Surviving week 1!

Well we’ve managed it! A whole week of classes and we have come through the other end in one piece! I can’t say that it has been easy – it most certainly hasn’t, but it has taught me a thing or two:

1) French lecturers talk really fast

2) You actually have to concentrate on the whole lecture to understand what is going on

3) You long for the half way mark as there is a break so that the smokers (majority of the class) can have a cigarette whilst we can get a cup of coffee for 50 cents (bargain!).

The classes on the whole have been manageable and it feels like a huge achievement to get to the end of a lecture and realise that you have actually learnt a lot. Going through my notes today, I realised that most of the horrible red squiggly lines telling me that there is a spelling mistake were for not putting in accents which means that the majority of the words I typed were almost correct – bonus! However, I can’t say that it all makes complete sense! There were a lot of times when the lecturer would say a word that I did not have any clue what it meant – cue guessing how it is spelt and turning to google translate!

Yesterday we went to try to buy our ski passes. We went to the sports office and asked to buy them. We were swiftly instructed that we were in the wrong place and had to go to the swimming pool (obviously we should have thought that we need to buy ski passes at the swimming pool……!). When we got there, we were informed that we need a photo to put on our card. As we didn’t have one with us we could not get a card – wasted trip!

This morning we got up bright and early for our last 8am lecture of the week. As our timetables did not tell us where the class was and the portal was not working, we decided to go a bit earlier to see the secretary to see where it was. Her response was ‘look at the screens in the lecture theatre hall’. I hadn’t even realised there was screens in there, so we decided to trust her and went off to find out. When we got there the screens weren’t turned on (of course!) so our next step was to hang around and hope to see our lecturer appear so we could follow her in. This didn’t happen and so we have no idea where the class was! Next step: coffee! We waited until 9am so we could go to subscribe for our French class and then discovered that the secretary’s office in the language building was not open! Next step: buy stamps for Britain. As our morning was turning out so badly, we should have guessed that they would have run out (I will get round to writing to people soon!). Finally, our last thing that we thought we could do was to try to sign up for our tutorials, but when that secretary wasn’t there either, we decided to give up for the morning and head back to our rooms hoping that the afternoon would turn out better! Thankfully there were no hiccups this afternoon - just 4 hours of sitting in a hot lecture theatre!

It’s a lovely sunny evening here so we are heading off to get some pizza and wine!