ACA Collegiate Nationals: Matching the Boys

March was a busy month and April looks to be even busier!  The weather has been a bit interesting. The random snow days and  alternating days of heat and cold remind me of home. But now it’s April and I would very much like it to stop snowing now, though the extra water makes for some great river running!

We left on Friday the 29th of March for our long drive to Dillsboro, NC for the ACA Collegiate Down River Racing Nationals. Though it was beautiful when we left Roanoke, it’s a good thing that we all thought to bring our warmer gear too. As soon as we made it to the summit of the North Carolina Scenic Byway on the way to Asheville, we were surrounded by snow. Once we got to our campground in Dillsboro, it was only rain. We set up tents and made a late dinner before turning in and doing our best to rest and stay warm. Race day dawned cloudy, but the rain stopped before we unloaded boats at the put-in.

My parents had flown in from Wyoming to visit and see the races since they never got to see me in Paris! I loved seeing them! I’d also like to thank my father for the photos.

Nationals! A cold and rainy morning that turned into a beautiful day!

The river was running fast and made for good racing. All members of the team made two runs down the river, and also a relay run. I had a tandem run with my longtime canoe buddy Shep, and then I made my solo kayak run. I was also chosen as the anchor leg of the relay, which was a huge honor. Sage passed off the kayak and the paddle, the race equivalent of the baton, and I made the final flat water sprint to the finish. It was so much fun!

The end of my kayak run. Three runs in a little over four hours!

It turned into a beautiful day, the sky turned blue, and the sun came out. We ended up fourth in the nation and the returning members can’t wait until next year!

The team post awards. 4th place in the nation!

We had so many top ten finishes with Sage being 2nd and 3rd in her two individual runs. Our first-years Devon & Sam placed fourth in the Co-Ed Tandem Canoe, our highest placing ever in a co-ed event at a race.

• Sage Otto ’13 – 3rd, Women’s Kayak
• Sadie Giles ’13 – 7th, Women’s Kayak
• Jentry Campbell ’15 – 9th, Women’s Kayak
• Sam Hopkins ’16 – 11th, Women’s Kayak
• Devon Dovgan ’16 – 12th, Women’s Kayak
• Jessie Sheperd ’13 – 16th, Women’s Kayak
• Gabi Pendleton ’15 – 17th, Women’s Kayak
• Sage Otto ’13 – 2nd, Women’s Solo Canoe
• Carmella Glazier ’15 – 4th, Women’s Solo Canoe
• Brittany Gardner ’13 – 7th, Women’s Solo Canoe
• Devon Dovgan ’16 & Sam Hopkins ’16 – 4th, Tandem Canoe
• Sadie Giles ’13 & Carmella Glazier ’15 – 9th, Tandem Canoe
• Jessie Sheperd ’13 & Jentry Campbell ’15 – 10th, Tandem Canoe

If you’re interested in racing or in HOP in general, send me an email if you’d like to chat!

campbellje@hollins.edu

Spring Break! Paddle, Paddle, Grow.

Hello all!

Welcome to spring semester! This will be the first of two posts about March. It was a busy time and now that I have all of the photos I need, I can share my month with you! Since we last chatted I have run for & been elected to the position of secretary of the Class of 2015 for next year.

For all of you that don’t know, I’m on the Down River Racing Team. The team spent spring break in North Carolina paddling the Tuckaseegee River and the Nantahala River. The odd weather followed us everywhere we went! We had warm days, cold & rainy days, and cold & snowy days. But it was still a fantastic time! This river is important to us because the week after spring break ACA Collegiate Down River Nationals are held here, and we are lucky enough to get a chance to practice. More on those in my next post.

Paddling on the Tuck

Besides paddling we obviously had plenty of bonding time and also took a hike through Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest, named after American poet and fallen war hero, Joyce Kilmer. “Trees” published in 1913 is one of his most well known poems:

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,

And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear

A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree.

The biggest tree we could find

We also spent some time volunteering at the Cherokee Youth Garden in Cherokee, NC. The site of the garden is sacred to the Cherokee, and Kituwa mound is considered the center of Cherokee universe is also located on the site. It’s was an amazing experience to garden at the center of the universe. We finished as many projects as we could planting peas, garlic, onions, and many more edible plants.

Cherokee Youth Garden

Garlic & Onions

Planting Peas

Though it was only a week, our time in North Carolina was well spent. We became better paddlers, helped with spring planting, and bonded.

The team at the end of break.

Next post: Nationals! If you’re interested in HOP, feel free to send me an email! Campbellje@hollins.edu

Welcome Home: Readjusting To America

Hello Everyone!

This is sadly my last blog post about Paris, but I am thrilled that I was able to share this experience with you all. As many of you know I’m back in America and back at Hollins, so if you’re on campus and want to chat about Paris or Study Abroad, feel free to email me or find me on campus.

I returned to the states on December 16th, after 18 hours of traveling I was finally home. My last days in Paris went quite well. There was quite a rain storm on the 14th, but it all subsided and I had a lovely weekend. I must say that I cried as I was telling my host mom “au revoir! à bientôt!” at Charles de Gaulle. On the plane across the Atlantic, I had a baby next to me but she was fantastic and we had quite a lot of fun.

Returning home hasn’t been as hard as I expected it to be. I adjusted rather quickly and returned to my home routine without much effort at all. Sometimes French still finds its way into everyday conversation or I confuse my sentence structure in English before correcting it, but other than that I can’t say that I’ve had many problems at all. I would say that I’ve probably just become more aware of the similarities and the differences between the two cultures and countries. I do miss the food a bit, but I can make many of the desserts I love and since many American chefs are heavily influenced by French cuisine, it’s not too hard to find good food that is reminiscent of France. It’s just a tad pricier here for great food.

I miss my host mom Sylvaine, and our cat Parvatie, but we still email and send photos back and forth. I also plan to return to France in the near future! I’m still practicing my French by reading, by occasionally writing, and by watching a few French films here and there. I have a friend on campus who speaks fantastic French and we chat sometimes too.

All in all, I’m terribly excited to be back on campus and involved with my other activities again. My classes sound fantastic and I’ve settled back in to my life on campus nicely.

I wish all of the Hollins Paris Spring students the best! Enjoy every moment as it goes far too fast. And if you need food recommendations, I know a lot of fantastic restaurants and bakeries in Paris.

Happy First Day Hollins!

Fall Break: Staying Put and Enjoying Paris

Fall Break is a wonderful week in which there are absolutely no classes. I had major travel ideas, but never made reservations. When it finally got down to it, I decided that having a Paris staycation would allow me to make the most of my time here. You might say “But you live there? Why stay when you’re there every day?” Those are both reasonable things to say. I do live here, but only for now. And my time here is incredibly short! I can’t believe it is already the end of October! I’m also in classes four days a week and have homework, so I don’t always have time for the things that I want to do most, such as taking cooking classes. So to fit in many of the things I wanted to do before I must go I decided I could cook, sleep, and play tourist instead of being stuck to a rigid travel schedule of many different cities like I had originally planned.

Instead of all of the words, I’m mainly just going to do pictures. Let it be said that this break was ten days of awesome!

Here’s what fun I had:

• Visited La Grande Epicerie du Bon Marché, a renowned food haven!
• La demeure médiévale à Paris, Exhibition Les Archives Nationales
• Lots of eating
• Le Camion Qui Fume – An American Burger Food Truck
• Walked from Le Louvre to L’Arc de Triomphe
• Musée D’Auguste Rodin
• Musée D’Orsay
• Walked the Seine
• L’Hôtel de Ville (façade only)
• Macaron Class, Baking Class, Bread Making Class, and Evening Market (4 Course Meal) Class: Cooking Classes taken at Cook’n With Class
• Rode a Horse (“Lotus”) at L’Haras de Jardy
• ChinaTown with Sylvaine (My Host Mom)
• And more, but those were the highlights.

Enjoy the photos! I couldn’t get the slideshow to work for some reason, but the gallery is a kind of manual slide show I suppose.

Le Bon Marché

Le Bon Marché Olive Bar

Les Archives Nationales

Dark Chocolate Eclair

Tiny table!

L’Opéra Garnier

Longest Line EVER

Place de la Concord

L’Obélisque

L’Arc de Triomphe

Le Camion Qui Fume!

Thoroughly American.

And delicious!

Lunch in the Jardin des Tuilleries with the birds

I’m Thinking…

Le Musée D’Orsay

Walks along the Seine

L’Hôtel de Ville

Macaron Baking Class

Baking Class

Market Class Plate 1

Market Class Plate 2

Market Class Plate 3

Market Class Plate 4, Chocolate Soufflé

Bread Making Class!

China Town

Paris Sunset

Lyon: Food, Silk, and Film

Day 1: We left from Gare de Lyon around 10am on the 19th. Due to some unexpected Metro malfunctions Maggie had to sprint to make the train and Melissa missed it entirely and had to take the next train. So we got there around mid-day after some beautiful scenery. We grabbed some lunch, I had packed a sandwich, and walked to the top of Lyon, taking a lot of stairs on the way up. We saw a lot of interesting things including the Basilique Notre Dame de Fourvière, the streets of old Lyon and the ancient Roman ruins, the astronomical clock sang for us, and we finished our tour with the house of the Lumière brothers (which I don’t have a great photo of). They were the first filmmakers in history and their home is now an amazing museum to film and movies. For dinner, instead of having Lyonnais specialties, Lauren and I went to an Asian restaurant which was very good. Not long after that I sat down and wrote some cards and then it was back to Paris!

Day Two: We started the day at Les Halles de Lyon, which is a giant indoor market with bakeries, restaurants, cheese shops, butcher shops, and fish mongers. It’s incredible. We had a tasting of local Charcutries (cold meats), including pâtés, cheeses, wine, and apple tarts. It was quite good and I enjoyed the pâté en croute the most out of all of those. And dessert. From there we made our way up to La Croix Rouge and went to a silk artisan’s that has been around for centuries: La Maison des Canuts. It was incredible. The amount of time it takes and the level of concentration needed is indescribable, but the end product is absolutely stunning.

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Two Decades! Happy Birthday to Me!

I turned 20! It was so lovely. I woke up to a brunch of croissants, pain au chocolat, tea, and fresh squeezed orange juice. Sylvaine had also bought me Cyclamen flowers and a tiny teddy bear, which we thought kind of looked like Parvatie so we named it Parvaty. I had to finish writing a paper the rest of the morning, but Sylvaine made a wonderful lunch around mid-afternoon. Since she had just returned from Thailand, it was a Thai lunch. It was quite good. White mango salad, red and white rice (made with the handy, dandy rice cooker!) with green curry shrimp soup  (with coconut milk), and green tea lemongrass drink. Yum yum yum. For dessert she made tapioca (the best ever) with mini bananas. It was a perfect lunch.

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Monet and Impressionism: Day Trip to Giverny

The weekend of my twentieth birthday (yes, two decades already!) started with a Friday trip to Giverny, which is about 45 minutes outside of Paris by train. For those of you that don’t know the name Giverny, you may know of some of the famous paintings produced there:

Water Lily Pond, by Claude Monet

Water Lilies, by Claude Monet

Monet’s Garden is amazing. It is dense with flowers and your eyes are overwhelmed by beauty and color everywhere you look. The property, which fell into disrepair after the artist’s death, is now owned by the Claude Monet Foundation and was restored with much work to its former glory. Giverny now welcomes 400,000 visitors every year, and I am so glad that this year I was lucky enough to be one of them. The pictures do not do it justice, but they try. If you come to Paris, go to Giverny. We also visited the Museum of Impressionism, which has a wonderful collection of art. Two very good reasons to take a day trip!

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