Of Corsica!

Click on photo to enlarge

I’ve finished my first vacation in a long time and I’m feeling pretty damn good! I feel genuinely decompressed from work and life and I’m ready to get cracking on these next few months ahead with a renewed sense of vigor.

So, a week ago, I left for Corsica, and to put simply, my visit there was relaxing, fun and filled with little pleasures appearing around every corner. I mostly stayed in Bastia which is the capitol of Corsica and is an old port city stuck between the sea and the mountains. It’s a very small city and most of the buildings have not been taken care of in decades. Everywhere you walk, façades are crumbling and spider webs of phone lines, power lines and laundry line paint over the cracks and chips. While decay of this kind might have a negative connotation with normal people, Julie and I agree that there is a certain beauty to this decay. It gives it character. It’s the opposite of sterile and clean and new. It’s old and rustic and crumbling and forgotten. Corsica’s an interesting place, actually. Despite the fact that it’s a part of France, you never really hear about it. Instead you tend to hear more about France’s other outer-continental conquests like Algeria, Morocco, Martinique, Haiti, etc etc. Corsica, despite being closer geographically and politically than all of these other places, is just this entity, 1/13th the size of Ohio, floating in the middle of the Mediterranean. This old, forgotten piece of furniture in the attic hidden behind a wall of boxes.






Even the people are different. They do not strike me as French even though they speak French, watch French television and movies dubbed in French; listen to French music, etc. Despite this linguistic link, they are a population à part. They seem hardened and weathered. Open and jovial but at the same time reserved and cautious towards strangers. The difference between the populations really hit me when I came back to Lyon and everyone on the mainland just seemed so...soft. When I first arrived on Corsica last week, Julie took me to a drumming circle she attends where a bunch of people around our age get together to bang on various homemade percussion instruments to play Brazilian drumming music. I got to bang a pot with a drumstick and we rehearsed a number for a couple hours. Later that evening, we went out to a bar where half of the people in the group were very nice and very open (Men will greet each other with the bise here in Corsica. Something that’s reserved between very close bonds like Father and Son on the continent) and the other half would barely even talk despite efforts on my part to say hi. This weird dichotomy between the friendly, carefree Mediterranean stereotype and the cautious native of an island that’s been fought over and battled over for centuries made my head turn a bit as I soon became unsure of how to act and react around this population.

While I had a lot of time to spend observing and pondering the lives on these people on this island, it’s important to note that fun was had as well. Despite Julie still being at work, we managed to do so many things. There was the drum circle night and a Valentine’s day party the following night with the same group of people. We took a bus to Erbalunga, a small village north of Bastia that has a historical watchtower that normally has no public access inside, but Julie and I hiked to the shortest wall facing the ocean and climbed up the wall and into the tower and then walked up to the top where we could see the coast for miles and miles.



We’ve also had a ton of dinner nights here at Julie’s with her colleague Anne-Sophie, one being a raclette dinner in which we just stuffed ourselves with melted cheese on potatoes, ham, prosciutto, bread and wine. Speaking of which, Anne-Sophie has become my new French best friend. We go off on tirades talking about movies, TV and books (mostly about Dune, a book I’m reading at the moment and she’s a huge fan of the series) and I was sad that we got to spend so little time together. Oh well, there’s always Facebook. Ha?



The rest of our spare time was spent chilling out max and watching episodes of “In Treatment” and reading and hiking around the different small villages surrounding Bastia. We didn’t stray very far and we didn’t have an itinerary of places and things to do or see. We just existed as normal people for a week, as the good friends we are and what more could you ask for out of a vacation?

Not much at all.

Mommy Dearest

I’m sitting in my room getting ready to leave on vacation, but I felt like getting a quick word in. Last weekend my mom came to town for a 3 day visit which was very relaxed and fun. My mother's a wonderful, self-less and caring woman and I am lucky to have been raised by such a fantastic human being. During her visit, we walked around town and I showed her the sights, she went to the musée des beaux arts with my roommates when I had to go to work, I ate an entire bag of homemade chocolate chip cookies she brought, watched Avatar in 3D (and just for the record, I thought I was going to hate it, but it turned out that what it lacked in subtlety and depth made up in sheer entertainment), watched episodes of The Office and ate, ate, ATE. Our stomach linings were about to burst we ate so much. Oh and I finally got my favorite hoodie back after leaving it in a bar in Madison last August. (Thank you Jeff and Daron!)

However, the funniest part of the trip was us going to the supermarket and buying so much food, we couldn’t carry all of the bags with us by hand, so my Mom just up and said, “Come on, we’re pushing the shopping cart home.” We pushed the cart down the street like a couple of hobos, brought it up the elevator and into my apartment to unload. We were laughing so hard, as perhaps you can see in this photo:



All in all, we had a wonderful time and I can’t wait to see her again in April.

Anyway, I need to head out to the airport now. I am finally getting out of the Lyon for the first time since October and I’m headed to Corsica which is a wee bit warmer than Lyon - however I just found out that it’s snowing there as we speak. Blah.

PS: Wow...minutes after posting this blog I almost had a heart attack when I found out that the deadline to renew my contract was during vacation and I needed a woman's signature before sending it in...who is leaving in a half hour on vacation. I managed to print out the paper, sign it and scan it and email it to her in time. Phew. All good.

Busy little Beaver.

Wow, January has pretty much flown by. This whole year seems to just be picking up more and more speed. It’s making me worry about the future and what the hell I am going to do afterwards.... But let’s not get ourselves too down here. The season premiere of Lost is downloading so in the meantime let’s get cracking on these past couple weeks.

If I had to describe January, I think it’s the month where I finally found a group of regular friends I like and with whom we spend most of our time together - and even managed to start a few traditions. For example, every Tuesday we get together for various happy hours around town. We start at 6pm at Les Berthom for their €2.50 pints and then we pack up and head up to the Cosmopolitan at 8 for their €1 half-pints. Last happy hour call is at 10pm but by then we’re all pretty drunk and dancing and just going crazy. That is... until midnight when everyone scrambles to catch the last metro train. Another tradition we came up with is the Time Capsule. It started after a holiday party in December at Emily’s place when people who were too drunk stayed over and just holed themselves inside for Saturday AND Sunday watching movies and eating. I wasn’t there for the first one, but the second one they held the second weekend of January was really a memorable time. We closed the curtains and just veg’ed around for 3 days straight. Everyone took turns cooking and cleaning and everyone fought over what movies to watch. I would usually just quietly go up to the computer and start one without permission. By doing this I was able to introduce them to cinematic masterpieces like They Live and Roadhouse. Classics I tell you.

Apart from that, most of my free time has been spent knitting. Last year I asked a bunch of people on facebook if they’d like me to knit them a hat or scarf since I was needing to work on my knitting skills and didn’t have any projects at the time. It was a big success so I decided to make it into a yearly tradition, and a couple weeks ago I asked people on facebook again if they wanted me to knit them something. Since then I’ve just been pumping out the orders. So far I’ve made 3 hats and 2 scarves:

These two scarves are for my cousin's wife and their 3 year old son.

This hat's for Jenn Harvey. Old, old friend.

This is for my colleague Emily who has to get her gall bladder removed today.

This was for Javier who I met at Christmas.

I still have one more scarf and one more hat to make before my initial orders are complete - but there are still some people who didn’t get an order in and are begging me to make them something. Sigh. Winter might be over by the time I finish!

Oh and yarn is ferkin’ expensive here. Never thought I’d live to see the day when I say I miss JoAnn Fabrics and/or Hobby Lobby.

I also threw a party last weekend which was kind of a bad idea.... The weekend started as a rather chill time. Loads of people were leaving town and I just thought I’d stay inside and finish my knitting. However, bad weather forced a group of friends headed to the Alps to turn around and come back to Lyon. My roommate had left to visit family in Auvergne so I was just like, “Hey! Come on over to my place!” What I was hoping would be a nice, chill relaxed evening turned into a monster with people bringing friends who in turn brought their friends, etc. Everything was alright until around 10:30pm when alcohol was running out. So Patrick and I took a collection and walked to an convenience store and managed to make it as they were closing and bought €50 worth of booze. That was a bad idea. Here’s what ended up happening:

- First my roommate’s desk was broken and the damage left two huge holes in the wall.
- Someone puked somewhere and used my bath-towel to clean it up.
- Red wine kept spilling everywhere. Some even on the white couch.
- People kept taking food without asking (some of it being my roommate’s)
- The neighbor knocked at 2 in the morning to complain about noise and even though I turned the music off people were still yelling and talking loud.
- One person was off his rocker and started pushing and punching people.
- Someone puked in my building’s lobby right in front of the elevator (I had to clean that one up...fun)
- No one left until 5am

Needless to say I hated people - nay, the world - the following Sunday. I’m just lucky I have a really chill and cool roommate who understood, but it doesn’t matter. No more parties at my place.

Now how do you say “spackle” in French?