The State of my world a million miles away....

McDonald’s, The Buffalo Grill, and a sketchy Kebab stand are our only options for dinner out here on the Technopole. McDonald’s is McDonald’s…I have been warned not to patronize the Buffalo Grill which supposedly is neither a steak house nor a wing joint…and the concept of a Kebab shack where they shave meat off of a giant composite, origin questionable, hunk of meat three feet tall disgusts me to no avail. Considering these meager options, out of sheer necessity I have been forced to concede and embrace my womanly domestic duties…I have begun to cook. My dormitory has a kitchen; if you can call a bare room equipped with a sink, refrigerator, toaster oven and two hot plates a kitchen. The Frenchies on my hall use it to cook nearly every night. They can somehow manage to sauté, boil, fry, sear, steam, and smoke every type of fish imaginable…So I figured if they could do it despite such ill-equipped facilities, so could I! I mean Martha Stewart survived in jail for five months, I can manage three months in middle-of-nowhere-France! So far the extent of my cooking is limited to baked chicken, pasta and omelets, but I expect to have accumulated quite an extensive repertoire of recipes by August.
Cooking was not an issue this weekend since it was spent roaming through the French countryside with my mother. We took the train to just outside of Tours and rented a car to better facilitate our drive through Chateau country. Being that I am neither capable of driving a manual transmission or able to read a map in the car without getting car sick, I was the designated DJ, attempting to find American music amidst the 8 radio stations in our pimpin’ VW Touren. Zach was our built in navigation system and my mother, she was our pilot. Having assured me that she had practiced driving a manual car before her trip I was blindly confident in her abilities…I mean she learned to drive on a manual, that sort of stuff is supposed to stick, right? Like riding a Bike… Needless to say it has been quite a long time since the Ford Pinto she got at 16, which was wrecked twice…
Our first adventure came as we attempted to pull out of the parking space at the car rental office…I knew in those five minutes as she struggled to reverse and pull forward, reverse and pull forward, that the next two days were going to be interesting, and that the least of my worries should be the fact that Zach was navigating…. It didn’t turn out to be nearly as bad as I had anticipated, in the end we were flicked off twice, forced to turn around three times, ended up two miles down a bike path instead of the road once, became lost four times, stalled out once, but frighteningly in the middle of a round-about, and accidentally stayed in reverse a couple of times. My mother and rental cars are not good friends, the last time she had one she managed to hit a deer in St. Croix…this time she only put one medium sized dent and scratch on the side of the car, but that was totally because the decorative cement ball at the entrance to our hotel came out of nowhere…
This weekend’s gallivanting took us through the Loire Valley, known as Chateau country south of Paris. The homes were enormous and intimidating, but looked as though they had come out of a fairy tale…an all too clear indicator of why the French Revolution took place…Check out my newly added pictures of the Loire Valley and Eiffel Tower on my Webshots:
Next weekend Zach and I head south to Provence for our first four day weekend, with days in Arles to stalk down Van Gogh, Avignon to tour the hardly used Papal complex, and Nice to soak up the sun on the French Riviera!

Bonjour!

One thing that I have begun to realize about American society is that we strive for simplicity, while the rest of the world is content to continue with their old traditions, regardless of convenience. The most pertinent example of this is the fitted sheet. In Europe, beds normally do not have a fitted sheet covering the mattress. Instead they rely on expert bed-making skills, tightly wrapping a second flat sheet around the bed and tucking it tightly beneath, a task that would be made far more simple by adding a little elastic to the sheet...The issue arises when you have individuals…specifically Americans accustomed to the fitted sheet…whose bed-making abilities fall short of what is necessary to keep the mattress covered. At school I have survived because I did manage to find a fitted sheet at the CORA, however, such a luxury was unavailable to me in the hostel I stayed in this weekend...
At one o’clock in the morning, when I arrived at the hostel in Köln, I was hoping to find a warm and inviting bed to crash in…honestly I was so tired from the 5 hour train ride, that I thought I could have cared less where I slept, as long as it was a bed. Upon entering the room, I was a little perturbed that the bed had not been made for me. My tired apathy thought…Ok that’s cool, its cheap, they expect you to make your own bed, I’ve totally got this. But when I examined the linens provided for me I was truly perplexed…laying on my bed was a flat sheet, a pillow case, a pillow, a featherbed thingy, and a large sheet sack…I had the pillow / pillow-case match on lock-down, but was the sack? A slipcover of sorts I was supposed to push the mattress into? Or was I supposed to sleep in it like a sleeping bag? My worry about the hostel’s sanitation kept running through my mind. I examined the entirety of the mattress looking for remnants of bugs or eggs as my backpackers guide to Europe had encouraged. It was spotless, but they could be hiding right? I decided that my best game plan for making the bed was to put as much fabric between myself and the possibly bug ridden mattress as possible, regardless of whether I sacrificed my own warmth. I began by laying the “feather-bed” onto the mattress, and covering it with the flat sheet, which I then attempted to tuck around as tightly as a fitted sheet. I stuffed my pillow in its case, stuffed myself into the large sack and waddled as best I could from the light switch to the bed. Instead of fixating on the obscene roughness of the sheets, which couldn’t have had a thread count higher than 50, I lay there petrified of what could possibly be living within the mattress, featherbed, or pillow. At some point my exhaustion set in and I did fall asleep.
In the morning, after my alarm had sounded and as I lay in bed wondering whether I had it in me to brave the bathroom or not, I begun to think about the large sheet sack I was currently enveloped in… All night long I kept getting tangled up in it as I tossed and turned, surely, I mean Surely Europeans couldn’t find this comfortable…a sleeping bag could not be the appropriate usage for this sheet sack… And then it came to me. The “featherbed” that I had laid down as a mattress pad was of coarse not a feather bed, but a duvet insert, and my sandpaper sleeping bag was in reality the duvet cover…I felt a little disappointed in my own intelligence, got up and started the day.
Friday was spent pursuing through the city of Köln, the highlights of which were their Cathedral, “the Dom,” which ironically had no dome…the Chocolate Museum and the Museum Ludwig, a modern art museum that took us the better part of the morning to see. I personally loved the Museum; it had fantastic collections of Picasso, Warhol, Max Ernst, Dali and Kirschner. My least favorite part was the constant grumble coming from Zach as he insisted that half the works could easily be reproduced by a four-year old and the other half were offensive…
Saturday we were on to the tiny town of Treis-Karden to see the Castle Burg Eltz…which we had to hike to…like actually walk in the woods for an extended period of time to see. I swear I think it was the first time in at least three months that my tennis shoes were worn…However, in spite of the blood, sweat, tears and mud (actually there was no blood, it just sounds better if there was) the sense of satisfaction when we finally reached the castle was incredible. Tucked within the mountains bordering the Mosel River, this castle dating from 1250 was quite a diamond in the literal ruff.
Having showered up from our grimy morning, Saturday night we were in the town of Heidelberg, which was quite the happening scene. I felt so Cosmopolitan mingling with so many other college students, the only downfall was that none of them really spoke English, so we kinda kept to ourselves…Sunday morning we explored their ruined castle on the hill, and took the funicular up for quite a sweeping view of the Neckar River Valley.
I have had several requests for our address here in France and it is as follows:
Georgia Tech Lorraine
Attention : Name
2-3 rue Marconi
Metz-Technopôle
57070 Metz
France
I love goodies, especially jelly beans and anything with peanut butter and chocolate, my shoe size is 11, celery green and pink are my favorite colors, and my birthstone is Ruby…and ummm, Zach, he’ll eat pretty much anything that isn’t rotten…

Until next time,
Lots of Love!

New Pictures of this Weekend have been added to my Webshots, http://community.webshots.com/user/HillHerb

Bonjour!

Email sent out May 16th 2007

I really think that I am just a simple girl, with simple needs…I’ve been sick and I would really like some Kleenex, I love me a bagel in the mornings and I really just like to be organized for my classes. Sadly these simple needs were unable to be fulfilled today by the Cora, proclaimed to be bigger and better than a Super-Wal-Mart…
Today we have checked into our dorms at Georgia Tech Lorraine. My room is quaint, bare but quaint…not nearly as depressingly Spartan as Zach’s room whom he shares with an intimidating French student. Beige would be the best word to describe the room…beige walls, beige floor, beige curtains, beige furniture…and all the same color of beige, like a sterile ivory. In an attempt to make the room a little bit more livable, since it will have to be home for the next three months, I went to the Cora and bought pink sheets, a lime green bath mat and a pink, orange, yellow and green table cloth for my desk. It’s defiantly an improvement, but not quite my chocolate covered Strawberry shoebox that I had called home for the past year and a half…
The campus is small, two dormitories shared with a neighboring French University, a dining facility shared with a research institution, a single extremely high tech five story academic building boldly emblazoned with Georgia Tech. It all sounds quite convenient, however there is a large obstruction in the form of a pond between my resident hall and the academic building which requires quite a hike around.
After we moved in and had perused campus, we were off to the Cora which is the sight of my first and only (so far) break down of the trip…I had never really realized how different French and American cultures were until I crossed into their version of a Wal-Mart. Similarly laid out, you have electronics, Clothing, school supplies, Meat department, frozen foods, produce and non-perishables, a garden center, automotive center, optics center, beauty Salon and arcade. The Cora also houses a full-size Cafeteria, and a Wine section that would put even the best liquor store in America to shame. However, despite all these amenities, and having twice the product offerings of your average Super-Wal-Mart…There was nothing, I mean NOTHING I wanted to eat. Since Breakfast is not served at the school’s cafeteria I needed breakfast supplies. There were no pop-tarts, no bagels, no frozen waffles, and while they had cereal a plenty, there was no milk except powdered milk and Baby formula. Frustration Arises. So I finally decide I could do croissants with a little butter and Jam, but then I think, hey yah know what would be good on a croissant? Peanut Butter. So I begin my quest, Zach trailing behind for a jar of peanut butter. The obvious place for me to look was with the jelly; because everybody eats good ole peanut butter and jelly right? WRONG. Maybe with other sandwich toppings like Mayonnaise and Ketchup? Not there either. It wasn’t until Zach and I split up and crosshatched every aisle that the peanut butter was discovered. Where you ask…along side the Salsa, Taco shells, and bean dip in the Mexican Cuisine department. Really because they eat so much peanut butter in Mexico? Frustration Builds. Once I had my food situation on lock down it was time to concentrate on school. There are few things that I truly enjoy more than shopping for school supplies, and I had reserved this delight for the Cora. I mean I could have bought notebook paper and folders at the CVS back home, but why wag it over here and ruin the opportunity to buy something that they don’t have in the States. I got excited just approaching the school supply section in anticipation of all the new sorts of pens and highlighters. Oh they had pens and highlighters galore, but when it came to folders and notebook paper, nothing. Yah, in addition to hating breakfast and having some vendetta against peanut butter they also do not write on standard horizontal line notebook paper. Frenchies… Nope, all the Cora had, was a very large selection of Graph paper, like the paper with the little bitty boxes. I opened one of every notebook they had, hoping for some paper with just lines, and notebook after notebook only had graph paper. As I opened the last notebook, with a frolicking deer on the front, and saw graph paper yet again, I sunk to the floor and started to sob, and as the tears steamed down my face I began to laugh at the fact that I was crying over notebook paper, and that I had nothing to wipe my eyes with because they also do not sell Kleenex in France.
Other than my dilemma in the Cora, we have had a pretty good week in France so far. Our first few days we wandered around exploring Metz the city were our program is hosted, and then took day trips to both Luxembourg and Strasbourg, which were both beautiful. Check out my pictures at: . This weekend we are heading to Germany, specifically the Rhineland with nights in Koln (Cologne), Koblenz, and Heidelberg. The weekend will include a hike to a castle and my first stay in a hostel, which should be interesting!