(192-195): Stuff I've Been Doing

(194) is Saturday, 17 July 2010, and (195) is today: Tuesday, 21 July 2010.

Like I said before, I just sort of do stuff here... it's not like the travel entries where I was trying to jam pack every single instant in every single place. Here's sort of a bullet point summary:

--On Saturday, I went to Marseille for a few hours with Alex, an Austrian classmate of mine. We walked around for a while, saw the port and some other sights... Marseille isn't the nicest city (a little smelly and not so clean), but there are some nice snapshots to be had. It's also cool to see the prominence of the immigrant population. This is a port town, after all, and it's one of the 5 biggest cities in France (and, among those 5, certainly the closest to the French-speaking countries in northern Africa).

--Saturday night saw me at my second concert of the Jazz a Juan festival... first act that night was Dee Dee Bridgewater. I thought she was good - did a rendition of Billie Holiday's "Lady Sings the Blues" that's still stuck in my head - and she's definitely got a wonderful voice in general. Trouble is, she was doing her whole set as a Billie tribute and she picked some weird songs (probably with some weird original arrangements). Plus, she has this reputation as the favorite daughter/diva of Juan-les-Pins, and I didn't find her whole diva shtick that compelling.

--Melody Gardot, on the other hand, followed Dee Dee and had this incredible soft-spoken, mysterious, stylish, and altogether lovely presence about her. She did this bossa-nova/tuneless singing (in a good way) sort of style. Also, lighting design par excellence really helped give a sense that everything had been thought through carefully. Her act and personality came across as much more polished than Dee Dee's, and when she dropped two lines of "Fever" (made famous by Peggy Lee) into one of her closing numbers... I swear, that song was written for Melody instead of Peggy. And her encore of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" was the quietest show-stopper I've ever seen.

--Sunday was kind of lazy, but I went with Belinda, another friend from school, to the evening's conert: an American big band. They were a nice change of pace, performing favorites like "Don't Mean a Thing if it Ain't Got that Swing," "In the Mood," and "Pennsylvania 65000." The second (much longer) half was a Django Reinhardt tribute. They had some AMAZING musicians on that stage*, but the trouble wtih Django is that - since it's all strings and other bands have variety - the music all starts to sound the same after an hour and a half. Belinda and I left after two hours (3 hours of concert total), figuring we'd paid our dues.

--Monday saw me go back to Nice with a few friends (Victoria, Camilla, and Nabil) for a few hours. We met up again a bit later for some pretty darn good thai food.

--Today, I went to class, where I decided I had had it with listening exercises taken from a standardized test I'm not taking. Afterward, my American group went to the island of St-Marguerite, a gorgeous little spit of land off the coast of nearby Cannes. It was lovely beach weather, so we sat for a while and enjoyed. And, thanks to Kristin (program person), who brought the gear, I went snorkeling in the French Riviera.

--When I got back, I met up with Victoria and Nabil. We went to see Shrek 4** and got dinner (moules frites for me) afterward. Then, I came back here.

--Oh, and at some point in here I picked up my train tickets for Saturday, but had to resolve a fairly complicated blip related to my not having the right credit card with me. But, I got it worked out and all in French. I was feeling pretty good about myself and my decision to stay in France and keep speaking the language for an extra little while.

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Footnotes

* Best said by one musician who came out onstage. He congratulated the lead guitarist who organized the Django tribute group by saying (in French): "He [the guitarist] has played like a god this evening and I think we should all salute him for that."

** We were trying to see Toy Story 3, but they didn't have it in English. And I know I gave Shrek 4 some crap before, but it was actually so much better than I thought it was going to be. It had a villain I could take seriously, an actual plot, and it had all the clever twists on fairy tales that made the first two movies great. Yeah: all the expectation-surpassing is based on how bad Shrek 3 was.