Food

I've been hesitating a lot about whether to write this post, but I decided to just do it.  So here we go.

I love food.  I love food.  All kinds, really, and there's nothing I wouldn't try at least twice.  I say "twice" rather than "once" because there are plenty of things that after having tried them multiple times, they've really grown on me.  An example is the second big tub of yogurt I have in my fridge right now.  I got the first tub last week only because it was on sale - $2.99 for 16 oz. of full fat, plain and unsweetened whole milk yogurt from a local dairy, where the cows are actually raised and grazed in pastures.  Now, I love me some plain, full fat yogurt, but the first few bites of this stuff were too much for me.  It was very sour, and tasted more like a cow than I usually like my yogurt to taste.  I figured I wouldn't be able to finish the rest of the tub, but I stuck it back in the fridge anyway because I hate wasting food.

Over the next day or two, I tried it with a little sugar mixed in, and with a little sugar and vanilla mixed in, and with some strawberries and a dusting of sugar, and it just kept tasting better and better, until I was quite literally licking the tub empty before throwing it away.  I had to go back to the grocery store yesterday, and it was still on sale for $2.99 and I bought a second tub with no hesitation.

I love to eat, and I will eat anything, and I get great pleasure out of it.  I am also a great proponent of the adage "all things in moderation", and I'm generally pretty good about sticking to that.  The thing is, I regularly eat more fruits and vegetables than the average person, I think, but I also eat a lot of crap, because I love sweets.  This was a minor problem being in France, because while the fruits and vegetables are out of this world, so are the pastries and breads.  And cheeses.  And everything, really.  And when you're only there for a relatively short amount of time, it's very easy to convince yourself that you need to try a different pastry every day, because darn it, there are so many pastries to try!

The upshot of my time in France is that upon weighing in on my return - and I mean that in the literal sense - I had gained a good 10 pounds from where my weight usually is.  I will make a slight digression here and say that I used to be quite overweight.  Now, I will also say that I tend to carry weight fairly well, because I build muscle easily, so I think I usually weigh more than people might guess.  The most I ever weighed was probably in the 8th grade, when I topped out somewhere in the 170s.  And for a 5'3" female, it doesn't matter how much muscle you're carrying, 170+ is overweight.

When I transferred to Uni High, I worked really hard to get in good shape.  I've written about this before, but I started running and kept it up every day the summer before I started there, and I started actually paying attention to what I ate.  The weight came off pretty easily by just cutting out junk and watching my portion control, and over the course of about 5 months, I probably lost about 40 pounds.  That sounds like a lot, but that's exactly what it should be, now that I look back on it: 8 pounds a month is about 2 pounds a week, which is what doctors recommend, so yay for me.

Anyway, this was hard, because I got a lot of flak for it, to tell you the truth.  I felt great, and I was so healthy and eating really well, and people kept asking me if I had an eating disorder!  It was kind of unreal, because for the first time in my life, I was actually eating really well, and that's when everybody started scrutinizing my food intake.  But after I got my weight down around 130, I gradually quit paying attention to what I was eating, and my weight's been relatively stable ever since.  This is largely due to my running; as long as I put in some decent mileage every week, I can basically eat whatever I want (within reason), and I tend to stay somewhere between 128 and 135, which is within my healthy range.

Before I left for France this last time, I was creeping up towards 135, due to eating more and running less than usual.  I go through periods where this happens, so I wasn't really concerned about it.  A little bit of diligence and I would stop gaining weight.  Well, 6 weeks' worth of pastries later, I get home, step on the scale, and I'm at 142.  That was a bit of a shocker, actually!  I don't think I've weighed that much in at least 7 years, or maybe since high school when I first slimmed down.  The number doesn't lie.  Time to actually reign things back in.

So how to regain some control with my eating habits?  The "all things in moderation" thing clearly hasn't been working, because my idea of "moderation" has gotten far more lax over time.  "Moderation" had come to mean a treat every day, and the caloric toll of my treats has been increasing such that they're not actually very moderate anymore.  Add to this the fact that there's a fair bit of research coming out suggesting that bread products are probably pretty bad for us, and the fact that it makes intuitive sense (to me anyway) that our bodies are probably not designed to deal with the amount of sugar we throw at them.

At the same time, I do not like extremism.  I am not a fan of "diets".  I would never claim to be an "-an" or an "-ist" with regard to my food intake, because I think we should eat some of everything.  In moderation.

Except maybe bread products.  Maybe that does mess with our insulin response.  The idea has always made some sense to me, but I've always been too attached to bread products to test it out.  However, having gained a good 10 pounds in the past few months and somewhat gorged myself on breads and sweets for the months of June and July, I'm ready to let the pendulum swing back in the other direction and see what happens.

For this reason, I have decided not to eat any baked goods or other wheat products for at least one month.  I started last Friday, meaning I've completed 8.5 days of this experiment thus far, and I must say, it's going smashingly well.  I'm back down to 137 pounds already - so almost back into what I consider my healthy range - and I'm just not nearly as hungry as usual.  It's pretty amazing, actually.  I'm eating a ton of fruits, vegetables, eggs, and yogurt, and I'm feeling really good; I think my body is responding favorably to the higher fiber, lower sugar, and corresponding even blood sugar levels.  I'm already reaching the point where sweets and junk just don't sound very good anymore.  And I'm eating so much delicious food that I can feel really good about.  Here's what I remember eating yesterday:

scrambled eggs
mushrooms sautéed in butter
coffee
a mango
big bowl of blueberries and yogurt
several slices of watermelon
salad of chopped zucchini, tomato, avocado, butter beans, and parmesan cheese
few handfuls of nuts
iced coffee with milk, vanilla, and a sprinkle of sugar
salad of kale, red onion, dried cherries and cranberries, sunflower seeds
more watermelon
beef jerky
2 big mugs of tea (one red, one black)
large bowl of popcorn

The reason I decided to actually make this post is two-fold.  One is that if I write it down, actually putting it in a public forum where people can see it, I'm much more likely to stick by my resolution.  It's very tempting for me to keep it a secret that I'm not eating bread, because I generally think such resolutions are weird.  Because I don't subscribe to what I feel are arbitrary diet rules, it makes me somewhat embarrassed to be sticking by one, for once.  But I feel it's a worthwhile experiment, and I'd like to actually carry it through.  July 22nd was my first breadless day, so I'm going to keep going until at least August 22nd and re-evaluate once I get there whether I'd like to keep the experiment going.

The second reason is that I'm hoping people will be sympathetic, and maybe even supportive, if they know what I'm doing and why I'm doing it.  I'm headed to Illinois next week (August 3 - 10), and I'm still not sure whether I'm entirely wedded to the idea of sticking by this thing while I'm there.  It'll be a challenge, and I really don't want to be That Person who appears to be looking for attention for their weird dietary practices and restrictions.  I hate That Person, I really do.  But at the same time, I'd like to challenge myself in this way, and see whether I can really stick by it.  So I'm going to try it and see what happens, and I hope people won't think that I'm being That Person, and I also hope I'll stick by my resolve to keep this experiment going despite my fear that people will think I'm being That Person.

I'm tired of talking about this (and I also need to quit typing and take a shower).  But let it be known, once and for all, that I do not have food issues, and that this is an experiment in regaining some self control when it comes to sweets, and also in just seeing what happens if I'm forced to replace the bread products in my life with more fruits, vegetables, and protein.  Nothing more, nothing less.

Well, it ain't no Sainte Chapelle...

... but I'm home.  :)

I've been meaning to post something saying I'm home for the past week (since I've been home for a week now), but I just haven't been feeling motivated.  Today, though, is the day.  I am home.  And it is time to post something.  So before I write anything else, I want to finish up with the Paris post that never made it out of the queue: pictures from my visit to the Sainte Chapelle with Karen.  They speak pretty well for themselves, so the only background information I'll offer is that it was constructed in the mid-13th century by Louis IX to house the Crown of Thorns (yes, like, the Crown of Thorns), but you can go to the Wikipedia link if you want to know more about what the Sainte Chapelle is.

Entrance to the lower chapel.  Yeah, seriously.

More lower chapel.  At some point I learned the vocabulary for all of the parts of a cathedral, but I've completely forgotten it now.  And I guess I learned it in French, so that wouldn't be much help anyway.

Inside the main part of the cathedral itself.  If you ever go to Paris, go here, and not to Notre Dame, for your cathedral experience.  While there are lots of tourists here, they're very quiet and respectful, whereas at Notre Dame they're incredibly loud and rude.

The rose window.

Unless I'm very much mistaken, this is the reliquary that houses the Crown of Thorns.  But don't take my word on that.

So that was the Sainte Chapelle.  I mean, do you see how hard it is to write a blog post about being back home after you've been hanging out in 13th century gothic cathedrals for 6 weeks?  'Cause that's what we do in Paris, just hang out in 13th century gothic cathedrals.

But seriously, it's very nice to be back, I just kind of don't know what to say about it.  It's amazing how quickly Paris seems so long ago.  And it's doubly weird that my friend and collaborator, who I was living with, is still there right now.  It really seems like it was ages and ages ago, and yet just last weekend, I was biking along the Canal and taking in all those Parisian smells.

One thing I will mention is what an amazing memory trigger the sense of smell is.  One of the first things that struck me when we got to Paris was the smell of the metro.  And I have no idea how to describe it, or what it is, and I can't even really remember what it smells like very well right now, but as soon as we got down into the metro, my brain was like, "PARIS.  YOU ARE IN PARIS."  It's not an especially strong smell, and definitely not an offensive odor or anything, it's just so particular, and it was so jarring to have that, of all things, come rushing back to me after so many years.

And then, as I was walking home to our house in Berkeley from the BART station last Monday night, the fruity-sweet smell of summer flowers wafted over me, and my brain went, "Mmmmm California.  You are in California."

Smells are so funny that way.

Well, the other thing I wanted to say is that I'm headed to Illinois next week, if you can believe it.  I wasn't originally planning to, after all this traveling, but fall semester is going to be crazy busy, so otherwise I wouldn't be able to make it back until Christmas, and that's a long time with no Illinois love.  So I'm flying in to Chicago on August 3rd, taking the train down to C-U on the 4th, hanging around until probably the 8th, then back up to Chicago for a little bit and flying back to Berkeley on the 10th.  Very quick little trip, but this way I get to go to my cousin's baby shower, and it'll be so nice to be in my Illinois home and see people, as always.

I think that's a wrap for now.  I'll try to write again relatively soon!

Paris Parks FAIL (sort of)

My goodness, how time has flown!  Gosh, I can't even remember what I've been doing over the past week that I haven't updated my blog.

Well, for one thing, I've got a bit of a project going that is related to my blog, but basically replaced the time I might have otherwise spent actually writing in it this past week.  So... more on that in a few weeks, I guess, but in the meantime I will just say that I have been having such a nice time in Paris and it seems like such a shame to leave, in a way.  I mean, I know I can't stay here forever, and it would obviously start to get old eventually, but I've just had such a great time!

So let's see... my last entry was from July 7th, what have I done since then?  Well, last weekend, the friends I'm staying with went on a little daylong excursion to a neighboring town, and I took the opportunity to go to a free jazz festival in one of the last big Parisian parks I hadn't visited yet.  I've knocked a good number of things off of my "Paris To-Do" list since I've been here, and I'm very pleased about that.  I did the Sainte Chappelle with Karen, Emily and I did the Grande Roue, and one other thing I always meant to do was to get out to see the Bois de Vincennes.  So the Bois de Boulogne is the big park that extends all along the western side of Paris, and it's where I used to go running a lot of the time when I lived here.  The Bois de Vincennes is the big park way on the opposite side of Paris, in the southeast corner (which is probably why I never got there), and there's a big castle and botanical gardens and all sorts of cool things to check out.  So since I had the day all to myself with nothing to do and there was a free jazz festival going on, I took the opportunity to sort of kill two birds with one stone and see the Bois de Vincennes and some free jazz.

The concert I saw was really great!  There was a jazz accordionist, if you can believe it, and he was incredibly talented.  They played some super cool music, and it was a really nice afternoon, and I was so glad I went.  I also had a fun little exchange with an older French dude, related to the fact that I had misunderstood how the public bike system works.  So, the public bikes.  They are so great.  But the thing is, you normally have to have a credit or debit card with this little chip on the front of it to be able to pay to use a bike.  In fact, all machines everywhere that accept cards in Paris basically require you to have a card with the chip.  And my impression is that all machines everywhere in the world except the U.S. require you to have this little chip thing, actually.  So it sucks as an American to have a hard time using your credit/debit card to pay for things.  It means you have to pay cash for everything, which means you have to keep going to the ATM, which means you wrack up an impressive number of bank fees pretty quickly.  (Except Emily told me that Bank of America has "partner banks" in most foreign countries, where you can use their ATMs without getting charged any fees, and it turns out BNP Paribas is my French bank.  That would have been really nice to know before I got charged like $30 in bank fees.  But I digress.)

Anyway, the Vélib' bike thing normally works by just inserting your bank card and getting charged a euro or whatever for the time you use the bike.  Unless you don't have a card you can use, in which case you can purchase a day pass or a week pass on their website, and they give you a little number you can type into the machines.  So that was really nice to figure that out, and we did that the first week we were here.  But it's 8€ a week to use the bikes, and it's only 29€ a year if you buy a special pass.  So heck, knowing I was going to be here like 6 weeks, it was totally worth it to buy the year long pass.  The thing is, I just assumed that in typing in my credit card information online to buy the pass, they would just keep my card info and charge me for however much I used the bike.  (The first 45 minutes of each ride are free, and beyond that it's 1€/hour.)  But no.  Of course not.  Silly me, this is France!

The point of the story is this: I was going to go for a very nice bike ride to explore the Bois de Vincennes after the jazz festival, and I went to use my year long pass and pick up a bike, and it wouldn't work.  As I was being unsuccessful at using my bike card, this guy comes up to me on a bike, and says, "Ah!  You're an angel!  I've been circling on this thing forever."  All of the bike lock ups were full, and he needed to turn in his bike so he would quit getting charged for it.  So I'm trying to get my bike card to work, and I say, "Well, I'm apparently not that blessed, because this is clearly not working."

So we go over to the little machine thing and I type in my number, and it says, "You currently owe 1€ before you can get a bike."  And he's like, "Oh, you just have to put more money on your account, no problem."  And I say, "No no, I have the year long pass, it should work."  And he says, "Yeah, but you still have to recharge it."  And I say, "You do??  What?  I apparently don't understand how this works."  And he says, jokingly, "What, you thought you could pay 1€ one time and just ride all over France however much you please?"  And I say, "Well, I gave them my credit card information, I thought they would just keep it on file and charge me for however much I use the bikes."  And he says, "What?  No, of course not, then you'd have to send in a form."

Dingdingding.  I had completely forgotten that whenever you want to authorize a regular deduction from your bank account in France, you have to send in a special form, with like, copies of your ID and signatures and blah-dee-blah.  So I'm like, "Oh right!  The form!  I totally forgot about the forms!"  And he says, "Well of course, you don't want places just charging you however much they please all the time."  And I kind of see the logic there, but being truly American at heart (apparently), convenience is a much higher priority to me than, say, financial security.  Man, whatever.  I would rather let the Vélib' people keep my credit card information and just charge me however much I owe rather than have to fill out paperwork and wait 4-6 weeks to be able to go for a 1€ bike ride.

Anyway, the guy says, "Well it's ok, you can just put your bank card in and add money to your account right now."  And I say, "No, I don't have the chip on my card."  And he says, "What do you mean you don't have a chip?  Of course you have a chip, everyone has a chip."  And I say, "No, it's an American card, we don't have the chip."  And he doesn't believe me, so I show him all of my cards, and sure enough, no chip!  He's flabbergasted, and totally tickled.  "Hehehe!" he says.  "For once we're ahead of you guys on something!  Vive la France!"  Which was pretty funny, because he was genuinely quite happy to learn that France's credit card technology surpasses ours.  And then after he finished laughing at me and gloating, he offered to use his card to give me the 1€ it would've cost to go for a bike ride, which was really extremely nice of him.  He insisted, too - I said, "No no, that's very kind of you, but it's ok."  And he said, "No, really, it's no problem at all!  It's just 1€!"  But I thanked him again and we went our separate ways.  I dunno, I think that whole interaction might have been more fun than the bike ride, anyway!

That was all on Sunday.  The rest of this week, we had a few subjects to test, and my French friend (whose piano is sitting all alone in my house right now) got into town, and we've been having a really nice time!  He got here on Wednesday and is staying with us until Sunday or so, so it's been great catching up and hearing about his crazy summer traveling and linguistic fieldwork.  He's been in a tiny little village in Chad for the past two months, which inevitably results in some interesting stories and gorgeous photographs, and I don't have to feel bad for making him sleep on the floor because hey, he has a mattress and a pillow and that's way better than a dirt/sand floor in a leaky tent.

Yesterday, the two of us met up with a friend of his and we walked around Paris all day.  All told, we did somewhere between 10 and 12 miles, including a trek up to the Sacré Coeur (the basilica we can see from our balcony) and getting mildly lost in a neighborhood where none of us had ever been before, resulting in a necessary, well-deserved, and delicious ice cream break, followed by lots more walking and a second break for coffee and French fries a few hours later, after we dropped his friend off.  You know, coffee and French fries doesn't sound like it would be particularly appetizing, but the coffee was a really nice pick-me-up, and the French fries were nice and salty and caloric, and it really kind of hit the spot at the time.

But that's when things got a little more complicated.  So, yesterday was Bastille Day, which is French Independence Day, and there was a big military parade and a big concert and a big fireworks display, and I had planned on going to see at least part of the concert and the fireworks with the friends I'm staying with.  The thing is, one of those friends isn't big on crowds, and I went to the Eiffel Tower for New Year's Eve the year I was here, and it was the biggest, rowdiest, craziest event involving a crowd that I've ever experienced, I think.  There were people chucking full bottles of champagne in the air, and it was really pretty insane and somewhat dangerous, and knowing that my friend doesn't like crowds, I thought it might be better to avoid all that stuff and go back to the Parc de Belleville (the park from my last post, with the gorgeous view) and watch the fireworks display from there.

But there was some sort of miscommunication along the way, or something, and so while Florian and I were enjoying our weird-but-necessary coffee and French fries, waiting to hear from my friends about what they wanted to do, it turns out they had already left for the Eiffel Tower without us.  This was totally fine, except that we had pretty much decided we would like to avoid the crazy crowds and that they would probably like to avoid the crazy crowds too if they realized what they were getting themselves into, so by the time they sent me a text message saying they had already left, it was kind of hard to figure out what to do and where to meet over text messages.  Eventually we decided to meet at the metro station close to the Parc de Belleville, but I couldn't tell if they actually wanted to do that or were just being polite, and it took way longer to walk up there than I thought, so they were waiting for us at the metro for a really long time, and I felt bad about that, and then it turned out that everyone else in the northeast quadrant of Paris was trying to see the fireworks from that park too, and we couldn't see a darn thing.  I would've been okay with that, except that then I felt bad that I inadvertently made them miss the fireworks, basically.  So, Parc de Belleville FAIL.

But today is good so far.  I just had a delicious lunch with lots of veggies, which was really nice after my day of ice cream, coffee and French fries, and kebabs for dinner.  Don't get me wrong, all of those things are absolutely delicious, but sometimes a girl needs some greens.  I think I'm going to go by the store and pick up some goodies to bring home to people in the U.S., and I might be going all-in on the non-native speaker thing tonight and going to a party with a bunch of French people.  My brain usually protests for a few minutes ("Aaaack!  What??  Hang on!!") but it doesn't take too long until I don't have to concentrate anymore and can relax and just let the words wash over me.  Yesterday was a nice reminder that it really doesn't take too long to switch language gears, and that I am in fact still capable of doing it!

Well, this is a long post, and I think it's time to wrap it up now.  Thus begins my last weekend in Paris for a while, so I probably won't post again until I'm home in Berkeley, which will be Monday night!  It's been so great, but it'll nice to be back in California and start to get back into the swing of real life.  (Finally.)  Signing off!

Dans le coin: Parc de Belleville

Another evening walk with my camera...

It took me a while to find this park, but I'd say it was worth the search, if only for this one shot.

"Il faut se méfier des mots" ~ "Watch out for words"

Aaaaand crêpes for dinner... :)

Last Weekend

My friend Emily came to visit last weekend!  She's working at the Max Planck Institute for Nanobio Photonics (did I mention she's one cool chick?) in Göttingen, Germany this summer, so she took the train out to visit for a few days, and we had a really fantastic time.  So here are some pictures from over the weekend!

One of the first things we did was go up in the "Grande Roue", a big ferris wheel they construct at the end of the Champs-Elysées, in the Jardin des Tuileries, every summer.  I didn't go up in it last time I was here because it's a little pricey, but as long as I'm playing tourist this time around, we went for it.  And it was really great!

La Grande Roue de Paris

More gorgeous sky.

EmJ in the Grande Roue!

Jardin des Tuileries, seen from up above.

The Louvre, seen from the Grande Roue.

More Louvre, more Grande Roue, more gorgeous light.  *sigh*

Looking down the Rue de Rivoli from the Grande Roue.

The Louvre on the left, and the Musée d'Orsay on the right.  We went to the Musée d'Orsay on free museum day, on Sunday, and it was just as great as I remembered.

On Saturday, we went out to the Bois de Boulogne, a big beautiful park where I used to go running when I lived here, and rented bikes and tooled around for a bit on a gorgeous, sun-drenched, breezy afternoon.  I just love the public bikes here, and I love the Bois de Boulogne, and I love my camera.  Love love love.

Boats on the Lac Supérieur, in the Bois de Boulogne.

EmJ is an aspiring amateur photographer too.  :)

On Saturday evening, we stopped by the market and picked up some deeeelicious strawberries, apples, and figs, along with some cheese and bread, and had a ridiculously tasty dinner on the balcony.

Dinner, Paris style.

Figs sautéed in butter and honey, eaten with crusty baguette, fluffy cheese, and crunchy apples.  Heaven.

The first time we got figs here, they were not that great, and I was a leeeeetle bit disappointed.  But these figs totally made up for it.  Oh man, were they good, plopped on top of a baguette smeared with some ricotta-like cheese.

I have resolved to keep eating French-style once I return home.  So much delicious produce, all the time. And I live in California, for Pete's sake; if there's anywhere in the U.S. where I can eat almost as well as in France, the Bay Area is probably it.

On a somewhat related note, I've been trying to go running every day, partially to fend off the pastry pounds, but also partially to soak up as much Paris as I can before I leave.  I've got about a week and a half left, which I think will be somewhat good timing, on a personal level.  I love it here, but it'll be nice to be back in California and see Roger and my puppy dogs and my friends (the ones who aren't gone for the summer).  I do feel a little bad on the research end of things... it's been going really slowly - still having trouble finding subjects - and I'd like to stay longer and help.  But there's not too much more I can do, with time running out... keep your fingers crossed that we find some more people to test soon!

"If you know it's called 'Brittany', why didn't you just say that?"

Edit: I started this post on Monday, but am finishing it up on Friday.  So it was ridiculously hot when I started it, but it has been absolutely gorgeous the rest of the week.

Hoooo-eee it is a hot one in Paris today!  98 degrees Fahrenheit as I type this, and no air conditioning, bien sûr.  Now that I checked the temperature, I feel a little more justified in starting to feel kind of gross.  I mean, I am sitting here in a small pool of my own sweat, and I was starting to think, "Jeez, I'm a gross little piggy, just sitting here sweating for no reason."  But if it's 98 degrees out (and in), it is completely acceptable that I'm sweating for no reason.

Anyway.  I had a great weekend in Brittany visiting the French-American family I used to babysit for in the U.S.!  Brittany is a long, long way from Paris, it turns out.  You kind of realize that when you look at the map, and I already knew it would take about 4.5 hours by train to get there, but Brest is actually nearly 400 miles directly west of Paris.  I was waaaay out in the "arm" part of France, where I had never been before.  It was a really lovely train ride, and fun to watch the French countryside shift from very Midwestern looking to very Irish looking over the course of my journey.  The west coast of France is so beautiful (well, most of France is pretty beautiful...), and the friends I was visiting were kind enough to take me out and about a bit to get a good look at it.  We drove out the Pointe St. Mathieu to a really cool lighthouse, and I was able to get some nice pictures of the coast and the countryside.

The lighthouse we went up into.

Shadow from the lighthouse and an old church on the same grounds.

The very western edge of the French coastline, looking north towards Le Conquet.

Cutie pies!

The kids were every bit as sweet as I remember - just really nice, fun boys, and it was great to catch up with A and S too.  A was a grad student in linguistics at the U of I when I was an undergrad, which is sort of how we made a connection, and then I wound up babysitting the boys for about a year while she worked on her dissertation.  It's crazy how much they've grown up, of course - the youngest one is now older than the oldest one was when I used to watch them, but they still look and act so much like I remember.  It's cool that their personalities haven't changed much, and it was really neat to see how much they've grown and matured.

Oh, the title for this post comes from a conversation I had with the older of the boys, who is now 8 (8!).  One thing I found myself thinking a lot about during and after my stay with them was the amount and type of code switching going on.  You can look at the Wikipedia link for more info if you're interested, but basically it's pretty normal for people in an environment who share multiple languages to switch in and out of those languages during the course of conversation.  I find code switching really fascinating from a linguistic point of view and also just really fun to do.  The thing is, as an English-dominant person living in an English-dominant environment, my opportunities for code switching are normally extremely limited.  I did it a lot more when I was living in France with a bunch of bilingual Americans, naturally, but what was interesting to me over the weekend was how different this family's code switching is from how mine is, and how my group of friends' was.  The rules were just different, and I couldn't get a handle on how much of it was competence driven, in the case of the boys, and how much of it was conscious vs. below the level of consciousness.  For example, they pretty much never switched languages in the middle of sentences, which is something I find myself inclined to do, given the opportunity; the switching was more on the level of the whole conversation, meaning there were many cases where one person asked a question in one language and it was responded to in the other language, and no one really seemed to notice or care, whereas for me, switching languages is more of a stylistic choice, I think.  Sometimes there are certain things that happen to sound better or are more readily expressed in one language or another.

Anyway, I was talking to the older boy in the car, and I had a whole sentence in English but inserted the word Bretagne in French.  He kind of paused and then said, trying to be helpful, "The word for that in English is Brittany."  So I replied cheerfully, "Oh, I know, but thank you."  He looked bothered by this, and said, "If you know the word in English, why did you say it in French?"  I had to think about it for a minute.  Why did I do that?  I often don't actually know why certain things want to come out in one language or another, but it is fascinating to me.  In this case, I was able to come up with a plausible explanation: "I think I did that because usually when I talk about Brittany, it's in French."  And I think that's true; I'm nearly certain I've heard and used the word Bretagne more times than I've heard and used the word Brittany.  Also, Brittany is French, so it feels like its name should be French.  Just like it feels a little weird saying "Shee-cah-go" for Chicago or how I really didn't like people calling me "May-leen-dah" when I first moved here.  It's just silly to say things in the "wrong" accent if you know how to do it in the "right" one.

That made me wonder if the boys were only switching languages when they couldn't come up with the right way to say things in one or the other language, which is what P's comment would suggest.  And it made me wonder if they always notice when someone switches languages, and what they understand the rules for switching to be, if any.

Well, that will be enough discussion of that, for now.  I've been doing a fair amount of reading this week, and I think I might turn back to that now before my friend Emily gets here.  It's made me a little sad, turning back to my reading this week; it's easy to forget I'm in Paris when I'm trying to concentrate on my reading (but I need to keep slogging away at it, with the whole "dissertation" thing coming up).  I feel like I should be out walking around and enjoying being here more, but it's good to get some work done, too.  I have 2 1/2 weeks left before I leave, and I've gone running every morning this week, and I'll be out and about all weekend with Emily visiting, so I'm getting out and seeing things plenty.  I just somehow feel a little guilty sitting inside reading when I love being here so much and I know I have to leave in not too, too long!

Au revoir, l'Angleterre

Today is my last day in England, and I'm waiting in the train station in York.  I had to check out of my guest house at 10:00, but my train doesn't leave until 2:15, so I wandered my way to the train station, made it here a little before 11:00, and I decided to just plop down and wait it out.  I've got a tiny bit of a  sore throat, and it's a little drizzly out, and my suitcase is pretty huge, so I'm just gonna sit and waste some time on my computer.

Really, I would probably do well to get some reading done, but I just want a day or so off from thinking about speech processing.  The conference was really, really great, and my talk went over pretty well!  I said at the very beginning, "This is my first conference talk ever, so please be kind."  And that got a laugh out of the audience, and then people were very, very kind.  It's pretty fun to get a laugh out of a room full of people too!  Then once I got started, I wasn't nervous at all.  It was very weird, actually.  I started to freak out a little on Friday night, when I was still fixing up some of my slides.  I could feel my heart beating and I was really, physically anxious thinking about giving my talk.  I decided to go for a brisk walk and get some dinner in town, and working out some of my nervous energy helped.  Then by the time I got up at the podium on Saturday morning, I was feeling strangely relaxed.  There were lots of questions and comments at the end, which is always a good sign, and multiple people came up to me throughout the rest of the day and said, "I really enjoyed your talk" and then had some comments and suggestions.  So I would definitely call the whole conference a success, and I would even call my first talk a success and a good experience, and it feels really good to be done and to have my first one out of the way.  Whew!

The conference ended around noon yesterday (Saturday), and then there was an excursion to Fountains Abbey, about an hour's drive west of York.  We got a guided tour of the abbey and all of the grounds, then we had tea and cookies and made it back to York around 6:30 last night.  I grabbed a sandwich in town on the way home, and then I got back and suddenly realized I was done!  I was absolutely exhausted once the realization hit me (and I also didn't sleep too much on Friday night), so I turned on the TV and zoned out in bed, and it was so nice.  Zoning out in front of the TV is such a luxury these days, since we don't have a TV at home, and I found this British show called "Fool Me" where magicians do tricks in front of Penn and Teller, and if Penn and Teller can't figure out how they did the trick, the magician wins a trip to Las Vegas to perform with them.  It was really fun.

Anyway, here are some pictures of the abbey.  It was pretty cool, and a really nice day, even though it was threatening to rain all morning.  The abbey was apparently constructed in 1132 by some renegade Cistercian monks, and it went into disrepair during the reign of Henry the VIII in the early 1500's when he founded the Church of England and quit funding the Catholic Church in England.  (Or something like that - more info at the Wikipedia link.)

This is actually a church on the grounds of the abbey, constructed in the late 1800's.  I'm becoming a European church snob, apparently, because I couldn't be bothered to take pictures of the inside.  1800's?  Pffft.  Unimpressed.

The abbey in the background, seen from across the grounds.

Now I'm at the train station and starting to get a bit peckish.  (I've noticed I've started staying "bit" a lot more just in the past few days.  And I'm finally getting used to looking to the right before I cross the street, just in time to leave this silly country.)  I think I'm going to get some porridge (i.e. oatmeal) from the café in the train station.

Some of the signs here are really funny to me.  Like this one: "Do not struggle on the stairs."

There was a really great one in my hotel room that said, "IN CASE OF FIRE, DO NOT RUN.  It tends to cause panic."  I don't think they're trying to be funny, but it cracks me up.

Also, people keep saying "thank you" when they do things for me.  It is really throwing me off, because then I don't know what to say back.  A waiter poured me coffee at the conference dinner, and then said thank you.  And the woman who served me breakfast at the bed and breakfast kept saying thank you when she would bring me things.  I just don't know what to do, so I've been having a lot of conversations that go like this:

"Would you like white toast or brown toast this morning?"
"Brown toast, please."
"All right, thank you."
"..........thank you..."
[Then she comes back and hands me my toast.]
"Thank you."
"..................thank you..."

I obviously can't say "you're welcome", but it's kind of ridiculous for two people to thank each other like 8 times in the same conversation.

This may be related to the fact that I do not understand the usage of the word cheers.  I think it can alternately mean thank you, you're welcome, and something like go ahead.  Because I was walking home the other evening, and a guy on a bike stopped and said "cheers" as I passed.  Ok, it's not "thank you", because he stopped for me, so it might be like, "don't worry, I see you and am not going to run over you, so go ahead", or he might be a creepy dude and I should just keep walking and not respond in any way.

Never before have I felt so confused about my own language.  I'm ready to go back to France, where I know what everything means. ;)

Au revoir, l'Angleterre!  Bonjour, la France!

Gallivanting

I'm in York!

(If staying in academia means I get to keep gallivanting around Europe periodically, count me in.)

I went with Karen to the train station this morning, so she could head off the airport to go back to Vienna, and I could get on the train to England for my conference.  I was seated next to a really sweet French girl who was going to London alone for the first time, hoping to find work for the summer.  We mostly spoke French, although I tried to help her practice her English a bit too.  It took us about 2 hours to get to London, and only about 20 minutes to go through the English Channel!  It was really weird knowing we were going underwater, and picturing where we were on the map, and then - hop! - back above ground, with all the signs in English again.  I keep trying to speak French to people here, though.  It's like my brain knows I'm in a foreign country, in Europe, and it just won't let me speak English to strangers.  It's quite odd.

Well, Karen and I finally went to the Sainte Chapelle over the weekend, an amazing cathedral that dates from the 13th century and that I meant to visit the whole time I was in Paris last time, but never made it for various reasons.  I got some stunning photos from that, but I don't want to post them just yet - I want to show you my photos from this evening.

So I changed trains in London, which involved going outside and across the street from St. Pancras station to King's Cross, and that was all I got to see of London, unfortunately.  Then it was just over 2 more hours up to York, through the English countryside.  I got in around 5:45 this evening, only that was 6:45 my time, meaning I was starting to get hungry.  I took a cab from the train station to the guest house where I'm staying, and the cab driver was fantastic.  Super friendly, jovial, joking, with a great northern English accent, and he pointed a lot of things out to me on the drive to the guest house.  He also apparently lives a block down the street, and he told me to come knock if I need anything!

He also helped me count out the money I owed him; I took some English pounds out of an ATM in King's Cross station, but it is just funny money to me.  I'm totally fine with euros, they seem like real money and I recognize the denominations of bills and coins and can count them out just fine, but English money might as well be Monopoly money printed in Chinese.  It's ridiculous.  I've never had the experience of holding a handful of coins and having absolutely no idea what any of them are worth.  I have so much more sympathy for foreigners who can't count change now.  It's a very odd feeling to have to turn every coin over in your hand multiple times in order to find the small print that tells you what it's worth, and then to have to do some weird calculation in your head to figure our what it's really worth.

Anyway, I got to my guest house, which is on the south side of the city, dropped off my bags, and headed out exploring.  Here's where I'm staying while I'm here:

It's the dark brownish one on the very left, with the sign, called Friars Rest.  My room is the one immediately above the main entrance.

The city of York has about 200,000 people, according to Wikipedia, and the city center is surrounded by walls from medieval times.  It's maybe a 5 minute walk from where I am to the walls surrounding the city.

You can take the steps up on top of the walls, too, and walk around the perimeter of the city, like so:

And just like all European towns, there are awesome churches peaking out at you wherever you go:

What I really, really love about England so far is the color scheme, though.  It's all very earthy and drab, and then you get these catchy little punches of color everywhere you look.  If it's not some shade of brown or dirty green, it's a bold and vibrant flash and catches your eye right away.  It really stood out to me while I was walking around, and it really stands out in the photos I took of the town center.  Look for it.  :)

I wandered around for a while, looking for a place to eat, when this tea shop finally drew me in.  The view was lovely, and there was a woman playing the piano, and it was all very soothing.  Everything looked so delicious, but I ultimately had to go for the fish and chips and peas with a delicious English lager made right in the area.

Right after I took that picture, a very English looking young man came and sat down next to me and ordered "one of your lovely cream teas, please".  He was so not from York.  The accent up here is really down home, inn-keeper sounding, and this guy sounded straight out of Oxford and was carrying a small bit of luggage.  So after both sitting next to each other, alone, for a while, I eventually decided to make good on my promise to myself that I would talk to random strangers while I'm here, and I said, "So how weird is it if I strike up a conversation with you?"  And he said it wasn't that weird at all, but that it might be a bit awkward, with him being English and all.  He was a historian who had taught at Cambridge for 10 years and now teaches history at a school in London.  A taaaad bit on the stuffy side, but quite friendly, and it was a nice little chat.  I wished he was from York so I could get a better handle on the accent up here, though.  Although I guess this is what happens when you choose a lovely tea room for dinner; you meet other people who choose lovely tea rooms for dinner.  If I want to talk to some Yorkies, I'll have to pluck up the courage to go into a pub.

After dinner, I needed to walk off the fish and chips, so I took a nice, roundabout, indirect way back to the guest house.  There are two little rivers that go through the town, and I crossed one of them on the way back:

There was also a sandwich shop with a rather cryptic message on the left side of its sign:

And I walked by the tower that either had something to do with Jews being executed during World War Two, or the Duke of York nursery rhyme, or maybe both.  My taxi driver mentioned both things at one point, and I can't remember if they were both in reference to this landmark or not.  It was a bit of a whirlwind tour, and I had no idea where we were for any of it.

These people live a few doors down from my guest house, and they apparently consume a positively comical quantity of onions:

And finally, I made it back to my temporary home!  Doesn't even the door to my room look cozy and cute?  And I'd like to think the teddy bear was put there just to welcome me.

Last note on this evening: it is somewhat terrifying that they drive on the left side of the street here.  You don't realize how much it messes everything up until you have to cross the street a lot, and you can't keep straight which way the traffic should be coming from...

(aaaaack there are French people walking by outside my window and it's messing me up)

... so every time I have to do it, I look both ways about four times.  I also keep walking on the wrong side of the sidewalk, or through tight spaces, or whatever, because people tend to follow traffic patterns when they walk, and you don't realize it until you're in a place with different traffic patterns.  When I got off the train I kept thinking "What is wrong with these people?  Why do they keep walking right into me while I'm trying to get around with this big suitcase?"  And then I would realize that I was going up the wrong side of the stairs, or walking on the wrong side of the pathway again.  D'oh.

Well, I think it's time for some tea (I have my own electric kettle in my room!), and probably bed pretty soon.  I'm tired, and it's going to be a very long couple of days.

And I have to get up early in the morning, because I'm having a full English breakfast, which I'm ridiculously excited about.  This is only my second time staying in a bed and breakfast, and I wish I could do it more often, because it's so very fun.

Well, goodnight for now!