Still alive!

I'm still alive, I promise! :) Probably still a little damp from all this crazy rain, but alive and well nonetheless. This is evidently the time of year when the weather gets really bizarre. Let me describe Saturday for you. It started out sunny, with hardly a cloud in the sky. This lasted for a couple of hours, and then within the span of fifteen minutes, the sky had turned to nothing but a layer of gray, as though it had been raining all day. Then the wind started gusting, the heavens opened up, and the rain poured down for about half an hour (sometimes interspersed with little bits of ice). And then it all blew away, and the weather was perfectly sunny again for a couple of hours, like it had never rained and wouldn’t rain again for a week. Haha. Clever trick. In thirty minutes to an hour, the clouds roll back in again, and you rinse and repeat. Try that five or six times in a day. It's one of the most deceptive weather patterns I've ever seen, and it makes it extremely difficult to make outdoor plans! There is one upside though, and it’s a beautiful one:




Three days in a row, I’ve seen the most gigantic, brilliant rainbows I have ever seen in my life - sometimes two at a time! The one in this photo stretched all the way across the sky, visible from end to end. We could even see where it touched the ground on both sides. It would have been amazing to make a dash for the fields to play in it, but I don’t think I could have convinced the bus driver to stop.

So, what have I done lately that you would find interesting? Looking at rainbows, definitely. Listening to that lecture on French union workers in the 1890s...um...probably not. Oh! We were given a four day weekend in honor of Easter, so Friday morning I decided to take a walk to get some air and take some pictures of the beautiful blooming trees. I ended up in a park across town when, of course, one of those crazy unexpected rainstorms blew in. Needless to say, I was soaked and freezing by the time I got home. But - le Jardin des Plantes is always so gorgeous:



And the city is full of new spring flowers:









I haven't really taken any spectacular shots, but I think these capture a little bit of the raw beauty of spring here - the kind of beauty I notice when I walk to school every day.

Speaking of school, it's almost over! I can hardly believe it. I will have a rather normal week of classes this week, then a week of spring break, then a couple of weeks of classes, one week of catch-up classes, and then a few days of break before the week of written exams. By the middle of May, nearly all of my exams will be finished, and I will only have my oral exam for Arts, Langues, et Patrimoine left to take at the end of May. As short as the academic semester has seemed, I have still managed to learn an amazingly immense quantity of information. At the same time, I’ve realized just how vast the sea of information is that I *don’t* know (and could never begin to fathom, even if I tried). In any case, I've discovered a new passion that might help me to focus a little bit. It's been a while since I found something I could get excited about doing, something I could get lost in for hours without it being a chore, but I can definitely do that with translation. It’s interesting to think about how I felt before I came here, when all I wanted to do was get my degree and get out of the straitjacket of education. Now I am considering pursuing a master's or graduate certificate in translation. Go figure. Dr. Bailey even offered to let me do an independent study class on translation with him in the fall! I'm super-excited about that.

And, I'm actually super-excited about the fall semester in general! We found out that a French student from UCO is coming to study abroad at UCA, which will be like bringing a little bit of Angers back home with us! :) Kendra and I are going to meet her for the first time this afternoon to answer some of her questions about our university and Arkansas and Conway. Speaking of UCA, I was able to set aside some time last week to structure my fall schedule and register for classes, and here's what it looks like:

Sociolinguistics
Independent Study: Translation
UN & International Politics
Event Planning
Gender Communication
Choir

I'm so beyond excited...probably because my schedule also allows me to start classes no earlier than 10:50 and end no later than 4:15 every day. Annnnnnnd...it looks like Ali and I will be able to get an apartment together, with private rooms, *just* off-campus, for cheaper than what it cost to live on campus. It's unfurnished, too, which means we get to use the odds and ends that we've acquired over the years to create our own truly eclectic, cheap, college-student apartment style. Hehe. (That also means we get spend an afternoon this August sipping lemonade and watching all of our guys move our furniture in.) ;) I’m disappointed that we won’t be able to live with Caitlin, because that would have made for a pretty awesome suite, but University Park is cheaper and more practical, a definite bonus for my family.

Hummm, I know I’ve done a few other exciting things that might interest you. Oh, right, I haven’t mentioned the Chateau de Serrant yet. Our last ALP excursion was a little bit outside of Angers, to this reconstructed chateau:





This one is a bit more recent, with Renaissance-style architecture, but there are still remnants of the original Medieval castle, like the passageways underground. Anyway, the fact that you can walk around in period-furnished 15-16-17-18th century castles and princely residences still blows my mind.  They're just so - normal - when you walk around in them, like huge houses with fancy stone rooms adorned with tapestries, but they have moats and drawbridges and towers on the outside!  It's hard to imagine that men and women in fancy suits and dresses actually wandered around in those huge bedrooms, getting their hair meticulously coiffed so that they could go sit in the awkwardly stiff living rooms and talk about the weather and their latest expensive piece of furniture. Queen Elizabeth even came to stay in the Chateau de Serrant for a few days once. There are pictures of her piles of suitcases and huge assortment of hats on display. Anyway, the houses are beautiful, and the libraries are AMAZING (I might kill for the one I saw at Serrant, with all of its ladders and polished wood and original encyclopedia sets), but I still think it would have been boring to live like that.  The libraries are full of books no one would ever read. And, the canopy beds with flowing curtains are beautiful, but I would have been afraid that mine would have fallen off the wall and crushed me.  The paintings of French generals and kings and random sons of nobles no one's heard of get kind of old, too.  They all look like Napoleons and Louis’s and Charles’s to me.  And the women are usually rather ugly.  So yes...boredom, falling canopies, and stereotyped paintings. Three good reasons that I like looking at chateaus, but wouldn't have wanted to live in one.  However, I have also thought of three reasons I *would* want to live in one (at least nowadays): 1) bedrooms that have small bathrooms hidden inside small rooms disguised as armoires, 2) the surrounding countryside with winding paths and lakes and towering trees, and 3) a personal library.  Not to mention it would be awesome for entertaining guests and having balls (because I'm just that high-class). ;)

Anyway, I will probably write my next post after I get back from spring break. Kendra and I are leaving for LONDON next Monday. I can’t wait! :) I’ve dreamed about going to London since I was a little girl.

I hope you all have a great week! <3