Snow!

On Saturday morning, I woke up to something I thought I'd never see in Toulouse - snow! A fairly good amount of it too! My host mom said this is the first time they have had a snowfall in 9 years! I should feel lucky that I got to see it....except a) I'm from Rochester, so snow doesn't really excite me that much, and b) Saturday was the day we were going on a Dickinson excursion to the Pyrenees (actually, back to Bonascre!) to do snowshoeing and skiing! So I wake up at the crack of dawn early, which is NOT my favorite thing, drag myself to the bus at 7:45 am, and as we're heading down the highway (a good hour and a half out of Toulouse), we get word that the road to Ax-les-Thermes is closed. So there is no way to get to Ax/Bonascre! And the roads really were pretty bad, because France apparently cannot handle snow. We were going at a snail's pace on our big old bus, so it would have taken us about a day and half to get to Bonascre anyway. So we had to turn around and come back to Toulouse, and then we all had nothing to do all day. And isn't it funny that France just closes a road? And not a little road either - a highway. That would not happen in the real world of snow, a.k.a. upstate NY! And the real irony is that if we had been able to GET to Bonascre, the snow would have been amaaaazing for snowshoeing and skiing! :-( Oh well. They are going to try and reschedule our trip to either the 11th or 18th of February, and I'm hoping for the 18th, because I'm otherwise engaged on the 11th (going to the Olympics in Turin!) And meanwhile, Dickinson allowed us to go to the movies and out to eat, on them. So Annie and I caught "Good Night and Good Luck" with George Clooney this afternoon, because it was majorly miserable again today. The movie was kind of boring. Annie fell asleep.

Well I guess that's it. bisous!

Skiing at Bonascre!

Wheeeeeeeee! Sorry for the lack of updates, I haven't really been up to anything exciting until this past week. Exams were the week right after I got back from break, so that was a nice welcome back present...or not. They were pretty hard, I'm looking forward to seeing my grades, but I have no idea when they will be posted!

So two exciting things have happened since I've been back: Eiko (one of my roommates from last year) came to visit for 5 days, and Annie, Christine, David and I went skiing in the Pyrenees for a week!

Eiko's visit was great. She was doing a little European tour to see a bunch of friends that are studying over here, so Toulouse was the 2nd stop. We walked around, and went shopping (lucky for us, the semi-annual sales were going on when Eiko visited!), and of course, partied! It was so great to see her, and it made me really excited for senior year! Wheeeeee. That picture is of us, enjoying the beautiful weather on the banks of the Garonne.


Second awesome thing of january (so far): going skiing for a week at Bonascre, in the Pyrenees! Annie and Christine have an internship at SupAero, the premier aeronautical engineering school in France. Every year, SupAero takes the first-year students (who are our age) on a week of english immersion and sport, and they use native english-speakers as interns to help with the classes. Since there are only 2 interns this year, SupAero asked for 2 more students from Dickinson to come. Obviously I volunteered, because it was only the sweetest deal EVER. A week of skiing, staying in a hotel with a jacuzzi and sauna, delicious food, and meeting really cool SupAero students...all for free? Done. SupAero has its own chalet in Bonascre, so 60 students stay there, and the rest of the students stay in apartments throughout Bonascre. And the professors and interns stayed at the Hostellerie des 3 Domaines, which was the cutest little mountain hotel ever (see the view from our window, above). The food was out of this world, and the jacuzzi felt amazing after a day of skiing! So our only "job" was to teach english for 3 hours each morning. We were each paired with a teacher, who had planned the activity. Unfortunately, the teacher I was paired with had a death in the family right before the trip, so I ended up doing my class with Andrea, Alan, and Pierre, who are first year students at SupAero who are native english speakers. My game was "The Weakest Link", and the students wrote the questions and then asked them to each other. Everyday I just danced around the room and talked with the students and made them think I was crazy. I think it was a good method. And since SupAero is like, 99% boys, having 3 cute american interns was heaven for them. That sounds conceited, but it's true. We would go out to parties, and just be surrounded by the guys, because we were the only girls at the party. Fun! ;-)

(at the top of the mountain on the icy Thursday)

I ended up taking 2 afternoons of ski lessons, and then it rained on Wednesday, so we did english class all day, and then skied all day Thursday. Unfortunately, because of the rain, it was rather icy on Thursday morning, which was really rough on my feet and legs. Thursday afternoon was better, and then Friday was good too. It was pretty much the sweetest life ever. We were always really dirty, and we ate delicious food and hung out all day long. AMAZING. And we made some new friends, so hopefully we'll hang out with them in Toulouse!

Now I'm not looking forward to starting classes for the 2nd semester this week (they actually started last week, but I was kind of busy...) ;-) But oh well, c'est la vie. And I have so many fun things coming up! Bisous!

JFK airport = land of hell

Sooooo.......happy new year! I spent the first 3 days of 2006 stranded at JFK. My Jet Blue flight got in to JFK late on Monday, so I missed my flight to Brussels, and then spent the next 2.5 days crying to every airport official that would listen. I actually almost made the Brussels flight on Monday night, because I cried hysterically to a nice, incredibly New York police man was like "okay, i'll make some phone calls for you" and started calling all the American Airlines officials! He rushes me past security, with my two huge suitcases that I wanted to check, but didn't have the chance, and then we run down to the gate, but I JUST missed the flight. The plane was still there, but they had just "closed the door" or some nonsense like that. LAME. So Jet Blue put me up for the night at a hotel, then the next day I came back to the airport, was put on stand-by for the 6 pm flight to Brussels (same one I had originally missed), but didn't get on because the flight was oversold by 20.

Meanwhile, there were like 8000 other American Airlines flights going out to various European destinations, but since my plane ticket was actually held by SN Brussels Air (a partner of AA), I couldn't take any flight except an SN flight, and there was only that one SN flight per day (SN doesn't even have a ticket counter at JFK, so I couldn't even go plead my case to them!) Awesome beauracracy stuff. So after convincing Jet Blue to put me up for another night, because this was totally all their fault, I go back to the airport on Wednesday and am ready to take my totally confirmed, no way I'm not getting on flight. However, when I checked in, they didn't assign me a seat, and told me I was the first person the stand-by list. I flipped out. Of course, throughout all of this, my mom is placing a million phone calls for me, to Travelocity, SN Brussels Air, American Airlines, but nothing is working. So I end up going back out to the AA ticket counter, talking to a supervisor, who checks on a computer and is like "Yes, you have a seat tonight, here's your ticket." I somehow got off the stand-by list (don't ask me how), and got a seat. Yay!

Then, of course, our flight was delayed 5 hours and I missed my connection in Brussels. They gave me a new connection through Amsterdam when we were still in JFK, then our flight got delayed again, so I would have missed the new connection too. Then they gave me another (very tight) connection through Frankfurt, and a back-up direct flight to Toulouse that wouldn't have gotten me in until 10 pm! P.S. I don't know where any of my bags are throughout this whole ordeal, I hadn't seen them since Tuesday at noon when I put them through security to be put on stand-by. Anyway, all this fun had to end sometime, so we finally leave JFK, get to Brussels, I easily make the connection to Frankfurt, and then arrive in Toulouse at 6 pm Thursday. Through some miracle, one of my bags was actually on the Lufthansa flight with me! I picked it up right at baggage claim. The other bag had apparently gotten on the standby flight that I didn't get on, and was at baggage services waiting for me. And Annie Donovan was there waiting for me at the airport as a surprise and I love her a lot!

The end. That saga is complete.