something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue?

OLD

It shows its years, my door. It has some rust on the edges, but Jeff says not to worry because rust won’t go anywhere in this climate. When he moved his old rusty car from Puerto Rico, where the holes would grow an inch each year from the salty air, and brought it to Bishop, they halted their outward march entirely. So I’ve got time before I need to seriously think about painting it. I don’t mind the color, anyway.

NEW

I hadn’t even known Erik for 24 hours when he offered to help me put my new door on my truck. Remarkable people here. Far from the days of feeling faceless in La Jolla, I have been here for 3 days and already I can’t go anywhere without running into someone I now know – a friendly fellow mountain biker giving me directions turns out to be Erik’s neighbor, names mentioned and stored away become faces when I randomly meet them in town. Small towns are great for curing an insidious urban feeling of insignificance. I suppose I am just as new to the people here as my door is to me.

BORROWED

Swapped, recycled… I prefer to say that it is “empowered” in its new existence, given a second life, saved from the crusher. A kid named John came into the office, shirtless and caked with dust and sweat. Half-dazed by the sweltering sun, he led me to the golf cart to give me the tour of my options. First option: a supposedly “black” door, side mirror already salvaged, no window. No, that won’t do. The next door is stacked on top of another Toyota. Skate-shoe propelled, John bounds onto the hood, over to the top of the neighboring van, and climbs to the top of the truck in question. Window: check. Locking mechanism: check. Relatively good condition: check. “I’ll take it.”

BLUE

My door and me. Fortunately mine was only temporary. The door will be blue until I paint it. Or I’ll just leave it blue. It will at least be congruous with the story I now must tell to explain the claw marks in the passenger-side headrest.

The Die Hard 4 poster looks funny here. They’ve superimposed English slogans on it.

The mountains have been replaced by something equally as massive and much more foreboding: here, we call it the “freeway.”

I’ve forgotten how to spell.

“Grand” is not spelled with an “e” at the end when it describes the word “adventure.” “Adventure” is not a feminine word in English. We do not have genders in English. But gosh, the words look naked when I write “grand adventure.”

Southern California is lacking in wide open spaces. And green.

The burrito niche could never be replaced by kebabs.

Our huge juicy strawberries got nuthin’ on the tiny sweet alpine strawberries hiding in the fields.

After nearly suffering from a heart attack at the sight of the “cheese” section in Ralph’s supermarket, I found “made in the usa” camembert in the “artsy” cheese island just behind me. Okay, so it wasn’t spectacular, but all is not lost. This weekend I found Roquefort (I told you, Pierre!) and raw milk comté at Trader Joe’s…. the wine, however, is going to be another issue.

“You mean, his baby’s mama had a baby?”

It’s great to be home.

How I Spell Adventure

I will never forget how to spell adventure.

In second grade we had spelling quizzes every week. I was great at spelling, because I had a fool-proof memory trick. So good that I still use it today. “Extraordinary,” for example – it’s easy to forget that a in there, phonetically, but if you think of it as two words put together, “extra” and “ordinary,” you’ll never go wrong. Just as if you sing “advent” and spell “u-r-e” you get a fun rhythm and the correct spelling of “adventure.” Okay, perhaps that’s a bit of a stretch for a memory trick, but the wonderful thing about memory tricks is that they are highly personalized and function best when tailored to however it is your own brain works.

Years later, after spelling had become second nature, I found myself presented with another challenge: remembering the meaning of new, strange, and challenging words. I would search to apply something sensible to each word that would make me think of its meaning, somehow divide the word into its roots, or…

The word “cacophony” is an excellent example of a word which sounds like what it means. A discordant or dissonant sound. The strong consonance of the two c’s makes a rather harsh sound, and, getting more complex now (as I had gotten older and wiser by the time this word came into my life), you have “phony” which comes from… well, I don’t know what it comes from, but you think automatically of a telephone, perhaps “Hooked on Phonics,” and there it is, something that has to do with sounds.

And perhaps just as pleasurable as finding the perfect memory trick to remember a challenging word is finding ones’ self in a situation where there is only one word for that moment, and you know exactly what it is. And from then on you think of that moment every time you hear that word. It is from the discovery of that moment, lying in bed awake at 5 in the morning, without even the slightest desire left to sleep, that I will always smile when I hear the word “cacophony.” I could blame it on the jet lag, having flown over the Pacific the day before, but it wasn’t that at all. It was the cacophony of laughing kookaburras, magpies, and other (to me) exotic birds orchestrating outside my window. Never in my life had I heard such sounds. “Cacophony” was no longer a word, but an Australian souvenir.

The next vocabularical (I like inventing words, too) challenge would come from plunging into the French language. Here, I have discovered yet another new way to learn and remember words, and I call it “immersion driven vocabulary expansion” because, well, I like words – the more the merrier.

“Pelle” is a dustpan, and I will always think of the dustpan fixed to the broom hanging in the bathroom (with all the time we must spend in the bathroom in a year, what a great opportunity to find new vocab words!), its original sticker label, “pelle bord caoutchouc,” never removed.

“Concasser” is almost as it sounds in English: to crush (i.e. when grinding wheat), but we never use it like that. Among my climber friends, it is a word of encouragement and motivation – “you’re going to crush that route!” “Concasse! Concasse!”

“Flatter” – exactly what it is in English, but pronounced with a cute French accent (flat-TAY). What on earth do you say when a bud tells you he’s falling in love with you and you feel nothing more than friendship? Umm, uhh, thanks…? Hehe…um, that’s very flattering.

Appropriately, I searched for a translation for “doofus” after I pulled this one, but alas, it is a word perhaps too elite for Harper, Collins and Robert.

“Prendre de l’élan” means to gather momentum: Jonathan’s instructions just before we rounded a corner to meet the long hill that separated his apartment from the Toulouse Sunday market in the old center.

More to come…

Adventures on bike - part 2

Denis’ girlfriend came from Russia this week to visit him, and was staying at Les Deux Alpes ski resort, so he planned to go up Saturday with the ski club, teach his snowboarding lessons, and then stay with them for the remainder of the weekend.

As bikes often get stolen if left overnight anywhere, I offered to make a second trip and ride it home for him when I got home from Les Deux Alpes that night.

His bike has always revealed his “other side.” While normally he appears a very elegant, well-dressed, gentle young European man, he rides a funky cheap bmx bike (brand "TopBike") he bought in Paris last year.

From all the jumps he’s taken it on during his time in Paris and Grenoble, the seat is no longer able to retain its elevation and thus he rides super low. The pedals, also showing symptoms of over-jumping, wiggle to the point that one dares not stand and pedal, and even doubts whether or not they will hold on for the ride home; and it has a consistent and rhythmic squeak at every right downpedal.

And so here I am, late another Saturday night, riding low on a funky cheap bmx bike, rhythmically squeaking and wobbling, in my huge black puff jacket, and feeling quite the thug.

I think I even saw a few people cross to the other side of the street when they saw me coming.

Armani makes snowboard bindings?

I could not imagine getting any more lucky with my living situation here in Grenoble – my roommates and I all get along spectacularly well. They’ve become the brother’s I never had (at least around my age, that is), and we have an absolute blast together, from cooking to skiing to going out…

I came home for lunch the other day, and Denis bursted excitedly (in the reserved, very cool way he does) out of his room and asked me to come give my advice on his snowboard. I looked at him funny, as I know nothing about snowboards, and certainly not more than he, but he insisted.

He had just bought a new set of bindings for his gorgeous cobalt blue board, and wanted my stylistic opinion. You’d think he’d know better after living with me for the past 5 months…

The bindings were Burton, make no mistake, and a lovely clean white. Quite stunning on his cobalt blue board. But alas, they were a size just a little too big. Easy call for me – I said, “so exchange them for the ones that fit! I’m sure that’ll be safer and much better.” However, it was a little more complicated than that. They only had red in the size he needed, and that just is not possible with his blue board. He would look the fool in the snowpark.

* * *

The next day, he bursts even more excitedly through the front door at lunchtime, and I ask him what’s up.

“I exchanged the bindings.”

“Oh, you went for the red ones?”

“Well, no, you see, in fact, they’re actually burgundy!”

I smiled and nodded.

“And what’s even better is that the white ones would only have gotten dirty really fast, and the red ones show the B of Burton better anyway, and so can be seen better from afar.”

I couldn’t contain my giggles any more, and after a moment he joined me, appreciating the silliness.

“But seriously, these things are important in the snow park!”

Adventures on bike - part 1

What does a student in Grenoble do when invited to a friend’s apartment across town for a Raclette and is the only one with the Raclette machine?

Simple, really. Remove it from the box, cram it in the gargantuan North Face backpack she used to lug all her climbing gear and clothing from home, strap it down, strap it on, and start pedaling!

And the best part is she’s not the only one traversing Grenoble on bike late on a Saturday night with a huge gear-loaded pack.

This time I rode with a grin wider than usual, laughing to myself at the concept – Anyone who sees me must be saying, “oh, she just got back from the mountains,” and while they would be right, they would never guess what ‘gear’ I have in my pack...”

For those few minutes, I felt very, truly, proudly Grenobloise.

Bar hopping in Grenoble

Time since the New Year has flown like no other. Time always has a way of flying, but this time it must have taken the Concorde to some unknown destination where it broke down at the airport thus obliging at least 2 weeks of repair work before taking flight again at which point it had several backed-up trips to recover before it finally arrived.

Which would explain why I haven’t seen Nico (Mathilde’s boyfriend), Mathieu, and Olivier since before the break.

But I got a fabulous text message from Nico last Friday night which I had not the heart to delete:

« Ce soir rando à Chamrousse, depart 19h de Grenoble. Ski ? Raquette ? Luge ? »

“Tonight, ski de randonée at Chamrousse ski resort, leaving 7pm from Grenoble. Ski? Snowshoe? Sledding?”

I was tempted to get a cheapy plastic sled from the grocery store and head up with it strapped to my back, but decided instead to pull out my hiking boots which would have to serve as snowshoes and my downhill skis for the decent.

I somehow seem to show up ill prepared for every adventure I have with Nico – and it often involves having a huge backpack full of way too much food or something bulky and impractical to lug a long ways… But I have at least become accustomed to these types of adventures – what better way to learn to do better the next time, right? Ahem.

We set off around 8pm for the summit of the ski resort, following the resort’s slopes towards the little building lit only by a few lights and the glowing full moon. I was pleased to keep up with little difficulty most of the way, but on the iced-over black slopes I found no respite even on the snow to the side of the slopes.

A strange combination of digging my ski poles into the ice, kicking the hill to make little toe-sized stairs, and sometimes just trying my best to increase friction in any way possible, I finally arrived at the summit, completely beat and totally content.

In French we say “tout le monde” when we want to talk about “everyone” or “a lot of people,” but the literal translation is “all the world.” After about 10 minutes at the summit of the resort, it seemed as if, indeed, the whole world had arrived.

Mathieu and Olivier were giggling to themselves and explained to us how they had been in a bar the night before with nowhere near as many people as were here at the summit with us.

Though it would have been nice to not be surrounded by a crowd of people after our very relaxed and quiet climb up, I must say that I do love the priorities of the Grenoblois.

After a nice cup of tea, a few more warm layers, and some of my favorite French cookies, we geared up for the decent.

I am never at ease when I cannot see, and my night vision is absolutely terrible – so, naturally I was a little nervous as we started the moonlit decent. But quickly the concept and the spectacle of it all hit me. Skiing by the light of the moon.

Deep breath, loose hips, and I let myself be guided by the glow of the snow…

Bad Girls

If someone were to ask me what one thing I would take from my travels these past two weeks, I would quote a friend of Francine’s, a Bernese shopkeeper:

My mom and I had done something wrong (nothing serious, but slightly funny or something – I don’t remember what), and Francine was recounting the story in Swiss-German to her shopkeeper friend. Then she looked at us and said in English “they’re bad girls.” Her friend said something in Swiss and gave a smirk – then translated:

“Well, you know, good girls go to Heaven; bad girls go everywhere.”
Francine: “Well, I think I’d rather be a bad girl.”

We had a good laugh. Or maybe a bad laugh.

And indeed, if Heaven is as depicted by Giotto on the walls of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, I’m not entirely convinced I want to spend the rest of eternity sitting in a chair in the sky looking down on the world below. I’d probably fall asleep, or get painfully bored like I do in lectures that are way too long. And this professor is not likely to be so forgiving…

Would I be committing a sacrilege if I gave up my chair in order to go everywhere instead?... That is, if I even get one... hm.

La rentrée

The Return

I have a problem. It’s a vicious cycle deal.

You see, I go through these spurts of blog-writing excitement when I have some stress- and presse-free moments, then I get busy with something, and then in that busy-something I have some exciting experiences and lots of mundane ones that I want to write about but I don’t get a chance before the next ones start. Then I get a moment and I cower at all the writing it would take to catch up (just as you would probably cower at all the reading it would take), push it off until later, collect new experiences and writeable moments, sit down again to write (this time running away screaming at all the writing it would take), and it just goes on and on.

I really should work on that thing called “being concise.” How many times have I said that now?

All of this to say that I’m sorry (or not?) but the recount of my Christmas vacation is going to be a little stunted… However! check out my photos because that is quite possibly the best recap of the trip with lots of more lengthy descriptions of some funny historical tidbits and some thoughts and descriptions…

I had a lovely trip starting in Milan to meet my mom, then to Bern, Switzerland to meet Francine, a long-time friend of my mom’s who lives there, then to Francine’s family’s chalet in Mürren (Swiss alps) for Christmas, back to Bern, a last minute decision to spend a few days in Verona before our week in Venice, and a day trip from Venice to Padua.

Two weeks in one sentence – not bad for me!

If I had exams and papers more often, perhaps all my blogs would be this short!

Wish me luck.

Christmas Morning

Christmas comes early in France. Or at least it feels like it…

As I’ve gotten older, the excitement of Christmas Day itself has molded into a more long-lasting and subtler version of happiness. I don’t lose sleep and jump out of bed as I used to. Part of the natural aging process, I suppose, but I do miss that excitement sometimes.

This week I found something to recreate it perfectly. Monday felt indeed precisely like the 22nd of December – when it would just start to hit me that Christmas was indeed only 3 days away. And Wednesday just couldn’t go by fast enough. I even found myself watching the clock at the climbing gym, hoping that I would look at it and realize how late it was, have to go home, and then be able to convince myself I was tired and be able to crash so that I could hurry up and wake up in the morning.

That never seemed to work when I was younger, so I don’t know why I thought it would this time.

My excitement kept me up until 12:30am, packing my lunch, arranging my gear, tying and re-tying knots and checking to see that I could get to campus on my bike lugging it all.

I left my apartment just before 7am, Gael giggling and holding the door open for me as I ducked my abnormally large self through the doorway. I grinned a huge “later dude” as well as I could in French, clambered down the stairs, hopped on my bike, and was on my way in the cool dark Grenoblois morning.

I found the bus without incident, threw my gear in the underneath storage compartment, climbed on the bus, flopped into the quickest seat I could find, and half-slept/half-oogled-out-the-window until we finally arrived.

The first half of the day was, as we say in French, “nul.” That means: values nothing, is really lame, worthless… And I was quite disappointed with my introduction – and even a little worried that after all the hype and excitement I just wasn’t going to dig it. I wanted to push, but they wouldn’t let me go. Arg. It was torture. We waddled like penguins up and down and all around, inflicting pain upon ourselves but with no fun to counter.

We took a normal long French lunch break – and while I normally love that the French stop and take time to eat, I was chomping at the bit to go, learn, charge, practice. But no. Instead I sat on my butt (which was getting colder and colder by the minute), with two very lovely English girls, and we all waited impatiently together.

Finally we recommenced… on a recommencé… hm. That’s a bit of a Frenchism, but I have to balance my anglaisismes in French sometime… We split the groups, and were on our way. This time, with our smaller group of all very similar skill levels, we got much more practicing in, and profited (il faut en profiter!) quite well from a silly exercise squatting with our hands out in front, moving our hips as we turned from side to side to keep our shoulders squared to our destination.

It was magical. I progressed much more quickly, had a blast, and left feeling sufficiently destroyed as I had hoped. In the end, a stunningly good introduction.

So, what did I do today? For hints check out my Flickr photos… ;-) Enjoy! I sure did.

Bienvenue a English Monday

Fou rire. When you start laughing and can’t seem to stop, even though it hurts.

But not because of our linguistic adventures.

Gael’s French friends in Toulouse who he met while studying in Montreal last year installed English Mondays at their apartment to practice speaking. This inspired Gael to propose the same, and today was our first “English Monday.”

We had lots of good laughs, both searching for words to translate various hand gestures and sound effects (it’s hard sometimes being the foreigner, but it’s also pretty darn hard being the support for the non-native speaker!).

It must’ve been the English that irritated his sinuses or something, because Gael kept on needing to blow his nose. He said it felt like something was stuck between his throat and his nose. Must be that darn “th” sound. It’s like me and those French “r” sounds.

After several failed nose-blowing attempts, Gael giggled with relief and amusement – in his tissue he found a solid 2 cm of tagliatelle pasta.

That’s got to be a relief.

La cabane

When I explain to people here what I’m studying, French literature and geology, one of two things always happens. Either I get a confused look and a “well, that’s different” response, or they block out one or the other and ask me either what type of literature I’m studying or if I rock climb. French students register in universities that are focused either in sciences or humanities or engineering… never a mixture. I’m enrolled in two universities. It’s a little complicated sometimes, but totally worth it.

The reason I bring this up is because, well, one, it’s silly and happens faultlessly one way or the other, but also because today I had a literature day. Outdoors.

Today was a literature day not because I read some great book or wrote some paper I was really proud of. Instead, it was a literature day because of how each event seemed to roll into the next, building on some story that has yet to unfold.

It hit me on the ride home when I finally got the full story behind the various people we had met that evening.

Felix and Tony, brothers, both very successful students and artists, are building this cabin because their parents moved away from the mountains and they couldn’t bring themselves to leave. They’ve dropped school, evaded rent, dumpster dive at the local swanky market, design cd labels for friends’ bands, work on the cabin, practice music and circus-ry for their intermittent jobs at local ski stations where they perform spectacles and are lodged and fed at the station for free. Fascinating kids. I spent most of the evening sunk deeply into the big soft sofa blissfully listening to them jam on guitar and accordion. Their music was so unique and extraordinarily beautiful. For me it was one of those moments where it hits me how random life can be. Who would have ever thought even just a few months ago that I would be in a half-built cabin sitting around a wood-burning stove with the friends of my roomate’s cousin on a Sunday evening listening to a beautiful accordion/guitar duo? Life.

So why a literature day? For me, literature is something you read into deeply, analyze. Every word and every scene in a literary work was chosen carefully by the author, and placed equally as thoughtfully.

Every event today felt like it was trying to tell me something. Every word I said or heard seemed so carefully placed and expressed. Every scene planned perfectly to unfold the story in such a way, to set up for whatever is to come next. I had the feeling that it all made sense, but not yet. I must be somewhere towards the end of the beginning – where all the setup is in place and the story is finally ready to begin. Funny, that’s where I usually get bored with books and stop reading them.

The day started early, which I love (though not when I’m in the painful process of waking up). Gael and I arrived at his godparents’ beautiful house in the hills at 9:30am, visited over a cup of tea, and after a good hour were on our way up to the cabin higher in the hills to scope it out for Gael’s New Year’s party. We found our way to the cabin fairly quickly, arranged the wood pile so it would be nice and dry for when they come at the end of December, and set off to climb the peak behind the cabin.

We went as far as we could on the trail until it disappeared and then oriented ourselves toward the cliff face and started climbing. Scrambling on hands-and-knees most of the way, dodging under branches and over blackberry plants, we picked our way to the base of the cliffs where we had planned to traverse until we got to the best place to climb through. We had picked out a place that looked passable by foot, but we still had a bit of traversing to do before we could really assess.

Skipping, hopping and sliding along the base of the rocks we saw many traces of chamois traffic, and profited quite well from the little steps they seemed to have also used. The chamois are a very interesting alpine mammal, somewhere between a deer and a gazelle, with a fuzzy black (in winter) coat adapted to the alpine cold. Awesome animals – and my goodness do they know the mountains. At one point we saw a whole herd of them sprinting across the hill we were so un-elegantly crossing at at least a tenth their speed.

We finally arrived at the base of our chosen pass, and deeming it indeed passable, started climbing. After some decent 5th class climbing (about 2 meters with a good soft landing), lunch in a cave, and another bout of 4th/5th scrambling, we found ourselves at the top of the mountain looking at the ski station where Gael learned to ski. No snow yet.

We explored some of the caves around (read: really deep random holes in the ground with signs posted and planks laid so you don’t fall in them), then broke out in a run following the trail on the arête (the soft grass, moist soil, and rolling hills were all too inviting for a little run). Started our decent, also running most of the way, though with a little bit of intermittent and unexpected skiing on the steep, muddy, leaf-covered trail…

Four hours and about 1000m of altitude change later, we found ourselves back at Gael’s godparents sipping hot chocolate, munching warm apple tarts, and chatting with his family again. I love this country.

Gael’s cousin came downstairs and we took off down the hill to his friends place. Me and my terrible night vision crossed the creek cautiously, guided by the dim light of the cabin. We rounded the corner into a clearing – and I could almost hear the film rolling in the camera over my right shoulder. It was so perfect. The soft voices, laughing, a guitar and accordion practicing a waltz, the single bare light bulb lighting the attic, illuming the rooms and the deck, inviting you to come inside where it’s dry and wonderfully warm.

Maybe it’s time to go pick up all those books I put down after a mere 100 pages back in the day…