Swiss chocolate and CERN

It has always been a small dream of mine to live in Europe and travel frequently to many important sounding cites like Rome, Paris, Geneva and London. Ideally in this dream I would also be wearing high heels, a chic black coat and maybe be working for the UN or as some sort of exciting undercover agent.

This weekend my dream almost came true. I was invited by my friend G (mentioned in a previous post) to visit her for the weekend in Geneva. I wasn't wearing heels when I stepped off the plane in Geneva but I did feel very chic in my new black Italian coat (see previous post) and I tried to look purposeful and important as I road the train into Geneva.

My very first stop in the city was at Starbucks. I have been going through Starbucks withdrawal the past few months. It didn't even matter to me that my Grande Frappuccino cost me 8 Swiss francs (approx 8 Canadian dollars). Definitely the most expensive Starbucks I've ever visited. This fact also didn't stop me from going back two more times this weekend. I also purchased a Starbucks Switzerland mug for my collection :)

Ordering Starbuck in French for the first time wasn't very hard - it mainly involved saying 'Grande Frappuccino' with a slightly more French accent. I realized after though that most people in the Starbucks were actually speaking English - probably because Geneva is 40% expatriates because of all the different international organizations that are there.

That evening G and I went to one of her friend's places for dinner. G has interesting friends - everyone seemed to work for either the United Nations or for some NGO like Amnesty International. I met an Italian PhD student, who works for CERN and who offered to give us a private tour on Sunday.

On Saturday we mainly did the touristy stuff in the morning (old town, lake Geneva, Calvin's church etc.) and then went to the house of another friend to prepare four big buckets of sangria for a party they were hosting that night. G is part of a 'Couch Surfing' network. Basically this is where you sign up on a website to let people stay on your couch when they are travelling though and you can stay other places when you travel - they also do social events in different cities and G and a couple of her Spanish friends were planning the sangria night for this.

That night about 50 people showed up with finger food to drink the four buckets of sangria. I chatted with people from Italy, Switzerland (in French too), America, Spain, Germany, France etc. Very cool.


Sunday morning we got up early to catch the bus to CERN for 10am for our tour. Honestly, I don't know very much about Physics, but for some reason I do really enjoy going to sciencey things like this. Maybe somehow it feeds my inner science geek ;) CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research and it where they have an enormous particle accelerator. We visited a number of the buildings including the offices where they invented the World Wide Web. They also have things like their own post office, bank and travel agency onsite - which I guess is pretty handy.

After the visit I headed to the airport - slightly overcaffinated from my third Starbucks - and caught my 45 min flight back to Nice. The view of the Alps from the plane was amazing (see below). Overall a fun weekend :)

Crème brûlée

I'm embarassed that it has been so long since I posted anything :P My resolution for November is to post more often...even if it means that the posts are really short... and maybe a bit boring.

Last week was school vacation! This meant that I got to sleep in a bit and do some different things with my day. On Thursday I met up with my new friend D who is taking French classes in the room next to me at the Fac de Lettres. We became friends initially based on the fact that neither of us can eat gluten. D is a very good cook and she spent an afternoon earlier this month trying to teach me how to cook too. Unfortunately, I don't have the motivation to do so on my own - I haven't made much of anything since then. Here is the cake we made when she was over - it tasted like Nutella cause we made it with chocolate and ground hazelnuts:



Whenever I hang out with D she brings me something yummy and wheat-free that she has baked - so really I don't have to bake so often myself. :) This Thursday I went to see her in Antibes which is about 20min away by train. We went to the Thursdays morning market and then went on a hike around the 'Cap' d'Antibes which took us a totally of 3.5 hours!

Although I haven't done much cooking I have started painting again! M has a bunch of watercolours left to her from a friend so she has invited me over to paint with her from time to time. I think it is fitting to paint in an area where so many famous painters has lived and painted: Rembrant, Picasso, Chagall, etc. I decided to paint one of my favourite things in France. Here it is:



On Friday, we organized a GBU day-trip to Italy! The closest Italian town in Ventimille - 45min on the train and Friday is their all-day market where they sell everything from jewlery to shoes. I bought myself a winter coat for 20 euro (super cheap!) and I had a cappuccino to say I've had one in Italy. It didn't taste any different from the ones in Nice.

Friday night my friend G came to visit. We're friends from University and she is living and working in Geneva now. We did lots of sightseeing in Nice and went for gelato at Finoccino's - one of the best gelato places in Vieux Nice! Here in France the word for ice cream and gelato is 'la glace' and not 'crème glacé' like at home. This must just be another difference between European French and Quebecois French. They also don't say 'fin de semaine' here - they say 'le weekend'. Finoccio's is a good place to have la glace because they have so many different flavours!



Desserts in Nice are pretty amazing. Here another dessert that I ate last week - probably the BEST crème brûlée ever:

Bureaucracy and Beer

In which Rebecca experiences French bureaucracy, participates in a pub quiz and begins her French classes.

(I've been reading a book that M lent me called something like 'How to give yourself a classical education' - that's not the title... but it is something like that. The book gives some good tips on how to read different kinds of literature. Years ago, books and chapters always had very long a descriptive titles which, although they gave away what was going to happen, helped the reader better understand the text. I decided to try it out.)

Carte de Sejour

I was warned before coming that French bureaucracy can be frustrating. That you can wait for hours just to find out you needed a document from somewhere else first. This is true.

Last Thursday I woke up at 5:30am in order to get myself to the Nice administrative centre (which is way out by the airport) in order to get my Carte de Sejour. The building doesn't open until 9am, but because so many people go if you don't get there by 7:30am you won't be able to be seen that day. When I arrived a the centre, there was already about 20 people crowded around a small gate waiting to get in. This was just the outer gate - not the actual gate of the building. Now the document I had read online about how this works said to: be "Prepared for long line-ups" and to be "patient, polite and assertive". This was a huge understatement.

When the gate opened at 7:45am the race began. People immediately started pushing me from behind and the whole crowd broke into a run to be the first in line at the building. I almost knocked over an old man as I was pushed forward. I joined in running and actually managed to get a good spot in line! Then we had to wait another hour before we could get in the building.
When I finally did get in I was told that because I was here on a student visa I was in the wrong place - I actually had to go to another office downtown :P

The rest of the day was spent: going to office #2...waiting in line...finding out I was missing a document...going home to get it...going back...waiting in line again...discovering I was missing photocopies of my documents...getting copies made...going back again...waiting...waiting...FINALLY seeing someone and getting my paperwork done!

Pub Quiz

On Monday night the group of us went out for dinner at an Irish Pub in Vieux Nice. One of our group, E's boyfriend was visiting from England and was staying with some some guys from church so she had invited them along for a thank-you dinner. It was nice going out with other people - it felt like being at home! It feels really weird living somewhere and knowing only a handful of people.

The best thing about this pub is that every Monday night they have a pub quiz! We had tried to get in the past week but it was totally packed. It was a fun evening overall: ordering in English, having a Magners cider, being the only one who could answer the question about Brian Mulroney AND having my team come in 2nd winning 50 euro off our bill!

French Classes

Yesterday I began my first day of French classes. I have class every day at the Fac de Lettres from 9am to noon. I was happy to find out I was in the most advanced class :) There are 17 of us in the class - I'm the only Canadian as most of them come from China, with some from Japan and Russia. Quite a few students also seem to be women who have married Frenchmen and now need to improve their English.

I got to know a Japanese girl sitting beside me and she, I and a few others went out for lunch after class which was fun. I find it feels a bit strange to be speaking with international students in a third language. I'm used to being the ESL teacher who gets to speak in my own language while the other person is at a disadvantage. It is really nice now to all be at the same level - somehow it seems easier to have a friendship this way too.

Suntan lotion and language

After being in Nice for over a week I finally got the chance to swim in the Mediterranean! It is a twenty minute walk to the beach and my flatmates (four of us now) and I headed down earlier this week for an afternoon of sun and swimming :)

The beach in Nice is one long strip that runs along the famous 'Promenade des Angais' and the only down-side is that it is a pebble-beach so it really hurts your feet to walk - the key is to get in the water really quickly and start swimming - which is easy cause the water is so warm :) The sea is also a really deep turquoise blue - a bit lighter closer to shore and then deepening in colour the farther out it goes. It's stunning.

I was excited to wear my new green polka-dot bikini...which was conservative by French standards...there were at least three women on the beach with us who were completely topless. ;)

I love the area along the Promenade des Anglais. There are rows of palm trees, famous hotels, gelato shops, joggers, para-sailors and very tanned people (I wonder if I'll be that tanned by the end of the year). There is and even an old carousel which I absolutely had to ride as soon as I saw it - and dragged one of my flatmates with me. For some reason I get really excited about carousels and Ferris wheels.



Since arriving I've had a number of good opportunites to practise my language skills which has been great and has gone okay so far - except for a brief moment of total embarassment last night...

The four of us went to visit P, the final member of our team at her flat in another part of town. After have dinner there we walked over to a church nearby that held a weekly cafe in the evening where young people gathered to hang out and drink tea and coffee. This was a perfect chance to practise our introduction skills.

Near the end of the evening we were meeting a few more people that we hadn't met yet. Now I've been quite proud that my name (Rebecca) has a good 'R' to start with and I've felt quite French giving it a good roll as I introduce myself to people. I was thinking to myself at this point that I may have been rolling it a bit too forcefully and I decided to take this opportunity to perfect my pronunciation. I held out my hand as a girl came by to introduce herself and began with confidence "Je m'appelle R..." And THIS is where everything went wrong. For some reason as I nicely rolled my 'R' I got stuck on it and it came out as "Rrrrrrrrrrrrrr...rrrrrr.rrrrrr...(and 10 seconds later)...rrrbecca" So by the time I got to the end of my name my friends were laughing at me and the girl I was meeting had given up (she probably though that there was something wrong with me) and was introducing herself to the next person! So embarassing. I really don't know what went wrong. I think that after this I'll stick to introducing myself as just 'Becca' and skip the 'R' altogether :P

Pizza and Crêpe

One of the best things about Nice so far is the people watching. The city is very busy all day (and night too in our neighborhood!) Yesterday I tried out three different locations for their people-watching potential:

#1 Sitting outside the back balcony (in our very own apartment!) while having breakfast. Our second floor balcony looks onto high apartments with rows and rows of pastel coloured shuttered windows – some closed and some open. Every now and again someone would wander out onto their balcony to see what the day is like. One woman next door even came out with a vanity mirror to apply her makeup by sunlight. I knew that anyone could be watching me too from any of those hundreds of window…although I still decided to lick the last bit of mango yogurt from the bottom of my bowl.:)

#2 From a café: My Welsh flatmate (I’ve decided to adopt this British term) and I went for real French espresso at a café near our flat. It took a while to decide what to have from the menu: café, café restaurant, noisette (don’t know what this is yet), cappuccino, grand café etc. We both were curious about the café restaurant and ordered that – but were told that it was the same thing a café anyway. We turned our chairs to face the street (French style) and watch people shop at the market and pointed out who looked like tourists and who did not. I’m sure that we both still fall into the tourist category.

#3 Having dinner on our front balcony: After cooking our first dinner in our apartment (rice and stir-fry) we decided to eat it on our table outside in the front. Our apartment is also very hot and outside is a lot cooler!
Across the street there is a ‘Pizza and Crêpe’ shop that was entertaining to watch. The three employees would spend their time sitting out side, looking bored, chatting, folding pizza boxes and sometimes getting into heated arguments with cars that would try to park in front of their store and disturb their garbage bin – lots of yelling and hand waving!
Three motorbikes with red boxes on the back also sat out front and occasionally one employee would jump into action and speed off for a delivery but return in just a few minutes. Most of the time though, they seemed really bored…we were tempted to order a pizza (or crepe!) ourselves to give them something to do.
It wasn’t until later I noticed that we were also being watched - the man in the balcony above us to the right would also pop his head over with his cigarette too see what we were up to as well.

So far my favourite is #3.

Où est la piscine?

The name for my blog comes very uncreatively from the title of Julia Child's autobiography. Not that I'm comparing myself to her at all (I'm a terrible cook) but I'm hoping that living here in Nice for a year will inspire me to get better at this.(I'm also hoping to see the movie 'Julie and Julia' sometime soon for further inspiration!)

Today is my first official full day on the French Riviera. I arrived here last Thursday evening but left early the next morning for a week of cross-cultural orientation in Otford, England. As I don't have an apartment yet, I'm staying with my team leaders and their children for a couple days. We also share the apartment with a slim black cat with a Spanish name I can't remember who has her own European passport. For real. Her previous owner was a Spanish woman who moved countries with her cat so she had to get all the paperwork done. I am totally jealous of this cat. It does not seem fair that she can get an EU passport when I can't.

This morning M (my host) took me to the open air market in town to buy fruits and veggies. The market is open every morning except for Monday. It was super hot in the sun as we walked over (which I think is typical for summer). The market was made up of rows and rows of vendors selling fruits, vegetables, fish and other products. I bought myself a bag of seven yummy figs for only .90 euro! I ate them for lunch with fresh goat cheese on top :) An elderly man tried to talk with me but unfortunately my French is a bit out of practise and I couldn't catch everything he was saying. Hopefully I'll improve quickly over the next few weeks.

On the way home, we stopped in the health food store so I could look for 'gluten-free' bread. I was so excited to find that they had gluten free baguettes(!) - and the brochure in the store also promised gluten-free 'pain au chocolat' - which would be amazing! I also loved the health food store because it was the first store we visited that felt very familiar somehow to me - I guess that health food stores are the same around the world.

I haven't seen any celebrities yet...although there was a whole 'parking lot' for private jets at the airport here in Nice so they must be around somewhere... On the bus ride back from the airport yesterday we passed the clinic where Angelina Jolie gave birth to her twins. It is also the place where A (M's daughter) goes to the dentist :)

The rest of the family has gone to the pool this afternoon while I opted to sit and rest for a bit. This reminds me of one of my favourite 'Flight of the Conchords' episodes when they sing the French song...and look for the pool (la piscine). ;)