Well, you may have been wondering why I haven’t posted in the last week, and the reason is that my computer blew up on Sunday morning! Unfortunately I think it’s the hard drive and I shall have to buy a new one, but well I’ll have to wait and see what the repair people say. I’m back in England at Keele now for a week, so I will probably post less anyway this week, what with all the catching up I have to do with friends and everyone! A bientot!
Une soirée chez des françaises October 17, 2008
Well, last night I went out in the evening with Marion. We caught the bus to town after she finished lectures and went to her rented room where she lives during the week. It’s in a townhouse in one of the main streets which has been converted into individual rooms. Her brother, who is older and also doing a language degree, is in colocation (private-run shared flats) on the other side of the street. Anyway we dropped some things off at hers and then went for a walk through town, stuck our head in the Australian bar but there were only blokes in there so we decided to head for St. Leu instead; more expensive but nicer. However Marion realised she’d forgotten to buy a bottle of wine for dinner that night (we were going to eat at her friend’s house) so we headed for the supermarket, then decided we couldn’t be bothered to head for a bar and just hung out at hers watching tv, comparing music tastes and chatting about cultural differences. Mostly we had been talking in English, because she wants to improve her conversational skill.
Eventually her friend called to say she was home so we walked over; her friend has a really nice apartment, quite big really. She also comes from Beauvais. It was a bit of a makeshift dinner since her friend had been kitesurfing that day and wasn’t really prepared! It was good fun though. She is also learning English but that’s because she’s taking a tourism course. From that point we spoke mostly in French, at first she was speaking English or getting Marion to translate but once they realised I understood the conversation started flowing a bit more. We had a good long chat about music, education, cultural differences, tv, all the usual topics! They got me to check their homework and explain some things, and checked some things their teachers had told them; for example they’ve been told not to translate “moi aussi” literally into “me too”, but to use another phrase. But I can’t think of any alternative, at least no commonly used way, of saying “me too”!
I think this weekend will go quickly, and then before I know it Friday will have come round again and I’ll be heading for the UK. Today seems to have gone quickly anyway, despite getting up at 6.30. Our washing machines are broken again so I had to go down to Thil, and once again ran into Faith. I’ve hardly seen her because she does law so our paths never cross. She’s obviously used to speaking French among her friends though because she sat down and started to chat to me – in French! That goes onto the top ten list of surreal moments in my life; chatting in French with someone you know speaks English as a mother tongue! Eventually though her sentences became more English than French and we ended up talking completely in English.
Not sure when it occurred but I must have passed some sort of line between aquaintance and friend with Marion because since yesterday we now greet each other with “la bise” (kiss greeting) rather than just Hi! I was right though, I can’t make the sound they do!
Nearly the holidays! October 16, 2008
I’ve been a bit neglectful of the blog this week; once again it’s been a case of meaning to write a post but time getting away from me! I decided to blog now rather than this evening to avoid that happening again. The rain’s made a return, we had three or four days over the weekend of bright sunshine, clear skies and the information board up by the supermarket informed me that it was 24°C on Monday. But it started to go downhill on Tuesday and now we’re back to drizzly rain, cold wind and grey skies.
This week I’ve found out some of the dates for the first exams; it turns out that not only do we have “partiels” in January, we have “first partiels” in November! So far I’ve got dates for a listening exam and a written grammar exam for Spanish, a written exam for Ancien Français and I know of a commentary that is written in class time for Litterature Française and another exam for Methodologie de Recherche. I’ve also been looking at what courses I might like to do next semester, although it’s a way away I decided to revise my plan based on having experienced some classes. Given the problems of fitting my timetable together I’ve already had, I also wanted to simplify my plan with the minimum of faculties and courses. I’ve decided to continue with Ancien Français and Spanish, but all my other courses will change. The science subjects are the problem really because their courses aren’t worth so much so I have to try and fit in more. I will need 12.5 points, which I can either get by doing two 5.00 point courses and one 2.5, or one 5.00 and three 2.5, etc. However the 5.00 courses have lab time, so it’s a case of weighing up the pros and cons. Lab time complicates things so I want to avoid that if possible.
I’ve had a bit more of a social life this week; last night I went to the cinema with Alice and Katie to see Mamma Mia! I went to a sing-a-long showing back home with friends over the summer, and found that truly surreal! It turns out that’s still more strange than having it dubbed in French. Obviously the songs weren’t dubbed but they were subtitled, and half of it was wrong! Often they missed entire lines out. Tonight I’m probably going out for dinner in town with Marion, and on Saturday I think there might be trip to the zoo planned.
I am feeling much more settled now; while it’s still odd and every now and again I get reminded things are very different here, I am feeling more confident. I am still counting down to Toussaint (8 days!) and I’m massively looking forward to it, but because I’m excited about seeing Alex and my friends, not because I’m desperate to get back to the UK.
Sunny Saturday October 11, 2008
The sun’s come out again! It’s been blue sky and sunshine for a couple of days now, although the mornings are still cold and it takes until lunchtime for the sun to burn off the morning mist.
Been tatting around a bit today, tidied my room up and cleaned everything, took my recycling out and generally organised things a bit! I also went to town to get a few bits from the supermarket, the stationers and I walked over to the Coliseum to get some leaflets of information for the ice rink. I also picked up this month’s listings for the St. Leu Cinema, which seems to show the more arty films rather than the mainstream hollywoods. The Cardiff lot are planning a trip to the cinema this week so we might go there, although there are lots of others to pick from St. Leu is the nearest to them.
Speaking of St. Leu I was waiting in the bus stop yesterday to come back to campus, and a car drifted into the bus bay. It transpired that his engine had died and he tried in vain to restart it, but then had to give up a call for a tow. As soon as he pulled in though I thought to myself; there’s going to be trouble when a bus comes along! Sure enough, two minutes later a bus pulls in, people get on and off and then the bus wants to pull away, but he’s come up too close behind this car (probably deliberately), so he can’t pull out without the car moving. MEEEEEEEEEEEEEP! Bus driver hangs on the horn, peering round when the car doesn’t move, clearly annoyed. Someone else waiting for a different bus went and explained that the car was broken down which elicited a rather amusing french shrug from the bus driver, who then began to reverse his bus so he could pull out. Meanwhile another bus comes along and as he’s waiting at the traffic lights alongside the broken-down car he opens the doors so he can shout abuse at the poor man. The bus who was behind him does exactly the same thing when he finally gets past. I did feel a bit sorry for him but at the same time he really should have been able to see it coming! The bus drivers must have put it out on their radio though because the next bus to come along didn’t bother pulling in but stopped in the next lane over instead.
This week I’ve also made my first French friend; a girl called Marion who is in my spanish classes. She also studies English and has studied Italian and Russian in the past. She came up to me in Wednesday’s class and asked if we could go for a drink or dinner because she wants to improve her English. We have swapped email addresses and I’ve been chatting to her on msn but she goes home for the weekends (like most people here; Friday and Sunday evenings are a chorus of suitcase wheels along the corridor) so if we meet up outside of lectures it will be during the week. She actually lives in town in private accommodation, and her family lives in Beauvais which is the next nearest major town. One of the things we’ve been chatting about is the massive difference in attitude to university between the UK and France. She confirmed my theory about the French way of doing things; students don’t go far to uni “unless there is no other choice” because the parents don’t want them going too far from home. Completely the opposite to the UK where in most cases it’s the major life leap from living under your parent’s roof to managing your own life. It makes me wonder what their equivalent transition time is – clearly they don’t live with their parents forever, so when they’ve graduated and move off into the world of work, do they do so with no “halfway house” experience of life?
Reflections October 8, 2008
Another collection of little reflections tonight, and none of it really runs smoothly onto the next so a bit of a random post this shall be I think!
I’ll put the mini-rant (of course there had to be one!) first and then all the good stuff can come after. This one’s about the education system again, but specifically to do with the exams. I still don’t quite understand how this is supposed to work, because there’s a fortnight set aside in January for the “partiels”; mid-year exams before the start of semester 2, just the same as in the UK. But, yesterday we spent a full half hour discussing with the Ancien Français lecturer how we could find a common hour and a half to sit the partiel exam. In the end we came up with two possibilites, but I couldn’t understand why we were even having the discussion. The problems arose from the fact that there are two (perhaps 3) groups taking the subject but we all have to sit the exam at the same time, for obvious reasons. Unfortunately it seems there isn’t much common time that doesn’t clash with someone’s lectures…..but that’s why there’s always an “exam period”, where there are no classes and all the week’s time is instead devoted to exams, so every exam for every subject fits with (hopefully) no clashes. I have no idea why she’s trying to organise for us to sit an exam outside of that fortnight in January, when if we did it then there’d be no problems. I also found it surprising that we spent half an hour of our lecture discussing this, moreover that it was up to us to sort out the problem! Don’t they have a team of people to plan the exam timetables? It seems like a very disorganised and risky way of dealing with something as important as exams.
Anyway, rant over, here’s a collection of interesting things! I remembered there was an ice rink in Amiens this week, so I looked it up online and there’s actually two, but in the same complex. One is Olypmic sized so they must be pretty good. It’s quite cheap and they have some disco nights for students so I reckon that will be a definite regular event. I left my skates at home though, although I can rent them I’ll try and get hold of my own over Toussaint. I suggested it to the Cardiff students and they seemed keen on the idea so that will be good.
In the break between my two Organic Chemistry lectures this morning I was stood by the canal eating my almond croissant (a once-weekly treat – it’s the only thing that gets me through four hours of early morning chemistry), watching the ducks, and I noticed that there was a mirror on the wall at the corner of a four-way canal junction, just as there might be at a blind junction on a road. It made me wonder if the mirror had been put there as a precaution or as a result of a T-crash between two boats!
The residential road near to my accommodation that leads to town on the bus route has some notable houses on it. As you get closer into town they become “victorian” (obviously they’re not, but it’s the same kind of style) terraced houses, but out this far they tend to have larger plots of lands, and the houses are set back off the road with garden all around them. Many of them aren’t traditional looking houses either; they look like they could have been built with Grand Designs in mind, all angles and wooden box-like with windows cut in, or split-level with window-walls. Even the ones that don’t look like modern art have their own character and they all look like they’ve been designed by the people who live in them. One house has a pair of guard geese and today they were reaching out into the pavement with their necks through holes in the fence – I’m glad I didn’t have to walk along that bit of pavement!
Finally two more random things found at the supermarket today; a jar of Pollen (along with the honey), basically little yellow beads which taste faintly of honey and butter, slightly chewy and leave a powdery feeling in your mouth. It also suggests mixing with yoghurt, which I shall try. Perhaps with the other unusual thing I got today; Violet yoghurt, as in parma violets that you normally find as a fondant chocolate. Watch this space for more food wierdness!
A plus tard…
La pluie, round courgettes and Spanish arguments October 3, 2008
Again not much out of the ordinary has happened since I last blogged, but I’ve noted down enough random observations that I decided to post again. The heating came on this week so it’s no longer cold in the classrooms and halls – we’ve all been sat swathed in blankets and scarves for the last three weeks! Why they didn’t just turn it on at the start of semester I don’t know. The weather has turned from the nice sunshine of the first couple of weeks to mostly rain, cold, but changeable. A nice burst of sunshine is lovely when you’re stood in a cold bus stop but a day that starts sunny quickly becomes miserable if you didn’t dress for rain as well! I nearly burst out laughing in the supermarché yesterday because I found a round courgette! I took a picture to show people back in the UK because I’ve never seen such a thing back home. I think normal shaped ones are probably better for cutting up but I had to buy one anyway.
Round courgette!
I was on the bus today on the way to my 8am lecture at the Science fac. and we passed a mobile fish stall that had set up in a residential road right next to the passing traffic, between some parked cars. There was a man running it and an old lady just going to buy something from him. I thought it was very strange to have set up a fish stand there at 7.30am, but then I realised that it’s a Friday, and generally people here are more religiously observant than in the UK, so perhaps that had something to do with it. On the bus on the way back from my lecture an old man got on and went to sit down in a seat that had a magazine left on it. There was a girl sitting in the seat opposite and he asked if it was hers, she replied that it wasn’t. But instead of picking it up and moving it to somewhere else, he simply sat on it! I thought that was so random. Two people today also mistakenly got on the bus thinking it went to the Gare, and had to get off at the next stop. This always seems to happen at the stops on this road, and the number 6 does stop at the Gare, but going in the other direction. I think people get confused because most of the streets are one way but this one isn’t and the bus could turn left at the end of the road to go round to the Gare. All it takes it to look at the list of stops posted on the bus shelter though, surely. Or the front of the approaching bus, which says “Campus / Hopital Sud” when the Gare is Gare du Nord…..
I also managed to record the very strange St. Leu clock chime today. I’ve been trying this for the last week but I kept missing it, or I was too far away for it to be clear. Today I was stood right next to it (and had time to notice the pigeons in the bell tower sending scatters of masonry chips down to the cobbles), and got a clear recording although I missed the first two chimes, but they’re repeated so I got the general sound. I think it’s a strange because the tones don’t seem right, especially for a church clock. I’ll see if I can get the clip uploaded here somehow.
I’ve noticed some interesting things to do with language as well; most noticeably the word “email”. It’s one of the many words to do with technology the French have borrowed from us, mainly because their own versions tend to be long and don’t flip off the tongue in the smooth, quick manner that befits shiny-efficient technology. So although the Academie Française no doubt encourage the use of the word “courriel”, email has stuck. But the “e” at the beginning doesn’t allow the word to roll as smoothly into a french sentence as they’d like, so you often hear people say “mél”; “Do you want my adresse mél?” “Send me a mél.” The real evidence that this had been widely accepted and used however is that you frequently see it written on posters, noticeboards, adverts…in other words it’s gone from a verbal convenience to an accepted word.
It still surprises me how often I see lecturers treating students as if they were still in school. In UK universities, on the whole, students are treated as responsible adults by their lecturers and once you get to 3rd year or beyond, almost as equals. Here, and I don’t know if it’s because students stray less far from home and their lives are generally still managed by their parents, there isn’t much of a distinction between college and university, and it certainly isn’t the massive step in life it’s treated as in the UK. This attitude between teachers and students was highlighted again today in Spanish. Over the last three weeks there’s been an ongoing battle to even out the group numbers. We have four different classes (Grammar, Oral, Translation Version and Translation Thème) taught by four different lecturers. Each class is divided into 3 or more groups. The lecturers, understandably, want all the groups to have even numbers. Unfortunately this has ended in a stalemate between 8 students and the lecturers, with the lecturers banging on about even numbers and marking workload, and the students reiterating the point that they have a clash with another class that they can’t move, but they can move which Spanish group they’re in. Two of the lecturers who take Translation had a discussion with the students who’d turned up to the “wrong” group today that took about 15mins out of the beginning of our class. It was good entertainment really with each side dismissing the other’s arguments and reiterating the point they’d made before. Finally the lecturer with the bigger group said “Well, I’m not marking 50 exams. If you want to stay in this class, fine, but I’ll tell you now that I will take the first third (of all the papers to be marked between three lecturers) and mark those and any left over, well that’s not my problem.” This struck me as incredibly selfish and unprofessional. I didn’t pipe up with my (I thought) obvious question of why it mattered whose papers came from whose class – since exams are supposed to be marked impartially – why couldn’t they share the papers out evenly no matter whose class they were in?
Vraiment, ils sont fou ces Français.
Une adjonction… October 1, 2008
Just had to add another post – I prepared my dinner but went to the kitchen and found it locked. No great surprise there, but I go downstairs and there’s no one on reception, the shutter is down. Great, so the kitchen’s locked and can’t be opened, they clearly don’t want us to eat properly. Other people seem to be going out for food but that’s not good enough, we’ve paid to use that kitchen as part of our rent and it’s taking the piss now that they’ve locked it and buggered off. My dinner has had to go in the fridge for tomorrow and I’ll have to have the same dinner I had last night, which is the only thing I’ve got that I can prepare in my room. Tomorrow they shall be getting a formal complaint from me – I thought the system was crap before but now I really have reason to complain.
Ticking over October 1, 2008
I meant to post yesterday but time got away from me in the evening and I didn’t in the end. As things settle into a routine and some semblance of normalcy I find there are less things to write about so I expect there will be fewer posts than the one-a-day rate of the first week! Tomorrow will mark the beginning of my fourth week here. This week seems to be going more slowly than the previous ones but I’m looking forward to Toussaint. After that I think it will go quickly to Christmas and the January exams.
Not much has happened since my adventures on Saturday, I’ve just noted down a few things. It makes me laugh now how much Keele went on about how welcoming people are here – I think the students who’d just come back from their year abroad must have been paid to say it. I know that some of the other Keele french students have managed to break into some french friend circles but there are many others who’ve found french students totally uninterested in us, and staff and lecturers dismissive and rude. A prime example came up in my Ancien Français lecture yesterday; the lecturer was trying to find a common two-hour slot of free time to reschedule a lecture later on in the semester, which turned out to be quite difficult. When a slot was proposed that I couldn’t make, I said so. The response? “Ah, but you’re Erasmus aren’t you? Well, you make your timetables fit however, I’m on about the rest of us”, after which everyone exchanged snide looks and laughs, and they continued with their discussion. Way to make me feel included, eh? Not to mention the idea that just because I’m an Erasmus student, it doesn’t matter if I miss class material. I still have to get the grades.
Something else that annoys me here is the kitchen. The door is controlled by a swipe card but more often than not it’s also locked by key. This means I have to either a) take my food to the kitchen (at the other end of the corridor), try the door and if it’s locked, take my food back to my room, go downstairs to get the key, open the kitchen and then go back to my room to get my food and back to the kitchen to cook it, or b) go to the kitchen, try the door, if locked go get the key, open the kitchen and then go to my room to get my food and back to the kitchen again. Either way is a faff and irritating. On top of that, the reception staff take your student card or at least your room number if they give you the key, so if someone else comes into the kitchen before you’ve finished you then have to pass the responsibility, which isn’t popular. Overall it’s a totally unecessary system and it doesn’t work efficiently.
One more thing; another general observation about life here – the French kiss. By this I mean the greeting, not the more intimate version! It is very common, and I’ve seen extreme examples of this formality being carried through; like the girl who was hurrying down the corridor but passed a group of 5 friends who were waiting for the same Spanish lecture as me. Despite being in a rush, she stopped and kissed each once on each cheek, before waving goodbye and carrying on her way! The noise they make is not a “mwah” or even any kind of expulsion of air, it actually sounds more like they’re sucking air in through their teeth. I can’t recreate it; I rather think it’s something learned from childhood. I have also seen men greeting each other with a kiss but in general a handshake is more common. It still looks bizarre to me as generally in England we only shake hands at a formal first meeting or in some other formal context; this morning there was a bloke sat on the bus and two separate friends passed by to sit further back; both shook his hand before moving on, even though like the girl in the corridor, they didn’t stop to chat. It also looks strange to me when I see young boys of anything from age 8-14 shaking hands – like something from a bygone age!
Anyway that’ll do for today, I will just finish with a quote I came across online this week, which I think can be suitably applied to my year abroad. It is from the Tao Te Ching, poem 64.
What lies still is easy to grasp;
What lies far off is easy to anticipate;
What is brittle is easy to shatter;
What is small is easy to disperse.
Yet a tree broader than a man
can embrace is born of a tiny shoot;
A dam greater than a river
can overrun starts with a clod of earth;
A journey of a thousand miles
begins at the spot under one’s feet.
Therefore deal with things before they happen;
Create order before there is confusion.
