Pau

Pau is a city in southwestern France, near the Pyrénées mountains and the Basque coast. It's roughly the size of Iowa City and a little bit smaller than Green Bay. It's about seven or eight hours by train from Lyon, depending on how many connections you have. I spent three days there with a French friend this weekend because May 1 is a national holiday, Fête du Travail or Labor Day.

I met Andréa through the Oral Expression in French I class that I took during the fall semester of my sophomore year. The professor that teaches the class has a partnership with the University of Pau. Each student in the class was paired with a student in Pau, and we talked for an hour per week for ten weeks, half an hour in English and half an hour in French, in order to practice our language skills. The fall semester of junior year, I had the same professor again and participated in the partnership program a second time with Romane. The idea was originally to go visit both of them, as by coincidence they're also friends, but Romane unfortunately had to leave Pau last minute for another commitment and was unable to be there.

The French take Labor Day pretty seriously, so many things across the country are closed. On Wednesday, I tried to verify what time the bus would come so I could get to Part Dieu on time for my 6:40 a.m. train. At first I thought the app was glitching when it told me I would have to get there around midnight to arrive by 6:20. Eventually, I figured out that public transportation simply wasn't going to run on Thursday. I scheduled an Uber instead. On the way to Pau, I had one connection in Toulouse, so it took about seven hours to get there.

Andréa picked me up at the train station and drove me back to her house in Montardon, a small town about fifteen minutes outside of Pau. She and her mom helped me get settled in her old bedroom, which is now the guest bedroom despite the cute pink and purple decor. I met Andréa's younger sister Eva, and the three of us played some board games. Afterward, Andréa and I went back to Pau to pick up her dad, who had been traveling. He took us on a little guided tour of Pau. We weren't able to go into the Château de Pau because it was closed for Labor Day, but we walked through the gardens and around the outside of the castle. Henri IV was born there and often wrote to inquire about how the gardens were doing. We walked down the Boulevard des Pyrénées, which offers a magnificent view of the mountains. We sat for a while in Parc Beaumont appreciating the beautiful weather. Then we circled back toward Place Clemenceau, where there was a little fair going on. I had ice cream. We returned to the house for a dinner of crêpes. After dinner, Andréa, Eva, and I watched the film Uglies on Netflix, an adaptation of a young adult dystopian novel I read a really long time ago.

On Friday, we slept in late. Following breakfast, Andréa and I set out for Lac de Serres-Caslet. It wasn't supposed to be a long drive, but we ended up getting lost. A Facetime call with her dad set us in the right direction, and we parked on the side of the road and hiked down to the lake. There was supposed to be a parking lot, but we never managed to find it. We walked beside the lake for a while, eventually returning because it seemed like it was going to rain. While Andréa made a late lunch, I helped Eva make a chocolate cake. They had this fancy appliance called a "Monsieur Cuisine Smart" that had a touch screen loaded with recipes; you could select a recipe of your choice, and it would give step-by-step instructions, mix ingredients, and even heat things. We ate lunch, then left again to walk around Pau. By then, it was raining. I got ice cream at the famous (in Pau) Giorgio's food truck. It was honestly the best chocolate ice cream I think I've ever had. Andréa is a singer, and her favorite bar to perform at in Pau is Le Piano Sans Nuit. We got (non-alcoholic) drinks there and chatted for a while with some of her friends. Then we had dinner at Etna, a nearby restaurant. Between the ice cream, the late lunch, and the nonstop flow of snacks her family offered me, I wasn't very hungry, but my salmon pasta was incredible. We picked up two of her friends and headed to Jam Pub, a local bar/restaurant, to watch a band perform. The cool thing about Jam Pub is that after the band was done, other people were welcome to perform as well. Andréa performed two songs.

The next day, we slept in again. After lunch, Andréa, her parents, and I drove about an hour and a half to a beach near the border with Spain. We sunbathed and watched surfers on the small waves. Between a set of waves, I went out to swim. The water was really cold, but I still wanted to be able to say I'd gone swimming on the Basque coast. Andréa and her mom got waffles from a food stand, and I had a smoothie. We played a lot of Uno. I also played a little frisbee with her dad. I'm very, very bad at frisbee, so I scared aware a group of nearby sunbathers, who I think/hope had been getting ready to leave anyway. We returned to Montardon for a late dinner. I said goodbye to Andréa's family, as my train was at 8:09 a.m. the next morning, and Andréa was going to take me to the station before the rest of them woke up.

I was a little worried about this whole trip because it was fifteen total hours of train rides to see a friend I hadn't really talked to in a while and didn't know super well. I shouldn't have been worried! Her family basically adopted me for three days, and I learned so much French. My only regret is that my own host family in Lyon, while a perfectly comfortable and welcoming environment, isn't the same as the Baudy family; I would have learned a lot more staying with them, or a similar family, for the entire semester.