Bonne Année (Happy New Year)

Bonne Année!!

Hopefully 2006 turns out to be a better year for the world than 2005, which was natural disasters all the way. And of course Bush's re-inauguration, a completely man-made disaster.

My Dec 31 started off with a bit of exploration of the old part of Aix. Most of it was built in Medieval times, and is filled with beautiful old architecture - often combined with newer additions. One example is 'Librairie de Provence', a massive bookstore whose top two levels are new, but whose underground floor was clearly a medieval construction. It seemed to be some sort of dungeon, and in what I guess was probably a torture room, is now a room filled with dictionaries. I'm making a lot of guesses as to what the place was once used for, but dungeons and torture seem to fit the mood of the place, and its fun to imagine it that way too.

The bookstore was awesome - they had EVERYTHING. While not as big and with less books, it seemed to have more diversity in the type of books than Dymocks on George St, Sydney. Some things never change, and I found myself browsing the bookstore for 2 hours (but not buying anything). In particular I enjoyed the comics section - I have never seen so many types of comics, nor even knew that so many comics existed! Most of them were French-made, although your traditional Marvel and DC comics did make a slight appearance. Of course, there was plenty of Tintin and Asterix on display :)

After eating a meal at a sandhich stand, I decided I won't ever come back to Australia. Eating out is simply too good here. If I can feel like I am eating gourmet food from eating a €2 crèpe at a sandwich stand, imagine what actual french gourmet is like!! That was my breakfast; my lunch was a foccacia containing 4 types of cheese. The latter, while delicious, gave me a bad stomach and I was sick in the late afternoon. I don't know if it had been prepared unhygienically, or, more likely, i couldn't handle all those cheeses just yet. It hasn't stopped me from enjoying food - I think this year is going to spoil me senseless with all the gourmet foods, breads and cheeses.

During my explorations of the old part of Aix, I came across many, many clothes shops. A stupidly high number of them. I may seen about 25 so far, and I am sure there are many more. There are more clothes shops here than there are food outlets. I have since discovered that the people of Aix (the Aixois, pronounced 'Ex-wa') are unusually trendy and fashion-obsessed, even for France, which is a pretty trendy and fashion-obsessed country as a whole. I know that if my sister Kavita is reading this, she'll be happy, because she quite rightly thinks I am a dag, and her years of effort at de-dagification have thus far been quite unsuccessful. Unfortunately the Aixois only care about looking fashionable themselves and don't bother exerting peer pressure on others to also be fashionable - international students are proudly sloppy. However I do have an element of self-awareness and some minimal desire to fit in, so I've decided to shave every day. Ooh, that sounds like a good New Year's Resolution! I'm going to add it to my list.

There was a certain irony underriding all this fashion. No matter how many shops I entered, not one of them had a pair of gloves. I found this utterly stupid, that they would be willing to sell trendy clothing but not bother to stock the essentials (and a pair of gloves is definitely an essential in this freezing climate). In the end, I managed to get my gloves, but from the most unexpected place possible: The Gap. I had come to the clothing capital of the world, only to be forced to buy clothes from a stereotypically American shop. I felt a bit weird entering The Gap, not being white and all, but the guy who helped me pick out the (overpriced) gloves was Vietnamese. I guess globalised companies can change to meet local conditions. The shop attendants at The Gap were also extremely fashionably dressed, which is another big change from other Gap stores I have seen around the world.

Speaking of Americans, I ran into Shannon and Jeremy on the street (the helpful American exchange student and her visiting friend). I had a good chat with them while we walked to the pharmacy. Their friend Jason had gotten the flu from the cold weather. I am not sure it was a good idea given that it was even colder up north, but they were headed up to Paris that evening for New Year's and to spend a couple of days there. Shannon was helpful to me yet again, as she was the one who pointed out The Gap as a place where they should have gloves, even if overpriced ( I ended up paying €18, but they are very good and will last for 5-10 years).

After getting back home, I ran into Rob Watson on the stairs (he is a fellow UNSW student who will also be studying at IEP, and starts at the same time as me). He came back to my room, and we ate some bread with roquefort cheese and caught up about our various adventures over the previous days. He had had some bizarre experiences, from being woken up by snoring from another room in a youth hostel, to being thrown up on the plane by the person in the seat next to him (apparently the guy drunk 4 ot the white wine bottles - they are smaller bottles on the plane, but that is still excessive). Perhaps more bizarre still was that he met an Australian in his youth hostel in Nice, and this Australian knew me! Her name is Carmen, and she is a member of AIESEC University of Queensland. Once again, it seems its a small world after all...

Rob and I headed out for the New Year's Party which had been organised by Eglatine, the liason officer between the International Dept. at IEP and the international students. She was extremely friendly; she had made plenty of food and desert, and the party was held in her home. Talk about commitment to the job! She lived in the apartment with Mark, her husband who was originally from Louisiana in the US. The party was much smaller than I had expected, but it was good that way as it had allowed everyone to have a proper chat with one another. There were a couple of students who were already there or arrived at the same time as us: Bei and Helena from Canton, China, both of whom had been in Aix for 4 months. There was a Canadian girl called Rianna (sp?), from Ottawa, and she had arrived a few days ago. Finally there was a French girl who lived in Aix, and had recently completed a year of exchange at UNSW. Despite some good conversation with her, I unfortunately have forgotten her name.

The students there were quite accomplished, especiqlly linguistically, and this made me feel a tad jealous. Rianna spoke fluent English, Spanish and French (although her mother is Guatemalan, and she did live in Canada, so all 3 languages were kind of second-nature from birth); both Bei and Helena spoke fluent Mandarin, Cantonese, English and near-fluent French. I told them about my envy, and they reassured me that I could learn these languages. After all, I speak English and will have French under wraps within the year, so just a few more years of study and some exchanges/internships to those countries will get me to a similar level. I think I will pick up Spanish as a subject this year, as I will have a chance to use it as Spain is just over the border.

I had a very interesting conversation with Bei, who is a law student in China, about the Chinese legal system. Apparently legal argument is a bit of a farce there, and judges pretty much make decisions before the case has even begun. Particularly interesting was the fact that judges could be directly appointed without any experience as a legal practioner - Bei said he knew a 23 year old judge!!!! I definitely would like to read more about the Chinese legal system, because it seems very different to Western ones, where the focus is less on the judge and more on the lawyers.

Just when we were about to leave, at 11:30pm, about 6 French students arrived. They left with us, which was right away, and we headed down to a bar meet one of Rianna's Guatemalan friends who had been studying in Aix for 3 years, doing law. His whole family (mother, sister and father) was visiting from Guatemala, and they were all lawyers, or law students in the case of him and his sister. It was quite bizarre, spending New Years Eve with a family of Guatemalan lawyers, but they certainly were interesting conversationalists. The father in particular was very interesting - he had been practising criminal law for 25 years and had been exposed to the extraordinary corruption in the Guatemalan legal system, yet maintained an amazing level of idealism in spite of this. He was quite an inspirational character.

With Rianna voluntarily acting as Spanish-English interpreter, we conversed with him long into the hours of the morning, on issues ranging from sustainable development to comparative law to human rights abuses to interplanetary colonisation. He posed some very general questions to us (Rob, Rianna and myself) and as a result got some very general conversations resulting from it. For example, he opened up the conversation with "What do you, as the youth of today, think of the world of the past, present and future?" There's a phrase often associated with calculators: garbage in, garbage out. While our conversation was far from garbage, I think the same principles apply, with respect to the generality of his question anyway. During our discussion, I argued why the environment is the biggest priority for humanity at the moment, while the other 3 seemed to favour a a more social justice/human rights oriented argument. Ultimately the arguments over prioritisation are irrelevant - you need people working towards both environmental sustainability and human rights; if you focus on human rights exclusively then human society would no longer exist, and if you focus on environment exclusively then human society would be intolerable to live in. The important thing is that we actually do work towards them, as opposed to limiting our influence on world affairs to random chats in bars.

The New Year's Eve 'countdown' was sort of a non-event, we kind of realised it was 2006 after the fact. I began to think that New Year's was itself a non-event in France, until everyone started running around hugging one another and kissing each other on the cheek, the way that French people do when saying hello. I found myself being hugged and kissed on the cheek by complete strangers, which was a little bizarre at first to say the least, but it seems to be normal here so I just went along. I actually found the ritual quite repetitive and tiring after a few minutes, so I just sat down and continued my interesting, if very generic, conversation with the Guatemalan legal family.

We went out afterwards to some dance club - but I was too tired, and headed home. I fell asleep; was about 4am, and didn't wake up until 6pm that evening on the 1st January. Afterwards I woke up and had a pasta dinner with Rob, and we chatted about everything from music to the legalisation of drugs. Apparently pot smoking is quite common and is tolerated here, but if you're reading this mum, don't worry i have no desire to rot my brain or make myself schizophrenic.