The start of tutorials

Well the end of another week has come, which means another week of classes has successfully been completed! This week saw the start of tutorials which meant an hour and a half sitting in a class of 30 students being terrified!

The tutorials here are assessed on your input to class. Each week there are exercises to complete (which usually involves writing at least one essay) which may or may not be collected by the tutor. Also, there are 3 written exams to complete. The first of these is in two weeks time. We have to write an essay under exam conditions in half an hour. This seems like a task similar to exams in the UK, however, the French style of essay writing is completely different. The essays have to be written in two sections, with two subsections per section. Each main section has to have a specific title which you have to think of within the time limit. Add to this the stress of using a dictionary (which thankfully we are allowed) and you are left with a very stressed and worried ERASMUS student! There are two exams like this and a third one which is three hours long! I have not yet found out how many have to be written in this time, but I’m sure I will find out soon enough! Unlike our other exams, we are treated the same as all the French students. So a lot of studying will have to be done! Our final exams for each subject are done orally. This seems, to me, to be a much better way to do our exams as there is less of a stress on the correct grammar etc. Thankfully though, we still have a bit of time before worrying about them!

On Tuesday we decided to hire bikes to see Grenoble from another perspective. We paid 3 euros to have the bikes for 24 hours and after the initial worry of not knowing where we were going, in addition to not having ridden a bike for a while, we soon got into the swing of things! We were not offered helmets so the prospect of cycling on the roads seemed like a scary task! Sticking as much as we could to quiet roads and cycle paths, we made our way to Parc Paul Mistral which is right next to Stade des Alpes and the Opera House. It was a lovely day and was nice to have a cycle round the park. In an attempt to find the river without going on busy roads, we got quite lost and ended up cycling into a nice area of town that we had never been to before (I probably couldn't get back there now if I tried!) before tackling the centre of town again to take our bikes back to the shop at the station.

This weekend sees the start of our travels as we are heading to Lyon tomorrow!