Jenni Ajderian

     Goscinny & Underzo’s bandes dessinés are beloved by the French, and quite a few English people too. Trying to figure out how our copies of Asterix and Cleopatra and Astérix et Cléopatre corresponded with one another was the first time I really wanted to learn French. For those who have never read them before, it’s all about a tribe of Gauls who are the last stand against the Roman Empire, and spend their days hunting wild boars and occasionally chugging down some of Getafix’s magic potion so they can beat up their surrounding legionnaires with super-human strength and some very satisfying comic onomatopoeia. Oh, and they go on adventures around the world with their little white dog, meeting various different cultures, making jokes and sorting out people’s problems, so it’s kind of like Tintin, only, you know, good.      The studio may have been jumping on the Anglomania bandwagon following this summer’s Jubilee and the Olympics, but for a group...

     I’ve written before about how eager students are for anything that is free. Food, clothes and branded pens can be the carrot on the string of any advertiser or local business looking for a new batch of regular customers, and, it would seem, l’Opéra de Marseille is just one such business.      It was clear from the start that last Friday night’s Concert Offert Aux Etudiants was no normal night at the opera. Hipster glasses and ripped jeans took up seats usually reserved for suits and ballgowns as l’orchestre philharmonique de Marseille drew out the first few notes, but even before that the musicians seemed far more relaxed than I’d ever expected. A few were already in their seats before I was, tuning and reading over parts or just chatting away. During the performance a whole string of them made corrections in their music while not playing, then passed the pen on to the next person once they were done. At the back, a surly tuba player sat with arms ...

     I sat on the edge of the wall and held my arms out so I could no longer see it under me. Though I'm well aware that Mont Ste Victoire has been solidly standing for a thousand times longer than I will ever live, and the wall was probably put there a hundred years before I was born, I could feel them both move under me.      In the 1870s a troupe of church-goers did the same two-and-a-half hour hike I had just done, but with ten feet of metal on their backs. The cross now erected on the peak of Mont St Victoire is visible from miles away, has now rusted and charred in a hundred and fifty years of weathering, and makes a simple, omnipresent statement: we were here.      It's easy to see why people build churches on high points. The walk up took us sixteen Erasmus students from sea-level to over a kilometre in the air, and each rest-stop was punctuated with sounds of awe and breathless, admiration-filled statements. In our last half hour...

(originally published by Edinburgh Exchanges blog)      Well, they DID warn you, before you came to France, that the bureaucracy would be a nightmare. You thought they were just comptes de fée, but it turns out they're all true. Slaying all the demons and finding all the magic keys you need to get what you want to get done done can leave you with both sore muscles and damaged pride. I write with tales of experience from both myself and fellow Erasmus students.      Our first tale is of the Erasmus student who wanted to exercise. Moving to France means moving into closer proximity to more boulangeries than you can shake an enchanted baguette at, and to counteract the  mille feuilles  and  pain au chocolat aux amandes , a gym membership might be necessary. But, hark! what is that on the horizon? Our brave Erasmus hero steels hisself- it's the demon of  bureaucratie .      "Kraaak!" (this is the noise the bureaucracy mo...

(originally published by  EdinburghExchanges  -go here for bigger versions of pictures!) (also vlogged about at length at Etudiante X -go here for less static versions of pictures!)      Yes, we're in France. Yes, we're studying. Yes, we're really trying very hard to speak our foreign language.  But we've been doing that for A WHOLE MONTH now. It's time for a break.      Zadar is nothing short of breathtaking. A coastline pocked with tiny beaches and bathed in warm water lead from our hostel (the  Drunken Monkey - HIGHLY recommended) to the Old Town, which seems to have been built around its plentiful Roman ruins rather than making a tourist attraction of them. Monasteries and wells galore, a walled garden and the remains of the forum are all surrounded by normal high-street shops and low-price restaurants, as well as bountiful amounts of icecream vendors. On our second day it became apparent that for all sixteen of...

     Well, perhaps not strictly free, I'm yet to ask the owners' permission...      I've mentioned before the abundance of weird and wonderful fruit growing around Aix- while at home we're surrounded by blackberries and maybe the occasional sloe, the South of France's climate and soil mean the local flora are just about as strange and foreign as the University system.           First up is the humble fig. These are a long way off being ripe, but I always check them anyway on my way into Uni. The tree is in someone's garden but hangs over onto the road quite a bit, and, as my good friend Steph pointed out, for some reason smells like coconut. Both this and all the chestnut trees around make me a little nostalgic of my days as a Wwoofeuse near Alès.      I think these are walnuts, although I don't have my Kernel Identification badge so my quick Google search will have to suffice for now. The...