Winter Break

Hello, everyone.

Sorry…I’ve been too busy lately to update this. Kidding. That’s a bold faced lie. I haven’t been up to much, and it’s been wonderful.

My last exam was the 14^th of December. The long weekend after that was full of celebration and end of the semester festivities. My university has a lot of foreign students who only stay for one semester, so some goodbyes were said. It was sad, but we’ll run into each other again someday. There were about 100 of us in the initial crop who started in September, and I’m not sure how many are staying for the whole year, but a lot of my friends are sticking around and I’m sure lots of new people will come for the spring. I’ll survive.

I’ve made two trips to Marseille since exams ended. The 1^st was for a Segway tour with a friend, as a “gift to self” for surviving our first semester in France mostly because we love Arrested Development. If you don’t understand why we would do that, please sit down and watch all 52 episodes and then we can talk. Then a few days later another friend and I went back just to wander around the city shopping aimlessly for a few hours. I really miss true city life, and I forgot how close and accessible Marseille was. So I think I’ll definitely be going back more often in the future.

Then Christmas came around. As you know, I was pretty successful with spending Thanksgiving away from home and family, and it worked out again for the most part for Christmas. For dinner on Christmas Eve, some of the Americans from my program and I all had a potluck dinner at another girl’s house. Most of the kids in our program are either traveling around Europe, went home to the US, or have their families visiting them over winter break. But that left about 8 of us “all alone” in France for Christmas. It was really nice to spend an evening with the other misfits.

After that, I came home and Skyped into Wilson Family Christmas festivities at my Aunt Margie’s beautifully remodeled house. It was nice to “see” everyone from that side of my family. The Wilsons are a loud people, but once I had some external speakers hooked up to the laptop stateside, I was able to hold my own in the room. My father sent me a large box full of goodies for Christmas (thanks again, Dad!) and among other things, was a wrapped present that had “Do not open until on camera at Wilson Family Christmas. No commercial value. No useful value”. I instantly knew that it had to be full of tube socks stuffed with smaller items, also known as the classic Wilson Family party game “What’s in the Sock?” I was not let down, and my family got to watch me play What’s in the Sock. If you are curious about this game, as you should be, please ask me in another venue because I will not explain it here. But it’s hilarious. Then I digitally traveled from Greendale up to Whitefish Bay to visit with my mother’s side of the family for a bit, which was nice.

Since I haven’t usually been waking up in the AM lately, I missed Christmas morning. No big deal. Early in the afternoon, my friend Grace, along with her visiting sister and parents, came over for Christmas dinner. I realized how funny it was that not only them, but my friends here in general congregate at my house for meals because of my “good kitchen”. I don’t have a good kitchen by US standards, but as far as Aix student worthy apartments go, it’s AWESOME. So we cooked up and dined on some delicious duck and other things, washed it down with real champagne, and finished the meal off with a buche de noel (traditional French Christmas cake—think large, fancy ho ho). It was French, it was tasty, and it was fun.

Then I spent probably about 6 or so hours skyping into Christmas at my house. I had three gifts from my mother that I still hadn’t unwrapped, so I was added into the gift opening rotation just as if I had been there. They opened up the box that I sent home, which got beat to shit en route, and everyone loved what I included (except Ryan…because shipping abuse meant that his hollow chocolate Santa stood no chance, and arrived in powder form). The rest of the time I kinda just spent hanging out “at the counter” until I got too tired to stay up any later. They were cooking chicken wings and brats for Christmas dinner to eat while they were watching the Packer game, which I was jealous of. It’s no secret that I don’t care for watching sports, even if it is my home state’s nearly undefeated, reigning Super Bowl champion, American football team. But the idea of such a Wisconsin Christmas sounded wonderful.

So now I’m going back to doing nothing. But I’m not REALLY doing nothing. I gave my apartment a thorough cleaning, and I think it might look better now than it did the day I moved in, so…go, me. I’m doing a bit of reading on my lovely new Kindle Touch (thanks, mom and brad!). I’m doing a bit of research for my birthday trip to Milan. By the way, I’m going to Milan for my birthday with two girls from my program for a few days. I have plane tickets purchased and a hotel room booked, but I need to figure out exactly what I want to do when I get there. I’m very excited to use some Italian. I took four semesters worth at UWM for fun’sies, but it has kind of been buried in recent months by you know…living in France. Perhaps tonight I’ll watch La Vitta è Bella without any subtitles. Buongiorno, Prinicpessa! I’d like to take a day trip to the Alps over break, as well. They’re not that far away and there are plenty of cheap buses and trains that head in that direction. I just need to pick out a town or two to wander around for the day. And I’ll be baking some cookies, because three people know me well enough to know how much I would appreciate receiving American chocolate chips while in France. (Thanks Dad, Andrea, and Al!). Andrea gets bonus points because she also sent American brown sugar.

So yes, that’s my life right now.

I hope everyone enjoyed their Christmas and were fortunate enough to be surrounded by family and/or friends.

Bisous.

Travis came to sit at the counter as soon as they brought the chicken wings inside from the grill, and, unprompted, proceeded to stare directly at the computer for longer than I was comfortable. I could hear him purring through the webcam, and it looked like he was staring directly into my soul.
Christmas portrait. I think these photos are hilarious.

My body is easily convinced.

Shit. Does that title come off wrong?

This post is about sleep deprivation. I currently sitting in bed at 3:19am on a Tuesday morning and I'm running on three hours of sleep from yesterday. I'm blaming Thanksgiving weekend. For that stretch of four days, three of them I had spent awake until the wee hours of the morning for either American Skype dates or just for funsies.

And apparently that was enough. That was enough to convince my body to just forget everything it had ever been trained to do in the past and to just stay awake into all hours of the morning.

For a period of my life, I was going to bed at 8pm and waking up to go to work at 3am.
When I wasn't working that schedule...like clockwork I would start excessively yawning at 10:30pm on the dot and eventually go to bed at or before midnight.
I even once went through a period of a few months where I literally needed as much sleep as a four year old human.
And now here I am....laying awake at 3:31am on three hours of sleep.

Who am I, and what have I done with the old Carly?

This hasn't really caused me many problems so far. And you know why? Because I'm a champion. I got three hours of sleep last night, crawled out of bed, cleaned myself up, put on a blazer and some heels and went and passed two exams. By the way, passing exams here is really all I'm going for. It's enough of an accomplishment for me at this point.


In other related news, I have four exams left to take over the next week and a half. They're all oral finals and these are my only grades for the entire semester. That means I show up at a certain time, pick a topic/question at random from a pile, and am given 10 minutes to draft a structured oral response. Then I give my little schpeel to the professor, and then it's out of my control. Thank goodness for being an alumni of Greendale High School's forensics and debate teams.

And in more exciting news I have a Skype date with my circle of friends from school on Sunday morning. I was so happy to be invited to an event at Ben's apartment called "Say bonjour to Carly!" that I cried a little bit. Not gonna lie. I miss those people a lot and I can't wait to see them again, even if it's just through a computer screen.

So that's essentially all I have to say at the moment. Hopefully I'll fall asleep soon. This could make a great case to get a cat, actually. At home I fall asleep faster if my cat Princess is sleeping on the pillow next to me (can you believe a cat named Princess has her own pillow on a queen sized bed?) because she purrs all the time. So the cat could purr me to sleep....and defend my apartment from mice. I see no downside to this.

xoxo