Category: France

Au Revoir France

I have now (re)posted my last experience in France (at least for our first stay there, I’ve been back a few times). Thank you for following along. And apologies to those who weren’t interested, I know sometimes it was a big dump of posts.

I had a lot of fun reading those old posts and reliving those experiences. It is weird because in my memory banks, I thought I had written a lot more about the minutia of life in Strasbourg. I thought I had written posts about trams and post offices, restaurants, and dog parks. But I think maybe I added a lot of that to my Webshots page with pictures and captions. That Webshots page is long gone, but maybe I’ll upload all my pictures from France someday and post them here.

It is also weird to read those old posts and revisit who I was all those years ago. I feel like I complain a lot, and I griped about my wife more than I expected. Two things are responsible, I now believe.

1.) I was trying to be funny. My writing was very casual in these posts. I wrote like I was talking to my friends (which in those early days that’s pretty much all who were reading my posts). So, I complained, in the same manner, you’d complain to your friends about inconveniences you experience on a road trip. Even though you are really having fun.

2.) I was in culture shock way more than I realized. France was amazing, but it was also a shock to the system. While a lot of our friends spoke English, I was surrounded by people speaking a language I didn’t understand. That was confusing and anxiety-inducing. The culture was very different than mine and that was challenging. I’m glad I experienced it, but I can see now how that stress came out in my blog.

Anyway, thanks for reading along.

I will continue to go through my old posts and repost them. I honestly don’t remember what I did with my blog when we got back. I know I kept writing movie/music/book reviews and talking about pop culture. I also posted a lot of what we now call memes – silly little things I found on the Internet. I’m pretty sure the day-to-day stuff mostly disappears. I know you all are just as excited as I am to find out 🙂

Mostly Back

What was going to be a three-day family visitation, turned into a full week’s vacation.

All of Amy’s immediate family rented a cabin in Townsend, TN, which is nothing of a town right at the beginning of the Smoky Mountains. It was very close to Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg, which brought us some day visits. Both burgs are such tourist traps I once again felt plenty of reverse culture shock. While walking around Gatlinburg Amy turned to me and said,

“Americans really are a fat bunch of people.”

It was true, nearly everyone around us was well overweight, sucking an ice cream cone, eating a funnel cake, and wearing the most obnoxious tee shirts. Gatlinburg is probably not the best place to find good American culture, since it is nothing but eateries, tee-shirt shops, and kitsch.

We also visited Talahachee caverns and took a river raft ride. The river was very tame, which was what we planned since Amy’s nephews are small children.

By Wednesday I was ready to go, which was my original plan, but both my mother-in-law and sister-in-law accosted me about it. In my mind I had lots to do: find a home, talk to my former work about getting my job back, move, etc. But it seems they felt a few extra days were more than worth my time. The time was nice, but too long. I kept feeling like I had the stuff to do. Being here leaves me with an uneasy feeling. It is as if I have had this nice long break in France, and now is the time to get back to work. Sitting still in Tennessee made me feel idle.

The extra days turned out to be good, mostly, because my parents came up on Friday. In bed, I heard the doorbell ring at about 8:30 but paid it no mind figuring it was the cabin owner. I knew Alton would be up, and figured he could handle it. A bit later I got up for the restroom and stuck my head into the living room. Two people were sitting and talking to Alton, but I didn’t recognize them and went back to bed. I said to Amy that two strangers were in the cabin. We joked about Alton being able to talk to anyone and wondered when they would leave.

A few minutes later Alton knocked on the door and said I should come out. I did so and found that the strangers were my folks. They had come up because my grandfather has taken a turn for the worse. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease a couple of years ago and has steadily gotten worse. They’ve now gotten him a hospital bed and a nurse comes in each day to take care of any need. It was very difficult to see what was an enormously strong-willed man look so brittle and broken.

Happier times were soon had when we dined out with some old college buddies, Mullins and Juliana. It was grand to see them again, and their little boy Isaac.

I would like to say I’m totally back to the blog now, but it will still be sporadic. We go tomorrow to look for a house in Bloomington. Hopefully, we will find one this week, but there is no guarantee that we can move in so quickly. Then there will be a wait for us to get our internet connection. So, for a bit longer, blogging will be touch and go. I really will have details of our European vacation…sometime.

Kinda, Sorta Back

We returned safely from our two-week vacation (what I was vacationing from, I am unsure) on Saturday evening. It was a grand, if exhausting old time.

I do plan to blog out the whole trip, but I’m just not sure when. We fly to America on Thursday and there is much to do before then. My landlady is coming over this evening for a final inspection, so we are busy cleaning everything to perfection. This is particularly difficult since we have nowhere to put our bags in this small place. Of course, we are also packing everything we have in preparation for our departure.

I didn’t think we had purchased that much stuff in our time here, but packing it all up has proved me wrong. We sent one suitcase with our friend Pamela when she returned to the States. We still have four very full suitcases sitting here, plus a large duffel bag, two small carry-on bags, a backpack, and a laptop bag. This is what we will take on the plane, but does not include the 2-5 boxes we will have to ship full of junk.

My wife is a packrat extraordinaire. We’ve had far too many arguments over the packing situation. You see I believe we should take what is necessary, and chuck the remainder, which to me includes stuff like books, towels, and things. Amy likes me chucking my books just fine so she’ll have more room for her pizza advertisements and torn maps on the backs of menus. Seriously, we’ve argued over whether or not to keep a Dominos ad, because it is in French and she might possibly one day want to use it for class. Such is life with a pack rat.

But I digress much. The point of this little post was to say I am not going to have time, most likely, to blog about our past trip. Thursday is coming too fast to get everything down. Sometime in August, I should have a moment to get it down, plus our trip home, Gatlinburg excursion, and possibly the new move to Bloomington. So it will be a long period of nothing followed by massive dumping of blog experiences.

Such is my blog.

So Long, Farewell

Amy and I are leaving Saturday for Dublin. We will be visiting that fair Irish city for a day or so, meeting up with my sister and her husband, and then taking a packaged tour of Ireland. We’ll rendezvous back in Dublin after about three days and then fly to Barcelona.

We will spend a couple of days in Spain and then take a train up to Montpellier. We’ll spend a few days traveling the Riviera, and then we head to Tours. This is a city very close to some beautiful Renaissance castles, which we’ll be touring. Then it is several days in Paris, including the French version of July 4th, which is on the 14th and called Bastille Day and celebrates the beginning of the French Revolution.

Sometime around the 17th, we will return to Strasbourg to finish up our packing for our return flight home.

We fly home on July 21. After a few days of recuperation, we are traveling to Gatlinburg, TN for several days’ worth of relaxation and family visitation.

Then we will desperately be trying to settle back into Bloomington, which includes finding a new home.

All of this is to say that I am going to be absent from the blog for a good while. I’ll probably have some time post-vacation, pre-flight home to write about our vacation, but then I’ll be absent again while we visit and settle back into the USA.

So, take care of yourselves, folks. See you soon.

Fête de la Musique

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Yesterday was not only the longest day of the year, but it also marked the date on which Amy and I only have one month left in France. It was a rather busy day for us as well.

Our water, once again, was being shut off at 9 in the AM and so we awoke early, showered, and breakfasted. We then left for the library to return and check out books, CDs, and a DVD. While we were out and about we decided to check in with Air France to see what an extra piece of luggage would cost us.

Amy has about four boxes full of study material here, which she has to have in Indiana when we get back so that she can study for her Ph.D. exams. The German post office (which is cheaper than the French PO) is going to charge us about 60 Euros per box! Air France will charge us 100 Euros for an extra bag. So, we are now looking at cheap, but durable bags in which we can stash at least a couple of boxes worth of books.

After lunch, we spent the afternoon lounging in the shade at the park. It was a very pretty, yet extremely hot day. Without air conditioning, our apartment is rather unbearable, and thus sitting under a tree is preferable to sitting on our couch.

It was also the annual Fete de la Musique in Strasbourg, which is basically a city-wide music festival. At all of the larger city squares, they set up official stages in which the more popular local bands and a few medium-sized names in French music jammed into the wee hours of the morning. Yet at nearly every block in the city unofficial musicians were playing their tunes. This ranged from a 7-piece zydeco/reggae band to one guy playing a flute with another guy playing an old recorder. No matter where we were in the city, we could hear music.

We were meeting with a group from the university around 8:30 but Amy and I decided to wander around a bit first. We caught a fun French group with a terrible Rastafarian sax player in the Place de Zurich. Then we wandered downtown where there was live music playing every 20 yards or so. These street performers were so close together you could hardly hear them apart from each other. Around the cathedral it was madness. An official stage was set up in the Place de Gutenberg as well as nearby, right in front of the cathedral. Non-sanctioned performers were everywhere in between, as well as a throng of people. The poor choir, in front of the cathedral, could barely even be heard even when I was standing but a few feet from them.

strasbourg cathedral Time came and we went to meet the gang. None of us had any idea about where to go, so we began wandering back toward the center of town. The crowds were expanding and it was quite an experience just trying to keep the 12 of us from getting lost. We caught short snippets of several bands before always moving on. As is always the problem with large music festivals, no matter where you are, you always think something better is around the corner.

Eventually we all tired and amazingly found empty seats at a local café. It was a little removed from the live music, but the block was more than making up for this with DJs playing piped-in music. Our café was unlucky enough to be very near two DJs while employing one itself. This created three separate pieces of music blending together into one loud mess. It was so loud we couldn’t really talk to each other and I quickly developed a headache. Our gang seemed content in sitting there drinking beer, but I became discontent and told them we were leaving. It was not only the annoying DJs, but the fact that I was spending my night listening to canned music while live music was literally playing around the next corner, and throughout the city. I guess we might have seemed rude, but I was sick of sitting there.

We caught a punk/metal band in Place Kleber. They covered Nirvana as we were walking by, so we decided to hang out a bit. It has been a long time since I caught a live metal act and I must admit it was fun. The energy was really strong, and the kids were having fun jumping up and down.

Our feet got tired so we wandered away again to another square in which there was grass to sit upon. The band was playing lots of classic American rock and we decided to stay. They played covers of Dire Straights, Elvis Presley, James Brown, Deep Purple, and AC/DC. And let me tell you, you haven’t lived until you’ve been surrounded by a mass of drunken French people screaming “Highway to Hell” at the top of their lungs.

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The music officially ended at 1 AM, but many of the unofficial acts played much later. The street parties didn’t end until much later as well. We returned to our apartment and tried to sleep. Luckily the official places around us had cleared out early which moved the party a few blocks away. I still was awoken a few times by the drunken hordes singing their lungs out as they returned home, but all was well.

Life Is But A Swim

Yesterday we went to the lake for a swim. I am not much of a swimmer. I like the activity well enough, but it is a rare thing for me to actually make the effort to do it. In fact, the last time I took a swim was during my honeymoon three years ago.

A large part of the reason I don’t swim much is my body. I am not what anyone would call fit. I’m not a fat slob, but I’m not too far from it either. I have the white man’s paunch. I have no upper body development. If I have any sort of a tan it is of the farmer’s variety, which makes taking my shirt off less than pleasant for all spectators. The little swimming I’ve done since college has been in private pools with nearly no one actually in the water or poolside.

However, seeing the wide variety of people at the lake (women in bikinis with their large bellies hanging out, old men with their paunches tumbling over their speedos) I decided my unattractiveness would fit right in.

The water was cold. This brought me quickly to the ever-present lake decision: do I make my way into the water slowly, allowing me to adjust to the temperature in minute proportions; or do I just plunge right in, giving me a quick jolt which I absorb more quickly? Never one to prolong things I jumped right in and plunged underneath the water. This also gave me the ability to put all of my body underneath the water and out of the eyes of little boys who may decide to taunt me for either my whiteness or fat boy body.

Arising from the plunge I remembered why swimming in a static body of water isn’t always pleasant. The water was dirty. A hundred little kids had kicked up all the dirt, sludge, weeds, and slime from the bottom. I tried not to think about what particles were now clinging to my body, especially when some of it splashed into my mouth.

We swam for about an hour, at which time the question that always occurs to me when I go swimming occurred to me.

What do I do now?

As an adult, swimming isn’t exactly a fun activity anymore. The water is cool and refreshing from the hot sun. It is a pleasant exercise for a time, but then I get bored. So we got out and returned home. I managed to avoid the scorching sunburn. Perhaps only because I’m in a perpetual sunburned state these days. Amy, however, was not so lucky. She is now several shades of red. She must have moved the straps on her swimsuit at some point because there are two large red stripes down her shoulders. For I forgot to put sunburn under her straps. Elsewhere, there are blotches of red and white, for my general ability of sun screening seems to not be so good.

The Château du Haut-Koenigsbourg

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A continuation of last Saturday’s adventures.

After the horrors of the concentration camp, we trekked up a mountain to visit the Chateau du Haut-Koenigsburg. It was originally built in the 12th Century, but was sacked and rebuilt in the 15th century, and then sacked again and left to rot up until the early 1900s when it was declared a national monument and completely restored.

Its purpose was mainly for defense, being one of many castles located in this particular area. Its layout is not particularly pretty or ornate, but rather plain. That is not to say that it wasn’t interesting, or even beautiful, but that its purpose was not for its residents to live in grandeur. It will be interesting to compare this visit with the castles we visit just south of Paris. Those are supposed to be highly ornamental and gaudy enough to put the Biltmore mansion to shame.

On the road to the castle, we saw signs for La Montagne des Singes, which is to say, the mountain of monkeys. Nearby, they have a little zoo in which they keep hundreds of monkeys. Our friend Jill told us about the time they went to Monkey Mountain and brought their own popcorn. Apparently, the zoo gives all visitors a little packet of popcorn to feed the monkeys, but it is never enough to last the entire visit. The popcorn they brought was of the microwave variety and had plenty of salt and better. It must have smelled and tasted great to the monkeys because she said all of them began to follow her around and became rather aggressive toward the popcorn. So much so that the guards had to rush out and protect them from the monkeys!

Alas, we didn’t have time to visit the monkeys.

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We gathered our people at the bottom of the castle, where there is a lookout point. The castle rests upon the top of a mountain, and the view is splendid. After an hour or so of driving through the mountains, we were all ready to use the restroom, and like most public toilets in France, we had to pay 50 cents to actually use it. Although a few unsavory folks snuck into the stall without paying, because the guard was apparently off duty.

I was first surprised and happy to see that a scene out of the French classic movie, La Grande Illusion, was filmed at the castle. Having just watched the film a few nights before, Amy and I were very excited about this fact. For those curious, it is the scene in which the commander distracts the German soldiers so that the two French soldiers may escape out the window.

The interior of the castle looked very much like what a castle always looks like in my mind’s eye. It was all very large. And I’m not talking about the size of the castle in its entirety, but each individual room or hallway. The walls were all made of large stone blocks. The rooms were very open, with high ceilings. There were Alsacian Windows throughout, but shadows crept along many corridors. And there was a draft felt throughout.

It is difficult to imagine what it must have felt like to actually live there. Pre-electricity, it would have had to have been lit using torches and gas lamps. The multiple fireplaces would have raged most of the night and day to keep any semblance of warmth. Even then, it would have been very cold in many of the spaces, with cold drafts sweeping through. The fires would have kept everything hazy with smoke. And then there was always the thought of attack. The castle was sacked at least twice in its history, and it must have sustained more attacks than that. Much of the time, they were surely at peace, but Alsace has a long history of violence and war.

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One side of the castle was a keep, where there were many instruments of war. Cut into the walls were little slivers designed for archers to shoot out of. At our feet were little holes cut into the floor so that boiling oil or whatever could be poured down upon whoever was attacking. I couldn’t help but think of the Battle of Helm’s Deep from The Two Towers. In one room were old weapons of battle: suits of armor, axes, and a variety of spears. In an adjacent room were more modern weapons, including cannons and rifles.

Seeing this castle and many of the medieval cathedrals throughout France always makes me think of life during those times. I can’t imagine. The harsh realities of daily life are unfathomable. If it wasn’t war, malnourishment, or the plague killing you, then it was your own king or the church stringing you up to die.

Natzweiler-Struthof Concentration Camp

I am a little late in getting this up. I am finding I have less and less energy for writing anything these days. I also found after writing my account of the concentration camp, I just didn’t have it in me to talk about the castle. Perhaps some other time.

As our time in France is coming to an end, I have come to realize that we are just not going to be able to see everything that we had hoped to see. Though the border is but minutes away, Amy and I have seen very little of Germany, and thus it shall have to wait until another visit some years in the future. I had truly hoped to visit the many castles that the countryside holds, and also to visit some of the many horrors left over from the Third Reich.

This past weekend, I was able to visit one of each of these types of things, albeit in the Alsatian mountainside and not the mythic country that is Deutschland.

Our first stop was the concentration camp Natzweiler-Struthof. Though not the traditional death camp for Jews, it was never-the-less a place of absolute horror for many German criminals and members of the French resistance.

To say that I have been looking forward to visiting a concentration camp is to miss the point. Yes, I have wanted to go for a long time and even felt some anticipation before we left, but I can’t say that I was looking forward to it in any real sense of pleasure. Visiting a place of torture and death is not my idea of a good time. Yet, it seems these places are important, not only in a historical sense but in a manner of trying to understand what we are capable of as human beings.

The camp is located high in the mountains. It is a beautiful area, and I often found myself struck by the majesty of the scenery around me and then the horror of the place below my feet.

Most of the barracks were destroyed by Neo-Nazis many years back. In their foundations are little plaques inscribed with the names of the other concentration camps. This is designed to tie this camp with all the others. What remains of the other buildings is a rebuilt barrack, a kitchen, and a prison in which inmates were tortured, experimented on, and murdered.

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In a little ravine beside the camp, little flowers now grow. A placard noted that in this area many inmates were shot dead. It said the inmates were forced to carry large boulders up the hillside and deposit them in the ravine. A soldier would often kick the tired inmate just as he was bending over to drop the boulder. If the inmate fell from this kick, a machine gunner in the watchtower would shoot the inmate pretending it was an escape attempt. For this murder, the gunner would get an extra day of vacation.

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At the top of the camp is a large memorial. It is a tall spire sculpted to look like flame and smoke, engraved with the image of a man. Next to the spire are small crosses, each with the name of a resistance fighter who died for the cause of France.

In the prison building, there were many methods of torture set up. Beside the regular cell rooms, were tiny cells designed as solitary confinement. They were about 4 feet in height, and no larger than a small closet. For the smallest fractures, inmates would be locked into these cells for days at a time, given only bread and water for nourishment. In a nearby room, inmates were experimented on. They were inoculated with various diseases such as Typhoid so that doctors could notate how their bodies reacted to them. When the inmates died their torturous deaths, they were then autopsied.

A small bare room was said to be a place of execution room. Inmates, not condemned to die on the gallows, but never-the-less committing some small infraction that angered a guard enough, would be taken into this room and shot in the back of the head. A small drain in the center of the room would wash away the blood.

The most harrowing site was the oven. Like many of the concentration camps, the Nazis decided the most effective way to get rid of the bodies piling up, was to cremate them. This camp held but one oven, but it was enough. To see a thing in which so many were destroyed senselessly, was a thing of horror. I will never forget it.

As I walked to the exit, I took one last look down the slope of the mountain, taking in the entire camp. Thinking about all I had just seen, I said a small prayer.

Let us remember what we are capable of, so we shall not forget what we have done.

Long Time Gone

I apologize for having written so little the past several days. This past week a group from Harding University came over and I spend most of my time with them. Each morning I tagged along as they split into group and distributed flyers throughout the neighborhoods. Every evening they held a meeting which Amy and I also attended. So, from about 8 in the morning until 11 or 12 at night I was very busy, excepting maybe a few hours in the afternoon. And even this time was often spent either doing my French homework or attending class.

To have spent the last 8 months doing absolutely nothing, it was quite a shock to the system to suddenly be busy for 12 hours a day.

On Saturday we all did some visiting. We went to the only concentration camp in France. It was not a place of mass execution for the Jews but rather a work camp for German criminals and members of the French resistance. Yet still, thousands of people were malnourished, tortured, experimented upon, and murdered. It was a very harrowing experience. One I’ll not likely forget.

After the camp, we visited a castle. It was used for defensive/military purposes so was not nearly as beautiful or ornate as other castles in France, but it was still quite interesting.

In a day or two I shall post a more extensive entry about these two sites, along with some photographs. For now, I wanted to chime in, since the blog has gone to neglect over the last several days.