WEEKEND AT SET WITH SIT
did you know that besides being an assez industriel and apparently beachless port city on the mediterranean ('une mer morte') quelques minutes par route from montpelier, set is also the jackal headed egyptian god of chaos, evil, wind, storms, darkness, war, and conflict? bi-zarre.
so the general consensus among the group seems to be that SIT dropped the ball on this last excursion. I don't really reccommend set - the town was kind of drab and depressing (though though thigs turned around saturday night, which I'll get to later) - there weren't really any sights to see and it smelled pretty bad - on any given street either strongly of fish, dog shit or deisel, which i think might have had something top do with the giant maybe chemical plant right at the edge of town ... our hostel was pretty nasty too - it was generic auberge de jeunesse and though I suppose it was clean it also smelled pretty bad, and the heat broke the week before we got there and the patron still hadn't managed to fix it ... also we ate there and the food was god awful, and though we were assured of having a vegetarian option when we made the reservation in french apparently that means fried fish with fish soup le premiere soirée, and fried squid and french fries the deuxieme. It was funny becuase the first night they had this bucket for you to put your fish scraps in for the rotweiler that was chained up outside the reception office (behind a chainlink gate with a discrete attention chien! sign) but on night two after we bitched about the fish not being veggie and they gave us squid, I went to dump it in the dog bucket and the luch lady (oh my god who was like forty and dressed like a twelve year old and was probably the most disagreable woman i've met) stopped me and was like "no, he doesn't eat that."
and of course, because the city is named after the god of wind and storms and darkness, it was windy and stormy and dark all weekend. However, tout le monde made more or less the best of it - friday night we went out to two bars (and spent way too much money - oh my god) the first bathed in red light and pumping generic techno (shameless scheme to draw the drunks, which worked amazingly well) full primarily of the french version of whitetrashy/preppy teenagers/twentysomethings (for some reason these lines start to blur when they go to certain types of bars) and just hung out and chatted witht the group and didn't really make any new freinds ... second bar was a little more acceptable - the crowd was a little less 'lets go clubbing' but also a bit older, and the drinks were a little less expensive but not much, and there was live music but it was for the most part covers of english rock standards by people like creedence clearwater revival and the beatles (which was sad becuase the bar was called 'the bodega' so i thought maybe it would be latin) and it was way too loud (well, loud for music i wasn't enthusiastic about that is).
one thing that was nice about this outing was despite the the poor choice of venues it was nice to have a little soirée with the gens in the group - we never really did bond too concretely and our group vibe is a little weird, everyone is used to functioning in twos and threes and we barely ever go out together (though two weekends ago I did manage to get erin, rachel, brittany, and chris all to come to the same bar at the same time, even though it was only for a little while, which blew me away, and the weekend after I went out with rachel and her chilean freind, which is a good story that i'll write about later and post below) so now that we're finally (finally, we're almost done with the program) getting to know eachother better, like by osmosis or diffusion or something (by which je veux dire, a cause de proximity we've just slowly started to figure eachother out, we weren't necessarily proactive about it) and are more at ease with eachother its nice to just hang out and get a little silly and have conversations. my favorite part (in keeping with freshman year post sordid frat party tradition) is the walk home, when everyone's tired and preferably giddy and it feels so good to be able to breathe and to hear after hours in a stuffy ass bar, and you're trying to be quiet but being to loud anyway, trying to carry on a conversation that started in the bar but forgetting where it was going and getting distracted because someone needs to go to the bathroom or someones going to be sick, and then someone discovers that its easier to walk up the hill if you do it backwards, so everyone does ... and then you turn a corner and over the crest of the hill you see something surreal or magical, like the orange lights over a sleeping blue city, or the ocean.
anyway, so that was all right, but a bit sordid, and saturday dawned grey and gross with burnt bread and coffee for breakfast, followed by like three hours of hiking along highways and up flights of ancient stone stairs ot see first a not so scenic scenic outlook, then a pretty cool fort-turned-eglise with christmas lights on the linteau and modernist frescos inside, then a cemetery overlooking the chemical plant which contained the tomb de paul valéry, and in between a lot of concrete and immeubles about which the guide somehow found a lot to say, though I couldn't hear any of it for the wind ... followeed by a tasty but somewhat tense lunch at a vietnamese restaurant with danée hilary and jeanne, mostly a cause de the fact that people were in kind of a foul mood after the hike and the weather - split up afterwards and I sat in the town square fore a while, watching the pidgeons and the pedestrainas interact, and listening to love supreme live in japan which I think is more than an hour long so I think I'd been sitting there for more than an hour when julia showed up and lead me to a vintage store, where I ended up buyng a cool orange minidress, a weird lingeré dress/shirt/slip that I'm not yet sure I can figure out how to wear, and a thick pink and black shawl for 7€ total, which is like ten dollars, which is decent. Julia bought a cute polkadot dress and I hung aroud while she had the shoulderpads taken out, playing with a domestic rat that was scurrying (can i use that word? thats a weird word) in and out of the boxes of ribbons and spare buttons on the sewing table the patron was working at. Case in point on my rant about french people being hipper and more relaxed about their kids - the patron was young and had a pair of giant cobras tattooed on her clavicles but had three little kids who she'd brought to woek with her that day - they played in a back 'room' partitioned off by a curtain while she worked and occasionally darted out shreiking or crying to get her to settle some dispute.
When I left the store it started to rain so I hiked back up to the auberge but was locked out of my room becuase danée had the key and hadn't yet returned, so I went and waited in the lounge area where two other travellers more or less my age, a boy and a girl, were waiting for the office to open, and struck up an empty conversation, with the boy at least, the girl wasn't very forthcoming, until my roomies finally showed up.
that night at dinner over our squid julia informed us that she'd discovered a bar nearby where a band of gypsies would be playing music till midnight, which sounded like the coolest thing in the world to me and to everyone else as well, apparently, so we all went (sauf the boys, who had decided to go out for dinner and weren't around to hear the message) and as it turns out it was one of the coolest things ever - the band was great - two violins (lead; really weirdlooking and difficult to describe - funny smile, medium length hair, weirdly proportioned, head didn't match his body, body didn't match his hands - second; sketchyass but nevertheless attractive longhaired youngish guy, who looked exactly what I'd expect a gypsy to look like and apperently tried to hit on danée by showing her pictures of his kid on his cell phone) two guitars (both shortish and roundish, one with blond buzzed hair, the other looking vaguely latino, with strangely feminine eyes) one drummer (dear god he was hot - generic brand, though - he didn't really look liek a gypsy, he wasn't sketch at all) who played what looked like a plastic djembe (hand rolled cigarrette dangling perpetually from his lips) and an accordianist, who for the life of me I can rememeber nothing about - i think maybe he was roundish and latino-looking as well. there were also some sketchy looking women kind of hanging out around them, including an older one who looked alarmingly like she'd been cut from a lautrec poster, who they all kept bumming cigarrettes off of, and occasionally inviting to dance, and who eventually left the bar inexplicably in tears when the party really started to get going.
Anyway, long story short, among myself, danée, jeanne, hilary, erin, and rachel there were two bottles of wine, a couple of beers, and by the end of the night a bit of dancing with the gypsies (who led us in a drunken chant of 'LA-MOUR!-LA-MOUR! which I thought was hilarious) - rachel got hit on by this goofy six foot plus spastic french guy who danced absolutely absurdly and made the funniest facial expressions, and who bought a round of drinks for the table ... and danée got hit on by everyone in the house. I didn't really get hit on but i did do a lot of dancing and the tattoo got complemented and the guitarist tried to talk me into coming to hang out with him in montpelier, and when we fianlly left (after coaxing rachel away from one the sketchylooking ladies, who was in the process of teaching her the irish 'santé') at like one AM all the sketch violinist followed us out to try and coax danée into staying ... writing that out i think this maybe sounds a bit more louche than it was, but really, no one was really much more than tipsy and everyone was smiling, it was all more or less like a game.
So taht was great. But now I'm back in toulouse and have the CSP to stress anew about. Plus I think I'm going to barcelona this weekend but can't find anyone to go with, and am still exhausted from last weekend and don't see that changing any time soon, what with the CSP. And I want to hang out with my half syrian freind and do some language exchange becuase ever since I got back from the village I feel like I can't speak french anymore, but actually maybe he said he's going to be in montpelier this week. so bleh.
so the general consensus among the group seems to be that SIT dropped the ball on this last excursion. I don't really reccommend set - the town was kind of drab and depressing (though though thigs turned around saturday night, which I'll get to later) - there weren't really any sights to see and it smelled pretty bad - on any given street either strongly of fish, dog shit or deisel, which i think might have had something top do with the giant maybe chemical plant right at the edge of town ... our hostel was pretty nasty too - it was generic auberge de jeunesse and though I suppose it was clean it also smelled pretty bad, and the heat broke the week before we got there and the patron still hadn't managed to fix it ... also we ate there and the food was god awful, and though we were assured of having a vegetarian option when we made the reservation in french apparently that means fried fish with fish soup le premiere soirée, and fried squid and french fries the deuxieme. It was funny becuase the first night they had this bucket for you to put your fish scraps in for the rotweiler that was chained up outside the reception office (behind a chainlink gate with a discrete attention chien! sign) but on night two after we bitched about the fish not being veggie and they gave us squid, I went to dump it in the dog bucket and the luch lady (oh my god who was like forty and dressed like a twelve year old and was probably the most disagreable woman i've met) stopped me and was like "no, he doesn't eat that."
and of course, because the city is named after the god of wind and storms and darkness, it was windy and stormy and dark all weekend. However, tout le monde made more or less the best of it - friday night we went out to two bars (and spent way too much money - oh my god) the first bathed in red light and pumping generic techno (shameless scheme to draw the drunks, which worked amazingly well) full primarily of the french version of whitetrashy/preppy teenagers/twentysomethings (for some reason these lines start to blur when they go to certain types of bars) and just hung out and chatted witht the group and didn't really make any new freinds ... second bar was a little more acceptable - the crowd was a little less 'lets go clubbing' but also a bit older, and the drinks were a little less expensive but not much, and there was live music but it was for the most part covers of english rock standards by people like creedence clearwater revival and the beatles (which was sad becuase the bar was called 'the bodega' so i thought maybe it would be latin) and it was way too loud (well, loud for music i wasn't enthusiastic about that is).
one thing that was nice about this outing was despite the the poor choice of venues it was nice to have a little soirée with the gens in the group - we never really did bond too concretely and our group vibe is a little weird, everyone is used to functioning in twos and threes and we barely ever go out together (though two weekends ago I did manage to get erin, rachel, brittany, and chris all to come to the same bar at the same time, even though it was only for a little while, which blew me away, and the weekend after I went out with rachel and her chilean freind, which is a good story that i'll write about later and post below) so now that we're finally (finally, we're almost done with the program) getting to know eachother better, like by osmosis or diffusion or something (by which je veux dire, a cause de proximity we've just slowly started to figure eachother out, we weren't necessarily proactive about it) and are more at ease with eachother its nice to just hang out and get a little silly and have conversations. my favorite part (in keeping with freshman year post sordid frat party tradition) is the walk home, when everyone's tired and preferably giddy and it feels so good to be able to breathe and to hear after hours in a stuffy ass bar, and you're trying to be quiet but being to loud anyway, trying to carry on a conversation that started in the bar but forgetting where it was going and getting distracted because someone needs to go to the bathroom or someones going to be sick, and then someone discovers that its easier to walk up the hill if you do it backwards, so everyone does ... and then you turn a corner and over the crest of the hill you see something surreal or magical, like the orange lights over a sleeping blue city, or the ocean.
anyway, so that was all right, but a bit sordid, and saturday dawned grey and gross with burnt bread and coffee for breakfast, followed by like three hours of hiking along highways and up flights of ancient stone stairs ot see first a not so scenic scenic outlook, then a pretty cool fort-turned-eglise with christmas lights on the linteau and modernist frescos inside, then a cemetery overlooking the chemical plant which contained the tomb de paul valéry, and in between a lot of concrete and immeubles about which the guide somehow found a lot to say, though I couldn't hear any of it for the wind ... followeed by a tasty but somewhat tense lunch at a vietnamese restaurant with danée hilary and jeanne, mostly a cause de the fact that people were in kind of a foul mood after the hike and the weather - split up afterwards and I sat in the town square fore a while, watching the pidgeons and the pedestrainas interact, and listening to love supreme live in japan which I think is more than an hour long so I think I'd been sitting there for more than an hour when julia showed up and lead me to a vintage store, where I ended up buyng a cool orange minidress, a weird lingeré dress/shirt/slip that I'm not yet sure I can figure out how to wear, and a thick pink and black shawl for 7€ total, which is like ten dollars, which is decent. Julia bought a cute polkadot dress and I hung aroud while she had the shoulderpads taken out, playing with a domestic rat that was scurrying (can i use that word? thats a weird word) in and out of the boxes of ribbons and spare buttons on the sewing table the patron was working at. Case in point on my rant about french people being hipper and more relaxed about their kids - the patron was young and had a pair of giant cobras tattooed on her clavicles but had three little kids who she'd brought to woek with her that day - they played in a back 'room' partitioned off by a curtain while she worked and occasionally darted out shreiking or crying to get her to settle some dispute.
When I left the store it started to rain so I hiked back up to the auberge but was locked out of my room becuase danée had the key and hadn't yet returned, so I went and waited in the lounge area where two other travellers more or less my age, a boy and a girl, were waiting for the office to open, and struck up an empty conversation, with the boy at least, the girl wasn't very forthcoming, until my roomies finally showed up.
that night at dinner over our squid julia informed us that she'd discovered a bar nearby where a band of gypsies would be playing music till midnight, which sounded like the coolest thing in the world to me and to everyone else as well, apparently, so we all went (sauf the boys, who had decided to go out for dinner and weren't around to hear the message) and as it turns out it was one of the coolest things ever - the band was great - two violins (lead; really weirdlooking and difficult to describe - funny smile, medium length hair, weirdly proportioned, head didn't match his body, body didn't match his hands - second; sketchyass but nevertheless attractive longhaired youngish guy, who looked exactly what I'd expect a gypsy to look like and apperently tried to hit on danée by showing her pictures of his kid on his cell phone) two guitars (both shortish and roundish, one with blond buzzed hair, the other looking vaguely latino, with strangely feminine eyes) one drummer (dear god he was hot - generic brand, though - he didn't really look liek a gypsy, he wasn't sketch at all) who played what looked like a plastic djembe (hand rolled cigarrette dangling perpetually from his lips) and an accordianist, who for the life of me I can rememeber nothing about - i think maybe he was roundish and latino-looking as well. there were also some sketchy looking women kind of hanging out around them, including an older one who looked alarmingly like she'd been cut from a lautrec poster, who they all kept bumming cigarrettes off of, and occasionally inviting to dance, and who eventually left the bar inexplicably in tears when the party really started to get going.
Anyway, long story short, among myself, danée, jeanne, hilary, erin, and rachel there were two bottles of wine, a couple of beers, and by the end of the night a bit of dancing with the gypsies (who led us in a drunken chant of 'LA-MOUR!-LA-MOUR! which I thought was hilarious) - rachel got hit on by this goofy six foot plus spastic french guy who danced absolutely absurdly and made the funniest facial expressions, and who bought a round of drinks for the table ... and danée got hit on by everyone in the house. I didn't really get hit on but i did do a lot of dancing and the tattoo got complemented and the guitarist tried to talk me into coming to hang out with him in montpelier, and when we fianlly left (after coaxing rachel away from one the sketchylooking ladies, who was in the process of teaching her the irish 'santé') at like one AM all the sketch violinist followed us out to try and coax danée into staying ... writing that out i think this maybe sounds a bit more louche than it was, but really, no one was really much more than tipsy and everyone was smiling, it was all more or less like a game.
So taht was great. But now I'm back in toulouse and have the CSP to stress anew about. Plus I think I'm going to barcelona this weekend but can't find anyone to go with, and am still exhausted from last weekend and don't see that changing any time soon, what with the CSP. And I want to hang out with my half syrian freind and do some language exchange becuase ever since I got back from the village I feel like I can't speak french anymore, but actually maybe he said he's going to be in montpelier this week. so bleh.