Weekend in Dordogne

Since a picture is worth a thousand words and all that, I will send you first to my Flickr page to look at pictures. But I still get a few words, since some of them require elaboration/there are things I didn't get pictures of. The itinerary for the weekend was:

• Friday
• bumming around Bordeaux with the other Poitevines (cathedral, wandering around carnival, pizza)
  
• Saturday
• Grotte de Rouffignac (really ancient cave art)
• lunch in Eyzies-de-Tayac (salad! duck! tomato encrusted in spices and cheese! pie!)
• Musée national de préhistoire (ancient bones and tools and all the things we learned about in 9th grade anthropology)
• Lascaux II (facsimile of really ancient cave art, more famous than Rouffignac but not as cool, in my humble opinion)
• Chateau de Beynac (with gorgeous views and hot air balloons and sunset on the ramparts - one of those "wow, I'm really in Europe" moments)
• dinner in Sarlat (more duck! weird soup with meringue! chocolate fondant and lemon sorbet!)
• Sunday
• 2-hour tour of Sarlat with a history prof (we were very well-informed)
• bumming around Sarlat (paninis, ice cream, antique fair)

I think that's most of the high points. One of the cool things at Rouffignac (apart from the whoa-really-ancient mammoth drawings and cave bear claw marks on the walls) was all the really old graffiti from before people really figured out there was prehistoric art - written on the ceiling in candle smoke and dating from the 1700s. Elizabeth found the IHS symbol (first three letters of Jesus in Greek, common in church decorations) on the ceiling of one of the caves. There were several priests who signed their names. Holy graffiti, anyone?

In any case, it was an excellent weekend. Now I'm going to be late for class because I've been typing this on an infernal French keyboard and it's taken me far longer than it ought.

Good bread, good meat, etc.

I don't generally think much of the theory of Platonic Forms (an ideal coke can? really?), but I after today I am convinced that somewhere, floating in the metaphysical ether or what have you, is an ideal church potluck of which all other church potlucks are projections into the material world. It is apparently impossible to have a church luncheon without the presence of potato salad, meatballs (boulettes de viande, though apparently it's not a very French concept - they were brought by a Finnish church member), copious amounts of chicken (here, rotisserie rather than fried), and deviled eggs. The only thing missing was the little-old-church-lady banana pudding, an oversight somewhat ameliorated by the arrival of half a dozen fresh baguettes in the middle of the meal, and all but forgotten after the lemon cream pie. There's also something apparently sacrosanct about the second Sunday of the month and potlucks. It was excellent, and I felt very much at home.

Trop fatiguée d'inventer un titre intéressant

Highlights of the week: 

• Virtual Xenia dinner on Sunday night (in the wee hours of Monday morning for me), despite being able to actually hear very little and despite having to get up for an early class on Monday...which was cancelled, but I didn't know that until I'd gotten there. I miss Midd professors who email you when they aren't going to show up.
  
• Mysteriously nonexistent bus on Tuesday led me to try walking home from Hôpital de la Milétrie - I arrived about an hour later, by probably the most circuitous route possible. Fortunately, it was a pleasant day for walking.
• Three hours of outlining with my partner for an oral presentation on Balzac and mimesis. French students are every writing teacher's dream: they start by brainstorming, progress to outlines, leave the introduction and conclusion for last, consider revision a mandatory process...it would have been my own personal nightmare in English, but in French the organized method cuts down on comprehension problems. And I'm sure we're going to come out of it with a very good presentation.
• Les Bacchantes for Elizabeth's 21st birthday (a little anticlimactic, seeing as how she could have bought a drink just as easily the day before) and folk dancing, which was excellent. I learned how to dance the mazurka, at least well enough to follow my partner. It's Polish and lovely and counted in 9 beats, and the music is generally melancholy and romantic. I'm a fan.
• Waking up this morning for an 8 a.m. class after a mere 4 hours of sleep, and with a sore throat to boot. I more or less slept through said class, and afterwards braved a French pharmacy to get cough drops. Procuring anything remotely medicinal (up to and including contact solution) requires interacting with a pharmacist - no running into the grocery store to grab a bottle of Advil. On the one hand, they know quite a bit; on the other hand, I don't like being stared at while I decide what I want. Bah.
• Chest x-ray today to confirm that no, in fact, I don't have tuberculosis and it really is okay for me to stay in France for a year. I fail to comprehend the reasoning behind the procedure, since surely a short-stay visa still gives you sufficient time to infect people with TB. Who knows. It was also an object lesson in the casual French attitude towards nudity - in the U.S. they tend to give you a gown if you have to halfway disrobe for an x-ray. Oh, Europeans. On the other hand, I didn't have to wait at all - in fact, there was almost nobody in the hospital. It was faintly creepy. I walked home afterwards by a much more direct route, though it's still a solid 40 minutes. But a sunny 40 minutes, so no complaints.

Now just tomorrow to get through. Plans for the weekend: sleep. Lots of it.

Vive la Révolution

I've been to Bible study a few times now, so I decided it was time to buy an actual Bible. In naive American fashion, I thought this could be accomplished at a bookstore, so I went to Gibert Joseph - a chain, maybe not quite as large as B&N or Hastings, but same principle. First I looked around the religion section - nothing. Then I asked the saleswoman, who looked surprised by my request but directed me to the Livres de poche section (practically everything comes in a Livre de poche - literally, pocket book - edition) - nothing there either. So I asked another saleswoman, who looked similarly surprised and flagged down a coworker, who informed me with a shrug that they were out of Bibles. I waited momentarily for something like "...and we'll be getting more tomorrow." No such luck.

I recounted this experience to my host family over dinner, and was laughed over indulgently. Apparently no self-respecting French bookstore sells Bibles. I have to go to the librairie biblique for that, and, as Christelle said, I will never find it on my own (hopefully there was an implicit "I'll take you sometime" in there). The Revolution did its work well and thoroughly - most French people are aggressively secular, like my history professor, who finds it necessary to preface every remark vaguely pertaining to religious belief with "in the Christian imagination..." On the other hand, whenever I'm in churches (which is fairly often - I love them) I see a good number of lit candles and one or two people saying their rosary or praying to a saint - and this at random times on weekday afternoons. It's like the country has a split personality. Honestly, I think in all their efforts to separate religion from the state they've just made religion an even more constant specter - in the U.S. you can walk into any Wal-Mart and buy a Bible off the tiny book aisle and nobody thinks twice about it. Here I feel like any religious reference is followed by an awkward half-second pause. Ah well, hurrah for cultural differences. 

The Bises Problem

So when I idly posed the following math problem in my last post, I wasn't really thinking about it, but it's actually a little bit interesting. 

The Question: If a party of nine people is breaking up, in which there are five girls, four guys, and no relations, how many kisses will be exchanged?

The Assumptions: Any pairing involving a girl (that is, girl-girl or girl-guy) will result in two kisses (one on each cheek). Since none of the guys are related, any pairing of two guys will result in no kisses.

To warm up, let's consider the Handshake Problem: If a roomful of n people all shake hands with one another, how many handshakes will be exchanged? For simplicity's sake, let's say n in this case is 10. That means each person in the room shakes hands with 9 other people, so you might be tempted to multiply 10 by 9 and arrive at 90 handshakes. Actually, though, you've double-counted each handshake, since A shakes hands with B and B shakes hands with A, but that's only one handshake total. So you divide by 2 and arrive at 45 handshakes. Or, more generally, in a room with n people, you will have [n*(n - 1)]/2 hanshakes.

My problem is a little more complicated, since the guys don't faire les bises among themselves and instead of one handshake, we have 2 bises. If you look at the picture (sorry, it's not the most beautiful graph ever, since I drew it by hand and photographed it with my webcam, but it will have to do), where G = girl, B = boy, and each line = 2 bises, all the girls are connected to everyone else but the boys are only connected to the girls. For the moment, let's pretend kisses are like handshakes, i.e. one between two people. All you have to do is calculate the number of kisses for a normal group of 9 and then subtract the number that aren't being exchanged by the group of 4 boys, in other words:

(9*8)/2 - (4*3)/2 = 36 - 6 = 30

Now, remembering that each exchange of bises actually involves 2 kisses, we multiply by 2 to arrive at 60 total kisses in the above scenario. In other words, Elizabeth wins!

(Is it glaringly apparent how much I miss math?)