ah mon pays

Here I am, in France, writing my blog while my sister is searching for a movie to rent on her freebox (cable) and her boyfriend builds a solar panel powered robot. There is no more divide, I feel home everywhere. There are people I miss here and some others I will be missing when gone. And I know this experience is true to many of us. The here and... how?

Below are some pictures of our christmas trip to Pierre's friend; in a house close to the ocean, in the country side. Here, in general we eat well and laugh a lot.

I'm trying to do other things too, like walking in nantes' downtown, I got some infos about the university system here. Once again the divide is getting smaller, in France now the system is more like elsewhere. I'll try to have at least one year in a french university otherwise studying in the states would not do much for me.

my sister's family, my parents and I took the train with all the christmas presents and christmas food in bags... it was so fun. train IS really fun when you are a bunch. The same afternoon on christmas eve day I biked with my parents in the countryside 'til the ocean. In front of the ocean I sent thoughts to everybody I love. One by one I pictured and named faces. It felt like i was not missing anything inside, for once. I felt totally at peace.

Pictures speak better than words:

Many more pictures are on my picassaweb thing

alemany.Bd of life

This was a fun project with jocelyn and charm for an anthropology class.
it's about Alemany's farmer's market and its people.
We had a lot of fun!
I'm very opened to feed-back.thanks.
At this point I'm mainly looking for feed-back.

the GRAND canyon

At the end of our day in Bryce, I drove about 5 hours to spend the night in Tuba City, a strange town where Navajos and Hopis live to build their next neighbor's house. I say that because the main source of income there is from construction jobs.
We had a lazy morning in Tuba then drove to the grand canyon. We stopped at one of the outdoor stand of navajo jewelry. We met Genna who made her own beads of turquoise and shell. She told us about her art, where she lives how she has to carry water to her house ( like most of the navajos or hopis who don't want to live in cities). She also told us about a terrible plan of ski resort on top of a sacred mountain. The Abalone top mountain. Fools (or pigs, however you want to call them) want to put a layer of carbonic & synthetic snow to hold on the ground( because of course there is no natural snow on top of this mountain... certainly not enough to ski) and then a field of canons spraying treated sewage snow. Can you imagine this shit?
With bitterness we left this great lady to go toward another place of exploitation: grand canyon village.
It was really cold out there and camping under the rim seemed too tough and maybe too far away.We slept at one of the hotels. At night there was cool folk music in the bar of the hotel and I felt some anger and some happiness. Happy to see good people give good music and angry to know that all of this was built on stolen grounds. History is over, there is not much to do now, but when do we hear gratitude or ask for forgiveness to the descents of the stolen ones?
With that in mind I spent the day after looking at everything on our way down to the bottom of the canyon. I thanked the nature for so much beauty.

trip with the "remps", voyage avec les remps

Yeap, I made it. At least a third of it. I left the bay area with both of my parents for a week in the canyons. I'm still wondering if the numerous times I felt fear when I saw my parents almost falling off a very high cliff was caused more by denied desire or mature desire to care for them. You choose.
However enjoy some pics.
The canyons are sooo amazing! And my mom loves to take pictures... even if she might fall off the cliff!

ouai ca y est! On l'a fait! Ca etait dur: des fois trop de photos, des fois trop de conflit mais en general on as vu des choses tellement belles. On as passe une nuit dans un tipi par oºC. glagla. petit dejeune a la fraiche, pancakes en terrace... un delice.
appreciez les photos!

Zion, away from Babylon

Ooh, Mr W.

Face your elephant.