new zealand!

hello! hello!

that was such a pleasant greeting wasnt it? two hellos, two single exclamation points...i didnt plan it to come out so pleasantly but pop! there it was. ive decided that the exclamation point, when used wisely, is mankind;'s best invention. better than the wheel, sliced bread and that pennasillun ish...COMBINED. the exclamation point is usually over-used but when placed somewhere unexpected (like in front of the two hellos) it really is magic. usually i find conventional grammar and punctuation stifling to my free-spirit-like ways and insufficient for expressing my complicated train of thought, but that exclamation point - its a goodie

anywaysss, still in france. still alive. its about midnight here... about dinnertime for all youz representin the homefront . i havent written in a while, pretty much because im too cool and awesome and my life is so exciting and busy that i couldnt bother to sit and write in the blog. but i know u all are sooo curious about my whereabouts in the past week so i guess i can take a small respite from my awesome life to fill u in on the awesomeness... i guess

just kidding, nothing too incredibly awesome has been happening to me and i probably could have found time time to write but sometimes (always) i find myself too lazy to do so..that is, until i get that inspirational kick in the bum from above.. aka until its time to procrastinate something i probably should have started days ago and now the task is so large and daunting and overwhelming that i find it more appealing to just do osmething else rather than start the said something i should have started days ago..and so herrrrrrrrrrreee i am!

since last time i made efforts at communication, i have been to belgian and back. phew! now THAT was a gruesome trip. saw a lot of things that have been burned into my memory forever - i seen things i wouldn't wish my worst enemie's children to see - i seen things you couldn't possibly imagine.

yo, but fo realz, belgium was pretty tight. we went to two cities - bruges (chocolate capital of the world), and brusselles (just regular capital of the world. sike! captial of the EU, not the world. but europeans tend to be kind of euro-centric so they prob consider brusselles the center of the world. they love the eu. like they want to marry it and have its babies. i tell them thats ok, as long as it's for love and both partners get tested for hiv first. honesty is the best policy). both cities were really beautiful, but in bruges i got that weird feeling i had when i was in venice lasst summer... sour stomach.

eww just kiddingggg.. no but i did get a weird feeling: its so quaint but everything there is aimed at tourists and it all feels very contrived (even though i know mad history went down there and its not fake. it only feels fake because ive been pumped full of images and movies of other towns that try to recreate the ambiance and feel of these types of cities which are, in fact, real.) But in venice for example, i remmebr we couldnt find any real-people stores, like supermarkets or regular clothing stores or i dunno, tv repair places. things that real people who lead normal lives need to get by. Everything is souvenir shops, hotels, restaurants, museums, canal rides, etc. Bruges is known as the "venice of the north" becuase it too has many canals and they make mad lace there and its got a similar vibe. simalar in the non-realness. the tour guide told us that less than 20,000 people actually live in the city center - most just commute in for work. All the people who worked in the chocolate shops were wearing those stupid tall white chef's hats that are incredibly uneccesary and there were accordian players on every corner and i didnt see much public transportation or any schools or anything that shows signs of actual life. I felt like i was walking around an amusement park or some village that has been artificially preserved and forbidden to progress. especially when the horse and buggies almost ran me over every three minutes. although if you really want to get philosophical about it, what is progress anyways?? just because the city didnt fit the paradigm of what i consider a modern cosmopolitn city today doesnt mean the place is backwards. but like... horse and buggies? c'mon... So, all in all being a tourist in Bruges made me feel slightly depressed because i was participating in the perpetuation of this weird vibe i got when i was there.. even though the tourist industry is probably the reason every family in a 70km radious of the city has food on the table each night. but i did like Bruges overall and it was really beautiful and the french fries were bangin' and actually.. i take back everything negative i said before.

Brusselles was very scenic as well, but much more cosmopolitan. i get less of the amusement park feeling there but still weird vibes persist. for example, we were there on a saturday night, in the city center, and ther were bars and clubs and restaurants all over the place and they were all really nice, lots of variety, etc... but for some reason every bar and restaurant was deserted - they were all literally half to three-quarters empty. it was very bizarre. it was all likeeee "where the peepz be at???", ya know? strange. but really pretty nonetheless, and the next morning we went to mini-europe and i got interviewed by this swedish radio station and i probably couldnt have sounded more dumb and american if i tried buuutt i mean, its all gravy baby. i took mad pics and if u wanna see them then too bad im not showing u, you creepy stalker you. just kidding. they on facebook. look there if u want.

belgium was my first intra-continental voyage - the first of more to come. i spent a lot of this week planning trips for the rest of the semester. traveling is my favorite thing to so, fo sho. ill give ya the lowdown real quick on where ill be going:
oct 27-28: dijon/bourgogne -->france
oct 31-nov 6: LONDON AND DUBLIN!!!
nov 29-dec 2: BRATISLAVA AND VIENNA (maddddddddd siked to go to eastern europe and bond with my fellow slavs)
annnd the biggie:
dec 19-jan 1: CAIROOOOOO hellllllzzzzzzzzzz yeeeee third world here i come!!! soooo excitededededed for this. so excited. ok ills top telling you how excited i am.
february: morocco/spain??? more to come on this i dunno yet

lets see, what else have i been up to??? hmm... i went to the movies last night. i saw "This is england". and.. all i can say is that i really hope that that isn't england becuase if it is we got some serious xenophobia on our hands. It was about a boy in the 1980s who gets mixed up with the group of nationalist english skinheads. it was good, not what i expected though. first of all their accents were really bizarre (not american-friendly like Hugh Grant at all..) and i actually had to reference the french subtitles at some parts to understand what the little buggers were saying in english. but aside from that i liked it and i would recommend it to anyone who wants to see it - although its not playing in the states as far as i know so sorry guys.. no skinheads for you

ok i really wanted to talk about the "greves" and "manifestation" (bad-ass hippie liberal metro drivers revolting against the man) aka the strikes that have taken over france these past couiple days.. but im sleepy and i have class tomorrow at 10 soooo i will write about it later. until then, i leave you with one thing i like about france and one thing i dont like so much


like about france: new zealand. before i came to france the only things i knew about new zealand were: 1)flight of the conchords, and 2)australia. but, ever since i came here i have added 2 new nuggets of knowledge: 3)rugby --> they play it. thats pretty much the extent of what i know about that. the world rugby cup just wrapped up and from what i gather, new zealand is pretty good - although not as good as france is on a night when france is playing uncharacteristically well. moving on..4) the kindest ex-pats on the face of this earth. allow me to elaborate... during my time in france i have had some serious clashes with bureacracy, but none so frustrating as the language department at sciences-po. to make a long story short (too late) i was placed in a russian class that far exceeds my russian speaking abilities. The class im in is called "culture and engagement" and its pretty much a forum for native speakers/pushkin/dostayevsky to come together for 2 hours a week and debate russian literature, poetry, politics, current events, hirstoy using the largest vocabulary they can possibly think of. its actually really really interesting - one of the most interesting classes i have here - and even though i can understand for the most part what was going on, when it came time for anna to speak her mind in front of the politburo about where power really comes from in the russian political system and the future of the presidency after (if) Putin steps down at the end of his term, in russian... well lets just say it wasnt pretty. So, back to new zealand... i went to the "bureau de langues" a couple of weeks ago to inform them that there has been a horrible mistake and that if i dont switch out i will surely die. the lady told me no. just, no. non. non. no explanation aside from the fact that "no, theres no switching." i told her my placement test results werent accurate because i may or may not have taken it with the help of my father, who may or may not be a native speaker. then she told me that i had to suffer the consequences of cheating and that i had to leave the office because she wasnt going to spend 30 more minutes reiterating the same thing: "non"... ok, fine, i mean yeah i cheated bc the test was so hard aand had i not asked for some help i would have left it all literally blank.. but, regardless, bitchy-mc-bitch-bitch at the language department isnt there to teach me life lessons on how to behave honestly ... shes there to switch my class when i ask nicely. plus she gave me so much sass. i tried to sass her back but my french really isnt at a level yet where i can sass some one effectively... even in english when i think im sassing some one usually im just being slightly less polite than normal, but by no means perceivably sassy. anywyas... back to new zealand. after feeling very frustrated with the middlemen i went straight to the director of languages and by-passed the crazy bitch at "bureau de langues". The director's name is Jesus. Richard Collins for short. its kind of like his pen name. he's from new zealand and he looks like santa claus. only he's better than santa becuase basically i told him my woes and he changed my class on the spot - no explanatio necessary, nothing. AND there was no sass eminating from his pores, AND he was so nice AND kind AND gentle and amazing and this is why i like new zealand.

dont like about france: lined paper doesnt exist. they write on, what we call back in the states, "graph paper". it really weird. like why do you need the verticle lines unless ur drawing graphs?? so incredibly unecessary.. when i went school supply shopping i spent nearly a third of an hour searching for regular college ruled paper only to come to the realization that they dont do that in france. im telling you man, i knew the culture shock would be bad but i defintely wasnt ready for this curve-ball. so, ive converted for now to the graph paper ways of the french, so as not to offend, but my heart will always lie with college ruled.