On the Road

So at the time of this writing, I'm sitting in the car on the way to Rome. We woke up at about 3am to avoid the traffic, and so far the drive has been somewhat, well, boring, although I guess I should have expected that. Since half of the drive so far has been me sleeping, I can't tell very many stories about what happened on the way, but I did have the very strange experience of falling asleep in France and waking up in Italy: suddenly, upon waking up, all of the signs looked different and the spelling took on the standard "bouncy words" that comprised Italian. It didn't really fully register until we went to the gas station, and we got to actually hear the language. Unfortunately, I came to a realization that I was now in a foreign country where I couldn't understand a word anyone was saying. While this was true, I absolutely loved listening to it. For some reason, the Italians speak very quickly and then emphasize the last two or three syllables of their sentence, which I always found myself anxiously anticipating whenever I heard one of them talk.

The French side of the journey was rather, well, French. For some reason, we came up to a speed camera only 2 km/h over the speed limit (that's slightly over 1 mi/h) and we were greeted by a blinding flash. Keep in mind that this was at 3:45 in the morning, so a flash that bright leaves us somewhat visually impaired for the next 15 seconds or so: I'm amazed that there hasn't been a lawsuit over something like that. Of course, we felt pretty crummy for the next 10 minutes or so, but I honestly think that being stopped by a Gendarme would have been even worse (the French have 3 different police forces: the municipal police, the national police, and the Gendarmerie, which supervises the highways and is militarized so that they'll wake up any time due to the fact that they're sworn to service). Honestly, I wasn't driving, but I'm pretty sure that the adrenaline levels of getting caught by a speed camera is far inferior compared to being pulled over by a policeman. There were literally 5 speed cameras during the next kilometer, which was quite annoying thanks to the built-in speed camera alarm on our GPS that essentially yells at you and prevents any sleep whatsoever.

At the moment, we've knocked 7 hours and 20 minutes off of our journey, and we still have another 2h40 to go. At least the countryside (and the language) is beautiful. I'll post another one of these once we make it to the hotel and collapse from sheer exhaustion. Unless, of course, my crazy mother decides to go somewhere. In that case, I ask you all to pray for me.

Update

So we're leaving for Rome tomorrow, and before I leave I just want to take in this awesome town one last time before I leave. Ah, Hyères. Quite honestly, I didn't really like this place when we first came, but it definitely grew on me. One of the parts that I absolutely love about some of these cities is that they still have their older beginnings, so we can literally walk through the town as one would centuries ago. Being an American doesn't really equal history considering, as of this writing, we're only about 234 years old, so what seems everyday for these people is just so amazing for me. By the way, in my stupid American unable-to-perform-simple-math self, I got the chills when I realized that we really are only 234 years old. I thought we were at least 300. Silly me.

Another cool thing that I really liked about the town was the French camp. While everyone there spoke English and for the most part didn't help out my French, it was fun interacting with the various people from different countries, getting a glimpse into each one as I met new people. The majority of people there were Russian, German and Spanish, which made me pretty distressed because the only language that I've studied in detail at all is French, so I couldn't understand Russian because it's a Slavic language and I couldn't understand German because, well, spoken German sounds somewhat different than how I'd read it, apart from the fact that they all sound chronically angry. Spanish was somewhat easier for me to understand, and when there actually were Italians there I could comprehend a great bit of what they were saying thanks to my previous experiences of hearing Italian followed by French followed by Italian again with the Mazzeis. If any of you are interested, the camp is called "Fondation La Navarre." Just don't visit during the school year because it's a place for trouble children.

One of the kids at the camp, Leo, is going to be in Paris for the following year, so we're planning on meeting up. Unfortunately, I think he'll be the only friend I made there that I'm going to see again. Although that might be a good thing depending on if I now want to learn French or German. Considering my three years of studying French, I think I'll decide to perfect it. German can wait along with Italian, although I might have to learn a few phrases in Italian if I wish to survive in the cold, Mafia-filled world of Calabria.

Speaking of the Mafia, my grandmother and aunt will be going to Italy with us, and when they expressed their desire to go out, all alone, in southern Italy without having learned the slightest bit of a Romance language or the ways of European (especially Italian) driving, my mother went absolutely berserk. Currently I'm supposed to accompany them, but I honestly have no idea how I'm supposed to converse with locals in Italian when I speak French, nor have I any idea how to help them drive when it's illegal for me to do so in Europe because I'm under 18. That, and the stickshift is an entirely new concept to me. I guess I'll have a lot of time to think about it, though: we'll head off for Rome on Saturday (July 31st) at 3am to avoid the omigod-its-really-hot-im-going-to-the-beach traffic, and after 2 weeks I'll have to make a decision whether I want to go with them or not. In the meantime, I'm just trying to look forward to tomorrow, because looking two jam-packed weeks ahead just isn't working for me.

Sorry I haven't posted in a while, not falling asleep after a full day is fairly difficult.

Actually Posting Tech Stuff

So I know that you all are probably looking forward to reading a few facts on my visit to France. Well, I kind of intended this blog to be my daily blog as well as my posts for tech, so those who don't want to read this post can either close out of this window or read it clutching their head whilst making tortured noises. It's really up to you.

Recently I came across a few items thanks to my newest obsession: Google Reader. I have to admit, I had tried it out for a while and it never really made sense to me until I actually started following multiple blogs: up until then, the only blog that I checked frequently was Make: Magazine. After needing to consume more internet material thanks to an absence of actual internet, I decided to, in my twenty minutes of daily internet, save all of the content I possibly could from every tech blog I could find. After getting hooked to said tech blogs once we found a wifi network we could access from our house, I needed a way to constantly check them all in one place. So I tried out Google Reader, and from there I discovered a whole array of things that I've been missing out on.

First to come was Gnome-Do, a utility which I absolutely have no idea how I missed. Gnome-Do provides you with an interface to search for files, create calendar events, play music in your Rhythmbox library, manage tasks on your Remember the Milk account, post to Twitter, and (my personal favorite) install new applications with apt-get. But that's just the tip of the iceberg; Gnome-Do comes with a plethora of plugins that enable you to interface with a whole variety of other resources, and it even has a dock mode to let you imitate the famous OS X staple (except said staple does not include a do-it-all search feature). The downside: It's only for Linux, and the plugins, from what I can tell, are not third-party but rather developed by the Gnome-Do team, so development of new plugins is really up to them. Still, it really is quite an amazing feature, and I've never been so happy with my Linux system.

Also, after browsing Google Reader for some time, I began to get a bit tired of the interface. For one, I was tired of skimming everything with my down-arrow-key held down to find some content that I actually wanted to read. Also, there was no way for me to be able to share the links on Twitter or Facebook. So when I stumbled across Feedly, a Google Chrome extension / Firefox add-on, I was instantly hooked. Feedly takes your Google Reader, Twitter, and Flickr accounts and merges them all into a start page, allowing you to see all of your content at a glance. When you click on an item, it expands to show a preview, which you can either open into a new window or preview the actual webpage in the same window. Thanks to Feedly, I can now tell you what is latest in Fail.

Finally, the last thing I wanted to talk about was Springpad. Whilst browsing Lifehacker, I stumbled across a positive post concerning a certain piece of online organization software called Springpad, and I decided to try it out. Springpad is essentially a single place for you to put everything: contacts, calendars, to-do lists, products, books, bookmarks, wines, and all kinds of other stuff. You can use these different data types in different ways: for example, a to-do list for a bunch of wines, a shopping list for various products, etc. The really cool part is that it pulls various information from the web concerning the various items you post: Springpad might add an Amazon purchase link to a product you list, or a review concerning the wine you're currently interested in. It also lets you organize everything into apps: categories with specific layouts to help you get more organized, for instance, a school planner you can fill with various books, or a trip planner complete with events, packing lists, ideas, and even an itinerary created from the various addresses you've linked to the aforementioned items. My only gripe is that while it does integrate with Google Calendar, the synergy ends there: It appears as its own calendar, doesn't pull existing events, contacts, notes, tasks, bookmarks, or anything else from your Google account, and doesn't synchronize with other popular organization services like Remember the Milk. But it's still in beta, so it's likely that such features are down the road.

So that's pretty much it. To those of you that have read this without wanting to, I will now give you an update on France: Not much is going on, but we have managed to buy a car-turtleshell that will let us ride with more space and ever-increasing dorkiness. But we bought a van to begin with, so I guess we should have expected that. We're off to Rome on the 31st, and we're going to meet my grandmother and my aunt there to go family-tree-hunting with the Mazzeis. Also, as you all may have read, I now have internet in my apartment, so message me! Well, that is, if you can stand the 7-hour time difference.

Recap

This is a recap starting from the 14th of July, which happens to be the French Independence day. I apologize for not posting at all during this rather long period of time, we've been rather distracted what with things being more French than we expected. Plus, finding internet when you have none is fairly difficult. All right. Here goes.

The 13th was our first day at French school, a place called "Fondation La Navarre", which, or so I've heard, is a place where all of the trouble children go during the school year. Which makes sense, considering there's a huge gate up front, all of the glass has cracks in it, and every single window has bars to prevent the children from escaping. A veritable prison. I'm in the highest level class with about seven other people, and it's hilarious because all of the teachers just love making announcements to our section because they don't have to speak slowly and use hand gestures. Just another ego boost to make me all the more hated once I get back. Or maybe before. After we went to school, we began preparing to meet the Mazzeis, a family that my mother has been following considering that we share some ancestry with them: If we can prove that we share ancestry with an Italian family, and that that family emigrated to the United States and had a child before they renounced their Italian citizenship, then we ourselves can become Italian citizens and therefore European Union citizens, which means that we can actually work in Europe. It's a rather long story.
Anyways, after we left, our GPS ended up taking us to the wrong place (oops!) and we ended up being 20 minutes late getting there. Great first impression, but I've heard that the Italians can be up to 1 hour late and not notice at all, which makes me feel somewhat better. We met them in Bandol, which is really a wonderful little town right on a huge harbor. After meeting them out in front of the town casino, we went to a little cafe and talked a bit. After that, we went to Lenou (the mother)'s brother's shoe shop, which was, funnily enough, called "Scalise", which is another Italian family name of ours. After that, we headed back to our minivan, which they found absolutely enormous, and went up to their house, where they literally stuffed us to the gills with a 3-course lunch: Paté, ham, sausage, and bread followed by a pasta dish and some salad (with olive oil as dressing) followed by pastries, followed by fruit. My mother explained to us that the more food they offered us, the more they liked us, and that we should try not to offend them, but I literally have never eaten so much in my life. And that was only lunch. After walking down to the harbor, they bought us ice cream, and after returning to the house they decided to serve us dinner, only it was the very same food that we had said we weren't able to eat 3 hours ago. So we stuffed ourselves again. With the same food. Later on, my mom admitted that at the time the only thing she was thinking about was how much she'd have to work out to lose all of the weight that she had likely gained from that day.
So, after nearly exploding, we went back down to the harbor to watch the fireworks (it was Bastille Day, and I was anticipating making up for what I had missed the 4th, considering the fact that all we really did was sat and stared at each other while a huge party was going on back home. And I was somewhat disappointed, but only because I was expecting American-size fireworks from a tiny beach town. They had anchored a battleship in the middle of the bay, and I was amazed at how many bottle rockets they could fit on the thing (although it is a battleship, I suppose). The show lasted about 20 minutes, and then everyone and their mother began running to the car to beat the end-of-fireworks rush. So we all returned to the house for a glass of water, and then we managed to find a clever way of avoiding the traffic that knocked at least 45 minutes off of our journey back, which was already a good half-hour. Plus, it was about 12:30 AM, meaning that we were going to be zombies when we went to French school the next day.
The next day was fairly uneventful: we pretty much went to school, got back, took a little nap, and then the Mazzeis arrived. We talked, ate (less) food, and skyped with my father, who was in Germany at the time. The funny thing was, my dad hasn't seen us in at least 1-2 weeks, and after speaking Spanish and German to everyone for that amount of time, he was absolutely craving an English conversation. Only thing was, the Mazzeis were over. So he was greeted with "Ciao Henry! On va parler en Français maintenant, ou si vous voulez on peut discuter en Italien!" For those of you non-French speakers, that was basically the Mazzeis telling my dad to speak in French to them, or Italian if he wanted. It was all he could do to not explode. Lucky for him, though, that he was arriving in Marseilles the following evening and would stay at our apartment for the next two days. The only two problems were that Marseilles was about 90 minutes away from our apartment and about 50 minutes away from the Mazzeis, and that their prioritization was more oriented to finishing the meal that they had made for us. So he ended up waiting for about 15 minutes, just about ready to start looking for hotels (the shuttles stopped running at midnight). Once we picked him up, the back of the car immediately went to sleep while my dad told me and my mom about his adventures in Spain, Holland, and Germany.
Today we went into town and watched Toy Story 3, and even though it was in French I found it absolutely wonderful; I really love sequels that don't make me cry. After that, we went and saw the old town, which forced me to imagine my mother trying to navigate the 2-meter wide streets in her minivan (we came very very near to that particular situation, she had to pull back her mirrors just so she could fit in the street). Once we got up to the top, though, it really was amazing: you could literally see the entire village (old and new) sprawled out in front of you, with the structures terminating where the sea began. I love views, but unfortunately my camera's been acting up lately, so I'm afraid I can't share it with you. I hope my readers (if I have any) are actually appreciating the fact that I added pictures to this post, though.