Scenes around Clermont

Three weeks in and I'm finally getting settled.

I've been feeling as though I arrived here under a thick veil, and little by little, the layers are being lifted away. The first "layer" was probably the easiest to erase - my exhausting cold of week one disappeared the following weekend, thanks to lots of sleep and soup!

During that first week, I was also trying to get my bearings in the town. The winding streets around the Cathedral felt like an innavigable maze, but little by little, the paths from here to there are coming into focus, in an almost obvious way.

The language is similar, although it's slower. In general, when I'm listening to others speaking French, I can understand it about as clearly as I could if I were listening to English through water - I get the gist, it makes sense, but it's never sharp and totally in focus.

This week, I got a candid glimpse of myself through French eyes, and it was an amusing and interesting picture! First, Pauline, my neighbor who is a 3rd year medical student, invited me to dinner - which in and of itself was a great accomplishment - more than any French person had done when I lived in Paris! She let me know that my accent was strongly American, but that I don't make too many mistakes when I talk and I'm quite easy to understand (hooray!). Gaetan, who it the owner of "Moversia," a small company that arranges housing and everything that goes with it for foreigners like me, told me that when I speak French, my voice changes and I sound like I'm trying to imitate a princess. We both had a good laugh about that - I'm not sure how to change that tone, so I'll just hope that everyone else finds it amusing too!

One of the things I've been most grateful for is the hospitality of everyone at the school. The top pictures are from a day last week when one of our professors, Isabelle Jourdier, invited us to her house for a January tradition - the "Gallete de Roi" or "King Cake" which celebrates 3 Kings Day with an almond-paste treat, wrapped in flaky, buttery goodness. Emily is wearing the crown, which she won when she got the porcelin toy in her piece of cake.

3 Continents in 3 Days

Wow, has this week ever been a whirlwind.

One week ago, I had just finished two days of decorating and celebrating the arrival of 2008, and then lounging in the sunshine of the Finca in Colombia with Javier and his family. We ate salted potatoes, fire-roasted beef, fresh picked fruit I've never seen before, and guanabana-flavored meringue cake to name just a few of the star dishes for New Year's Day. For the rest of my trip we visited a Salt Cathedral, ate dinner at a fine French restaurant at the top of Bogota's nearest mountain, shopped for beautiful leather goods and capped it all off with a whole night of dancing and dining at Andres Carnes De Rey - the kitschiest, craziest, most popular dance hall/steakhouse/entertainment place anywhere near Bogota. It was wonderful!

On January 4,I flew back through Miami to Chicago where I was able to spend the next morning celebrating a belated Christmas with my family, including all of its newest additions - Mia (2), Sophia (2), Christopher (1) and Madeline (1) - and next year we'll have two more as well! It was such a treat to see everyone, even if the visit was quick.

That afternoon, I took off for France, and after a long flight and an even longer layover in Paris, I finally arrived in Clermont-Ferrand were I'll be living for the next eight months. The town is a charming maze of winding streets that spread out around the Cathedral (Philippe and I are standing in front of it in the picture below). We can walk everywhere; the school (Groupe ESC-Clermont, a prestigious French business school) is maybe 15 minutes a pied from my current home, which is a studio that's part of a student-housing complex. Within the next week or so, I'm hoping to find a place that's a step up so that I can really get settled.