When in France expect cheese...

While being driven along the coast of France this afternoon - the Mediterranean to the right of me french vineyards to the left - I couldn’t help but repeat to myself “remember this moment.”

The truth is my entire trip has been one amazing moment and my time studying here in Perpignan is no exception to that.

Since we have arrived I have been able to experience so many things and see a lot of France and the French culture that I probably wouldn’t have been able to if I had been on my own. I definitely owe a million ‘thank you’s’ to both the iei-media Program Director and the woman who runs Alfmed here in town.

I wish I had been journaling every day, every moment, but the first 8 days here were intensely busy so I will have to try to search back and evoke the feeling of the early days if the program.

Our first day we headed to the Alfmed school for an informal orientation, which involved a meet and greet game and some wine and cheese tasting. After that the entire group of students (about 17 of us) decided to go to dinner all together. We ate outside at a small restaurant in Perpignan’s city center that was nice enough to push about half a dozen tables together. We were definitely a sight to see (and hear I imagine). Our bill at the end of the night was about 216 Euros! (they don’t seem to do separate checks here)

The next day we met in the morning with our professors and the director of Alfmed who took us to the Castillet in the city center where we were able to climb to the top for a gorgeous view of Perpignan. On the way back down we had a small tour of the museum inside the Castillet, which focused on the history of Perpignan. From there we had a small tour of the narrow streets in the center of town, crowded with both small boutiques and big name stores as well as cafes and patisseries. We ended the tour at one the the larger Plazas in town where an open air morning market takes place everyday. Vendors sell fruit, honey, jam, cheese, fresh eggs, meat, spices, and bread to give you only a rough idea. We stopped for traditional french coffee at an outdoor cafe bordering the market, spending an hour people watching and talking about the activities planned for the week.

With the group now properly caffeinated our professors decided to send us out into the streets on a scavenger hunt. The seventeen of us were broken into our multimedia project groups and given five tasks to complete around town, requiring us to interact with locals, shopkeepers, a restaurant, and of course each other. My group worked well in hunting down garlic aioli (mayonnaise) to be used in preparing escargot for us later that night.

The scavenger hunt took almost 2 hours and at the end I was ready for a nap but felt my time would be better spent wandering the town. I came across what resembled a garage sale except that it was in one of the plazas with multiple people selling antique nick-knacks. One woman was selling the most amazing wooden owl figurines but they were all much too big to fit in my suitcase, otherwise I would have liked to picked one up for Trevor. While in the same plaza I saw a wedding party dancing while waiting on the arrival of the bride. The women were lovely, many of them decked out in colored head scarfs and gold bangles.

I walked back towards the Castillet where I happened upon a performance by Trobada de Falcons a troupe of castelleras, or human castle builders, which is an old Catalan tradition.

I cannot explain how exited I was to see this because I thought I knew I had missed the big performance of castellera done by Diada Castellera as part of Le Festa Major a few days before we arrived. I ended up writing my first assigned blog post for the program on the performance.

We ended the second night with a big welcome dinner at a lovely restaurant in town. As a before dinner treat we had cargolade - escargot in butter and garlic cooked over charcoal. I ate two and found them to taste overwhelmingly of butter.

To start our three course dinner I chose a simple green salad with tomatoes (after having been surprised when ordering a salad with goat cheese the night before to find it was a few green leaves and big thick slices of goat cheese fried in philo dough with honey drizzled on them). For the main plate I had a grilled white fish and for desert I had nougat ice cream. All of it was amazing!

Since I've been here it has become abundantly clear that the french are serious about their cheese and if a menu item says cheese it doesn't mean a bit of cheese or a hint of cheese or even accompanied with cheese... it means you are getting cheese. Often times cheese is the first ingredient listed, before pasta, bread, or meat - what you might have assumed would be the main part of the dish. While I can appreciate great cheese I can't consume it in such quantity. I'm a little cheesed out, ok to be honest I'm totally cheesed out.

Switching backpacks

Please excuse the embarrassingly large gap between this post and the last. A lot has been going on here with the Perpignan Project.

So to wrap up briefly, we were only able to spend a day in Barcelona but nonetheless we wanted to make the most of it.

After saying goodbye to our new friends we walked through Barcelona from the bus station, up and over Las Ramblas to Casanova where Hostal Centric was located. Our room was not ready when we arrived and crew men were working to restore electricity to the building as there had been a fire the night before. Sweaty and loaded down with our backpacks we decided to leave our stuff in a storage room and explore the city with the one small, incomplete map that we had.

Our first stop, as it was closest to us, was Las Ramblas. I have to say I wasn’t incredibly impressed with the street. Yes, there were some interesting street performers and human statues and a few artisan stalls, but in general there wasn’t much there that didn’t seem tourist and commercialized. Trevor said the area reminded him a lot of Telegraph in Berkeley.

From there we went into the Barri Gotic (Gothic Quarter) of Barcelona and walked around looking at the incredible architecture. We happened upon one of the many plazas in Barcelona, this one with the Christopher Columbus fountain statue. It’s quite tall and depicts Columbus pointing out towards the sea. The fountain water was cool and refreshing in the bright sun.

With the heat turning muggy we headed to Port Vell, Barcelona’s main harbor and from there we followed the crowds of people towards Barcelonetta, where the beaches are. Trevor put his hand into the Mediterranean but the beach was too crowded to stay for long.

We walked a different route across town to Hostal Centric, walking by gorgeous Gothic and Renaissance churches.

For dinner that night it was decided I must try a local food: tapas and paella. We picked a small restaurant with outdoor seating and ordered tapas, chicken paella, and a pizza for Trevor.

It’s been decided that I’m not much of a tapas fan and will definitely not be ordering paella any time soon.

As the evening wore on we headed off to one of Barcelona’s most famous sights, La Sagrada Familia, Gaudi’s famous unfinished church. It was a long walk almost all the way across town from where we had eaten but watching the sun set behind the tall towers of Sagrada Familia made it worth it.

Early the next morning we hoped on an aeroport bus and rode 30 minuets to the airport. As a side note I am so glad we decided not to try and walk to the airport, we never would have made it!

Trevor got his plane tickets and we sat together for a while before the Perpignan group arrived and we were forced to part ways, myself traveling back into France and Trevor home to California.

The bus from Barcelona to Perpignan was only 2 and a half hours and I caught a small but much needed nap.

I’ve been in Perpignan for about 8 days now and it is already becoming an adventure of its own. In the next post I will tell you about my cargolade tasting (mmm escargot!) and the great tours we’ve been on here.