This seemed like an obvious opportunity to explore.
I had heard that St. Nicolas Lake was near the campus, and that it was surrounded by many hiking trails, so I decided to make it my destination. In retrospect, it is not at all difficult to find, if you know where you're going. ;-)
Away from the tacky apartment buildings (like Florida condos with chimneys), the narrow streets, clutter of cars, and starkly utilitarian dorms I realized at last that, wholly apart from stunning architecture and carefully landscaped gardens, France is a beautiful country.
The woods today were sweetly fragrant with the fresh, maddening scent of April in Missouri. Rough walls of jagged moss covered slate, broken by flowery banks tumbled with ivy, yellow gorse, and dark green holly, rose on one side of the narrow sandy path. The other side dropped steeply through the trees to the glistening lake. The greenish brown water was dotted with little flotillas of mallards, trailing white victory signs behind them in a glimmering wake. Grey-barked deciduous trees, tall and eerie, were gnarled, knotted, and twisted in fantastic formations, stretching upward beside soft-needled pines, many of them naked saving a luxurious pouf of needles at the top, like flora escaped from the pages of Dr. Seuss. Mosses, twiners, and creepers raced everywhere, glowing in the luminescent grey air. At one moment, ivy peeped like scattered emeralds from a mat of rich red pine needles. The next, a bend was rounded, and a secluded clearing was revealed, carpeted in soft green moss and dotted with tiny flowers. Mounds of wild rose canes rose up against the craggy slate walls. In patches of mud, chips of slate shone in shades of blue. The birdsong was deafening, and intoxicating, and foreign. A thousand sweet notes and trills I've never heard before rang in my ears all morning. In short, it was a place to be lost in, and lost there I was, wandering from trail to trail, for three glorious hours. Definitely the best three hours I've spent since arriving in Angers.
What did I learn? French joggers, explorers, and strollers are almost uniformly un-gregarious, but if you grin at them all as they go by, you'll get the occasional answering smile, or a heavingly breathless 'Bonjour' as they plunge past you down the path. You'll also get some really weird looks. I've composed a sociological theory that to acknowledge the existence of other human beings on a woodland trail, where everyone is trying to escape the petty bounds of society and avoid being surrounded by people is probably considered a monstrous invasion of privacy by the French. Actually, I kind of feel the same way... but still... that rules out another strategy for meeting language partners- umm, I mean, friends. :-P
In other news, Stacey and Caitlin are off tonight to meet a new friend, Marta, downtown, and attend a French film festival. Hannah, (another American) and I are headed to a Bible study and hangout with Le Groupe Biblique Universitaire d'Angers. If we can overcome our nonblogging laziness, I'm sure the three of us will tell you all about both experiences later. And of course, we have many stories and lessons from the first week (mostly forgotten already) to tell you about as well. In future updates expect to hear about:
- Attending classes in French
-How not to make friends in France
-Sharon's creepy ideas for attempting to make friends in France which we are absolutely not going to try.
- Doing laundry in France, and various laundry related escapades
-Cooking in the communal kitchen
-Touring the 15th century castle
-Snookers: the only bar in Angers we're familiar enough with to discuss intelligently (expect a plug for the Monaco from Caitlin)
-The pervasive, mysterious 'Kebab'
-Grocery shopping
- Things we never ate in the U.S.
-Our dorms
-Taking the bus
-Culture shock
- Falling short of the French dress-code (It isn't hard. But who wants to wear a miniskirt and stilletto heels to class, especially when it's freezing out? It's not our fault that the girls here do.) This may occur as a separate blog post titled: 'The Scarf is not Enough' (refer to first post for context on The Scarf)
Au revoir, and until next time,
-Sharon
