Thursday, August 30, 2012

Arrivée!

So I'm in France now! Weird.
This will be brief because I don't think I've ever been more tired in my life, but I wanted to update everyone. After my 27 hours straight of travelling (Boston to Iceland, Iceland to Paris, TGV to Nantes, car ride to Bois de Cené), I met the Badaud family and got shown around their house and expansive yard. Such a yard could not possibly exist in the Silicon Valley, where acreage half that size is commonly a million dollars. Anyway. They have lots of chickens, ducks, birds, a cat, fish, a pond, and a swimming pool. I then was shown around the family furniture store, where I met lots of family members whose names I will not remember. Then we all had dinner together, along with my host sister's best friend, who talks too fast for me to understand. (The Badauds clearly understand what it's like and speak slowly and clearly, to my relief.)

That's all for today. I really like this family and they seem practical and smart, like our brains can work on the same wavelength. I am exhausted and grumpy from travelling, surstimulée from all the French and different things like backward lightswitches, weird toilets, and cheese for dessert, but I have really high hopes right now for how this year will go. I think the Badauds and I will do just fine. :)

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Berkeley


On Tuesday, my brother Alex and I drove up to Berkeley, where he goes to college. We spent the day moving him into his new house (shared with three roommates). We had to reassemble his bed and assemble his new ikea desk. I've discovered that ikea furniture is fun, and that non-ikea furniture that is old and lacking instructions is difficult to put together. But in the end, we succeeded with the help of our good friend Tim, and spent the rest of the day organizing Alex's things (whether he likes it or not...), getting ribs for lunch, and playing with his roommate's kids, who were visiting for the day. They are about seven and three, extremely energetic, and left us absolutely exhausted. To reward ourselves for a move well-done, we found a Thai restaurant conveniently only a block away from Zendo (the new house). Thai is pretty much our favorite, and they had decent pad thai and curry, though not exceptional.

Zendo is only a block from San Pablo Avenue, a very downtown-ish street with lots of restaurants and small shops that runs all the way through Berkeley. It's about three miles from campus, but Alex has a bike and will do fine. I was particularly charmed by the area: very much like San Francisco in weather and small, odd houses and shops, but cleaner, nicer, and smaller.

On Wednesday, we ran errands in the morning, buying the few things we'd forgotten to bring with us, and were on campus by 10:00. I quickly discovered that asking my brother, of whom I am very fond, to show me around was a mistake. He is a math major with a minor in computer science, so he knows where exactly two buildings are: Evans Hall and Soda Hall. We soon resorted to calling Tim, who is an eagle scout and therefore must be better oriented than Alex, and proceeded to climb lots of trees while we waited for him. Berkeley, I was surprised to discover, is actually a very green campus. I didn't mean “green” as in environmentally friendly, though I suppose that could also be true. With its fog and cooler weather, it is a far lusher place than Sunnyvale, covered in beautiful grass, ivy, and sprawling California oaks that are perfect for climbing. This combined with the beautiful, old, impressive Roman-style architecture left me quite visually struck by the university.

When Tim arrived, we followed him around to find all his classes for this semester, as classes began on Thursday and Tim is an organized sort of fellow. This provided me with some sense of having seen lots of the campus, though I was quite disoriented and don't know how much I saw or didn't see. Then we decided to try getting into the main stacks again, having been rejected the first time because I lack a Cal ID. Seeing lots of books is a must for every college tour, I believe, because it makes me very excited and says a lot about the school. So we walked around the library for awhile until we found an information desk, and asked if I could have a visitor's pass. Actually, Tim did the asking, since he is a redheaded, harmless-looking nerd who is also very good at talking to people. Alex and I also look fairly innocent but lack the necessary coercion skills. The guy at the desk told us helpfully which other desk to go to, and that we should sound more like we had a research project and less like it's a tour. So Tim decided we were researching LBJ (a favorite topic of his), and we got ourselves a visitor's pass.

Berkeley does indeed have lots of books. Alex was astonished that it was not above and beyond anything I'd seen previously. This, I explained to him, is because I have now done eight college tours, while he hasn't done any. All colleges have big libraries. Some colleges have enormous libraries. I believe the biggest ones I've seen were at McGill, Minnesota, and Berkeley, and I do not think Berkeley is the winner, though it is difficult to estimate on that scale. Anyway, we spent awhile wandering around the stacks and then went for lunch at La Burrita, a great Mexican place right next to campus. By this point all of us were a little tired and I was a little dehydrated, so we split and went home. At 2:45 I decided I could still beat the rush hour traffic home instead of waiting for 9 or 10 at night, so I said goodbye to my favorite brother and came home to wish my mother happy birthday.

My overall impression of Berkeley: Wow. I was not expecting to like it so much – not expecting that the city would be so charming, or the campus so beautiful, or that it would feel enough different than home that I could stomach living there. But it does! It is all of those things, and if there was a bat's chance in hell I could get in, it might well threaten my plans for Madison. Fortunately for Madison, my GPA and test scores are above average for Berkeley, but below average for going to Berkeley from my sickeningly competitive high school.

In other news, T minus 5 days until I fly to Boston. T minus 7 until I fly to Paris.

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Summer 2012! French Camp, Wisconsin, and CU Boulder


Well, I suppose I should say something about the 6 weeks of vacation I just had. Here's an outline, so you don't get confused: On June 24, I flew to Minneapolis where my aunt lives for a day, and the next day went off on the long bus ride to Bemidji. There, I spent 4 weeks at French camp, canoeing through the Voyageur National Park and the BWCA (Boundary Waters Canoe Area). After camp, I went home with my dear friend Solange, who lives at Hackensack, the neighboring French camp to our Voyageur. (Except by the time we got there, it was second session and had become Italian camp.) I stayed with her and her wonderfully hospitable family for 3 days, until my parents picked me up in the Cessna and we continued on to Wisconsin. We stayed at my aunt and uncle's cabin on Lake Wyandock for one week – just like we've done every summer since I was old enough to not drown (maybe 4 years old). Then, on the return journey, we stayed 2 days in Boulder, Colorado, where a good friend of my dad lives. He was in Atlanta on business, but let us stay in his house while I checked out the University of Colorado, Boulder. We returned home from all that on August 2nd.

As you can see, I've been busy. Now that you have a handy-dandy outline, I'll do my best to flesh it out a little.

French camp is incredibly hard to describe. I think (I hope) most people experience something like it at least once in their lives, be it summer camp, band, theatre, any really good group of people working for a common cause. Voyageur has really become my family. Even though there are new people every year and some people don't return for a 2nd (or 3rd, or 4th) year, it just becomes a nebulous and flexible family. I spend the other 11 months of the year feeling homesick for camp, and then one blissful month where my only complaint is the number of mosquitoes and the fact that all the tents are broken. Imagine loving something so much, and then trying to describe it to your friends back home, who have no frame of reference for it. It's tough.

We spend the first week at base camp, learning how not to die in the woods. We learn how to canoe, make fires, pitch tents, use the camping stove, pee in the woods, and sing Voyageur songs. This is my third year at camp, and I'm sort of a hardcore camping fiend, so I spent a lot of this time hanging out with my new idol, a counselor named Paul. He likes fixing things, and is actually a genius at it. You don't need to be a genius to fix things, but if you saw how creatively and effectively Paul does it, you would agree with me. Anyway, base camp is pretty dilapidated in parts, because no one ever has the time to fix it, and I'm pretty sure we're the only CLV camp without a handyman/janitor/fix-it sort of guy on staff. (CLV is Concordia Language Villages, that runs 15 or so different language camps including Voyageur, where I go, and Hackensack, where Solange lives.) So I followed Paul around during week #1 and fixed things. I've never had more fun during a week 1 of Voyageur, which I usually think of as the Boring Week.

We also do lots of team bonding, usually the last few days of week 1. It's very important to be good friends with your brigade and to trust each other, because in the woods, you put your life in your friends' hands. If your friends are stupid or thoughtless campers, there are thousands of accidents I could think of just waiting to happen. My brigade was called Montreal, and it was probably the best brigade I've ever had. We were all there for 4 weeks, not 2. We were small – 6 campers and 4 counselors. (If you are surprised at the high ratio, remember that we spend all this time in the woods and it is far more dangerous than most summer camps.) For the first time I've seen, we had an even gender ratio – I've been in 2 brigades in previous years that were all girls, and that is way too much estrogen for me. And no one was there who thought they were going to Princess camp, our neighboring French camp across the lake where they live in châteaux and wear dresses and make-up every day. We always get a few of those, and it's tough for them to get used to Voyageur. Three of us were in our third year, and the other three had no difficulties acclimating to the woods. It was amazing. I started to realize during the last one or two days of week 1 that we were all in for something special.

Week 2 is spent in the Voyageur National Park. This was my 4th time in the VNP, because last year we also spent weeks 3 and 4 in the VNP due to not having enough counselors to split us into two groups, and therefore being too large a group to be allowed in the BWCA. So many of the lakes and islands we passed were familiar to me, and brought back a lot of really good memories. I can't really go into a whole lot of detail as to what we did without typing up my whole 61 page packet of letters I sent home to my family, describing every single campsite and the exciting events of each day, but I can describe a typical day.

We usually wake up quite early, somewhere around 5:00am. In previous years this hasn't always been the case, mostly because I've always been with a fantastic counselor named Louis who really likes sleeping. But this year Louis didn't show up because he got kidnapped by pirates (or decided to become a paramedic, but I like my story better). So we got up early, packed up the camp in 30 minutes to an hour, canoed for another 30 minutes to an hour, ate breakfast on some rock sticking out of the lake, or in the canoes, or on shore, or wherever. Then we canoe until around lunch-time, when we find a campsite, pitch the tents and a tarp, and eat lunch. Then we usually took a siesta during the hottest hour of the day, went swimming afterward, and had the last hours of daylight to make dinner, work on projects and homework (since 4 weeks of French camp is technically a year's worth of high school, we have lots of homework), and write letters. We'd eat dinner watching the sunset, which is glorious without exception in the North Woods. Then we'd run into our tents for the night to escape the mosquitoes, and my tentmates and I would discuss philosophical subjects for several hours while the counselors yelled at us every 30 minutes to be quiet and go to sleep. They have a theory that I never sleep, because I'm always the first one up in the mornings AND stay up all night talking with Solange about philosophy. Jean-Luc has a suspicious theory that I secretly have an alarm, because I couldn't possibly be waking up so early on my own. Teehee. The real secret is just that I sleep incredibly well in tents, especially with all the sunlight and exercise we get. At home, I need almost as much sleep as a normal person, but in the woods 6 hours is more than enough.

Last night in the VNP, at Lake Mukooda. The sunsets are always like this:


That's how week 1 went. It was magnificent. We came back to base camp and bid a tearful goodbye to the 2-weekers (but they were all in the other brigade, so my group wasn't too teary). Then we had International Day, known as I-Day, a phenomenon that I've heard lots about but never went to because we were always in the BWCA. This year they changed the schedules, so we got to go. It's where all of the Concordia Language Villages get together at Waldsee (German camp) and, well, celebrate our international-ness. There's games and songs and food and lots of people wandering around speaking different languages. This year, unfortunately, we had the “rain plan” version, because the other camps are under the impression that villagers will melt in the rain. This meant that we went to Princess camp instead, along with 2 or 3 other camps – so that if it started raining, everyone could fit inside. There were other mini I-Days at Waldsee and Norwegian camp, I think. It was interesting and had some very good moments, like when we realized we'd forgotten to make a Voyageur flag, so Michel ran up onstage holding a rain jacket as our flag. It also had a few moments that I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry at: Michel, Ousman and I had a conversation with a few princesses from Spanish camp that went roughly like this:
Princesses: “Hey, are you guys Voyageurs? Do you really not shower for a whole month?”
Us: “Yup, it's true. But we swim in the lake.”
Princesses: “Eeeewww. That's GROSS. Do you guys really eat squirrels?”
Us: “Yup. Well, not only squirrels. But they certainly supplement our diet.” (There's a rumour that Voyaguers all hunt and eat squirrels, and we do our best to keep this rumour going. This year I tried to make it true, but squirrels are fast and really hard to catch!)
Princesses: “REALLY?”
Us: “Yeah. Actually, see these leather nametags we have? That's squirrel skin.”
Princesses: “...Are you just pulling my leg?”
Us: “No, really.”
Princesses: “...Yeah right. Liars.”
So it kind of made me happy because they were SO naïve and princess-y, and it kind of made me sad because after they decided we were lying to them, they didn't believe ANYTHING we'd told them about our lifestyle, and most of it had been true. It also made me sad because they were just so catty and mean, which is unfortunately how a lot of people are in real life, but not at Voyageur. At Voyageur I try to forget about real life, which is pretty cool most of the time but not as awesome as camp at all, and they were a sad reminder of the sort of person from real life that I try not to associate with.

But my favorite part about I-Day, besides Michel's rain jacket flag and seeing Louis, the counselor who got kidnapped by pirates, was the closing ceremony. We all walked to Waldsee for a big closing ceremony with all the camps, because Minnesota is weird and had decided not to rain all day. Each camp had a presentation on the theme of “Live together, Speak together.” The Voyageurs are famous for having bizarre presentations that leave people talking about it far longer than any of the well-rehearsed dances from other camps. It's also a tradition to come up with it 5 minutes before performing, but this year we actually rehearsed it three times the day before.

Dahveed, the dean, came up on the circular stage with a giant frying pan, hit it three times with a metal pole, and yelled “VOYAGEURS!” The Voyageurs, hidden all around the circle of listeners, yelled it back to him. He then yelled “A L'ATTAQUE!”, we yelled it back, and ran up on stage. We began to sing a chaos of 3 different songs, stopped, yelled at each other, began again with 2 different songs, stopped, and began fighting each other with fists and large styrofoam swords. Then four “demons” dressed in black covered the mob with a giant tarp, and Bras-Forts (with HATE and IGNORANCE written on his back in duct tape) came out to the theme of Darth Vader, and said something along the lines of “bwahaha, I've won!” Then tiny, cute Aicha came out all dressed in tie-dye. She handed flowers to the demons and started a chant: “Vivez ensemble, Parlez ensemble,” which means “live together, speak together.” So all of us came out from under the tarp, wrapped Bras-Forts in it, and carried him offstage, dancing to some catchy Quebecois rap. Everyone loved it, even if they didn't really understand it.

After I-Day, we had “credit weekend,” where we go into town and get to buy new supplies – say, for example, if you were like me in my first year and brought a rain jacket that wasn't actually waterproof, you could buy a new one at Gander Mountain. Minnesota is an odd place – it can be blazing hot, and then some clouds roll in and it pours buckets of rain for several hours (while still being fairly hot, temperature-wise) and then suddenly disappears and the sun comes out. That is a very normal day in Minnesota. Anyway, so credit weekend was fun. We all bought “Gander bands” at Gander Mountain, like Silly Bandz but with animals. I had a deer and a Jean-Luc-osaurus that was probably supposed to be an eagle. We terrified the customers at Target and then ate at a Chinese Super Buffet where we met a really funny man who recognized us from I-Day.

Finally we left for the “immense voyage.” 7 hour drive up to Canada. Voyageurs have the best road trips ever. We spend all 7 hours listening to catchy French, African, Cajun, or Quebecois music, usually singing along. In Canada, we visited Old Fort William for two days, which is a recreation of a fur trading fort. The first day we took a tour and wandered around the fort, seeing what there is to see. Everyone was supposed to do a historical project on something at the fort, be it the canoe-makers (which I did two years ago), a historical figure like cartographer David Thompson (which I did last year), or the doctor, the Ojibwe women, the tin-smith, the farmers, etc. I don't actually need school credit, I just do camp for fun, so I wasn't stressed out about doing the project or not and didn't even choose a subject the first day, preferring instead to wander the fort and talk with all the interesting people who work there.

At Old Fort William, there are certain events that repeat every day, because they relive the same day in June, 1815. Every day there's the arrest of the blacksmith, Alexander Fraser, and also a "fire" in the square that we helped put out with this big old-fashioned firetruck:



Day 2 is spent in the private Fort William library, which is not open to the public except if you pay them. I LOVE this library because I'm a complete history nerd. It is chock-full of original sources. You can read actual diaries of important men in the fur trade, letters they wrote, etc. I made a beeline for the “Bio files” which are kept on hand to educate the staff of Old Fort William. If you are assigned to be Alexander Fraser for a day, you'll go to the library and read the bio file on Alexander Fraser so you'll know who you are, how to act, and what background to fill in if the tourists ask you personal questions. I researched Lord Selkirk and the Red River scandal, which was a fascinating part of the war between the two big fur trade companies, the Compagnie de la Nord-Ouest and the Hudson Bay Company. I'm such a nerd. I could live in that library.

After visiting the fort, we drove back down to the BWCA, where we spent the remainder of the second two weeks. Picture a daily schedule roughly like that of week 2, except the days were often longer, sometimes canoeing for 7 or 8 hours a day. We also added portages: we didn't do a single portage during week 2, but we averaged about 4 portages a DAY while we were in the BWCA, because we took a route that led through the interior lakes, which is beautiful and isolated and you'll never see another canoe group, but is sort of a pain in the shoulders (literally) to get to. For the first time I learned to portage a canoe by myself, and did so for almost every portage. The canoes we have, let me add, are the oldest and heaviest type of alumacraft imaginable. They're about 80 lbs. per canoe. Woohoo!

My brigade for this second two weeks was called Les Hipster Canards (the Hipster Ducks), and we were almost the same as Montreal except we lost two boys, added one girl, and lost two counselors. It was a lot of fun, and we were also a very tight group. We played lots of aqua-Ultimate (frisbee in the lake!) and loved to climb trees and big rocks. Fortunately we stayed pretty close to the other group, Les Barbes de Plusiers Jours (the Stubble) and met with them often to hang out during the day, since we were all good friends at this point.

It passed too quickly, as always. I don't want to write about all our farewell rituals, because I'm still in denial that I've ever left. So soon I was with Solange at Hackensack, where her grandparents own the land and rent it to Concordia, and her dad is the handyman. I helped her and her family with the daily bathroom cleanings, the recycling, and the brush clearing. It was really fun, and I envy Solange for having grown up at a camp with so many things to do every day. Soon my parents came and stayed for a day with us at Hackensack in one of the guest cabins. They came unannounced, as my father is prone to overestimating the time it takes to get anywhere, so fortunately for them, Solange's family was flexible and welcoming. The last morning at Hackensack, Solange and I made pancakes over a campfire just because we missed cooking over a fire.

The week in Wisconsin was relaxing and lovely. My aunt is a terrific cook, so we always eat like kings, and though my cousins did not make it up, my uncle came just for a weekend, so it was nice to catch up with family. Every day went roughly like this: wake up, spend the morning reading (I got through Catch-22, A Spell for Chameleon, Almost French, and Catcher in the Rye during just that week), go running around 11 for 5 miles with my dad, come back and swim across the lake and back, eat lunch, and spend the rest of the day swimming, learning to windsurf, cooking, canoeing, or reading. I was very active and got to keep my canoe muscles for a little while longer, but nothing was required or stressful. It was really a vacation for my brain, which didn't have to do anything the entire week.

Then came the CU Boulder visit. I'm not going to do a whole long write-up about it like I did for the other colleges, mostly because this post is already far too long. But I will just say that it's a beautiful place to live, very active and intense, where everyone goes skiing and mountain-climbing on the weekends and bikes everywhere in town. The college is a good school with lots of options – the sort of thing I'm looking for. The campus is beautiful. I was impressed, but didn't fall in love with it like I did with Madison, Seattle, and McGill. I think my biggest problem was just that, coming from the North Woods, I couldn't possibly imagine living in a place with so little green. It's just too desert-ish. But it's a good safety school for me, and I wouldn't mind going there at all. However, I'll probably apply early to Madison and possibly Seattle and see what happens. I'm too lazy to apply everywhere, especially since I already think I know where I want to go.

Well, that just about covers it. My 6 weeks away from home. It's actually the longest period of time I've ever been away from home, even though I've been doing 4 weeks away just about every summer for 7 years or so. Now I have a month at home before a much longer vacation, and so far I've been using every day to prepare. Getting all my paperwork in order, insurance, bank card, getting a new computer, figuring out what to pack, etc. etc. Turns out, moving abroad isn't very easy. But I'll be a pro after this.