Misadventures in Abbeville September 28, 2008

Well, I had quite a random day yesterday! I went on a bit of an exploration with four of the five Cardiff students. Our destination was St. Valery-sur-Somme, via Abbeville. Right from the start, things didn’t go quite as smoothly as planned! I was meant to meet the others at the train station at 11, but my bus was late. By the time I’d bought my ticket there were only 3 minutes until the train departure, so we had to run from the ticket office, right through the station, pausing only to validate our tickets and arrived on the platform just as they were whistling the train off. Fortunately they took pity and held it for us; the next train would have been an hour later. Out of breath, we collapsed into seats and thought that was the end of transport issues for the day. Little did we know…

We got off the train in Abbeville and had an hour to wait for our bus to St. Valery. Off we trekked into town, chose a well stocked patisserie and sat in the square with our cakes of choice. Here’s mine; an apple tart. One of the best I’ve had I must admit!

The bus to St. Valery was actually a coach, cost us €1 each and took 50mins. We were also the only ones on it so essentially we had a private coach! The town itself was a slight disappointment in terms of the beach (it was more of an estuary) but it was still picturesque and had some interesting shops. Lunch was an experience! We picked a little cafe that had a garden area back off the road, which was very pretty. The prices weren’t too bad and they had a nice choice of things to eat. Unfortunately when our paninis and sandwiches turned up they were in bags rather than on plates – almost as if they’d gone down the road to get them from a takeaway! Anyway it tasted good so we didn’t mind too much.

Afterwards we had a wander round the shops and then headed for the bus stop to catch the bus back to Abbeville. This would actually be a two-part journey with a bus as far as Noyelle and then a train to Abbeville. Or it would have been, if the bus had turned up. We waited for 45 mins and then walked to the other stop, next to the “gare” de St. Valery. There was no question of us having missed it; it would have driven past us if it had turned up. There had in fact been a train from St. Valery to Noyelle, but the last one had left 30 mins before. No other solution but a taxi to Abbeville. We still had plenty of time until the last train back to Amiens (according to the regional transport guide we had), so it didn’t matter we had to wait an hour for our taxi.

At last we got back to Abbeville, and saw that there was an earlier train at 7.30 that we could catch – or so we thought. We hadn’t noticed that there wasn’t a yellow dot next to that listing, signifying that it wasn’t active that day. We didn’t notice this until we were waiting for the train at the point it should have arrived. There were in fact no more trains in the direction of Amiens, or at least according to the board. The man behind the desk had just closed his kiosk and refused to open it even to hear what we had to say. We asked a passing bus driver but there were no buses to Amiens either. Encore un taxi alors! Fortunately we only had to wait 10 minutes for this one and a very nice gentleman in the nearest tabac called for us. It did cost us €80 but split 5 ways that wasn’t so bad. We finally arrived back in Amiens at 9pm.

I’ll add some more pictures from the day to the “Year in Pictures” section.

I would like to add that despite the transport disaster, I had a great day and only spent £27 on transport (return train ticket, bus ticket, two taxi fares) – think how much all that travel would have cost in England!

Bits and Pieces September 24, 2008

Haven’t got much to report on today, we had a meeting for all the Erasmus students today which lasted nearly three hours, there were one or two important things but mostly it was just an opportunity to meet and get some information on things to do outside of lectures. It turns out there’s about 80 foreign students at UPJV at the moment, from countries as far away as Columbia and Brazil, and plenty of other countries including Germany, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Turkey and the Czech Republic.

Anyway as I say it wasn’t much of an interesting day today, just a couple of lectures so I thought today’s post could be a little collection of bits and pieces I’ve found interesting or different about life here.

The supermarket: always smells different to home – well supermarkets at home don’t usually smell of much but in France they always smell faintly of vegetables, cheese, fish….anything that’s not packaged up seems to make the store smell. It’s not a bad smell but it’s always noticeable. For some reason they only seem to sell UHT milk, and there’s a system which we don’t have in the UK for bottles of liquid like juice, milk or water than can be bought in palettes or multipacks. In France they just put the packs of 6 or 8 or 12 on the shelves, but they put two prices; one for the whole pack and one per bottle. It’s then up to the customers to break into the packs to get the number of bottles they want if that’s less than one pack. There’s a different system for loose veg and fruit as well; instead of putting it in bags and having it weighed when you get to the checkout you or a member of staff, depends on the supermarket, do it at the desk in the veg aisles and you get a printed sticker to put on the bag.

Buses: I’ve said a bit about buses before but I’ll add to it. Bus drivers in France don’t like to waste time on customers. They are employed to drive the bus and that’s it. Everything is set up so that the driver has minimal contact with the passengers, from the automatic ticket/pass validation machines as you board to the automatic doors to disembark (there are usually two of these, one in the middle and one at the back of the bus and no one exits via the boarding door at the front). If by chance someone needs to buy a ticket from the driver, he will invariably pull away from the stop and continue the journey whilst he takes their change, punches the buttons, prints them a ticket and hands them any due change. There’s also a strangely-named bus stop on the no. 6 route called “Royal Tank”. It’s just before the large crossroads “Carrefour des Royal Tanks”. I want to know the story behind this name (because there always is in France), it’s so unnatural for a French person to say out loud there must be a good reason for it.

Classrooms: The French don’t seem to have quite made the distinction between school and university yet. Most of the classes I have are in normal sizes classrooms rather than lecture halls, even though they seem to have plenty of lecture halls. For some groups this is fine, but for example my chemistry lecture has about 50 people in it, and we’re sat in a standard tables-and-chairs-in-rows classroom. If you’re sat more than three rows from the front, the bottom half of the board is almost impossible to see. At uni the class sizes are usually bigger, that’s why we have lectures in lecture halls that are angled down to a lecturing area at the bottom which we can all see. French lecturers also haven’t cottoned on to the idea of powerpoint or OHP presentations – everything is dictated, with students scribbling away furiously and frequently asking for repetition or spelling, or written out on the blackboard. Yes, blackboard. I have not seen one single whiteboard while I’ve been here – I thought blackboards had long since been outlawed due to the teachers breathing in chalk dust, but apparently not in France. I’d forgotten how hard chalk on a blackboard was to read, never mind it being handwritten and often shorthand french….

A week gone already September 22, 2008

I’ve survived one full academic week at UPJV! Still, one of my modules didn’t actually start until today but at least I can now say I’ve had a lecture of everything. What has surprised me most is that the science lectures are the ones I find the easiest, both to follow and in content. I had a three hour “Techniques d’analyses biochimiques” lecture today and 99% of the material was not new to me – TLC, chromatography etc that I’ve covered in Forensics over the last two years. In some ways it’s a relief that the science is easy because it turns out the french is hard, although interesting! I started reading Gargantua today, the novel we are studying in 16th-18th century french literature, and it’s in old french with lots of annotation to explain it – which makes for difficult reading. Still, since I’m also taking Ancien français as a module that should help me understand it.

I didn’t do much over the weekend, hence no posts. I spent most of saturday doing laundry because I had to go to Thil halls down the road since our machines were broken, which was inconvenient but it did mean that I came across Faith, the other student from Keele studying here, which I hadn’t managed to do via the internet. Another connection that’s helped me feel more settled in here.

A few more random musings:

Englishisms! Like the word “sandwicherie” applied to takeaway sandwich bars, which I very nearly laughed out loud at the first time I saw it.

French milk bottles: are opaque, don’t have handles and have much larger openings than UK bottles. They also all seem to be UHT because most shops don’t keep them refrigerated….haven’t quite got used to this yet.

Deference to old people: something else you don’t often see in the UK. If an old person gets on the bus, a young person sitting in a seat near the front will without hesitation stand up and make way. Old people can shuffle down the street in the slowest and most wandering fashion possible, but everyone makes way for them without complaint – this is in comparison with the impatience everyone seems to have with everyone else for space on the pavement or on the road!

Opening hours – have I ranted about this yet? I can’t remember but the two-hour lunch break is not a myth, in fact that’s the bare minimum. I have actually, genuinely seen the office hours “9-11.30, 2.30-4″. So if my maths is right that person spends a total of 4 hours a day behind their desk. Anyone fancy swapping?

I think that will do for today. More to follow no doubt!

Parlez-vous anglais? September 19, 2008

I actually spent most of today with english people! I met up with four students from Cardiff and we just hung out in the park and at their accomodation for a few hours, chatting and generally getting to know each other. It was so great to be able to chat and be normal!

I’m also getting more relaxed at speaking french; instead of having to think and check sentences in my head and then garbling them when I actually say them out loud, I find I can be more spontaneous now and it’s coming more naturally.

Booked some flights to Birmingham for the week’s Toussaint holiday at the end of October, so I’ll definitely be seeing my boyfriend and friends then, looking forward to that. I got parcels today too! I got one of magazines and hot chocolate from my nan and a big one from my boyfriend Alex which was a great surprise! It was packed so nicely I thought it deserved a picture:

I got two bubble bars from lush, a little froggy light/keyring that croaks and my favourite Hotel Chocolat product; kirsch cherries. A wonderful surprise!

Haven’t done much else today but I thought I’d list a few things I’ve observed over the last week.

1) “Espace culturelle” would be better named “Espace fumeur”

2) Following on from that, I can’t believe how many teenagers are badly addicted to nicotine already! In two hour lectures, the lecturers usually call “une pause” halfway through. Well, before they’ve even finished their sentence most of the class is halfway out the door, cigarettes in one hand and lighter in the other.

3) The stereotype that old french men smell, I have found is largely true.

4) The general obedience of people. The example of this I’m thinking of is the validation of the bus pass “carte vert”; basically a machine reads the chip, flashes a green light if your card is valid and that’s it, and you do this every time you board the bus. Even when it’s busy, everyone files past and one by one validates their card. The bus conducter has no apparent way of seeing whether your card has been accepted or not, you don’t get a receipt and nothing is recorded. In other words, it serves no real purpose and you could just as well have an invalid card and get away with it – I can’t imagine that in the UK such a system would be adhered to, people just wouldn’t bother.

There were more but I’ve forgotten them, I’m sure I’ll be reminded next time I’m out and about.

Looking brighter September 18, 2008

I’m feeling better about things today. Thanks to everyone who’s sent me supportive comments one way or another, it really helps. I needed to vent yesterday and in many ways once I’d got it out of my system and stopped holding back, things suddenly didn’t seem so bad. I’m still missing home but I’ve now made plans to meet up with the four law students from Cardiff, who seem very nice in the emails we’ve been sending. Knowing there are some other english people here has helped enormously in making me feel less isolated – even though I haven’t met them yet just knowing they’re there is reassuring.

One or two other things are nudging me towards feeling more confident here; I am now confident that we have a faculty-wide holiday at the end of October for which I am going to book flights back to England to catch up with friends and my boyfriend who I’ve hardly seen all summer, so that’s a 6 week goal to look forward to. I also found myself on the spot in Spanish today (yes I know, it’s mental doing Spanish in French…don’t ask) when I realised that particular class was the conversation class. Which means speaking out loud. Fortunately the language assistant was very nice and the whole lesson was conducted in Spanish, which I find easier than some of the ones conducted in French, bizarrely. I’m surprised how much I remember considering I’ve not touched the language in two years. Anyway as a tester of our levels we did the standard “round the class, say a bit about yourselves” thing, so I had to reveal I was english whereas up until that point I could have been anyone. And guess what – no one seemed to care! At least I didn’t get stared at which I was a little wary of. Oddly the ages in that group happened to range from 17 to 22, which I haven’t quite figured out since it was a 1st year degree course.

I also spoke briefly to two German girls who were in the kitchen when I went to do my dinner this evening, they’re also on Erasmus although they’re only here for one semester. They’re doing courses run by the Fac des Lettres so I’m sure I’ll run into them again there as well as in halls.

Soon I will have to start doing some work once the first lectures are all out of the way and we actually start getting set essays and things, so I’m sure the time until the Toussaint holiday will fly by.

A difficult day September 17, 2008

Well, I’ll be honest, today’s been shit. It started very early in the morning with having to get up and get the bus to town for a two hour chemistry lecture from 8-10. The lecture itself was actually one of the least crap things about the day because I found it surprisingly easy. Partly this is because of the universal language of chemistry but also we were actually covering material that I learned two years ago, as if they’d never seen it before. I always though that in France they covered more material in a shorter space of time so that I’d struggle because everyone was ahead of me, but today proved an exception.

After the lecture I spent a lot of time walking round town looking for somewhere that sells microwaves, to no avail. I’m giving up on this idea, I’ll just have to cope with the communal kitchen and the uni restaurant. At least it’s a guaranteed way to lose weight if I don’t eat much! I remembered to time the bus journey from the station to campus and booked my flights home for christmas, which seems an awfully long way away. I am feeling very isolated at the moment – I have no desire to go out and try to make friends with the french people on my corridor or in my classes because what I’m struggling with is the lack of familiarity, of anyone english or that I know from home. I was totally fine for the four days mum and Alan were here with me, partly because I was preoccupied with sorting paperwork out but also because we had the car and they were in a hotel just down the road…..the minute the door shut behind mum when they left on sunday it hit me like a ton of bricks that I was alone here for the next few months, and that feeling has only got stronger since. I have spent a lot of time crying and today when I asked in the International office for the contacts of some other english students it was all I could do not to break down again. I have now made contact with a group of students from Cardiff so hopefully things will get better, but as it is now all I can think of is getting home. I’m angry with my university for deliberately having a policy of sending students to different places in France to “force” us to strike out on our own when it’s so emotionally draining – you really need someone familiar to relax with. I’m emotionally exhausted and physically aching from being tense all the time and I realised today that in three days I’ve hardly spoken out loud at all, and none of that has been in English.

Things have to get better frankly because otherwise I simply won’t make it to Christmas, but at the moment I’m counting the days and that’s all I can do.

First lectures September 16, 2008

So I had my first two lectures today, which I understood a bit better than I expected to. They were both french modules; French literature from 16th-18th century and Medieval French Language. The second one was a last minute change; I’d originally chosen a module to do with the regional culture and language but it clashed with a science module. Just like the first lectures back in the UK it was mostly about the lecture programme and learning objectives etc. I find that I can understand the lecturers much better because they tend to speak more correctly than my classmates for example, but if they speak quickly or run one sentence into another it can be difficult to follow their train of thought. It was strange today, waiting outside the rooms for lectures to start. Because I’m doing classes at 2nd year level, most people already have their groups of friends formed, but still I couldn’t remember what it was like just two years ago, when I started uni and knew no one! How did I get started in conversation with people in my lectures? I remember what it was like in my halls, but it’s different here because the rooms are so much more self contained. The other barrier to making friends is that there isn’t a student union, there are no societies on the scale that we have at Keele. At the moment I can’t really see how to break through that – unless I get thrown together with someone in group work I haven’t got the opportunity to start a friendship. I guess this is the point where I start to miss people back in England more.

Building the timetable September 15, 2008

Well today was spent mainly chasing up timetables. I started on campus as that’s just over the road from my halls, in the Faculté des Lettres, Faculté des Langues and Faculté de Philosophie et SHS. All the scolarité offices were packed, presumably everyone else was there asking the same questions as me. I did manage to decipher the noticeboards and find my timetables for 3 modules. The fourth turned out to not exist this year so tomorrow I’m going to register on a similar one instead. I also paid a visit to the International office to deal with some paperwork. By this point it was nearly lunchtime so I walked to the supermarket, about 5mins away and stocked up on some cupboard basics, then came back to my room for lunch and to consolidate the information I’d got so far.

Next was a trip into town to the Faculté des Sciences to find the timetables for my modules there. I didn’t think this would be easy as of all the departments I’d dealt with up to now they were the least friendly and the least helpful. Firstly I asked at the main office on the ground floor and they tried to send me to see someone in Geology even though my modules are run by Chemistry and Biology, so I headed upstairs to see if I could find anyone myself. I found the Chemistry office and there a very helpful Monsieur who I trailed all around the building (including back down to the main office where the woman I’d seen exclaimed rather exasperatedly that she hadn’t sent me to see him) for the next 15mins while he tried to help me find the relevent people. Eventually he passed me over to an also very helpful lady who gave me the contact details of the lecturers responsible for the modules, since none were in their offices. Armed with these and having noted the details of the first lectures of each (from handwritten notes on the module noticeboards), I was satisfied I’d got all I could for the day and left.

The next job to tick off the list was to post a letter back to uni in the UK. This was very simple and cost me precisely 65cents. All that was left was to wander around town and take some pictures (which you can see by clicking “The Year in Pictures” in the top right corner), meandering my way to the Gare du Nord to catch the bus back to campus. The bus I use is the number 6 and I learned today that if possible I should get yellow and white buses rather than red and grey, because the yellow ones are newer and far more comfortable to ride in! Like most other forms of transport in France, it’s about the most efficient thing you can imagine. There’s a bus roughly every four minutes, if you have a bus pass you just wave the card in front of a machine as you board and it reads the chip. There are screens on board with a scrolling list of each stop and a picture of the bus moving along each one. There’s also an announcement for the name of the next stop. Why can’t we have a better transport system in England?

Anyway that was about all today. Tomorrow I have a couple of lectures and one or two timetable things to iron out, but I think I’ll be starting to get into a routine.

First few days September 14, 2008

Welcome to the blog! This is going to be a diary of my year studying abroad in Amiens, France. This is now my fourth day in Amiens and it’s been an emotional rollercoaster since I left England. I never thought I would struggle – I’ve been banging on for years about how much I love France and how I’d love to live there…but now I’m here I just want to go home again. I’m sure it’s just settling in nerves and trying to figure out unfamiliar systems but it has seemed over the last couple of days that not many people want to make me welcome here.

When we first arrived on Thursday I filled out some forms and got the keys to my accomodation, which is about the easiest and best thing about the process so far. It’s a nice, clean, new room and it’s starting to feel like a safe haven. The problems started once I tried to get registered with the university and get all my details to get online. Basically I got passed from pillar to post having to explain to a new person each time what my situation was. Every time I got told something different and sent to a different person. After 24hours of this I was getting really pissed off and losing my patience. Finally I found the international office and they registered me, I got my student card and some useful leaflets, and the information I needed to get online. I still can’t believe how many pieces of misinformation I was given though – if people don’t know they should say so instead of sending me on a wild goose chase!

I still don’t know when or where any of my lectures are – all I’ve been told is although in principle they start on Monday, basically the lecturers haven’t done the timetables yet and all I can do is go and ask each faculty’s secretary if it’s ready. A really efficient system, I’m sure you’ll agree.

The city of Amiens is very nice; it has a river and lots of open spaces, some green and some paved; lots of shops and bars and restaurants. Overall I think living here will be good but I have to conclude from my experience over the last few days that the education system is crap.