Explorations

Today the school didn't have anything for us to do, so we had the day to ourselves. I went to meet Hugo, who is a student in Aix from last fall (the fall program doesn't end for a few days yet; one of the reasons I decided to study in the spring) with a bunch of the other new Abroadco students, and he and Mandy (another student in the same school as us) took us to a student cafeteria. Apparently there are several in Aix, and they serve affordable food to students. For € 2,40 you get a plate with three dishes and a small bowl which you fill at the salad bar. Today they served Ratatouille, some potatoes that were fried like french fries but in cubes of approximately a centimeter, and some form of meat on a stick in a sauce, of which I did not partake. The food was good, and actually affordable, which is always a plus.

After lunch, we split up into smaller groups and went around exploring. Emily and her roommate and I went to a bookstore and looked around for a while; it wasn't nearly as large as most American bookstores would be (seems to be a pretty common trait for most of the stores around here), and there was much less in the way of "recreational reading." There was one shelf about 3 feet wide that contained all of their teen/young adult books, but most of the store was occupied by litterature, poetry, drama, political, historical, and general informational books.

We then proceeded to Cours Mirabou, which is sort of the main street of Aix, and extends in either direction from Place de la Rotund, which is the city center. The photo at the top of the page is of Place de la Rotund (not mine; E put it up there, as well as doing the entire layout for this. Thanks E!) We went to a Monoprix, which is a large two-floor department store that's open 24 hours. It's like Wal-Mart in that they carry nearly everything, only much much classier. I bought some notebooks for class there, and discovered that they don't carry the lined notebook paper like we have in the US. all the notebooks are either graph paper or something that resembles our notebook paper with lots and lots of lines running both directions. If you were to take our notebook paper, and then put two lighter lines between every horizontal line (somewhat like calligraphy paper), and then draw blue vertical lines the same distance apart as the main horizontal lines, that's about what this paper looks like. The effect is that if you choose, you can turn your notebook on it's side and write lengthwise and still use guiding lines.

We then continued down the street, and bought some roasted chestnuts from a street vendor (they were quite tasty, but a large proportion of them were too burnt to eat), and some crêpes from another (also delicious). We ran into my roommate, who had gone for a run, got a bit lost, and ended up there, and then we all decided that we were tired and needed to go home. So my roommate and I braved the bus system for the first time because it was about 3 miles uphill back to the apartment, and we'd both walked/run that far to get there to start with. There isn't really much interesting to say about the busride, other than the fact that when it got into our neighborhood the bus turned down so many side streets and made so many loops that we were thouroughly confused as to where we were up until the moment when we realized that it was at our stop.