Jours Six et Sept.

Jours Six et Sept. 6/9/10 et 7/9/10.
Monday morning began our intensive French classes before the start of the regular school year. Christine and I happened to place into the same level, along with fellow ISEP student, Jeremiah. We’ve met a few other classmates, but it doesn’t really help to make the class periods pass any quicker. 9am to 1pm with one break is still pretty unpleasant, even if our instructor looks like Mrs. Seltzer from 7th grade Health class and Oscar from Uruguay interrupts with strange comments pretty frequently. After class on Monday, a ton of the international students were shoved into this awesome café which is run by the organization for international students called Ulysse, but more about Ulysse later. A few people made small presentations/introductions about the sports available to us this week and then for the entire year. It was at this time that we met most of our new friends from the UK (I think) and met our Canadian ISEP student, Lauren. After sports stuff, Christine, Jeremiah, Lauren, and I had lunch with Georgie, Laura, Katie, and Charlotte (Maybe? I think? I’m really sorry if you read this at some point and I’ve gotten your name wrong.. :/) at a little place near to the school. I’m on a tuna craving, seriously. I had wanted it last week, and since I got it at Hippopotamus on Saturday night, I just want it every meal. The food was good, and we had fun getting to know one another a bit more before we ISEP students had to head out and meet our coordinatrice, Isabelle. We didn’t meet Isabelle right away actually, but had to go sort of monetary things with Marine (Or is it Marie-anne?) and then we eventually made it back to Isabelle, set up our bank accounts (which will be ready for operation sometime next week) and then had to fill out registration forms and hand over copies of passports and visas and too many things for me to keep track of, really. The meeting took about 4 hours. Though I wanted to come home and eat, I decided to stick with the 7 ISEP students and walk to the Centre Commercial V2 again (Don’t worry, I successfully avoided Auchan) to find some dinner. Rosalind, Raashnie, and I had some Chinese food, but their pricing per 100 grams really threw us off. Raashnie is the final ISEP student, hailing from East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania. (I consider it a small triumph. There’s also a guy named Brian who works with Ulysse.. In fact, I really have no idea what he does, but he’s very nice and welcoming… and he’s from Pennsylvania too, except closer to me, from around York. :) Pennsylvanians are clearly going to become as numerous as the Germans, Italians, and Spaniards here. Hah.) I guess if you were here, you’d understand that’s a joke. I suppose it’s mainly because they are three of the really big, populous countries bordering France, but I swear 50% of my French class is Italian, 30% is German, 15% is Spanish, and the remaining 5% of us come from other places… Anyway, had dinner, walked home. Via Skype, I was able to briefly speak to some of my relatives who had been over to celebrate Labor Day at my house.
This morning was more of French class, interrupted by a coffee debacle (Thanks a tonnnnn, Jeremiah, now my bag smells like coffee….) and then we had lunch again with Georgie, Katie, and Laura. More on UK students in a (hopefully) short video to wrap up the post. Following that, I tentatively picked a list of courses to take this fall with Isabelle’s assistance. So far, I’m looking at taking the equivalent of 12 credits in the US system, with this intensive French course (the one I’m in currently, which will go down to 2 hours once a week during the school year), Tandem (a sort of partner thing, where I’ll be paired with a native French speaker learning English), a dual set of English to French and French to English translation courses, a history of the French language course (taught in French, of course…), Arabic (though I’m unsure if I’ll be able to enter into their second year course, I’m really thinking about brushing up on what I learned last year..) and some sort of Ancient Egypt/Egyptian history/Egyptian religion course. I also think I might audit beginning Hebrew to be able to learn it without the stress of grading and credit transfer, but it really depends on how the rest of my courses go.

Oh, and I tried to send out my immigration forms and things at what I believed to be a post office (it wasn’t) and the lady told me to go somewhere else (a post office I don’t know how to get to) but probably not today since everyone is striking all over France. If you haven’t heard, the French government wants to raise the age at which one can retire/receive pension from 60 to 62 in an attempt to save money. I figure it sounds like a pretty decent idea, but the US already has the age set at 65. French people are pretty touchy about their lifestyles and that they have a lot of time off for vacation during the year, not as many hours in a work week, etc, etc, so I guess it’s not too ridiculous that they’re against this as well.

Sidenote: Ulysse at Lille is going to be great, I hope. I signed up today. They organize some parties, trips within France (Paris, Aix la Chappelle, Versailles, and Disneyland Paris) and even trips abroad to Brussels, Luxembourg, London, Amsterdam, Bruges, Cologne, Venice, and very possibly Prague. Organized trips for a set fee and with a set number of available spots to go. It sounds pretty cheap and pretty great to be able to have transportation figured out for us and to be able to go traveling with my new friends!

Here goes my video, I think it was a bit necessary, just to explain things quickly:




I hope you’re all enjoying reading my updates. They’re really entertaining to write, to be honest, and it’s quite nice to know someone is there reading from across the ocean, wanting to know what life is like here in Lille and how I’m adjusting.

A bientôt.