Rainy Weekend

This weekend has been fun, despite the crappy weather. On Friday, I woke up late since I didn't have class, which was very nice. Then Sam and I met Monica for lunch on campus. After lunch we came back here, and Monica hung out with us all afternoon. We pretty much just chatted for five hours, but it was pouring outside and we didn't feel like exploring the city.

Around four o'clock Christine came upstairs with a tray of cookies, chocolate and this drink she made herself. The cookies were amazing, and the drink was good, but it had an aftertaste that reminded me a little too much of amoxicillin.

We hung about for a bit more, and then went to the supermarket, bought some sandwiches, salad, peaches, bread, cheese, chocolate mousse and wine (all for 15€!) and brought it back to our house and had a little wine and cheese party. It was very fun. A relatively quiet Friday night, but we had a great time nonetheless.

Yesterday we woke up to worse rain and lots of wind! We said to ourselves, "We cannot just sit around again today", and so we went to the Musée de la Resistance et la Deportation with Monica and Clare.

Here's the deal: the name of the museum is really long and so on most maps/books/info things/etc. it is simply written "Musée de la Resistance". And when you think of the French Resistance, you think of excitement and intrigue and the good guys fighting against the Nazis and triumphing over evil, etc. But when you realize that the museum is pretty much all about the deportation bit that is conveniently left off your guide book to Grenoble, you're pretty alarmed.

The museum was a large, dimly-lit building, full of shadows and Bose® speakers blasting chants of "Vive la France!" and Nazi propaganda. It was very creepy. At one point I was in a room, looking at this scrolling text of Liberté Égalité Fraternité while watching video clips of Neo-Fascist demonstrations and hate crimes still going on today, and I was so appalled that I didn't realize I had stepped onto a little raised platform. When I pulled my eyes away from the horrific images in order to glance down, I realized I was standing on a huge Nazi flag. I was so shocked and disgusted that I instinctively leapt back, to the safe carpet area. I was very surprised that I had had such a strong reaction, but when we spoke about it afterwards, the other girls had had similar feelings. Perhaps it was the combination of all the horrible images and sounds that we were being exposed to.

At another point, after looking at 30 odd images of children from Grenoble who died in concentration camps, I meandered over to this wall full of shadow-boxes containing trinkets and mementos of times spent in the camps. I bent down to look at one of the lower boxes, which held a small mirror and some innocent-looking chess pieces, but when I straightened up, I was faced with the most frightening thing I have ever seen. Staring at me, at eye-level, was this horrific sculpture of an emaciated prisoner's head. I almost screamed. The eyes were bulging out of their sockets, and the look in them was so full of fear, resentment and resignation. I will never forget those eyes. They were worse than the images of the bodies being burned in ovens, worse than the photos of children's corpses being thrown into the ground with no ceremony or decorum. Oh man, I'm shivering just thinking about it.

It is amazing that after all the school lessons, the PBS documentaries, the Anne Frank books, the trips to Holocaust Museums and memorials, you still can be shocked by the monstrosity of it all. "No matter how much you see, you can never become desensitized to this," Clare said to me when we were looking at a list of the dead from Grenoble. I really think she is right. There's just something so horrific about the fact that humanity could commit such atrocities...ugh...anyway, this is way too depressing and serious for my blog. So I will stop. Suffice to say, it was a very interesting afternoon. The museum was definitely very interesting, but it was not what we had expected at all.

It did lend to some interesting conversation over lunch though, when we finally found a place that was serving food at 15h. We went to this little shop called "Sandwich Oasis", and that is really what it was: an oasis of food in a desert of restaurants that don't open until 17h, but still like to keep their doors open to fake you out and make you feel like an idiot when you stand there in the doorway expectantly and they let you stand there for like 5 minutes before telling you that there is no food.

Yes, so anyway, we ate lunch (I had a sandwhich with French fries and mayonnaise on it, and it actually was really delicious, I was surprised) and discussed everything we had seen at the museum, which was interesting because Sam is a history major, so she provided us with some additional information and some interesting ideas on the idea of war and how it's changed.

After lunch we all went our separate ways, and Sam and I came back to the house and on the stairs were two envelopes, one for Sam and one for me! Sam's Mom sent me a birthday card, because we're obviously best friends and she reads my blog (Hi Mrs. Ducey!) and is super awesome. It was really really nice of her.

For the rest of the afternoon, we watched French game shows, which were really fun! There is one called Les Chiffres et Les Lettres (Numbers and Letters) and it's a combo of math class and Scrabble. There are two contestants and in one round they are given a bunch of numbers. For example,

9, 7, 1, 10, 8, 8

And then they are given a total number. The total given for the numbers above was:

128

Then they have less than a minute to use any combination (the less numbers used, the better, I think) of the original numbers to arrive at the total. I don't remember how they got the answer to the problem above, but if you're the first one to post a solution as a comment and no one else can find a faster way (using less numbers) to get the total, I will give you a prize. Like, for reals.

Anyways, Sam and I tried to play along but were terrible. With the letters part, we didn't even try to play. They're given 10 letters and have less than a minute to come up with the longest word they can find. The player who has the longer word wins the points. The really interesting thing about this part was that instead of having a computer generate all the possible answers for the select number of letters, there were two people flipping through dictionaries, and they would announce if a word was correct or not and they would define it. It was very interesting, and the man and woman who were doing the dictionaries would occasionally have a little banter on the side, to take up time. It was so random.

Sam and I then went to the supermarket to buy food for a little dinner here. Clare, Monica and Julia B came, and we just sat around, ate, and gossiped. It was also very fun. We had really wanted to go out to a discotheque, but it was freezing outside and windy and wet. Obviously the kind of weather that makes you want to put on your hot pants and minidress and meet French men. So we all threw on some sweat pants and lounged about.

Today it is not raining (yet), but it is very gray and cold. It is also Sunday which means that everything is closed, but we're going to go hunting for food. Worst comes to worst, we will go to McDonalds.