Petit Intro to Dax (D'Aqcs)

The train ride down from Paris to Dax went by much faster than anticipated.

I chatted with the man next to me almost the whole way down to Bordeaux, which is where he was getting off for a business trip. We talked about various things, but of course the topic of politics came up and he asked who I was voting for (which reminds me I need to get my absentee ballot). He was nice, but it got a bit weird when he gave me his email address and phone number since he was at least twice my age (and married). I think he may have just been excited to meet an American, since he was excitedly talking about having a native to show him around DC if he goes there on business. I am not sorry to say I misplaced his info.

After he got off at Bordeaux, a guy my age sitting near me who I had chatted with in the lunch car (and by the way, food on SNCF trains are absolute rubbish), sat down across from me and we talked the rest of the way to Dax. Politics came up again. I felt like an ignorant American in speaking with both the Bordeaux businessman and my new seatmate since it was pretty obvious they knew much more about American politics than I did about French politics. I couldn’t even remember at first the name of their new president (it’s Hollande) but I really have no idea what his political platform is. But, I hope to change that (& just knowing more about French culture in general) during my time here. They both boosted my confidence though since they told me I speak pretty good French.

Dax and the river Adour

Stepping off the train in Dax from Paris was like entering another world. I left behind the cold, grey unwelcoming and impersonal city of Paris to a sunny, small, quintessential friendly southern French town. Not that I don't love Paris to visit, but I would never want to live there. People are just flat out more friendly in the south. Even the kid I spoke with on the train (who is from Paris) agreed that Parisians are not a very welcoming group of people. In Paris if you don't speak perfectly fluent French or "Parisian" French or you have an accent, people become exasperated with you and make fun of your French. I've experienced this even with people in the tourism industry who you would think would be sucking up to you.

In Dax, I noticed a considerable difference in people's attitudes towards those who were clearly tourists even in the first half hour I was there- from people on the train platform to the cab driver to the woman who welcomed me at my hotel. Although tourists in this part of France are typically quite different from tourists in Paris. A cool thing about Paris is it's diversity and the number of tourists from all over the world who come to visit the City of Lights (and Love?). In Dax, if you are a tourist you are more likely to be French. An upside to this is that people don't automatically speak to you in English. The first few days I was here I was quite nervous about how bad my French was going to be after not having spoken it all summer, but I just had to keep reminding myself that my French is most likely a lot better than their English.

I spent the first  two nights in Dax at a hotel right next to the river, the Adour. The Adour actually splits Dax in two. Just north of Dax is a town called St. Paul les Dax, and they are both quite small. Together, I think the population makes about 30,000.

Before getting here, I had debated about potentially living in nearby Bayonne (about a 45 minute commute) since I wasn’t sure if I was going to like how small Dax was. A couple different French people told me that Bayonne isn’t much bigger though – maybe 40,000 -- so only 10,000 more people and there isn’t much more to do there. After being here for almost a month now I am liking Dax quite a bit.

Dax, or D'Aqcs (how it is spelled in the regional dialect of Gascon) is in the region of Aquitaine. There are 27 regions in France, each of which are broken up into smaller départements. Aquitaine consists of 5 départements: Gironde (where Bordeaux is located), Dordogne (where the prehistoric Caves Lascaux were found), Lot et Garonne (lots o farms there I think), Pryénnées Atlantiques (where Biarritz is located) and Landes (where Dax is!) The image is a bit pixelated, but you can kind of see where it indicates Bordeaux in the north, Dax in the south west ish and Bayonne/Hendaye below Dax:

Dax is cute and small. It’s also a premier spa town in Europe. There are thermal baths on just about every street. I have yet to go to one (surprising for me). Although, most of them seem like they are tailored towards people with medical problems such as fibromyalgia (I’ve seen that in a lot of the descriptions). There is a culture of “curistes,” people who will travel to Dax to go to the baths everyday for three or four weeks to help with their medical issues. There are also med students here who study only thermal treatments.

One of the more famous spas, Les Bains St. Pierre
(I actually don't think you're allowed here unless you do have a medical issue)

This was not my hotel, I just like the pic

Anyway, I spent my first two days here in a hotel by the river and then moved into the residence on Friday. I was the first assistant to arrive by a good five days, so I spent a lot of time by myself when I first got here. It got lonely at times but I kept myself occupied by walking around and trying to get to know the town or skyping with my parents. Settling in seemed to take a bit since getting internet/bank/phone stuff set up was a bit complicated. I couldn't get internet in my room until I had a French phone number to send the access code to, but I couldn't get a French phone number until I had my bank card from the bank (I later found out this wasn't true) but I had to wait for my bank account to get approved first. By the way it's been 3 (almost 4) weeks since I first opened my bank account and I have yet to be approved by snooty BNP (it's the "rich people" bank according to some people but I chose it because they're a partner bank with Bank of America. That was a mistake), but I have internet and my phone.

The gardien at the residence, Monsieur Martin found me a bike the next week which made life so much easier. From the residence it takes about 30 minutes to walk into centreville, which is fine for a nice stroll from time-to-time but when you're going in multiple times a week it's much easier to go on bike, which only takes about 10 minutes.

La Fontaine Chaude built in the 1800s under Louis XVIII
A symbole of thermalisme in Dax

The main part of centreville consists of typical narrow French streets that twist and bend their way down to the Fontaine Chaude (above). There are a lot of cool shops and restaurants tucked and hidden away that I've started to discover since being here. At first glance, the whole center area seemed very touristy, but I found that the touristy restaurants are really only the ones facing the river.

One of my favorite places here is one that I actually stumbled upon my first day: a coffeeshop called French Coffee Shop. Feeling a bit overwhemled my first day from walking around and not knowing where I was, I decided to stop in the coffee shop to get a bite to eat and just study the map. I went in and started chatting with the shop owners and turns out they knew the assistants from last year! They at first had assumed me a tourist, as do most people in this town. The shop itself is warmly decorated in natural, earthy tones with tons of comfortable furniture, free wifi and even a computer to use the internet on. Their drinks are on a whole other level. It's like Starbucks on crack. They have all the normal lattes, capuccinos, etc drinks that you would imagine but also have smoothies and these crazy milkshake combinations that are obviously my favorite.They make the specialty drinks both hot and cold, with Oreo, KinderBueno, choc chip cookies, etc... basically a chocolate fiend's haven (aka me). My favorite so far is the FrioTella, a cold chocolate milkshake made with Nutella. I can't think of anything more delicious.

One of their Oreo creations. Nom.


That's all for now! Ciao!

Ze City of Lights

It was a weird feeling landing in France. Iceland felt more like a vacation than a pre-moving journey, and I was kind of sad to not be landing back and home and see my parents and friends. It was hard to stay sad though since we were all pretty excited about being in France: the land of wine, crêpes and kebabs (yes, kebabs)!

Getting from the airport to our hostel was quite a journey. After collecting our bags, Olivia and I said adieu to Nick who was headed straight to Chambéry. We headed off towards the currency exchange. Guess what? They didn’t take Iceland Krona, but they did take the Thai Baht… (???!). The guy told me I could probably find somewhere in the center of Paris to exchange my krona (although I forgot, of course).

Ahh La Tour Eiffel

Afterwards, we boarded the shuttle to a different terminal to catch the RER train. For those who have not flown to Paris before, the airports are all located a bit outside the city and Charles De Gaulle is about 45 minutes outside Paris. When we got to the terminal to catch the RER, we realized all the machines only took coins or cards, so we waited about 20 minutes in line at the ticket counter to pay with cash :/  Once on the RER, we got off at Gare du Nord to catch the metro. After lugging our suitcases to and fro across the train station in search of a machine to buy metro tickets, we finally asked a worker who told us we didn’t need one since we came on the RER (cool). However, there were no elevators or escalators, so we had to drag our suitcases down about 3 flights of stairs.

Luckily, though and much to our surprise, various passerby helped us carry our suitcases up/down the stairs at the metro stations since they clearly felt bad for us. I don’t remember experiencing such hospitality in the past. At our destination station, a fellow traveler asked if we were by chance heading to the St. Christopher’s hostel, which we were! He was Australian (the second one we met that day- we met one in line at the RER station) and also participating in the TAPIF program in Marseille. We dragged our suitcases up the metro stairs one last time (with more help, thankfully) and headed off down the street to the hostel. We were getting some weird looks from some of the other hostel-goers due to the excessive amount of bags we had. We ended up seeing the other Australian from the RER there and he commented on this, so I felt compelled to explain we were moving for 8 months and we NEEDED ALL 10 PAIRS OF SHOES (just kidding, I didn't bring that many...maybe).

I had heard really great things about the St. Christopher’s chain – they have hostels in Amsterdam, London etc and are rated highly on hostelworld. This one at least definitely tried to get all the money out of you they could, which is annoying because people staying in hostels are usually broke college-aged kids. They wanted something like 20 euro to store your luggage for 24 hours which is absolutely ridiculous we just left our bags near our bed and put the important stuff in the lockers provided underneath the beds. There was also wifi, but it was super crappy, so they also tried to charge you to use the internet on their computers in the lobby. It was fine though for two nights and we were just happy to not be dragging our suitcases around the city.

Although the hostel was in an arrondissement (city district) further towards the edge of town, it was close to a couple different metro stops, which was convenient. Olivia and I were just starving since we hadn’t eaten since the croissants on the plane and found the closest café to get a late lunch/early dinner. We got a funny look from the waiter when we ordered our food since it was only about 530 pm and unlike in Iceland, the French (and the rest of Europe) eat later and don’t close their restaurants by 9 pm! I ordered the carbonara, which I did pretty much every single time it was on the menu when I studied abroad last time. This was just alright though. Certainly doesn’t beat the carbonara I had in Montpellier.

We suddenly realized how tired we were since we barely got any sleep the night before and went back to the hostel to take a nap. We had set our alarms for 930 p.m. so we could get to the Eiffel Tower before the elevators closed at 11 pm. Well, we didn’t end up getting out of bed til 1015 or so, but still headed off to the Eiffel Tower to see it even if we couldn’t go up. You don’t immediately see it once getting off the metro at the Trocadero, so I felt the suspense turning the corner waiting for it to come into sight. It’s so magical to see at night. I was super excited to see it again, so I couldn’t imagine how Olivia felt seeing it for the first time. Even though it was past 11, there were still a lot of people (and annoying people trying to sell you souvenirs and those stupid glowy balls that they fling into the air). We got a bit lost on the way back – I knew the Champs Elysées wasn’t far and we were hoping to see it lit up at night, but we forgot to cross the river and just ended up taking the metro at Place de la Concorde. When we went to switch trains, we found the connecting one had already shut down since it was past 1 am, so we just hopped in a cab for the remainder of the way back since there was no way in hell we were walking through Paris towards the suburbs at 1 am.

Every so often the Eiffel Tower will erupt in an explosion of dancing lights that cover the tower from top to bottom. It's really quite magical to see. The lights would only show up well if I took it out of focus. Still looks cool though, eh?

Tuesday we had plans to meet one of my friends from abroad Emily, who is also doing the TAPIF program in Paris. We met her in the 4^th arrondissement and were supposed to go to a falafel place for lunch that she said was really good. What we didn’t realize, though was that it was the Jewish holiday and the place was actually closed. That explained all of the nicely-dressed women and boys in yamachas that we saw the night before near our hostel. There was a falafel place across the street that we went to instead, although Emily said it meant they probably weren’t authentic since they were open on the Jewish holiday (even though the signed said in huge red letters, AUTHENTIC). We ate in a park nearby and then all three headed off to the train station to get our cartes 12-25.

One of the great things about France is their train system – you can take a train to pretty much any corner of the country. I wish we had such good infrastructure. Another good thing about France is if you’re under 25, you get discounts on a lot of things. La carte 12-25 is a discount card for trains that you can buy if you’re between the ages of 12 and 25 to get between 25 up to 75 percent off train tickets. So Olivia and I got our cartes 12-25 as well as our train tickets to head off to our respective areas the next day (me, Dax and her, Le Mans – about an hour from Paris).

After saying bye to Emily, Olivia and I headed off to see Notre Dame on the Île de France. We took the requisite tourist pics in front of the cathedral, although due to construction half of the square was blocked off by scaffolding, and then headed inside. One thing I hadn’t noticed before was that inside they have the crown of thorns (well, a replica) that Jesus wore. Then we waited about 30 minutes in the cold to get up to the towers – the real reason for visiting Notre Dame. When I went to buy my ticket, I was expecting to pay the 6 or whatever euro for the under 25 group, but the guy saw my OFII (basically, the immigration office) stamp from when I studied abroad last time and since that meant I was a “resident” of France I got in for free! There’s no expiration date on the OFII, so he had no way of knowing it was two years old and I had since been living back in the U.S.

Even though it was easily my third or fourth time up in the towers, the view is always spectacular. The grey buildings and slat roofs of Paris seem to extend for miles, interrupted by the Eiffel Tower to one side, a cluster of business buildings further out and of course Sacre Coeur towering off over Montmartre in the distance. We got to go up a level even further, which I don’t think I had been up before. We then headed back to the right bank towards Le Louvre and Les Jardins des Tuileries. It was past 5 so the Louvre was closed – not that we had time to try to tackle it anyway.

We didn’t feel bad about not trying to visit everything in this trip since Olivia is only an hour from Paris and will have plenty of opportunity to go back and I’ve already done the touristy stuff before. We continued past the Louvre into the Tuileries, although half of it was blocked off for more construction. It felt like I was back on campus in Blacksburg with the never-ending construction. We walked about halfway up the Champs Elysées and then decided we were cold and hungry and went to a café/restaurant for steak-frites (nom). Of course once the waiter realized we were American (which probably didn’t take long) he kept speaking to us in English, even though we were only speaking to him in French. That’s one thing that’s frustrating about big cities like Paris – they’ll just keep speaking to you in English. I had that happen to me in Montpellier. But I don’t think as many people speak English in Dax so I won’t have to worry about it there.

The next morning, we decided there was no way in hell we were dragging our suitcases through metro stations again. Olivia and I hailed a cab from our hostel and although he looked at us with some doubt and told us we were “chargée comme des mules” (loaded with bags like donkeys), all of our stuff fit into the taxi. Once at the gare (train station), Olivia and I said adieu at the end of my platform as I headed off to find my car and she had some time to kill before her train to Le Mans.