Bordeaux-bound

June 27, 2015
Kevin
At my host in Bordeaux. She's very nice, but I'm tired.

June 28, 2015
Kevin
Sorry about the lack of essay-like letters recently. I've been very tired/busy, and the free time at an apartment I've had has been pretty well dedicated to catching up on news (Bernie Sanders is ON FIRE, and gay people can marry now! I should leave the US more often.).

Anyway, this is the chef house! His girlfriend left this morning to see family, and he works from 9 until 0h30 everyday, and I'm patiently awaiting a dish of tortellini, duck meat, and various cheeses. 

My first host, Michael, appreciated [my host gift, matching dish towel and pot holder], but I'm not sure how regularly he'll use it (though, it was folded on his kitchen counter when I left!); my second host, Inti, was still furnishing his apartment, and we used the gifts the entire time I was there; the same with Damien in Marseille; and here, once the current towel is dirty, mine shall be deployed! I don't think most CouchSurfers do this--I've been getting the impression that most people who stay on CouchSurfing are very cheap; a lot of my hosts have complimented me on my not using their home as a free hostel.

Back to three days ago: Notre-Dame [in Marseille] was exactly what I expected it to be, but it gave a really great museum-like explanation of the history of Catholicism in France, which I thought was interesting. The views, as well, from the top of the Basilica--which is already situated atop a mountain overlooking the city--were beautiful, and seemingly endless.

Afterwards, I found--on accident--the Grand Synagogue of Marseille, after which I ate a chicken sandwich on a bagel, as an homage, on my way to the MuCEM, which I think, translated, is Marseille's Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations. The really cool thing about museums in this area is that they're LOADED with neolithic artifacts, like arrowheads, for example. That didn't really interest me at the MuCEM, but after another three museums in which full rooms were dedicated to showcasing their collections of thousands of stone tools, it hit me: If I were ever in the forest, I would NEVER be able to make the stone tools that people made for centuries. Imagine being situated in a forest, in which the only things surrounding you are trees, plants, rocks, dirt, and animals that may be either your predators or your prey; the idea of finding two rocks and magically figuring out how to break them so specifically as to carve other rocks overwhelms me. I think we don't give enough credit to the neolithic people. It's pretty simple to code cell phone applications if you have the world's information at your fingertips; to come up with a strategy, in the company of no one, to forge arrowheads from seemingly worthless materials seems like a much harder skill to develop, and a more admirable one, at that.

Aside from the neolithic artifacts at the MuCEM (AND Marseille's other history museum AND the history museum of Aquitaine in Bordeaux), there was a really great exhibit at the MuCEM that discussed how, or if, people of multiple religions and multiple levels of observance to religions traditions can cohabit, using the three Abrahamic religions as a focus. Not only did I learn a lot about each religion, and various figures throughout the last thousand or so years who've learned and studied much about two or three of them, but the structure of the exhibit was incredible! The exhibit was divided into sections, further divided by blocks of informative texts between sets of 10-12 photos, paintings, and drawings, with various scriptural quotes interspersed throughout the entire exhibit. It almost made ME want to work at a museum one day, to explore the methods of teaching information and guiding discussions that they use.

Later, I had tartared salmon for dinner (the only thing I've disliked this entire time), walked along the beach, and saw a super-small (15-20 people in the audience) play at a local comedy club. It was a two-person romantic comedy (all in French) about a couple vacationing in Marseille that discovers throughout the weekend just how much they hate each other's idiosyncrasies, and how they can, eventually, overcome that, too. I think I got about half of it; the other half was just too fast for me to catch on. But, for about three or four minutes the guy actually pulled me into the play, as one of the characters! It was one of the most stressful, fast-paced, and funny moments of my life! Stressful, because I couldn't make ANY mistakes, as to let them catch on that I don't actually know French; fast-paced, because for every single sentence they uttered, I had to quickly search my mind for an applicable response, and the activeness of that made the time seem to speed three- or four-fold; and funny, because they TOTALLY knew I was American, and in a mixture of helping me along, making fun of my lack of knowledge, and continuing the general vibe of the play, the actors were able to work with me, asking me fairly simple questions ("How much does the water cost?") and saving the fast, complex, multi-tense sentences for their talk with each other. It was quite an experience.

The next day, I saw the Marseille History Museum (60,000 years of history in three hours), ate a calamari lunch, and went to the beach, where I found a girl my age selling "artisan ice cream" with whom I could practice my French! Later, Damien came back from sailing early, and we ate pizza and had a beer by the sea just past sunset.

The next day, I learned just how much to trust others when receiving transport advice, and how to call audibles when I deem it appropriate. I left Damien's apartment with all of my things at 11:30 for a 1:18 train, walking about 10 minutes to a bus stop. (The previous day, the lady at the tourism office told me to take a certain bus to the Vieux Port, at which I would get off, find the next metro to the train station, and take that.) Lo and behold, the lady was wrong, and that line of buses wasn't running! So, at 11:55, I'd gotten back to the apartment, where (literally 15 meters away) there was a different bus heading DIRECTLY to the train station. I found it, thanked the driver, and got to the station just in time. No transfers, no multiple passes, no respect for the Marseille tourism office. Unfortunately, the train from Marseille to Bordeaux isn't yet high-speed, so it was about 6 hours long (compared to the 2.5 hours from Paris to Marseille which is also a longer route, distance-wise). It wasn't so bad, though; I had my own seat, I finished The Omnivore's Dilemma, and I began Dorian Gray. I'm now about a quarter of the way through that book.

When I arrived, my hostess (not the chef), took me to the apartment where I'm staying now, and she cooked me a nice meal of shrimp and pasta, before taking me out to downtown Bordeaux, where she felt obliged to borrow my memory card, take a hundred or so photos on her fancy new camera, and give me the memory card for access to all of them. For once, I didn't have to walk around taking photos.

Today, I got a few nice maps from the tourism office, visited the Aquitaine history museum, climbed a local cathedral's bell tower (300 steps and an amazing view!), had WONDERFUL fish soup, walked through the local botanic gardens, had a strange African beef dish that tasted really great but made my stomach hurt, and I will soon have a delicious pasta dish! 

I think that's all for now. On Wednesday, I go to the farm.