December 2011
11 posts
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Norvege
For my last trip I decided to go to Oslo, Norway and stay with some family friends. I haven’t seen the daughters since 2nd grade so it was a fun reunion! They had leftovers from thanksgiving so I finally got to have sweet potatoes, stuffing, gravy, and best of all.. pumpkin pie! We started off the next morning with smoked salmon and eggs before they left for work and I headed off to explore Oslo....
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Family week
I left Thursday afternoon to meet my aunt and cousin in a small town in central France made famous by its small scale, high quality knife production. They picked me up at the closest train station (an hour away) at 9pm and we headed off in what we hoped was the right direction for Lagioule. Trying to find our bed and breakfast turned out to be more difficult than anticipated due to a combination...
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November 2011
13 posts
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Berlin + Paris encore
The train trip from Prague to Berlin was beautiful: the tracks followed a slow moving river that cut through a canyon surrounded with yellowing aspens and rock outcroppings. These sections reminded me a lot of Utah, Boulder Mountain specifically, until my daydream ended with a pop of red: the roof of a very european house set away from the river and surrounded by fields and sheep. After being met...
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Prague
After a sleepless night in Paris due to being locked out of our hotel (my friend with the only set of keys, including the key to the outside door, fell asleep before the rest of us got back from the bar and it took 21 phone calls and waiting until 7am to wake her up) we headed to Prague. The quick flight deposited us at the in the cold dreary outskirts of Prague. To get to our hostel we spent...
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October 2011
14 posts
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Perigueux
Last Friday we headed to a small town in the Dordogne region to stay at a french friend’s house. Only an hour and a half from Bordeaux, Périgueux is a different world. The houses all have classic Dordogne upturned roofs and the friend we were staying with knew almost everyone we passed in the streets when we went to the Saturday morning farmers market. We spent the whole weekend shopping for...
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Finally
settling into things here in Bordeaux. After a week or so of feeling homesick and bumming about boring classes/rainy weather/mean french students (no one even made eye contact with me the whole first week of classes), life is getting better. I had a friend come visit me from California for a week and it made me realize how much I’ve learned about the city and how much my french has improved...
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September 2011
20 posts
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I knew I’d had a good meal when I didn’t eat again for 20 hours. Lunch with my friend’s grandparents at a chateau just outside of Bordeaux started around 1:30 and lasted until after 4… consisting of aperitifs, salmon Carpaccio, langoustine curryish soup, potatoes, cheese crepes, and a sampler dessert plate for each of us. Along with some delicious Bordeaux Rosé. Yum! Wish I had the funds to eat...
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Hell Week
The first week of classes here is very different than at UCSB. First of all, the list of courses and schedules aren’t posted until 3 days before the class starts. This makes finding what classes to take/what ones will work together difficult. Its also hard to know what level of classes to take, 3rd year classes in French may be a bit tough language-wise, but 2nd year might be too lower-division...
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San Sebastián, Spain
During the last week of ‘summer’, when all the other faculties had already started and only Univ. 3 remained on vacation, I took a quick 3-day excursion to Spain with some other Californian students. Our 2-hour train ride south to the border between France and Spain passed through the beautiful coastal towns of Biarritz and St.-Jean-de-Luz, French surfing hotspots. At the border, signs suddenly...
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