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Hi everyone!

I am sad that this blog is coming to an end, but I am happy to have shared my adventure with you all. This post will be about the last night that I spent in France and traveling home.

We took the train back to Marseilles for our last night before we had to leave very early the next morning. After getting off the train, we walked with our luggage for 30 minutes trying to find our air bnb. We finally found it but had to drag our luggage up 10 flights of very narrow stairs to get to the top apartment. By this time, we were all sweaty and tired from pulling our luggage through the city, but we decided to go out to find somewhere to eat. We took a restaurant recommendation from one of Emily’s friends, but it was much fancier than we had anticipated. Other patrons were dressed formally but we were in sweaty travel clothes, so I’m sure we stood out as Americans. We ordered a bunch of small plates to share, but the best one was the pumpkin linguine that was served in an actual pumpkin! The pasta was delicious too, here’s a recipe if you want to try to make it yourself. During dinner I began to feel stomach pains, and was worried that I was catching the stomach bug that Emily had the week before we visited. Maybe it was all the bread that we had been eating all week that was clogging my system, either way it did not feel good. That didn’t stop me from eating the delicious gelato we had for dessert though. It was the best gelato I had ever had, but I am hoping to find something similar near me. Here is a list of the best gelato shops in PA.

We returned to the apartment and tried to get to bed early because we had to wake up at 3 AM the next morning to go to the airport. Before bed, we saw the most beautiful sunset above the city and the sea. We didn’t have much time in Marseilles, so we didn’t get to do much in the city. If you ever are in Marseilles, here are some fun things to do, maybe if I ever go back I could see the city more. Anyway, stomach was hurting a lot worse by bedtime, and I got maybe 2 good hours of sleep because of it.

We woke up the next morning and went to the airport, and this is when we had to say goodbye to Emily. After that we were on our own when it came to communicating with the locals, but we didn’t have any trouble in the airport.

This day is up there for being the worst in my life, because my stomach was hurting so bad that I couldn’t stand up straight or walk very well.  Pairing that with being on a plane for 8 hours did not make a good combination. After flying from France to Philly, I had begun to have a fever during our layover to Ohio. By the time we got home, I had not slept in 24 hours (I was in too much pain to sleep on the plane) and was extremely happy to be back in my own bed with my cats. As for the pain, it subsided after I returned home and could clear the *ahem* blockage in my system from the French diet of bread for every meal.

That’s it for my adventure! Thank you all!

Hi everyone!

We were all very sore and tired the day after we went skiing so we decided to take it easy and do some shopping and sightseeing in a town near Gap called Briançon. We took an hour long train ride to get there and it was so beautiful! The whole ride was at the base of the mountains with beautiful lakes and pastures with farm animals. It looked like something straight out of a movie. Unfortunately I couldn’t get any good pictures from the train because of the window glare, but don’t worry I got some good ones in the town. If you ever find yourself in Europe and want to take some train rides with beautiful sights, check out this list of the best ones.

Once we got to town we walked around a bit and decided to check out some old war forts that were up on the mountain. It was about a 30 minute walk up a very steep road, which didn’t feel very good especially since I was so sore from skiing. But after we got up there, I realized it was worth it. I wish I could have learned some history about the forts and what war they were used in but it was mostly turned into a touristy area with shopping, so there wasn’t much focus on the history side. Other than that, I really enjoyed checking them out. The view was beautiful! You could see the whole town underneath and the mountains all around. 

After we got back I did some research on the forts themselves to learn more about the history. If you are a history enthusiast you can read about them here.

Up in the fort was a tiny old town that was full of shops and restaurants. It was clear that the town was very old, it had cobblestone roads with a drainage indent in the middle. The architecture appeared very old as well, with some very fancy wooden doors. We did some shopping around, my favorite shop was a classic French soap shop, where I found this really cool natural deodorant (my only souvenir from France, weird I know). I won’t go into too many personal details about my experience with deodorant, but let me tell you this one works. You can get a similar one here.

When we were tired of shopping, we had lunch in an old looking restaurant. There were some swords and pieces armor on the walls, and the owners said that some were real and some were fake. The biggest sign of its age was discovered when my mom and I went to the restroom. There was a very real skeleton being used as decoration near the bathrooms! That’s crazy! Who knows how old it was. At first I didn’t think it was real, but my mom told me to look at the teeth, which are a good indicator to see if a skeleton is real. That is pretty weird decoration for the bathroom if you ask me.

After a long day of shopping and exploring, we went back home and started getting ready to travel to Marseilles the the next day for our last day in France.

See you all next week!

Hi everyone! This weeks blog is about what was probably my favorite experience on my trip to France: skiing!

If one thing is for sure, I took the best pictures on this day. The mountains in the Alps are so incredible, it felt like I was on top of the world!

The ski resort was about a 45 minute drive from gap, a lot of which was making zig zags to get up the mountain. I was a bit scared during that, because there was not a lot of restraint to keep cars from falling off the side of the mountain, especially during the winter when the roads can be icy. My step dad was driving, and while he is certainly the best driver of the four of us, it was still frightening. But, I kept my mind off of it by taking pictures all the way up the mountain.

When we got to the ski resort at the top, I was amazed. The resort looked like a small city up in the mountain. This resort was obviously meant for people who traveled to the alps to ski for days, but my family are amateur skiers to say the least, so we just stayed for the afternoon. If you are a more avid skier than I and want to travel, check out the top ten ski resorts in Europe. 

We rented our skis and our helmets (in France everyone wears helmets, unlike in America), then made our way to the bunny hill to get warmed up. They have really cool lifts that I had never seen before, and didn’t know how to use before I saw my sister wipe out on it and learned from her mistake. It is a little plastic disc like a frisbee, which is attached to a metal poll. You put the poll between your legs and let the plastic disc pull your butt, basically. But what you don’t do, as Emily quickly learned, is sit on the disc because it is not designed to hold your entire weight, just give you a boost to get you up the hill.

Once we made it to the top of the 50ish foot long bunny hill, I had to summon all my previous skiing skill from the last time I skied 8 or so years ago. I successfully made it down, but ran into the same issues I had when I was a kid. I couldn’t figure out how to slow down! It seemed everyone else could gracefully swerve side to side down the hill and keep a slow pace, but whenever I tried I just gained and gained speed! I was an unskilled missile flying past the 3 year old French kids who could ski like professionals. If you are a bad skier like I am, or have never done it at all and want to try it, check out these tips for beginner skiers. 

I never fell on the bunny hill, but my family decided that we were all warmed up and ready to take on an intermediate hill. We went up a real ski lift, which had an amazing view of the mountain, and disembarked at the end to figure out which hill was the easiest. We found a hill that didn’t look too bad, and went down. Soon after, there was a fork, my sister and step dad went down one side, and my mom and I went down the other. We didn’t mean to get separated, but we couldn’t exactly stop or yell loud enough for the others to hear. My mom and I didn’t know where they were, but we kept going and decided to try to find them at the bottom. We found them sooner than expected, at the top of a patch of moguls. There was no way down except through them, and I knew I was a goner. I don’t understand why anyone would purposefully add bumps to a ski slope for fun! I tried to watch the little ski school kids go through them to get a sense of the strategy. They all zoomed through them with ease, and none of them were older than 5 I guessed. As soon as I took on the moguls, I fell immediately and couldn’t get back up! My mom, who wasn’t doing too well herself, and step dad came to try to help me up. It is very difficult to pull someone up while 1. You are on skis yourself, and 2. trying to stand on a slippery hill. Eventually I got up and we all made it to the bottom in one piece.

After that experience, I decided to stay on the bunny hills for the rest of the afternoon. I am actually really glad I went on that hill because it is where I got my best picture! When we got home, I was quite sore and cold. We made amazing homemade hot chocolate that evening (this recipe is similar), and all went to bed very early. I was really sore for the next few days, but it was worth it. 

See you all next week!

Hello again! This post is will resume describing my adventure in France (last week’s post was talking a bit about Emily’s life in France, but now we are back to our regularly scheduled program).

The following day after visiting Emily’s host family, we did some more exploring around Gap to see its landscapes. We did a lot of walking around town and ended up in the grocery store parking lot, which has the best view of the mountains. Seriously, it’s crazy to me that people have views like this just while doing their daily errands. I have always wanted to live in a beautiful town like this, and if you are the same you can check out this list of the most beautiful towns in America. The mountains surrounding the town are so beautiful, especially because the skies were so blue as well. I am used to gray, overcast skies every day during the winter in Ohio but even though it was December there in Gap, the sky was a brilliant blue. I couldn’t get over the sight of the mountains the whole time I was there.

While we were walking around, we gathered different foods from the markets around town to make our dinner. When we were in France we mostly had what my family likes to call a “snacky” dinner, which is basically just a bunch of snacks put together to make a meal. Now, we weren’t too concerned with the aesthetics of our meal because we were so hungry after walking around town all day, but if you want some tips on how to make a beautifully assembled “snacky” dinner, check out this charcuterie and cheese board guide. We got fresh bread studded with whole grains at the bakery, fresh cheeses at a dairy store, fruits and dried meats at the outdoor markets, and (my favorite) delicious apricot preserves from a seasonal Christmas market. We ate this same meal for a few dinners, but it was so good that we never got sick of it. After dinner, Emily showed us how to make vin chaud (hot wine), which is a stable in France during the winter. She added a bottle of red wine, a generous amount of sugar, cloves, cinnamon, orange zest, and a bit or orange juice to a pot and simmered it for a while to get the flavors to meld. I tried a sip and still found it as unpalatable as normal wine, despite the added sugar and flavors. I am just not a fan of the taste of alcohol, but my parents enjoyed it a lot. If you want to try to make your own vin chaud (once you turn 21 of course), here is a recipe.

I’ll see you all next week!

Hi everyone!

So this week’s blog is going to be a bit of a break from my adventure in France and talk a little bit about life in France, specifically my sister’s life and how she ended up teaching English to French elementary schoolers.

Emily took French for 5 years before college, and double majored in French and Anthropology in college. She also studied abroad in France for a semester, so she is pretty good at French (I tried to follow in her footsteps but gave up after 5 years in high school). If you are thinking of picking up French or curious to test your skills, check out this

basic French quiz. After she graduated college, she received an offer to teach in France and decided to take a gap year (in Gap, haha get it?) before going to grad school.

The French lifestyle is very different from ours here in the United States. They are very laid back and easy going, especially when it comes to work. Emily works 12 hours a week teaching (there is no school on Wednesdays), and in France there is a two week break every 6 weeks of school. She shows up to her classes for their 30 minute English lesson, but many times the kids are still out at recess. The kids basically stay out at recess however long they want, and the teachers just wait for them to come back in to keep teaching. This means that Emily has sometimes waited the whole 30 minutes of her lesson and the kids just stayed at recess. Sounds like a pretty easy job to me. However, the French school system gets very rigorous in high school, which I suppose makes up for the leisure in the early years. Students have to take a very difficult exam at the end of their senior year to graduate, and those who don’t pass have to do a 5^th year of high school to study for the final exam. If you want to check out more about the French school system, here’s a link. I was most surprised that they get an hour and a half lunch break!

When Emily is not teaching, which is most of the time, she likes to hike in the Alps and spend time reading with Toupie by the fire. She has made some friends with the other English teachers in her same program, and she visits them in other towns. She also spends a lot of time sleeping and playing Sims, which honestly sounds like a pretty good life to me and I’m pretty jealous. She just snapchatted me last night saying that she slept for 17 hours straight! It’s hard to imagine a life that relaxing while being here at college. She gets her groceries at the cute markets in the city that my family and I visited while we were there. Though, some of her favorite foods pretty much don’t exist in Gap, like peanut butter and taco seasoning. She had us bring some when we came to give her a taste of home. If you are curious if you will be able to find your favorite foods while abroad, check out this list of American foods that don’t exist in Europe.

I hope you guys liked learning about the French culture and we will be back to our normal adventure next week!

Hi everyone!

While my sister, Emily, teaches English to elementary school kids in France, she lives with a host family in Gap. We visited them for dinner while their whole family was home for the holidays. The parents spoke quite a bit of English, enough that we were able to have conversations, but the children mainly spoke French.

As soon as I walked into the living room I saw what I was most excited about in visiting Emily’s host house. The queen herself, Toupie (meaning toy top that you spin). Toupie is a cat that is the subject of about 90% of the snapchats that my sister sends me from France. Being a cat lover myself, I was quite excited to see her in real life. We brought her a Christmas present, a small stocking filled with catnip, as an offering to her majesty. She sniffed it a few times, but was unamused. Nonetheless she allowed me to pet her and even laid on my lap while I was sitting on her favorite chair by the fire. If you love cats as much as I do, or are thinking about getting your own cat, you can check out this guide to cat breeds (I think Toupie is a calico).

We had a dinner of cheese fondue, bread, and dried meats (typical, I know). The fondue was really good and I will take any excuse to eat a full meal comprising of cheese and bread. If you want to make your own fondue, check out this recipe.

Our conversations mainly consisted of comparing our two very different cultures and what stereotypes were or were not true. This led to lots of joking about Americans being fat and dumb and the French being snobs. It turned out that our families were very similar and got along great, despite our different cultures. However, this may have been the result of the numerous French did not help me to understand the profanities they were probably yelling at me while I defended my position in first place. Even with the language barrier and my superior Mario Kart skills, we all still had a great time.

I saw Emily’s room, which was also upstairs. She has pictures from America and her new life in France all on her walls, and plants decorating the room. Her room definitely felt like home, and was very similar to her room back in the states. I think having the little things to remind you of home really help when moving to another place (whether that be a new country or just college). If you want any tips for making your dorm room feel more like home, check out this article. The view from her window shows the town and the Alps in the background, which is so beautiful. I am used to just dirty cityscapes and farm fields, so this view was spectacular to me.

See you all next week!

Hello again!

Now on to day 3 of our adventure. Since we were mostly rested from all of our travel after sleeping until noon the next morning, we decided to go out and explore the town of Gap. The town was decorated for the holidays with lights everywhere. In the middle, there was a huge Christmas tree. I asked my sister where they got such a huge tree and she said there are tons of trees like that all over the mountains. I guess that’s a perk of being in the Alps. I’m from Ohio, so I’m used to completely flat land and was astonished at the mountains when I came to Penn State. But let me tell you, Mount Nittany looks like an ant hill compared to the mountains surrounding Gap. You’ll have to wait to see them until my later post about skiing in the Alps, though. If you’re interested in learning more about the Alps (who knew they are the youngest mountain range in Europe at 65 million years  old?) here are some more interesting facts. 

We explored all of the tiny shops in town (and there are a lot of them). Like one would expect, there are a ton of small street-side cafés, bakeries with beautiful pastries in the windows, and boutiques displaying the latest Parisian fashion. While I didn’t see anything quite this avant garde in Gap, here’s some Paris fashion trends for spring 2019. We walked around for hours and kept finding new things to see. One of the highlights of the trip for me was a cat that I found sitting on a bench. I have three cats at home and was missing them terribly, so it was nice to sit and pet him for a while. I didn’t think he was a stray since he was so friendly and appeared well fed. I sat on the bench with him while my family was shopping in a nearby boutique. Saying goodbye to him was difficult and made me miss my own cats even more but I liked having his company.

While walking around, we found a cute stone bridge across a little creek running through town. It looked old and weathered, but I wasn’t sure how long it had been there. It was really fascinating to see landmarks that had been in the town for generations next to brand new things. In my hometown, which is a suburb, there really aren’t a lot of really old landmarks. The closest thing we have to a historical landmark is a field of giant concrete corn statues (??), I’m not joking. You can read about it here. Everything is pretty modern and urbanized, which is different from a lot of the places in Europe. European cities have so much more history to them and it was cool to see that for myself.

Thanks for tuning in this week!