Thar Shaddin

St. Malo, while a tourist spot, isn't nearly as well known as most, such as all the Parisian sights. Because of this, it's a genuine French town: more like tourists view it, but it isn't wholly devoted to tourism like Paris. And it's unique history makes it worth a visit.

A few miles away (20 km, I think), is St. Briac-sur-Mer, a practically-zero tourist zone and a terrific little village. I spent a week and a half there last summer during a student exchange trip. Fresh baguette, pain-au-chocolat, and strawberry tart every morning in the little downtown, damn that was a nice week and a half. Good beaches, too. But if you go there, make sure you speak at least passable French. While most people speak some English, there are better than even odds that the shopkeepers of St. Briac-sur-Mer won't really understand you in English.

In addition, anywhere is Provence is beautiful. Hot and humid, but beautiful.

Hello to a fellow newbie!

I was reading through some of the newbie introductions since I'm the newest now and I couldn't help but notice that you're a fellow former-Tulane student. I went to Tulane back between 1993-1996 (that was when I was studying biomedical engineering). I left Tulane in 96 because it looked like I wasn't going to finish my degree in 4 years and it was soooo expensive. I ended up transferring to a state school. Ten years later and I still have school loans I'm paying off but Tulane was worth attending for memories of New Orleans.

My sophomore year of college the day of my last final (biology) there was a godawful flood. I remember the water being waist deep all over campus and some young men had floated a raft down McAlister Dr. The lights were all out on campus and the campus radio station was underwater (the dummies had it in the basement of the student union, but why the student union even had a basement seemed really dumb to me anyway).

But my biology final was not delayed, it was on schedule bright and early the next day and I had a flight out of town on the following day. It was so fun to pack up the remainder of my belongings while those flood waters were still receding. I was worried my boxes would get wet but it was amazing how quickly they got the city dried that time.

I had some good memories of New Orleans and some bad, from witnessing a guy peeing on a building in broad daylight to the stench of the city after a good rainfall, to the weird fuzzy fungus that grew on dead tree leaves down there and the flying giant roaches of DOOM. Being panhandled in the center of a campus quad, my friend throwing up in a limousine after a wild night, the Lutheran Student Center (I'm not Lutheran but I have a good story about that one), Crawfish, sharing my shower with a palmetto bug, drive-through daiqueri shops, Food poisoning at the Rat, The Boot and Waldos, Kaldi's (which I hear closed down sometime ago), Powdered sugar wars at Cafe du Monde... oh yeah and the day my brother visited me there was actually an all-out fistfight at Cafe du Monde.

Becky