A Ski-Day in the Alps (February 10)

A fantastic day! At 5:30 in the morning, Philippe, Rachael and I headed downtown to get on the bus. The little ski-town of Vars is about a three-hour drive from Aix in the direction of Italy. I definitely used that extra bus time to try to catch up on a little sleep. I had only gotten four hours of sleep that night, and only one hour the night before (I was up late studying for my last exam—which, interesting fact, in the middle of writing it, the prof supervising the exam picked up his cell and stood at the front of the amphitheatre making a personal phone call and chatting for about 10 minutes!)


It was a beautiful day in Vars, and we couldn’t have asked for more gorgeous weather! The slopes were covered in pretty nice snow, for the most part. It got icy on some of the runs, especially near the end of the day, but you could still find powder if you wanted to. It wasn’t very busy at all, and with a total of 51 chairlifts, you had a lot of options. There were six of us in our group: moi, Phil, Rachael, Gabriel (Luxembourgeois), Lukas (Austrian), and Franz (German). Gabriel and Lukas are amazing skiers; of course they live in the Alps with their families most winters.





I was quite sore the next day, but strangely enough, not from the actual skiing part. My shins hurt because the boots didn’t fit me properly and my lower back and neck are even still in a little pain because of the whiplash I got on their version of a t-bar. Rachael is suffering from the same thing, and now we both look like goofs cringing every time we turn our necks! Despite that, I’m so happy I went. It was a fun day, I got a little skiing in this winter, a nice little sunburn on my cheeks, and I can check “skiing in the Alps” off my to-do list!

Roma, Italia (Jan 26-31)

Saturday, January 26

After writing my German exam in the morning (my first of five exams to follow in the next two weeks), I went back to my residence, woke up a sleeping sister and hopped on a two-hour bus to the port of Toulon. Our final destination: Rome, Italy.


We got to Toulon much earlier than we needed to be and wandered around the huge palm trees in the beautiful sunshine. After a while, we headed to the port only to discover that we had to weave our way around and in between the commercial 18-wheelers in the parking lot to get to the check-in. The check-in area for the passengers was a tiny little one-room building in the middle of a parking lot with a couple benches out front. We checked in and were told that there would be a “bus” to pick up the foot-passengers and bring them to the ship. The “bus” was a van, and it appeared that Vanessa and I were the only foot-passengers to go aboard the ship—or at least the only ones in the van.


In the area that Ness and I had reserved Pullman seats, we were the only ones there! So we could sprawl out over a few seats to sleep. At least, we could have slept if this creepy old man truck driver who didn’t speak a lick of English or French kept passing by to hit on my 16-year old sister. He wanted to buy her a drink, and take her for a walk around the boat, etc. It was kind of weird. Another truck driver came to her rescue, and shooed away the creepy one. He sat and started talking to us about his two daughters at home. He left when he made sure the creepy man wasn’t coming back, and then later on in the night, he actually brought us the extra pillows and blankets from his cabin.

In the morning, the nice truck driver and his colleague treated us to a croissant for breakfast—their “company pays for it anyway” was their argument when we attempted to politely turn down the offer. The nice trucker even hitched us a ride from the port of Civita Vecchia to the outskirts of Rome (18-wheelers aren’t allowed in the city centre)! We would have been fine from there, but he insisted on calling a friend of his who lived in Rome to pick us up and take us to where we needed to go. This was successful because he told his friend that we were his colleague’s nieces from Canada!

After taking the metro to our hostel, we dropped our stuff and walked around Rome for five hours. Walking is by far the best way to explore the city. Rome is a lot smaller than I had imagined. And the Vatican is even smaller, of course! The rest of the trip was filled with frequent fountains, remarkable ruins, plenty of pizza and pasta, and generous amounts of gelato! Even in “low season”, there were lots of tourist traps, and tons of people at every place trying to sell you unnecessary things (like a duck-shaped, sand-filled balloon—who the heck needs one of those?!?)








We decided we’d take the train from Rome to the port this time, to save us the hassle of pretending an old Italian man was our uncle. And the boat ride home was much less eventful, except for meeting an old couple on vacation who offered to drive us back from Toulon to Aix. All in all, it was a great trip, and so much fun to hang out with my sister. The 4-year age difference has been pretty significant all our lives, and it really seems to be closing in now. The comfort of traveling with my sister made the trip one of the most enjoyable and memorable yet!

Vanessa’s Visit (Jan. 20 - Feb. 3)

My sister, Vanessa, had been doing a co-op program at high school, so she ended up getting an extra two-week break at the end of January. Our parents surprised her at Christmas with a trip to visit me on her own during that break. So only three weeks after finding out she was going to the south of France, she arrived here right in the middle of my exam time! Argh! Originally, her visit was supposed to be AFTER my exams and during the first couple of weeks of my second semester. However, because of last semester’s five-week strike, they pushed back the semester and the exams, and now the second week of her visit coincided exactly with the first week of my exams. Despite that, as soon as I found out my exam schedule (about one week before the exam period), I worked on planning out a mini trip for Vanessa and myself. Because I wasn’t sure if it would be possible to work something out at the last minute, I decided not to tell Vanessa about the trip, and kept it a surprise even when the plans became set in stone! In between two of my exams, we would have enough time for a four-day trip to Rome… by an overnight boat ride on the Mediterranean!

Her first week here, I felt bad because I couldn’t play hostess entirely. I was half playing hostess and half studying for my exams. Also, Nicolas, a friend with whom I worked at Parliament these past two summers, is starting his 3-month backpacking Europe trip and stayed with me for a couple nights before heading to stay with Philippe, a mutual friend, in Montpellier.

Other than studying, one of the things I needed to do while Vanessa was here was go to Marseille for a medical exam that I was supposed to have when I arrived in France (but simply because it’s France, I had to wait four months for my appointment). They basically wanted to do a checkup to make sure I don’t have tuberculosis and infect their country. (Well, if I HAD had tuberculosis, I would have spread it around their country during my first four months here!) So I decided that I would turn this medical exam into a day trip to explore Marseille with Ness. It started off with an hour wait in the doctor’s office, and then a 15-minute checkup: breathing, eyesight, height, weight, chest x-ray, family’s medical history, etc. When I left, they even gave me the copy of my chest x-ray! How cool is that?! I wanted to put it up in my window in my room, but I sent it home with my sister instead. Really, why exactly do I need a view of my lungs hanging in my window?



Afterwards, we wandered and explored Marseille. We headed to the Entrecastaux Fort, and then climbed (what a climb it was!) to the highest point of the city: Notre Dame de la Garde.


The weather was great, and we had a beautiful view from the top of the basilica.

Montpellier, France (Jan. 10 – 13)

When I returned from South Africa, the first two people I bumped into were NOT the people I wanted to see. Within seconds of me stepping into the residence with my suitcase, one of them dumped a load of dirty sheets into my arms and asked me to trade them in for clean ones later in the day. The fact that I had only just arrived back on the continent and was already late for class was a good enough excuse to turn that oh-so-tempting offer down. The second person was one that had two weeks previously confessed his “feelings” for me 20 minutes before I had to leave for the airport to head to South Africa. Upon my return, he came into my room and started telling me that he had changed over the break, and he no longer had feelings for me. He then proceeded to say incredibly horrible things for the sole purpose of proving that fact. It wasn’t appreciated. (He apologized later in a message.) In any case, I didn’t feel the need to stay in res, and I knew that Philippe, a friend of mine (and fellow guide, uOttawa student, ultimate and soccer player), had just arrived in Montpellier for the start of his exchange. He sent me an email saying to come when I could, and probably didn’t think that I actually would so soon! I hopped on the train and arrived in Montpellier that night, only three hours after sending Phil a message (and hoping he would get it in time) saying I was going to the train station. He was a little surprised, but it was so good to see him again and we had a good weekend.

Since he had only arrived in Montpellier a couple days earlier, we wandered around exploring the city, tossed a disc in a park, visited the market, and he took care of a few set-up things (i.e. getting a cell phone—the key element in the French culture to having a social life). We went out for a delicious meal with a few other international students and took a lot of pictures. Philippe’s residence is not really in the most central location, it’s quite far from downtown in fact; however, the walk to the residence is one of the coolest—if not THE coolest—that I’ve done since I’ve been in Europe. You pass some charming little squares and streets, an arc de triomphe, a really neat park with a pond and monument that marks the beginning of an aqueduct that runs all the way to his residence. And at night, they light up the aqueduct, and it’s BLUE—so cool! The walk in pictures would look something like the following:










On Sunday, Phil and I took the train to Aix, and we explored Aix a little bit. I’d have to say the most random part of the Aix visit was when this whole procession of dressed up bible characters was wandering the streets of downtown Aix singing. If that’s not random enough, they had a donkey and a camel with them—so odd!

Olympus, Med School, and the Square (January 3-8)

Since Warren is in med school, he has to register and start classes a month before everyone else. So on January 3rd, we headed to start his registration at the med campus (much farther from the main Pretoria University campus [and no, they don’t call it “PU”, they shorten it to “Tuks” for some reason]). Everyone was greeting each other after their summer holidays, and it was pretty neat to see. Since these people have every single class together, they’re all friends. That’s a nice thing about a small and very specific program. I went to their “registration party” that night which started on the patio of one of the common rooms. The rooms of the Olympus residence are pretty standard res rooms: single bed, desk, chair, closet, and then whatever you bring in to personalize it. But the rooms are in three-storey clustered buildings with balconies in their common rooms, and a nice courtyard in the middle of them all. They even have a res pool. However, that pool hadn’t been cleaned over the holidays, and that would be my downfall that night. Since it hadn’t been cleaned, the mosquitoes had nested there, and that night I got absolutely eaten alive by the mozzies!

The party moved from the porch to an area downtown called ‘the Square”. It really is a square courtyard surrounded by every type of bar, pub, and club you could want. And apparently it’s always full of people late at night, and just PACKED with students on the weekends.

On the weekend, we went to a market that was near the Square, and got some pretty cool things there. We even picked up some funky beads for an afternoon movie-watching project. Since Kyle’s apartment is right close by, we headed to hang out with him and Candice for a while before heading back to Warren’s house for a swim. (It was getting pretty sickly hot again.)

On Tuesday, I went with Warren to his anatomy practical in the morning. We sat in groups around different stations set up at different tables. There were just human hearts at some of the stations, one of them had a pacemaker in it, and that was kind of cool to see. And at some of the other stations, they had a whole bust—everything from the ribs and lungs up! It was quite cool to look and touch, but the heat mixed with the odor of formaldehyde made for a very nauseous morning. What hit me the most about the class was that all of these people were my age and already in their THIRD year of med school! That was a shock. They don’t have to have a degree there before med school; they can go right after high school. Funny enough, South African medicine programs are apparently the most similar to the Canadian programs, and therefore lots of South African doctors have an easy time finding jobs—and sometime are even sought after—in Canada. I won’t deny that it kind of freaked me out to see the people my age in the class, and of course the goof-balls that go with it. I mean, these are supposed to be future doctors, but I still was hearing stories of second years cutting the nipples off their corpse and putting them in his eye sockets. Moral of the story: don’t donate your body to science. Donate your organs to people who need them instead.

Tuesday afternoon, I packed my things, thanked Warren’s family, said my good-byes, and Warren took me to the airport for my flight back to France. I could have stayed for so much longer. The country was so different and I really wanted to do more exploring. I’ll have to do that next time. I wasn’t looking forward to leaving a summer and going back to a winter either, but I was exhausted so thankfully the 10 and a half hour flight went by a lot quicker on the way back. It was an amazing trip, and to this day (I’m finally writing this over a month later), I still find it hard to believe that I actually went there and saw the things I saw and did the things I did. It was absolutely fantastic, and I can’t wait to go back!

MacMac Falls & God’s Window – The Drive Home

January 2nd

After spending the last day in the Kruger Park, we stayed in the Protea Hotel that was about 50 meters just outside one of the entrances to the park. As soon as we walked in, they offered us apple juice in a champagne flute, and dollied the small amount of luggage we actually had to our rooms. If I had to describe it, I would call it safari-luxury. The rooms were luxury. The outdoor pool was luxury. The little individual open huts propped high up looking over the park in the distance were luxury. You sat up there with your group and the servers would come up and take your drink orders.


The buffet dinner was something else! They had giant slabs of almost animal-shaped meat turning on a spit, a giant selection of varied entrées, main courses, and a dessert spread designed to make you salivate. I was stuffed. It was delicious. We ended the night with a glass of Amarula—a South African drink made from fermented marula fruit. One of the funniest mental images I have ever had was when I was told about the animals eating the rotting and fermenting marulas from the ground and actually getting a little tipsy. I would never have believed that the dinner buffet could be beat, but the breakfast buffet sure put up some good competition! I was still full from dinner the night before, but somehow managed to eat quite a lot for breakfast, too.

We left after breakfast and started the drive home—with a couple of stops on the way. We went to MacMac falls and saw some people zip-lining and bungee jumping in front of the falls. It was pretty neat to see, but had been turned into a bit of a tourist location. The stalls they had set up with people selling all sorts of neat African art, jewelry, instruments, carvings were great to look at, and bargaining was easy, but it was still a little more expensive than the market stalls in Durban. (Though, who am I kidding, I’ve seen most of the same things in “African stores” here in France, and their prices are marked up about 400 – 700%.)

Our next stop was at a place called “God’s Window”. This was the first place in South Africa where I saw a bus load of Asian tourists, if that says anything. According to Greg and Sandra, since they had last been there, the roads were now paved, and they had signs and advertisements directing you there. There was a bit of a hike up, but the view was amazing!


You could hike up even further through a rainforest-type park, and the view was pretty much the same, but from higher up. It was pretty spectacular.


We thought this sign would be pretty humourous for anyone who didn’t know that the name of this place was God’s Window.

Kruger Park, South Africa (Dec. 29 – Jan. 1)

Saturday, December 29

The day after Warren and I returned from Durban, we woke up early, packed our backpacks, helped pack up the car, and with his mom driving, we went to go pick up Kyle and Candice and headed up a few hours north to the Kruger National Park. Warren’s dad, Greg, had to work and was going to join us a couple days later in the Park. Our first destination was the camp at Berg-en-Daal. Upon our arrival to the entrance of the park, the man working there wanted to see our confirmation of accommodation reservation since we would be in there for a few days. When we showed him the papers, he shook his head and said, “Sorry, we can’t let you in. It’s full.”
“Okay, but we have a reservation; it says so right there on the papers” replied Sandra, Warren’s mom. The man just looked at her and kept shaking his head.
“It’s full, so we can’t let you in.”
“No. Listen. We have a reservation, and we’ve already paid. It may be ‘full’, but we’re supposed to be in there filling it!” The man just shrugged his shoulders and apologized. The argument carried on a little longer, and just as Warren, Kyle, and Sandy were all about ready to jump out of the car and strangle this guy’s neck, he threw back his head and laughed hysterically.
“Just joking!” It was so NOT funny.


After he let us in, we drove slowly to our camp while peering out the windows. Within the first 10 minutes of being in the park, I spotted something far off in the distance that turned out to be a pair of white rhinos. As we had entered in the south of the park, there were quite a lot of mountains, so it was harder to animal-spot and most prefer to live where it’s flatter.


At the Berg-en-Daal camp, we had a nice little cabin with a thatch roof and a place to braai and everything. After exploring the campsite and walking along the path that surrounds the campsite, we had some boerwors for dinner, (and of course, took our preventative malaria pills that we only needed to take while in the park because we were further north in the country than Pretoria), and then we just stayed up late talking on the patio.


We went for a long drive at 7:30 the next morning trying to catch the animals early in the day. It was already 31 degrees! Among other things, we saw elephants, monkeys, a snake, a chameleon, giraffe, buffalo, a massive gecko, many different types of birds, and of course, lots of impala—the most common form of South African antelope. In the afternoon, a whole herd of elephants came right up on the other side of the fence from the campsite. That was so cool.


Sandra had signed up Warren, Kyle, Candice and myself for the night drive, and so at dusk, we made our way to the set of two vehicles and the guides that would be taking us for the drive. Since there are curfews at the camps, the only way you’re allowed out past a certain hour is with a guide. Within the first few minutes of leaving the camp, Kyle spotted a massive elephant (probably one of the ones that were at the camp earlier), and so we headed to get a closer look. She was probably the head of the herd and was sending us all kinds of “warning signs”, or so our guide said. So we killed the engine and just watched as the whole herd came out of the bushes to cross in front of us.



We saw quite a few things during the night drive, however, pictures in the dark in a moving vehicle on a gravel road are almost impossible to take. We saw a hippo rummaging in the bushes, and a couple chameleons (that glow when light is shined on them!), a few hyenas, and a spotted eagle owl.



December 31, 2007

Sandra had signed up Warren and me in the last two spots for the 4:30 am bush-walk. Again, you’re not even allowed out of your car in the park, but we had two trained guides (and their giant rifles) accompanying the eight of us in the group. We saw the sunrise, spotted a giraffe almost immediately, some other interesting small creatures and insects, and then some fresh rhino poop that started us on the trail of finding these rhinos.



(These last two pictures are in fact worth clicking on to see in the big format. The spider is brilliant, and check out the locust—whoever created it was definitely feeling artsy that day!)

After a while of unsuccessfully tracking the rhinos, we sat and ate a snack on this hill with an “awe-inspiring view” (as the camp advertised the 4:30am bush walk!), and that’s when we spotted the rhinos off in the distance on the other side of a dry riverbed.


We hurriedly took off in the direction of the rhinos to get a little closer. As the main guide went ahead down into the riverbed, telling us to stay on the side we were on, the rhinos actually changed direction, and when our guide climbed up the other side of the riverbed, the two rhinos were almost right in front of him! They’ve got really bad eyesight, but amazing hearing, and automatically went into defense mode, and the bigger one actually started charging at our group. The rhino pulled out of his charge at the last second because our guide was yelling at him trying to scare him off, but then came back and started charging again as the other guide was rushing the group of eight of us back behind the bushes. Both of our guides cocked their rifles and the rhino pulled out of its charge again, and slowly started backing away.


Our guide told us that the first step would have been a warning shot, and he’s lucky he didn’t have to do that. He’s even MORE lucky that he didn’t have to shoot the animal—he would have lost his job automatically, even for saving the group. Though saving the group is his first priority, he would have lost his job for putting us in that sort of danger in the first place! Crazy! Thankfully they weren’t black rhinos—they have a much more aggressive reputation.


After returning from the bush walk, we packed up our stuff and left the Berg-en-Daal camp heading more north to the Orpen camp. The land started getting a lot flatter and we started spotting animals more frequently.


This was one place in the park where we were actually allowed out of the vehicle, as long as we stayed within a certain area. Later on in the drive, we found a baobab tree—trees that I have read about in every single book about Africa, and trees that live to be hundreds of years old! I couldn’t resist breaking the do-not-leave-your-car here. If it wasn’t bad enough that I put myself at a risk of being mauled by a lion or other wild animal, I made Warren also get out of the car to take the picture! Clearly he’s a little more intelligent than me (or maybe just more in the habit of being around wild animals!), because he picked up a rock and tossed it into the bushes he would be standing in front of to take the picture. Really though, I’m not sure how much difference seeing the beast leap out and attack you would make. Whether you see it jump you, or it does it when your back is turned, I’m pretty sure the wild thing would win. Well, we’re both still alive, and hey, I got a pretty cool picture!


It also happened to be Warren’s dad’s birthday that day, and we met up with Greg-the-birthday-boy at a camp along the way to our destination, and I’m actually quite happy that we didn’t stay at that camp. It was really quite touristy, where as the ones we stayed at seemed to be a lot less so. However, we did see a hippo there (though I’m pretty sure they don’t put that there for the tourists)!


At the second camp, we could actually HEAR lions roaring. So Warren, Kyle, Candice and I hopped in the car and tried to head and there were cars lined alongside the road trying to spot them, however, no such luck. However, we did run into a lot of zebra.


When we went back to the camp, the braai was on, and we had a nice birthday dinner for Greg on the outside porch—where the kitchen was!


During the dinner, the lions started roaring again, and Sandra spotted something on the other side of the fence from the camp. You could actually see one of the lions drinking from a watering hole, and another lion hanging around in the bushes. It was pretty cool to have the lions roaring in the New Year with us only 70 meters away! We hung around and watched the lions for a while, but Warren and I were so tired from the morning walk, that we crashed early and were woken up by Kyle at a quarter to midnight to say a quick “Happy New Year!”… And then head back to sleep! A great finish to 2007.