Most Random Chaos of the Stealthy Elephant
The Adventures of the Stealthy Elephant in Angers, France
The City of Angers Page
Angers is a 2 hour train ride on the TGV train from Paris. It isn't a very big town, but it does have a lot of stuff crammed into it. In my four months there I didn't get to see most of the stuff there. I did tour a lot of the bars just because that's the only thing we did most of the time with the engineers. And when you're bored, you usually end up going to the movies and shopping. My favorite movie while I was there? Le Fabuleux destin d'Amelie Poulain or Amelie here in the US. It's really good, GO SEE IT!
A lot of people ask me what my favorite part of my trip was. I would have to say it was all mes amis (my friends). I met Japanese, American and French friends. UCO is a school where people from all over the world come to learn just French. So I met a lot of people from other countries. I didn't hang out much with the other Americans because they speak too much English which I can do in the U.S. I hung out mostly with the Japanese. Heck, my best friend there was from Japan. My other favorite part was speaking French most of the time, I think I can say that I speak French now. We learned a phrase in my language class: Je parle francais comme une vache espagnole or I speak French like a Spanish cow. It is one of my favorite phrases. It means that you suck at speaking French, but I think that doesn't apply to me anymore. But I still have a lot to learn, so I am going to go back to Angers to study and speak French some more.
Maybe one day I will get pictures up from my trip, but for now you will just have to deal with a pictureless website.
Chez Zonik - Here I lived with Mme and M. Zonik and 4 other exchange students, one Japanese girl (Sanae), an American girl, a Belgian guy and a guy from Holland. Every night we all came down for dinner and ate together, it was Quite noisy, but lots of fun. And there was always more food.
Chez Mialot - I lived here from octobre to decembre Mme and M. Mialot, Bayou and Adelaide. I sang in M. Mialot's choir, where we sang Mozart's Requiem. Mme. Mialot was an English teacher who loved American culture. She was always asking how Americans said words because she was taught British English. Bayou was really cool, he was really laid back, but funny. Adelaide was a teenager and it was easy to upset her, she talked about a million miles a minute so it was often hard to understand her.
Sanae is my infamous meilleure amie in France. She was so awesome, we got along so well. All we ever spoke together was French; she didn't speak English and I didn't speak enough Japanese, so we did everything in French. It was so cool. I really miss hanging out with her. She sends me postcards all the time and I send e-mails and postcards to her. One of these days I'm going to send her a Christmas gift. She was so cool, I can't even explain it. Most of my pictures are with her because she liked to take tons of photos and do different poses too. And she was really adventurous.
Now for Les Ingenieurs Francais. You've probably heard about the French engineers and if you haven't, you have obviously been living in the jungle for the last year. I guess I should explain first how I met the engineers. It's a "club" with the engineering school next door where anglophones and French engineers get together to practice their respective foreign language skills. So it usually ended up with me speaking French and everyone else speaking English. So to avoid this, I got to know Xavier, who didn't speak a whole lot of English and preferred to speak French anyway. He had a great sense of humor and he liked cars and traveling too. There was Vincent too. He was really eager to meet us and speak English all the time and learn all kinds of new stuff. He was cool too. Once a week we would all get together and usually go to a bar. There isn't much else to do in Angers after 7h in the evening and we never thought of getting together on the weekends, that would have just made too much sense. However, we did go to Emmanuel's house once and to Vincent's another time for dinner. Emmanuel made crepes and Vincent made this beef in boiling wine concoction that was really good.
I don't know who else to talk about so I'll just wait until I have some real live photos up.