Fete de la Mirabelle!

This past weekend was le Fete de la Mirabelle, which is the big festival here in Metz.  It celebrates the harvesting of the mirabelle, which is a grape-sized, yellow plum.  There's been a lot of mirabelle jams and preserves, and recently I picked up a bottle of a soda made from it, which was really good.  

The festival went all weekend though.  Unfortunately, I don't have many photos from it specifically, but I'll try and get some from friends to put up here so everyone can see.  There was stuff going on all weekend long, so there was a fair bit of walking downtown from the Residence Lafayette (our dorm).  The walk is only about 20 minutes if you keep moving, but whenever we start travelling in a group, we start moving a lot slower.

Starting at around 5 on Friday was "The Ball" according to the information I was given to one of the professors.  A group of us headed out from the Lafayette at about 8 so we could wait for some of the students getting out of later classes.  We headed downtown to a cafe close to the cathedral where we thought we were going to meet up with other students, but they didn't show up for another 25 minutes and when they did, they were all dressed in their kitschy costumes for the night! 

This guy above wasn't with us, but he's a pretty good example of what we started to see around there. When the other students showed up in costume like that, we decided that we definitely needed to get our own, so Thomas, Stefan and I headed over to the tent in the festival square to pay our two euros and leave with all we could wear. Inside were about six racks of old clothes that people had donated, as well as buckets of ties, scarves, belts and that purse.  

Everyone had their photos taken by a photographer at the end of the tent so that they could be projected up onto a screen for everyone in the square to judge.  If you liked the outfits they were wearing, you were supposed to shout out "Vengeance!" to cheer for them.  We all had a fun time cheering for each other, but it seemed like the voting was a little rigged....

After all the costumes and picking the kitschiest of us all, everyone in the square turned to the live bands there for some dancing.  There was one rock band that we were all enjoying, and they sung a bit in English, too, though I didn't really recognize the songs.  Friday night was rediculously fun.  I ended getting back to the dorm around 1:30 and then slept until 2 on Saturday.

Saturday was a lot of fun too.  For most of the day was the market that is in town on the weekends.  Starting at about 7pm though, there were a few concerts and performances by a number of Celtic and pipe and drum bands before a fireworks show that was fantastic.  The French really know how to do fireworks here.  At one point there were some type of emitters or fireworks strung across the back of the stage which poured a sheet of fireworks down. I had gotten separated from everyone else somewhere in the massive crowds that were there and when I found a group that was heading back, I just decided to stick with them.  

The main event on Sunday was the parade through town.  We started off with walking downtown to the train station and bought our train reservations for our trip to Nice next weekend.  It seems like half of everyone here at GTL is going to be coming with us, but we're hopefully going to be splitting up a bunch.  The train reservations went just fine for me, so I've got a bunk on a sleeper train for next Thursday night!  I'm really looking forward to that trip.  

Outside the train station was a craft show where a number of artisans came out to display their work.  A lot of it seemed like the typical craft show type fair.  There was one very interesting watchmaker/watch repair stand that had beautiful work.  I didn't even bother trying to figure out how to ask the price though, since it would have been through the roof for me.  After we walked through all the stalls and admired their work, we found a little place on the side of the road and waited for the parade to start.

It seemed like there was a general theme to the parade, starting out with very early history and a float that seemed like it had Flintstones characters on it... All the people walking along with it had toga looking things on and necklaces of little plastic bones.  Then came along the first pipe band of the group.  It wasn't quite the typical Scottish pipe band that I'm used to seeing at the Alexandria Scottish Christmas Walk though, since some of the musicians had an instrument that looked like a clarinet that was fitted with a bagpipe style reed, and there were some of those in pretty much each band that was there, and relatively few of the bands wore kilts too.  The rest of the parade was pretty much a float, then a band, then a float and a band.  

The floats seemed to generally get more modern too, as we had the medieval(?)  lord and dragon float, which was somewhere close to the group of princesses we saw walk by, and we also had the Renaissance players float, which these two walked along next to.  

The culminating float was, though the cathedral float with the freshly crowned Queen of the Mirabelle.  She won the beauty pageant on Friday night, and got to stand at the front of the final float, strategically placed in front of the two monks.  I assume they were there to remind you not to sin :)

From what I remember, there were one or two more pipe bands after that and then it started raining more heavily, so we decided to walk home, by way of the creepy graveyard :)  

Hope it's all going well back home!

Classes, Festival and Nice!

Classes are starting here at GTL this week.  Tuesday was basically sitting through a few monotonous orientations, except for the one by a professor that's been here for a few years about daily life in France.  She told us a lot of stuff, like seltzer water usually comes in a hard bottle with a red cap and skim milk is usually color coded green.  

Yesterday I had my first User Interface Design and Technology and Society classes.  The UI class looks like a lot of fun, even though I'm taking the same class as a bunch of graduate students.  Most of them are French students who are also taking classes in other tech schools around here.  Apparently they're having a bit of trouble already with some of the English technical terms.  Tech & Society looks kind of interesting, but It definitely seems like a lot of work.  It's my first real history class with a lot of reading and writing associated with it.

Today I actually don't have any classes, just meetings to take care of rent and residence card issues and such.  There's also a presentation on travelling in Europe that I'm looking forward to for tonight.  

We're looking forward to the festival this weekend in Metz.  I'm not exactly sure what's supposed to be going on, but it looks like there's going to be a few live performances, some fireworks, and apparently a lot of dancing.  It'll be another good experience.  Next weekend (the first one out of Metz!) I'm thinking of going to Nice with some people.  We wanted to get to the beach early if we were going to go, so I figured that it would make a good first trip.  I think we're going to take a TGV to Paris and then one to Marseille, and then a train from Marseille to Nice.

I hope everything's going well at home! 

Exploring Metz!

So this weekend has been about a lot of downtime and chilling while everyone travels to GTL.  We've been to the cathedral, which is has the third highest ceiling in France, and the biggest "enameled wall" (I think they were referring to the stained glass window).  After that we had decided to try to find a tower we saw sticking above the roofs, so it led us on an adventure through the city.  I'm glad I had my camera, and here are some of my photos from it! Thought everyone might like to see our city.  :)

Getting to Metz!

So it's the end of my second full day in Metz and my updates are a little overdue, so here's the story of my travels to Metz.

My plane ticket were from Dulles to JFK to Frankfurt.  Both my connections were delayed while I had already boarded, but there was a really nice tailwind going to Frankfurt which helped us make up for all the delays in taking off.

Getting through customs and picking up my bags wasn't much of an issue and even meeting up with Siri (one of the people going to Oktoberfest with me) went really easy.  We had arranged to travel to Metz together and met up outside of Customs really easily, all due to her purple hat.

Our next steps were taking the train to Metz.  I purchased a ticket in the airport (which is really easy and done all the time) and we walked to our platform.  Our original plan was Frankfurt => Mannheim => Saarbrucken => Forbach => Metz.  We were supposed to arrive at about 5:35, which would give us nearly 1.5 hours to check in at the Residence Lafayette (the apartments we are staying at).  The connection to Mannheim ran like most other European trains (that is, on time).  But when we got to the platform, there was a little announcement next to the information saying that the train wasn't running.  We heard later that a garbage truck drove into the side of the express train we were to take and that the line had been shut down for the day.

So, at the information desk we were given another itinerary: Mannheim => Offenberg => Strasbourg => Metz, which would put us in the Metz-Ville station at 6:58, 2 minutes before check in closed.  We figured there was a long shot that we might be able to check in that night, so we were still pretty hopeful.  Sitting on the train however, there was an announcement in German that made the three locals in front of us laugh.  We just smiled and chuckled, pretending to know what was going.  We must have made some comment at some point, because one of the ladies sitting across from us suddenly started explaining what happened.  There was a medical emergency in one of the cars and a doctor had been called to help.  After about a 45 minute wait on the platform, the train finally started moving.  We figured that we wouldn't make the next train by a long shot, so we had to wait for another hour and a half before we could finally make the connection to Metz.

Once we were in Metz, Siri (who has been here before) grabbed us a cab and we finally got to the dorm, to find it dark and locked.  Fortunately, there were a few people who showed up and happened to be the few that Siri knew before getting here.  We were able to sleep on their floors for the night and I was finally able to check into my room the next morning.

In Metz!

It's late Wednesday night, and I just wanted to post that I made it late Tuesday night, for all the family and friends following this.  I'll have a more detailed post coming soon.  It's kinda been hard to find the time so far since all the students here have been travelling in packs.

Good night from France!

packing!

It's 9:12 pm on the 15th and I take off for New York in approximately 19 hours and 45 minutes.  I'm a little behind on the packing right now though.  I've gathered the majority of all the stuff I've been taking.  There's a few things to add to the piles in the guest bedroom, but it's mostly there, so I've decided I'm going to start on my first practice pack.  The challenge:

This stuff: 

Into these bags:

Let's see how I do!

Eat Mor Chikin

Sorry for the week without a post, everyone.  It hasn't been particularly busy, but I still haven't gotten around to posting.  I've just been taking care of the little stuff and getting details in line.

What I've been meaning to post about was what I cooked a week ago.  Laura, my little sister, had to go to fencing practice, so the whole meal wasn't ready for her.  For a quick dinner, I made her an omelet with some tomatoes and onions, and the salad that I had made for dinner.   

The rest of us had more sauteed chicken and a tomato, rosemary and white wine pan sauce on a bed of mushroom pilaf.  The salad was spinach and arugula with oil and balsamic vinegar topped with crumbled cheese and crasins on top.  It was good, but I think the first dish was better.  The flavor of the mushrooms in the pilaf was a little strong.  The salad was fantastic though.  

12 more days to go!