ma vie commence a Grenoble

The trouble of starting a blog is that I really have no idea where to start... do I start with the summer leading up to where I am now? Do I explain instead what is really more relevant to why I've decided to study abroad? Well, that would take us back at least 1994, and leaves more than half of my life to describe. Perhaps instead I will leave it all out, and in what ensues maybe they will come to explain themselves.

So I'll start with where I am now - computer, my room, mopeds zooming the street below, Dent de Crolles lurking in the twilight outside my window, Russian roomate on the phone in the other room, my fingers a little resistant to typing due to abrasions and overuse. It's been a good week.

I've been in Grenoble, France, for about a week and a half now - and I fell in love with it the moment our train entered the valley. Never in my life have I thought of myself so much as a mountain person - I've always lived near the coast, and truly love life on the land-ocean interface. But as soon as I saw the Alps, I saw so many adventures, and so much freedom. And for the first time, I felt the desire to see snow (mind you, I've never been a cold-weather person).

For now, as we await the commencement of classes, and winter, I'm enjoying the warm alpine summer, climbing, exploring, eating cheese that makes me depressed every time I buy it because of the knowledge that in a year I will not have access to it (unpasteurized, raw milk cheeses not so kosher in the US)...

Today I went climbing with a couple of French friends in the mountains near Seyssins, south of Grenoble proper. I met Mathilde this summer in San Diego while she was doing a seismology internship - she came in to the Outback Climbing Center on my shift once, and recognizing her French accent, I started to speak with her in French for a bit. Her boyfriend, Nicolas, also a climber, had been at Stanford at the same time. And as the world always seems to get smaller and smaller, it turns out that Mathilde lives very close to Grenoble, and her boyfriend lives in Grenoble.

Nicolas has taken me under his wing this week, climbing at the old Chateau overlooking the whole valley, then scaling the western side of Dent de Crolles (tooth of Crolles, a town just east of Grenoble), the mountain which taunts me every day from my window, and then some falaises (cliffs) in Presles - with a drive and hike that almost surpassed the awesomeness of the climbing (views, tunnels, creeks, alpine flowers, the sighting of a rare alpine snake). And today we went climbing with Mathilde who came to visit for the weekend. C'etait super!

It's hard to not feel a little overwhelmed right now - not by the language difficulties (though that does come and go), nor by some sort of shock from the drastic changes of the past few weeks, but rather by the way I have been welcomed here. My roomates have been incredibly warm and welcoming, even before we had even met in person, and Mathilde and Nicolas have already been such great friends, climbing partners, and exploration-facilitators (that sounds kind of funny and sterils, but I couldn't think of any other way to describe it...) showing me so much of the beautiful countryside.

Classes start next week, and I am quite excited. This will of course wane a bit as the stress and routine sets in, but I am also quite confident that my decision to go instead for a French Literature minor instead of a double major was the right one, and that taking lots of geology classes to supplement my Biology/Ecology major with another minor in environmental studies, was certainly the right one.

To stir up the most appropriate words from my childhood and apply them to my current level of emotional sensations...

Splash Mountain!!!! WOOOOOHOOOO!!!!!