. First, France has been around for so much longer than our country. Avignon itself is ancient. Makes you reflect on how young our country is, and how that might affect the way we live and think and view the world.

Next, there’s meeting these kids from all over the world, most of whom speak a minimum of three languages, many of them can get along in four or even five. It is actually quite terrifying to think about the monolingualism in our own country, and how the lack of seriously studying (= actually being able to communicate in) another language-- which by default makes you study a culture-- makes us so insular. Our country is already isolated geographically; since we are already unlikely to meet people of many different cultures at home, we should prioritize language-learning all the more. But instead we just plug along with English, knowing less and less about the lives of people elsewhere.

I just had a fascinating conversation with an Israeli, who among other things, commented about Americans taking their birthright trip (the Israeli government pays for American Jews to come and visit Israel for a week or two when they turn 18.) My friend was remarking that there tend to be two problems with these American Jews visiting Israel: 1) since they aren’t 21 and can’t drink at home, they tend to spend much of their trip partying and binge drinking, and 2) they tend to see themselves, now that they are traveling, as instantly an expert on the unrest in the West Bank, etc. They have no idea what it’s like to live there, to work there, to deal with the daily realities of life in Israel, but many of them tend to see the world in black and white. This guy has just completed his three years of mandatory military service, and he was reflecting on how much that changes you. You might become more to the left (treaties, peace) or more to the right (stand up for rights,) but during the time that you serve you see so much that no matter what you conclude, you have an idea of how complicated the situation it is. I think that Americans are not very good at looking at things from others’ perspectives. It makes me wonder where we are headed in the next 50 or so years, since as a country we are so insular in our daily lives.

OK, off the soapbox now. We will be arriving in Avignon in another hour or so. More to come, contingent on my access to wireless!

Day the first

Arrived yesterday morning (1am for me, 7am for Paris.) Plane ride uneventful, except for the American chatterbox pouring her entire vacation plans, topped off by her entire life story, out to a poor French man. She asked him dozens of inane questions (like, “Notre Dame (she pronounced it like the school), is that worth a visit?”). You could hear every word of what she said (because she’s a loud American) and nothing of the French guy’s reply (because he is a typically discreet Frenchman).

Also to note: I was in the screaming babies section on the plane. I felt sorry for the parents…. although not nearly as sorry as I felt for myself.

On the metro ride into town, I worked on honing my Look. The Look says many things. It is sort of an eye roll, an impatient head toss, and a sneer all rolled into one. It says, “There are SO many more chic things I would rather be doing now than riding public transportation.”

I spent the afternoon at Ungaro visiting with some of my former colleagues, as well as two friends from Auburn who are currently interning there, Ross and Caroline.

Ungaro team members, L- R: Ross, Marilyne, Gérard, and Caroline

New Ungaro entrance with a sweet new chair

Gerard, hard at work at usual

Unfortunately not much has changed in the Ungaro product, despite cycling through several designers (including a disastrous stint with Lindsey Lohan). Not very inspiring or coherent. Here, see for yourself. (Actually, I think some of that is the old Lohan collection.) Also, in the few hours that I was there, ANOTHER poor woman walked in asking for "heels that are not too high," and of course, we have nothing. When are we going to cater to our clients instead of size negative zero, seven feet tall models?)

However, the alterations workshop is just as charming as it ever was

Idea board/ recent Ungaro pictures in the news

I traveled next a few neighborhoods over to Frederic’s new apartment. New= still in the stages of renovation (thus no pictures), but it is going to be awesome when they finish.

Yesterday evening we went to one of Fred and Charlene’s favorite spots, a restaurant called Da Rosa. (I guess I should consider this tame; my first jetlagged night in Paris a few years ago, Fred took me to be on a French TV show that was airing the next day). We spent several hours just hanging out.

Fred and Charlène

Avignon, July 2010

As you may or may not be aware, I will journey across the pond again the summer for a brief stint in the south of fair France. The amiable government of that same country was kind enough to offer me a scholarship, complete with plane ticket (!) for this little trip.

I have gotten some of the following questions of late, so I have compiled a frequently asked questions section:

Q: Where are you going?
A: I fly into Paris for two days, but my ultimate destination is Avignon:
Q: What are you doing there?
A: I am attending an international theatre festival, le Festival d'Avignon, "one of the most important manifestations of living contemporary spectacle", as its website states.

Q: What's the deal with Avignon?
A: The city has two claims to fame:

1: due to struggles within the Catholic church, it was the seat of the papacy from 1309-1377. Seven popes lived there (instead of in Rome). They built a sweet castle:

(DG took this picture when we visited Avignon last summer.)

Many of the shows for the festival take place IN this building, the Palais des Papes (Pope's Palace), as you see below; the stands can seat more than 3,000 people.

(I KNOW, right?! Incredible. Image from a book, "Le Festival d'Avignon")

2: Avignon is also the subject of a popular children's song, Sur le pont d'Avignon ("On the bridge of Avignon.) (I tried to find the least-annoying rendition possible, but I make no promises about the high-tech graphics of this video.) The bridge collapsed in the 1500s, but it lives on in in the little song, so to speak.

(DG took this: see how the bridge stops? Yes.)

Q: Are you by yourself?
A: I'm going by myself, but I will be with a group of international students. There are students from all over the world on the email list.

Q: How long will you be gone?
A: July 15-29.

Q: Can I see some more sweet pics of the festival?
(OK, so no one really asked me that. But lets pretend:)

Curtain call for a show called "Les souliers en satin"

A set in "le Cour d'Honneur" ("the Court of Honor") where many of the shows are held)

Poster from the very first Festival d'Avignon in 1947

(So my blog title is out-of-date, but I haven't really figured out how to change it. So it will stay).

I'll update this as frequently as I can while there; hopefully we will have consistent internet access...

Thank you, Blog, for the pictures.

Final Paris blog post! I have just gone through and saved all the pictures that were here on the blog to David Graham's computer (as I no longer have one, it being in the stolen suitcase.) So a big thank you to my blog readers... if you hadn't been reading, I wouldn't have been posting, and then I wouldn't have had any Paris pictures left! But thanks to you, there were about 100 of the best ones safely here on the internet!

And now I sign off. Until the next adventure...