aixtoberfest

While some of the students of AUCP made their way off to Munich at the end of September, I finished off my first month in Aix with a pression pêche — beer with peach syrup. Girly and oh-so-delicious — at Pub O'Sullivan's with a group of pals who were also staying in the country. No traveling for me, unfortunately, at least not until les vacances de Toussaint, a week of fall break at the end of October. Me and my pal Kiely will be heading off to Bretagne, followed by a romp in Paris with my friend Dan, and we will finish off the ten days or of blissful freedom with a few days in either Copenhagen or somewhere in Italy. Or Berlin. Scotland is also a possibility...

This is one of the best things about living in Europe. Everything is so ridiculously close, at least compared to an American scale. France alone is the size of Texas, shares borders with Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain, and is a mere underwater train ride away from England. If I wanted to leave the United States from Ohio, I could make it pretty easily to Canada, but Mexico would be something of a trek. Starting from Aix, I could hop in a car and be in Barcelona in three hours. This blows my mind.

Unfortunately I don't have an international driver's license and/or a vehicle to call my own, so I have to find my way around by the means of other forms of transportation. Like every other student who has studied abroad before me, I am slowly and steadily coming to see the beauty that is Ryan Air. I bought tickets from Marseille to London for the first weekend in December for about 50 Euros, and two round-trip tickets for me and my boyfriend to go to Venice for only a little over 100. The times of the flights are not what you would call convenient and you can only have one carry-on bag free of charge, but really, who really gives a shit when you find yourself on a gondola a few hours later?

I have those two trips planned, and am in the midst of figuring out the rest of my travel for this semester. The program I am with doesn't really want us to travel much, unfortunately. They're all about staying in Aix, which is okay for this first half for me, but I would get insatiably restless if I had to stay much longer after that. My friends and I are trying to pack in trips for every weekend we can after the October break — aside from the trip we're taking to London, Barcelona and Milan are also in the works. We have cooking classes with a Provençal chef here on certain Friday evenings, which means that when we have those we won't really be able to travel very far away that weekend. Oh well.

In the meantime, I'm just hanging out in the south of France and getting to know Aix pretty well. Pas grande chose. Went to Abby's house out in the country today for a bike ride. It was gorgeous, with striking views of le Mont St. Victoire — the mountain that Cézanne painted incessantly AND that I triumphantly climbed this past Sunday! — in the distance. Harumph. So typical.