Aix, Nice, and Monaco with Muqing and the Italians

Thursday, November 1st – Monday, November 5th, 2007


Background on Muqing (pronounced “moo-ching”):
• Muqing and I worked together in Ottawa on the Hill for about a year.
• She’s doing an exchange for this semester in Lille, northern France.


Background on her friend:
• Laura is Italian, from Milan, and she met Muqing in Lille while also on exchange.
• Laura has a twin sister on exchange in Nice, about two hours away from Aix.


The plan:
• Muqing and Laura come down from Lille and visit Aix-en-Provence.
• We spend a day or two in Aix and cram the three of us here in my tiny little room to sleep.
• We then take the train or the bus and head to Nice to stay with Laura’s twin
• And then we cram the four of us in her res room to sleep!


The weekend:
Thursday, November 1st, 2007

Muqing and her friend Laura arrived in Aix shortly after noon. I met them at the bus station and we headed back to my residence to drop off their stuff. It was so great to see and to spend the weekend with someone from home.

It was also really great to get an opportunity to play tourist in the city that I’m living in. When I moved here, I just sort of immediately adopted it as “my city” for the year, and I did lots of exploring, but more of my adventures were finding the cheapest grocery stores, where the nearest park was, how far away the soccer field was, the quickest way to get to school, and where the best and cheapest crepes were; but I never really explored Aix like a tourist would.

The first day consisted of wandering around downtown with Ben from down the hall, and searching for the best pizza place that was open considering it was a holiday (Toussaint). This was followed by more exploring downtown.

In the evening, we stopped by a grocery store, bought the makings for a delicious pasta dinner and breakfast the next morning. We ate dinner pretty late and then went to bed (as the girls had been up since 5am that morning to catch their 6-hour train ride here.


Friday, November 2nd, 2007

The next day, we started out by heading to the Friday market that is beside my residence. We explored there for a while and then headed back to my place to make a big breakfast. We went to the train station and the bus station to see what would be the cheapest and most convenient way to get to Nice, and then we learned that Laura’s sister had not made it back to Nice after going home for the week. So, taking into account the fact that we would be homeless if we went to Nice that night, we decided to spend the rest of the day in Aix again and we’d head to Nice tomorrow morning.

So on Friday, Muqing, Laura and I really walked around a lot downtown…


…Found a really cool courtyard in this massively ancient church…


…Took a ride on the mini tourist train that bounces down the streets of Aix while giving you information about the city in seven different languages…


…And then found a little Asian store down a tiny street that sold what we needed to have a SUSHI NIGHT!! Everyone from the residence who came into the kitchen while we were making it was so impressed! It was great.


Tonin joined us while we ate our sushi and watched “Casino Royale” (en français, bien sûr!) and then we headed out for Nutella crepes downtown. Mmmmmm…


Saturday, November 3d, 2007

The next morning, our bus arrived in Nice at 11am. It was beautiful. The water was so blue, there were people sun-tanning on the palm tree lined beach, and it was warm enough on November 3d to be walking around in a t-shirt.

We headed to the train station to pick up Laura’s twin (Daniela) who was arriving from Milan and then bussed it to Daniela’s residence. And I thought MY residence was far from everything. Daniela’s residence is a 45-minute face-paced walk from downtown, and for her to get to her classes, she has to take a 30-minute train ride every day. That’s brutal! Her residence, on the other hand, is much nicer than mine. She does pay a bit more than me, but she has a little cooking area with a mini-fridge and a sink, and she also has a bathroom with a sink, a toilet and shower!! That’s luxurious! Her building is circular and she has a great view of the city and the Mediterranean through the huge window in her room.



The rest of Saturday, the four of us spent wandering around the really charming Vieux Nice, getting groceries for a dinner at the residence, and watching a movie with a German girl from the residence.


Sunday, November 4th, 2007

Sunday morning, we woke up early to go catch the bus to Monaco. We spent the whole morning and into the afternoon climbing the side of a mountain to get up to the Royal Palace, taking pictures, watching the changing of the guard, wandering back down the mountain on the other side, through the botanical gardens, getting to Vieux Monaco, taking pictures, exploring a giant church with pictures and the story of the Prince, Grace Kelly and her death, eating lunch, taking more pictures, walking up another mountain on the other side of the port to get to the famous casino (where I’ve never seen so many fancy cars, well-dressed people, and tourists all in the same place!), and then taking the bus back to Nice.











Once back in Nice, we did more climbing of mountains up to this ancient castle site. The castle was no longer there, but of course, having a bunch of ancient stones on the top of a mountain with a really nice view is enough to make it a tourist attraction. The nice part was that it wasn’t only tourists. Some locals just go and walk around there, too. It was pretty nice.






We sat on the beach to watch the sunset, then went hunting for a place to eat out (that wasn’t ridiculously over-priced). We eventually found a place, ate our food, and walked back into Vieux Nice for ice cream. That was the coolest part of the weekend. This ice cream place called Fenocchio’s had dozens of flavours: poppy, lavender, cactus, olive, Kinder, tomato basil, about 20 kinds of chocolate, and other bizarre flavours on top of that.

We went back to the residence after going to the train station to pick up one of Daniela’s friends, and then fell asleep

Monday, November 5th, 2007

I woke up at 4:45am, said my quiet “goodbyes” and “thank yous”, and then walked the 45 minutes in the dark to go catch the 6am bus back to Aix. Muqing and Laura left from the train station in Nice to head back to Lille later that morning. I arrived back in Aix at 8am and went to the market to do my groceries, and then relaxed before heading to soccer.

Country on Strike

Tuesday, November 13th, 2007


As I’m writing this, I should be in class. I’m not in class though because there is a massive pile of desks and chairs--from floor to ceiling--blocking my way. A “blocage” (said with a French accent) is what they’re calling it. The students at my school are on strike.

Actually, I should say that the students at my faculty are on strike. The rest of the faculties and schools in the area are still having classes and exams and everything. It’s only my faculty that has completely closed down the campus where we are. It first started about two weeks ago when the students were going to hold a huge protest right in the main hall of our faculty. The president of the school got wind of this, and evacuated everyone from the school. The students held the protest outside of the school, tossed chairs and desks all around blocking all the entries and so the campus was closed down with chains and locks. Classes were cancelled for the next two days. The school reopened, but on the second day, when I showed up for my evening class, there was no teacher, and someone came running into my classroom to tell us that there was another strike. No class for the rest of the week. It opened once more for a couple days, and then I think it was the president who decided to shut it down for a while. And here I am today, not knowing what’s going on or whether I will have class tomorrow or not. (Did I mention that the train company in France is on strike today, too?) Welcome to France.

The students are striking the privatization of post-secondary education. Basically, they don’t want to have what we have in Canada. Right now I have friends paying anywhere from 7€ to a few hundred euros each year. It’s really cheap. Everyone in France has access to higher education, and there are heaps of bursaries that they can apply for (hence one of my friends paying only 7€ for the year). The government wants to turn it into a system (like Canada’s) where tuition will resemble 5000€ and therefore, not everyone will have access. So if you take this into account, you’ll realize that the students right now are striking a service that they’re using. It doesn’t really make sense. You can’t “strike” a service that you’re using. You can boycott it, but you can’t strike it.

Anyhow, all the classes except for the sports classes are cancelled, so it’s kind of fun. (My academic classes: langues du monde, morphologie, discours et pratiques langagières, italien, allemand.) All I have to go to are the sports classes! (I have a soccer class with the girls, one with the boys, a volleyball class, and a soccer coaching course where we work with 8-year-olds from the nearby primary school.) Rough life, eh? However, as nice as it is for the moment, it’s also really frustrating. I have no idea when to go to class or when the strike will be over or even really what’s going on. I’ve heard rumours that classes for the next couple of weeks might be cancelled, and the repercussions of that would be adding a catch-up week or two, then pushing the exam period back, which would push the second semester back and in turn, the school year would finish later into the summer than it already does. I am really not looking forward to that if it happens.

Holidays: MIA

Monday, November 12th, 2007


I’m really missing something here, and I think I’ve figured out what it is: holidays. Since I’ve been here, we sailed by Thanksgiving, we zoomed passed Halloween, and just yesterday, Remembrance Day flew by and I hardly even noticed. Here, those holidays are either not celebrated, slowly dying out, or just forgotten.

Thanksgiving isn’t celebrated here, and while it’s not huge in Canada either, I still missed having the quiet evening eating a huge delicious meal with my family and grandparents, and then having leftover turkey sandwiches or turkey soup the day after.

Halloween, I’m told, used to be celebrated here a couple years ago, but it’s just sort of died. And as much as I missed seeing the kids in costume running around the streets with their bags full of candy, and the “big kids” dressed up going to Halloween parties, it is nice to know that cultures can withdraw from the American influence. While I was doing my groceries the day before Halloween, I actually heard an announcement in the grocery store giving directions to the kids to put on a costume and go knocking on doors for candy. That was when I knew that it wasn’t going to be as big as back home. I mean, what kid need directions to dress up and get candy?!? I was also very disappointed at the lack of discounted Halloween candy the following day. It was pretty much non-existent. The French even have a holiday (Toussaint) the day after Halloween, so it’s strange that more people don’t go out.

People know what November 11th is, and I’m told that sometimes there’s a holiday on that day. But since it fell on a Sunday this year, everyone just sort of let it fly by.

I am so incredibly happy that I am going to be spending Christmas with a family (even though it won’t be my own). I’ve been talking with a bunch of the Canadians that are here for the year, and they are all frantically trying to search for Christmas plans. Some of them had the impression that their European friends would invite them home to spend the holidays in Italy, or Germany, or Spain, etc. And even though that’s how it would work in Canada, the culture isn’t quite the same here. The Europeans are all expressing their excitement to head home for the holidays, and the Canadians still don’t have any invitations. Most of them are now looking up travel options that are going to cost them a fortune because it’s the holidays and yet, they’ll still end up sleeping alone in a hostel on Christmas Eve.

All of this is making me feel pretty fortunate that I’m heading down to South Africa and staying with Warren and his family for the holidays. It’ll be nice to be around a family, and it’ll be a totally new experience having Christmas in the summer, and spending New Year's in 35-degree weather!!

Residence Staff

Wednesday, October 31st


The staff that works here at the residence is an interesting group of people. The cleaning ladies are psycho, and the lady who works at the front desk is an impatient, aggressive, paranoid nutcase.

I was actually woken up one morning at 7:30am by a gang of raging cleaning ladies banging on my door. Not knocking—banging. To lock your door from the inside, you still need to stick your key into the lock, and I had left my keys in the lock overnight. Lucky for me, that disables anyone using a key from the outside to come in. Therefore, instead of the cleaning ladies unlocking my door and just barging in, I actually had to get out of bed and go open the door. I didn’t mind. I later heard horror stories of the cleaning ladies not even knocking, but just opening the door and barreling in to rooms with people sleeping naked, or standing there getting changed, or doing other strange things. And the reason they came storming into my room at 7:30am? It was to tell me that I should wipe the kitchen counter after I use it. There was a mob of cleaning ladies clamoring down my hall banging on everyone’s door telling them to use a sponge on the kitchen counter after they used it. That was their only point. The kitchen was dirty, so let’s wake everyone up at 7:30am to tell them to clean it. It was ridiculous. The fact that there isn’t even a garbage can in the kitchen, and we’re not even allowed to put one in there makes it even more ridiculous. Apparently, the cleaning ladies aren’t paid enough to empty a garbage can (but yet, they’re paid enough to flock the rooms in the morning).

The signs that they put up are even funnier. First of all, all of their signs were in French. But as they’re starting to notice the number of Asians that are in this residence, they’re starting to translate some of the signs into English. What a joke. You have the funniest wording on some of the English translations, that it’s almost incomprehensible. “I remind to you that to put a plastic film or other envisaged to this end on a dish makes clean the microwave.” There are also signs in each of the bathroom stalls that tell us to use the seats for what they’re for and to not stand on the edges. I’m not quite sure how they pictured people standing on the seats to use the toilets, but there must have been some reason that they put signs like that up.

The lady who works every morning down at the front desk is scary. The first time I spoke with her at the beginning of the year, she asked me what room I was in. I answered her “422”. She stared at me impatiently. I repeated myself in case she didn’t hear me or didn’t misunderstood me. “422.” Again, she just peered up at me over the rim of her glasses like she was waiting for something more. Then she burst out angrily “and what building?” “Oh, building G.” Then she exploded!! “Well, how am I supposed to know what building you’re in? Am I supposed to be psychic? You have to answer my questions when I ask you. I’m not a mind reader, you know.” And she carried on lecturing me with a fast-paced French rant until I had given her the information she needed and slipped away back up the stairs to my room. 422. Building G.

One morning, I had woken up early, made a cup of tea, and went downstairs to ask if the residence receives news from the faculty about the strike. I worded it that way and everything. Man, this woman really must not be a morning person—they should definitely put her on a later shift or something! She exploded at me again. “We are CROUS (housing in France) and we’re not affiliated with the faculties. We don’t hear anything from the school. We are CROUS. We have nothing to do with the universities. We have students from all of the faculties. How are we supposed to have news from all of the faculties? That would be impossible. We’re independent from the universities, and you’ll have to read a paper if you want news.” I really only needed the first sentence. That was the answer to my question: “do you receive news from the faculties?” “No.” Simple as that. I really don’t think I needed my head ripped off to get the message through. Oh well, maybe it helped her release some tension. I hope so, anyway.