Well it's about time, Lauren!

I told myself I was going to blog and post pictures when I went to the fair a couple of weeks ago.

That didn't happen.

THEN I said I was going to blog and post pictures when I uploaded my photos from the Circus to my computer. I had stories for pages about the absurd fact that Chris had never been to a circus before to the man brushing a camel to the seemingly unstable supports holding up the net beneath the trapeze artists to the elephant that forgot to use the restroom before coming out for his performance.

That didn't happen either.

So just now as I started clicking around the internet, I decided that it's time for me to post again. But my  post isn't going to be about these isolated, incredibly fun moments that I've had in the past few weeks with some of my recently acquired absolutely lovely friends. In fact, I'm certain that there will be times I will wish that this post had been about them, but it's not (although I might post some of my photos at the bottom, we'll see).

I want to post about fear.

My closest friend here, Michelle, is going through a hard time with friends back home and friends abroad, and I feel for her. And, while you probably don't know her well or at all, keeping her in your thoughts and prayers would be a kind gesture at this particular point in time. In addition to the external stress from friends and family here and abroad, many of us are winding down our time in Aix, in France, in Europe, and working on sorting out our affaires (range-ing them, to be franglais). It's a frightening time full of a sweeping spectrum of emotion that brings to mind what Semisonic wisely sang, "every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end."

I am living a beginning that is about to come to an end, allowing the birth of a new beginning, and this prospect is terrifying. As of this coming Monday, I have four weeks left in beautiful Provence. During this time, I will work, enjoy myself, sleep too much, eat delicious food, play, romp, and bask in the beautiful weather that we are so fortunate to have. After this time, however, I will tumble back down - hopefully with as smooth an atterrissage as possible - to Mississippi, to my wonderful family, to my fabulous friends, and to no plan whatsoever. And this prospect is terrifying.

I look forward greatly to getting to spend time with the people there that I love, but at the same time, I anticipate the schism from the people in Aix that I love with anxiety. The bonds that we have here have been forged quickly and strongly, and as we separate, we will return to all ends of the earth: England, Laos, Russia, Egypt, Chicago, Vancouver, Virginia... the list goes on.

Thomas Friedman wrote about the world being flat. It's easy to bounce from place to place, experience new cultures, meet new people, enjoy the novelty of the world. He didn't write - at least in the bit that I read - about what happens when you have to bounce back home. I suspect very strongly that I will quickly find myself in a routine, but as of this moment I don't know what it will be.

I have applied to work in a handful of school systems in the Jackson-Metro area, but who knows if that's what I'll end up doing permanently? I don't.

I love it here, I love you all there, and I'm spinning my wheels in anxiety thinking about re-entry.

Well, it's about time that I post. It's about time that I come home. It's about time that I leave home. It's about time that I start again. Well, it's about time, Lauren.

[Here are some photos from the fair and the circus]

Yes, I paid 5€ to bungee jump on a trampoline.
I also almost passed out from the effort. I'm not 12 anymore. 

Chris attested that doing flips was harder than he expected.

Michelle's fantastic camera skills captured us both mid-air at once.

Yes, this man is SWEEPING a camel.

PR 5443 - FINISHED!

I don't think I've ever written two 20-page papers in 3 days before.

Check that one off the bucket list.

On to explaining the US Government to French people. I found this infographic on Google that I intend to learn. Any specifics that I should teach would be appreciated; I'm not exactly a government scholar.

It Works Like Clocks.

It certainly easier to understand things looking backwards. Last week, I made a post about inexplicably breaking down at the wrong hill, the wrong bus stop, and a handful of other places that certainly didn't warrant breakdown. I tend to write random breakdowns like that off on hormones, seeing as they tend to cause waves of uncontrollable emotion.

I think, however, that I was wrong.

For years, when I get to be about a week away from the deadline for a major project - however close or far to finished with it I actually am - I tend to break down, complain to my mom that it can't be done, get reassured that, sure enough, I'll be able to finish it, pull up my big girl pants and plow through to the end. Every play I have directed, my senior honors thesis and defense, countless performances - really anything major enough to start on before the night before it's due has been known to send me into hysterics about a week in advance. (You should've seen me right before the Patriot Performers did ANY of their events. I was a wreck. Ask Mom.)

Now, the reason that I didn't realize that this breakdown had to do with projects being due was mainly that I didn't really REALIZE that I had projects due. Now, this is rather unfortunate since it means that I couldn't break down over my research being inadequate, my writing being trite and disjointed, or my thesis statements being too weak. It meant that I had to break down over some completely inexplicable thing - being stuck across a body of water from a quite lovely mountain.

So, last night, I started going through to verify that I'd done all of my coursework for this semester. (If you don't know, I'm enrolled in Mississippi College's graduate school for an MS in Communications; this semester, I'm taking a public relations course online that's proved more difficult to keep up with than I expected it to.) What I learned as I was checking off assignments and going back through the syllabus is that I am missing two ten-page research papers (in APA 6th style), a 20 or so page PR Plan to be modeled on a sample that we were given (that I have, fortunately), and a case study project that I hadn't ever heard of. Doing some quick math, I realized that was about... 40 pages of paper to write by Thursday.

So, accepting and attributing Thursday's breakdown to these projects, I put on some big girl pants and forge boldly ahead. At this point, any thoughts, prayers, or positive energy in my general direction would be incredibly appreciated. I will probably spend the next few days threatening people with, "I might cry." but the truth is I'm already done with that for this project. Perhaps another time.

Je me suis trompée. Or something,

I should probably write this post in the optimist vein of "a good time or a good story," but it's really just the case that I had a miserable day. Perhaps, however, I will spin it in such a way that makes me not remember today as the day I broke down crying on a hill that wasn't a mountain, by a dam overlooking a very picturesque lake, and at a bus stop after two busses decided that we weren't people they should stop for. Or I could be brutally honest and just say that that's what happened.

I should've known that it wasn't looking like a good day. It took longer than it should've to get up and going, and, as we were almost at the point of leaving, things started to go awry.

If you've known me for more than a couple of hours and we have been travelling any distance on foot, you will know very well, that I'm not exactly the most coordinated of people. (This surprises a lot of people who also know that I've been dancing since I was 4. I've talked to a number of other lifelong dancers with similar problems.) Now, the first problem occurred at the combined faults of Jason and me. He had been weighing a couple of bottles of wine to see if they would go in his suitcase without pushing it over the weight limit, and was in the process of unpacking the bottles to fill his day pack with our lunch (baguette, cheese, and dried sausage; two bottles of water; mmmm). I turned around to get something off of my armoire shelf, didn't realize there were bottles on the floor, tripped, knocked them over, and watched in horror as one (fortunately only one) burst into pieces on my floor, flooding my room with wine. Now, while you might think a wine flood would be a fortunate thing to have, I'm not particularly fond of it on my things. Miraculously, it avoided all major items, getting my floor mat wet and staying predominately confined to a small puddle in the middle of my floor.

That slowed us down - floor towels and rags came out, glass shards went into the trash; eventually we got everything cleaned up. I'm still rather wary of walking barefoot in my room again. I'm telling you, it was an omen.

Eventually, we wandered down to the Rotonde and asked in the tourism office where we needed to go to climb the Mt. St. Victoire, our original plan for today. The man in the office gave us two sets of bus hours and instructions as to which stop to take, neither of which coordinated with the instructions that my assistant friend had given us yesterday. Trusting the man at the tourism office equally, we decided to take the bus that came the soonest, letting us off to hike up the north side of the mountain.

We had fifteen minutes or so before we needed to be waiting for the bus, so we went and got a crêpe at the crêpe shop in the underground passage way by the Rotonde. It was delicious.

We caught the bus around 12:15 and asked the driver to let us off at the stop that the man in the tourism office had indicated. When we got to a stop and the man told us it was ours, we dutifully descended. I'm pretty good at following directions.

Unfortunately, the stop where we got off the bus was in practically the middle of nowhere. There was a road off to the right, and, since there was nowhere else to go and no bus for another hour, we decided to just go that way. Now, the man at the tourism office had told us that there would be clearly marked hiking trails, but there were none. There were some cars that came by every now and then, but it was not a heavily trafficked road. After walking some distance, the St. Victoire came very clearly into view. It was MILES away with no clear access from where we were.

When I get lost, I get frustrated, and when I get frustrated, I cry. Jason is very optimistic and patient, and that's really fortunate. I texted my friend who had given us different instructions on how to get up the mountain, and he pretty much laughed at us for taking the bus we did. That didn't help. I sat down and cried while Jason wandered a ways off to see if there were trails nearby that went anywhere that seemed roughly like the mountain we were trying to climb. No dice. He did find a large lake that stood between us and the hill. This made me cry, too.

I was eventually coerced into wandering on down the trail, and boiling frustration brought tears out again when we actually got to the lake. I will admit, the view was beautiful. Once I get the photos off of Jason's camera, I'll put one up.

Frustrated, probably tired, and generally disgruntled, we decided that it would be best to go back to the bus stop and get on the bus home. The hours that we'd been given said there would be a bus in 15 minutes or so, so we sat, played sudoku on our phones, and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

And waited.

After some time, we moved to a different bus stop slightly further down the road but on the other side of the street, thinking that a bus going past would be going in the right direction. Cars passed. Motorcycles passed. French people on bicycles passed. Three busses passed going in the other direction.

It wasn't until two busses in a row passed and, as we tried to signal to them that we wanted on board, wagged their fingers at us in a "I can't stop here" kind of way that I burst into tears again.

Shortly thereafter, we decided to walk down the road and see if we could find another bus stop, which we did. We decided to take the next bus going in whichever direction we could, and if we could, we'd see the little town of Vauvenargues and the chateau that Picasso owned for a while. It took some time, but a bus finally stopped for us. We did go to Vauvenargues - there's not much to see there; it takes about 10 minutes to walk the length of the town. There are pretty views of the mountains, though. Around 4:30, we got back on the bus and came home.

I took a nap and a shower and felt a lot better. Then we had pasta for dinner in town and hot chocolate and beer and live music and the company of friends at the bulldogge, and all of that was good.

What's it that Scarlett said? Tomorrow is another day?

That was some BIG chess!

What is probably the case is that the majority of today's events will come out in various blog posts, facebook statuses, and conversations in the form of the conceited an inevitable form of place dropping. ("Well when I was in Geneva...") We have had a fantastic time the past couple of days in Nice and Geneva, and we hope to maintain as much energy as possible to go see Monaco tomorrow (3 countries in 3 days!), but out of all of the cool things that we've done and seen, there is definitely a story that stands out above all the rest.

It was last week before I realized that my brother and sister-in-law had come to Geneva on their extension of our France trip a couple of summers ago. When this fact was brought to my attention, I sent Michael an email asking for what to do and see while we were here. He had a handful of excellent suggestions, and we took some of his advice and forewent some of it due to time and perhaps financial constraints. The exchange rate is, in fact, an irksome thing.

One of the places that Michael strongly suggested we go was the Parc Bastion. He said that there were two things to see there: statues of the reformers in their pajamas (I think they're actually clerical getups, but when it comes to information about the Reformation, he certainly knows more than me), and "Big Chess."

Thanks to Jason for the photo.

If you know anything about my experiences with chess, you'll know that I do a lot better job of singing the music from the broadway show at the top of my lungs in the shower or on the way to work than I do at actually playing the game. My claim to fame is that, during my first semester Freshman year in college, I played well over 100 games with a couple of guys I was friends with, and despite my perseverance and delusions that I had any idea as to how chess strategy worked, I lost EVERY SINGLE GAME.

I got the "chess with friends" app for the iPhone a while back and started playing Jason. We've played about 10 games, and I haven't won yet (and this is against someone who claims he's no good at chess. How's that for a vote of confidence?)

So, at Michael's suggestion, we meandered to the Parc Bastion and found a sizable crowd of people gathered around big chess boards. There was an open board, so we set up and started a game.

Now, before I go on, remember two things: Jason doesn't speak French, and if you're ever stranded on a desert island, the third thing you need to make sure you have is a deck of cards (so that when you've tried to use the mirror to call for rescue during the day and the flare to call for rescue at night and neither has worked, you can sit down to a nice game of solitaire, and before you know it there will be SOMEONE behind you telling you to put the black 4 on the red 5).

It took about 15 minutes before we had a spectator, and another 5 or 10 minutes before he started wincing at the moves I was about to make. After that, there was a tall, lanky man - who reminded me very much of a man Mom works for - who pretty much yelled at me from a good distance away not to make the move I was about to make. He sauntered over, smoking a cigarette, and started instructing me in some French/English hybrid as to how to move my pieces.

I came back from being way behind when a scraggly Jamaican man took to helping Jason. He didn't really catch on that Jason didn't speak French, and references to the "cheval" and the "tour" weren't exactly clear. (cheval=knight/literally: horse, tour=rook/lit.: tower). So a game that had begun as a frustrating but friendly game of "echecs" turned into team play with some men whose pastime seems to be drinking, smoking, and playing big chess.

A bit later, after some major miscommunication and instruction on the part of my new chess partner to "stand here and smile," - and after Jason did a pretty darn good job of playing this man in chess - a fourth spectator arrived, yelling odd, disjointed phrases in French at Jason about how the game was crazy and he needed to eat more chess pieces... Or something. (He was, in his sanity's defense, unquestionably intoxicated.)

The newcomer lacked comprehension of three things. First, that Jason didn't -doesn't- speak French. Second, that Jason's pieces were white and mine black. And third, that the white pieces that happened to actually belong to Jason, not me, were coming towards me. (For those who don't know how to play chess, pawns only move one way.) I think that at least once, this man tried to give Jason serious, heart-to-heart advice and chess instruction, but the whole being drunk and not realizing that the person you're talking to doesn't speak your language left his message unreceived.

When he started helping Jason, the man who had taken over my pieces yelled at him to not help and told me in a very serious and confidential tone that the man now helping our opponent was a world chess champion. He assuaged my clear concern (/sarcasm) by letting me know that HE was the Swiss chess champion. Who knows if either man is or was ACTUALLY a chess champion? It doesn't seem that important; they were both better than me.

The game quickly disintegrated into a match between my guy and jason's new guy, and it ended with only a few pieces left in play. I lost, but it didn't feel like a loss. I'll mark it as a - on my record. Or something.

Tomorrow, we fly to Nice, bus to Monaco and Aix, and rest. I doubt we'll have an equally entertaining experience as this one, but, if we do, I will welcome it with open arms.

[EDIT] Now, we're sitting in the Geneva airport again, waiting for our ridiculously early but only costing 16€ each flight. Totally worth the 70€ for the middle-of-the-night taxi. The adventure continues.