Que des instants

I'm back on my home turf, getting ready to go back to my home home turf.

After Verona, my Dad and I took an incredible train ride through the Swiss Alps to Paris, spent a couple days there, and then returned to Montpellier for the final days of his visit. I think it was my fifth time in Paris, and I enjoyed showing my Dad around the city. One thing that we did there that I'd never done before was to hear the organ at St. Eustache. We actually weren't even trying to go to St. Eustache, but I got turned around and as we were looking at the map to get our bearings, we heard the organ start up inside the cathedral. I feel like most people associate church organ-playing with boredom. If those people heard the organ at St. Eustache, they would poop their pants. The prelude to the service was one of the most stirring, captivating, and frightening things I've ever heard. A thunderous noise that I cannot even imagine contained within two staves. We saw some great things in Paris -- the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, even Les Champs Elysées covered with, as we later found out, 800,000 people -- but none was as memorable as that minute and a half of transcendent music.

My father returned safely to the US on Wednesday, and now I'm really down to it. This morning I had the femme de ménage (cleaning lady) check out my room to make sure it was sufficiently clean. We ended up talking politics for a little while, which was essentially the first conversation we've had all semester. It's funny how transitions are never as tidy as we imagine them. Whereas I'd maybe expect to have a nice gradual decrescendo as I left Montpellier, saying my goodbyes and finding closure with the many people I've met here this semester, it still seems to me that I'm continuing to make connections and build relationships. Last night some people went to Le Massai, the African restaurant, again, and for the first time since January I hung out with a couple acquaintances I met very early on. That's not proper departure etiquette; it would probably make more sense to simply avoid meeting people or builing new relationships in the very last paragraphs of a chapter. Generally speaking it's bad form for an author to introduce a new character at the end of a story. Yet people have a tendency to act as if life were no book, or perhaps a book with no conclusion. We don't typically meet someone with the end of that relationship in mind. Rather, we build relationships as if there will be no end at all. You might call that an illusion, but I'd call it our aptitude for, our sense of something eternal. I titled this post "Que des instants" -- "Only Moments" remaining -- and it's true that there is only a matter of moments remaining for me in Montpellier. Heck, there is only a matter of moments remaining for our time on Earth. Yet -- illusion or affinity -- we live them presently, eternally. I'm returning to the US on Monday knowing that I lived Montpellier presently. It's a good feeling.

My Favorite Thing

I'm writing this from Verona, Italy, at the Gregory residence. My Dad's long-time friend, Kyle Gregory, has been a musician in Verona for the past twelve years. He and his family have graciously welcomed us into their home these past few days, giving us a small taste of the city and of what their lives are like. Yesterday we took a day trip to Venice, only about an hour east of here. It's a remarkable city. I had never thought about how quiet a city would be if you replaced all the streets with canals and all the cars with boats. It's a very peaceful yet very active place. My Dad and I were both jazzed to be able to take a day-trip to Venice, but when Kyle asked his 14-year-old daughter, Emily, if she wanted to go with us, she rolled her eyes and said in disgust, "Venice? I've been there like 20 million times." I guess we can get accustomed to even the most special of places.

I was already in Italy once before, about five years ago on an EF Tours trip with my French teacher and ten other high schoolers. One of the most outstanding memories from those two weeks in Europe was the gelato. Yesterday in Venice, I found that my passion for that sweet heavenly substance has not diminished in the slightest. I can hardly ever say something is my favorite, no favorite color, no favorite number, no favorite book. But I'd say my favorite ice cream -- and actually perhaps my favorite thing at the moment -- is Italian pistachio gelato. Oh my goodness. And at one euro twenty for a scoop, I am currently a very happy man.

Happy summer to those who've made it there! And to those in Colorado, I'll be seeing you soon!

In Nice. It's nice.

Salut au monde! from me and my Dad. We got to Nice yesterday and walked about 7,000 km to get to our hotel, which is apparently -- and this without any exaggeration -- farther away from downtown than the airport. On the plus side of things, the whole walk was alongside the Mediterranean. A very pleasant exhausting walk.

We had a great time in Montpellier over the weekend, seeing the city and enjoying many moments at outdoor cafes. Next stop: Verona, Italy, where Dad's friend Kyle lives. I'll try to keep giving brief updates during our trip, but this blog may come to an end pretty soon -- after our two-week excursion, I'll have a few days in Montpellier again and then I'll be back in the States. Crazy.

I hope you're having an adventure of your own. There are plenty to be had. Peace and love

Academic Update/African Food

Salut tout le monde!

Believe it or not (I don't really believe it myself), I have only one more day of classes in Montpellier! I have a Phonetics test tomorrow afternoon for which I sorely need to study, followed by the final session of my literature class. Yesterday I took my Grammar exam, which I'm almost positive I passed. My entire grade for that class came down to literally 20 questions where I had to identify the category and function of certain groupings of a paragraph. This morning I took my philosophy exam, for which I actually felt rather prepared and which, depending on how my professor grades, of course, I think I passed as well. It was a commentaire de texte (commentary) on a part of the preface of the third section of Spinoza's Ethics. Interesting thinker, that Spinoza. I largely disagree with his philosophy, but he was quite bold for someone writing in the 17th century. With some focused studying (and a little Frisbee break this evening) I think I'll pass my Phonetics exam as well.

I just barely got a passing grade in my Poetics class which ended last week. It's my only third-year course I took this semester, and the professor is sharp, well-read, and clearly a discerning critical thinker. I put in a lot of time but not as much as I would have wanted for my paper, and before I got it back all I was really hoping for was a passing grade. After a not altogether encouraging introduction where she said the papers ranged from excellent to failing, she passed back our essays and I guess I got exactly what I asked for -- a 10.5, one-half point above the minimum passing grade. I was somewhat relieved but by no means thrilled. Later, when I flipped through to read her notes, to my great surprise I noticed that there were pages missing. Actually, earlier in the week she had emailed me to tell me that the last page was missing, so I sent it to her and apologized for not having stapled them together. But apparently it was a printing error and not a packaging error, because my paper was also missing the sixth and the ninth pages. For an 11-page paper, that's a significant amount of missing text. That I still received a passing grade proved to me two things and taught me one other. One, I should be perfectly content to receive a 10.5 on an incomplete work, and two, that she must not have read my essay all that carefully. I hate to assume that it's because I'm an exchange student and that she gave less time and attention to my work because she figured it could be mediocre at best, but it's hard to let go of that assumption. It's maybe the first time I have felt treated unfairly in the education system. Oh yes, and what I learned: always check to make sure all the pages printed out right.

And as an aside, I simply have to say something about how I spent my evening last night. My Camerooni (is that what we say?) friend, Bertrand, invited me and others to an African restaurant downtown called the Massai. Since we were meeting at the university at 7, I figured I'd have a couple hours to study afterward, but -- and all the better -- the night unfolded in typical southern France / African tardiness. We got there a little before 8. The upstairs is nothing extraordinary -- a few tables, a small bar -- but the gentleman led us downstairs, where a table awaited all ten of us, chairs on one side and a long cushioned seat with red and gold-embroidered pillows on the other. Then he started up the music, popular African songs that played on speakers more fit for a club than a restaurant. Well, they were perfectly fit for this restaurant; Bertrand and my Senegalese friend, Sylvain, told me that nearly all restaurants in Africa have music playing like that. They eat for a while, then they dance, then they eat, then they dance some more. And Bertrand and Sylvain certainly danced. Bertrand asked the waiter to put on some Camerooni music, and once that got going he became even more animated than he usually is. Dancing and grooving to the music (it's great music -- so rhythmic!) and discussing what we would all order, somehow we ended up getting our main courses at nearly 10:30. Who knows if it was all the waiting or if it was simply the culinary quality, but that food tasted so damn good. The Aloko -- fried plantains -- was amazing. Naturally, we passed several moments in relative silence, our attention suddenly on other things than music and conversation. After more dancing and more eating we ended up leaving after midnight and getting back to the dorms around 1. I'm not accustomed to eating African food, to dining with music booming at my back, or to having dinner out last for six hours, but I tell you what -- I am certainly a fan.

An Eclectic Update -- Jared Kelly, Frisbee, School

First of all, if you know Jared Kelly, you need to call him, email him, or make mention of him on your blog, because yesterday was his birthday!!! Twenty-two years old. What an oldie (but goodie).

So life in Montpellier marches on. In eight days I'll be done with all my classes and exams, and in nine my Dad is coming to visit me. Our rough plan is to spend some time in Montpellier, Nice, Verona, and Venice. He's been studying French this semester using one of those teach-yourself-French CD series. Apparently he's good at least for asking how to find Boulevard de St. Michel. I guess I'll take care of the rest.

I am really looking forward to his visit, though it will definitely mark the final moments of my time in France. He'll be here until the 26, and then I'll have a few days to pack up, say my goodbyes, and soak up the Montpellier sun before leaving from Paris on the 31. For those who don't know (which could be a lot -- I'm not always good at communicating this sort of thing), I will be staying in Colorado this summer as usual. I haven't yet decided what I'll be doing for work, though window washing is ever a possibility. I do, however, have specific plans in mind: I want to hike with my Dad, perhaps do a backpacking trip with Robbie Chalmers and his brother, and train for and run a half-marathon with my sister Nicole. Oh yeah, and play lots of Frisbee.

Speaking of which, I love Frisbee. The weekend before last we brought a Montpellier team to a nearby beach tournament. We were a young team that hadn't even practiced together, so we got 13th out of 15, but it was still loads of fun. It was also loads of hard work, playing 5 on 5 on a 100-meter playing field on sand. And at that point I was still recovering from museum legs -- that gradual atrophy that results from hours and hours and hours of walking at reading pace from one painting to the next -- so it was even more tiring. After the games the first day there was a wine race, a relay race involving running, drinking, spinning around a lot, and running again that inspired lots of laughter and memorable photos. Later that night all the teams gathered for paella and music. I feel like French ultimate players respect the spirit of the game much more than American players. They all love the game, but they love meeting other players and spending time together -- yes, even with opponents -- just as much. It's really something to see. Like the university tournament in Lyon, each match was followed by la ronde, where both teams got in a circle, the captains gave brief speeches on what they appreciated about the game, and everyone played a game together afterward. I'd like to impart that spirit to players in the US.

Last week, right after the beach tournament, I had three major assignments due: a take-home test Monday, a presentation Tuesday, and an essay Wednesday. I had worked on the various tasks for approximately eight minutes over my two-week break, but, miraculously, I finished all of them in time. With how few assignments there are in this academic system, in three days I turned in what accounts for 40% of all my grades for the semester. In the US, I've never had an assignment count for 40% of one single class, not to mention 40% of all my classes for the semester! Needless to say, it was quite a relief to get all that done.

There now remain three exams for me: Grammar, Phonetics, and Spinoza's Ethics. I believe, in fact, that I will go study right now. Peace!

Le denouement

I feel I may have left off on a sour note at my last post. For those of you who couldn't decipher my poetic abstraction, perhaps you heard on the news about the volcano in Iceland that erupted some days ago and whose cloud of ash cancelled nearly all Western European flights for most the week. To be honest, it didn't affect my travel plans all that much. It prevented me from going to Dublin and gave me three extra days in London. Can't complain too much about that. Especially when you consider all the people who were really inconvenienced by the flight cancellations -- Britons stranded around the world trying to return to their families and their jobs, for instance. For me, it was just another part of the adventure.

Come to think of it, disrupted travel plans played a major part in my two-week break. My initial train from Montpellier to Paris was cancelled because of a rail strike; one night in London I waited for a bus until 3 am before giving up and going to a different stop; and when I returned to Montpellier yesterday the tramway was down because of a strike. I got back to Montpellier by taking a bus from London to Paris and then the TGV from Paris. Instead of going through the chunnel -- which I was pretty excited about -- the bus took a ferry. It was a surreal experience. My bus left London at 10:30 Wednesday night, and I woke up around midnight to the angry yelling of our bus driver telling us to get off. There were dozens of coach buses and cars in this long chamber, and we took a passenger lift to the lounge area. I was with this French student named Thibault who I met on the bus and who, remarkably, is a good friend of Marine, a French girl doing a year abroad at Whitworth! I followed him in a half-daze to floor 5 of the ferry, which, but for the people sleeping awkwardly in chairs and on the ground, may as well have been a shopping mall. For some reason I've never considered how large a ferry must be. Quite large, I discovered. There were cafes and shops, huge seating areas and carpeted walkways. We went up another floor and found a quiet place to sleep for the hour and a half before reboarding our bus. We arrived at Gare de Lyon in Paris around 8:00 am, and as we looked at the metro map to figure out our route, my friend Rachel came walking up. What the hell? She's from Montpellier and was on break, too, but what are the chances we'd see each other in the Paris metro? What's even weirder is that I saw her in London, too, in the British Museum. Too bizarre!

After that journey down the rabbit hole, it's very nice to be back in Montpellier. It's warm and humid here, even when cloudy, and you can feel summer creeping on. Next week I have three major assignments due -- my last assignments of the semester, in fact -- which will be hard to finish with my playing in a Frisbee tournament this weekend. It also didn't much help that I made dirt cake with my friends Sarah and Eddy this afternoon. It sure was tasty, though, and fun!

It astounds me that I have only a few more weeks left in France. Two weeks of class, a few days of finals, then my dad will visit me for a couple weeks, and I'll leave soon after that. Just before break I spent my last time with the Tapperts (my pastor and his family) at the CFU (my church). They leave this weekend for the states, as they do every summer, to visit their base of support and ask for continued support for their mission in France. It was a sad and significant goodbye. By and large they have represented the most important aspect of my time abroad, that is, the development of my trust in the Lord. They were very nearly the first people I met in Montpellier, literally the first morning I was here. They took me into their church and their home like a son, and I have benefited greatly from the fellowship that's taken place in their home.

Well before break the idea of "denouement" came to mind. We use the word in English when discussing literature to mean the resolution of a plot, the events that follow the climax. In French it derives from the verb "denouer," which means "to undo," literally to undo a knot ("knot" = "noeud"). With my last time at the CFU with the Tapperts, with my vacation having finished, with only a few weeks of class ahead of me, I feel very clearly in the denouement of my chapter in France. It seems that I experience a somewhat significant denouement in my life every few months in recent years. Last year I started getting sad about leaving for France sometime in August! On the other hand, I'm already really excited about next semester starting and being an RA again. Transitions come at me so fast, they tend to blend together, these beginnings and endings, the process of making and untying all this yarn, all these knots. I go back and forth between Colorado and Whitworth, and now between the US and Montpellier and other places in Europe, and no matter how present-minded I am in each place, threads are constantly being done and undone. I am becoming more and more convince of two absolute truths. Human life is inherently transient, and all that remains and remains constant is God. What I wrote in my second post on this blog -- which I didn't understand as well as I do now, and which I still can't completely understand -- still holds true: God, the one Constant, is with us, ever with us. Two weeks of travel only served to convince me further of this. In allowing me to meet with good friends in Paris, in blessing my travels, in giving me a gracious host in Chester, in keeping me safe in London, in intersecting my path with those of Rachel and Thibault, in granting me a thankful heart, I know the Lord is in my life, solid and active and good.

I took several hundred pictures in Paris, Chester, and London, but since I'm still borrowing a computer, I unfortunately can't put them up here. Not too long from now, though, I'll be back in the US and can post them or, better yet, print them off and show them to you myself! With much love and gratitude, your Montpellier man.

My vacation plans are like a volcano...

My vacation plans are like a volcano
that unexpectedly blew up,
sending massive mushrooming
clouds over the UK,
grounding all the planes
until who knows when.
Oh wait --
a volcano actually did blow up,
and the planes are actually grounded.




(composed in an internet cafe in London)