Aix-perience

So I haven’t had a chance to post anything about my days in Paris! Rest assured, I am still alive and doing well. Actually, by the time you read this, I will already be home!

Since I’ve been so behind and I’ve done SO MUCH in Paris, I’ve decided to separate my posts. So if you can’t read a humongous long post, don’t worry, you can always read a short one and come back to the rest later! : )

Ok, so my last couple of days in Aix was… quite bittersweet. On Thursday, which was our last day of classes, we were all prepping for our finals. That’s right—we DO need to study on our study abroad. I know I haven’t really been mentioning that very much, but yes, education comes first. In my writing class (which is one of my favorite classes I’ve ever taken), we had to right a creative piece and a reflection on our six weeks of material, including movies, readings, and writings we’ve done. In my art history class, the final was a third exam (non-cumulative), which involved three pieces that we’ve talked about and analyzed during class, and a fourth piece by one of the artists that we’ve studied (we have to analyze and based on our analysis, deduct (aka guess) who the artist was).

Anyway, so Thursday we were preparing for that, and then I decided to go to a concert! I originally thought it was an orchestra concert, but it turned out to be a choir concert with a small orchestral accompaniment in the second act. It was incredible! I was originally disappointed that it was a choir concert because I love orchestra, but WOW. It was in two acts—the first act was all a cappella and everyone in the choir did this cool choreography and had these awesome facial expressions. Now I don’t blame my choir director Lorraine for always having us do these creative entrances or small choreography moves—when everyone gets into it, it looks SO COOL.

The choir and the orchestra people!

So that night, I had dinner with Iku and Marie-Claude, as usual. We ended up having a really late dinner because Marie-Claude was sleeping, haha. I usually find myself skipping on whatever I need to do and just talking to them… which is not exactly great as far as responsibilities go, but my friends say that it’s a good cultural experience and much better than skipping out on my responsibilities to watch Netflix! Haha. I mean, as much as I would love to catch up on the newest season of OITNB, I figured I’d have as much time as I wanted to do that when I returned to the US.

Friday—day of finals! They weren’t that bad. They definitely could have gone better, especially my art history final… but whatever. My writing class and I actually got our professor a gift, which was a bottle of rosé and a signed card from all of us.

I can explain the bottle of rosé—besides being a brand of wine that’s quite famous in the south of France, I probably mentioned that we had a class picnic the other week. Noëlle, our professor, brought two bottles of rosé that everyone finished really quickly (!! Don’t ask me how, I guess my classmates really liked wine), so she kept saying that she should have brought a third bottle. So as sort of a joke, we gave her a third bottle. I actually picked it out because I went to a wine tasting at our school, and it was the only bottle of wine I’ve ever actually liked. It tastes like flowers (!!) and is from Vaucluse, an area north of Aix. I also liked the bottle of white wine from Cassis, but I got a headache after I tasted that. Apparently that’s pretty common because white wines have sulfites.

Anyway, I always get pretty emotional when I write reflections for my French writing class, because I’m all about writing about my feelings. Turns out, it’s really easy to write about your feelings in French. So it took everything not to start crying during the middle of the exam. I can’t even really remember exactly what I wrote, but it was something about how Aix has become my home and how I learned about myself and friendship and everything else important. I honestly got so much out of the experience—I’m not even sure I have words to describe how amazing it was.

Also, something really cool we did as a final project for our class was write an “abécédaire” of our experiences; each person had a couple of letters of the alphabet and we chose one word to write about, and then compiled them together. I am really going to miss my class and my professor. She was the sweetest lady, and even when my writing sucked, she was so, so supportive.

My art history exam, on the other hand… well. Haha. If you had asked me during the six weeks, you probably would have found me complaining quite often about that class (the one where we had to write a 20 cut down to 15 page paper). I messed up quite a bit on that test. Yikes. But I think everyone did, but that still doesn’t really make me feel better. Oh well, it’s over, so that’s that.

My friends and I were all pretty sad to leave each other, but I have high hopes that we’ll stay very good friends! They were really an amazing group of people to study with. It’s so hard to believe that we won’t be seeing each other again very soon. Like, it was all a dream. Anyway, next post I’ll be talking about Paris, so see ya then!

Monica, Abby, and I celebrating our last Thursday lunch together :')

-Cindy