Regardless of your circumstance, I am sure that, as someone who has officially been living here for 155 days, I have some tiny nuggets of advice for you. And I am ready to impart that wisdom.
1. The rumour about the French not bathing is not true for 4/5 of the population. The fifth guy, however, is a very real threat, and he will try to sit next to you on the bus.
2. Pretty much all French kids go home every weekend, because they tend to go to the university nearest their family home, which means that if you're staying in student halls, you will be woken up at 9am every Friday by the sound of trundling suitcases on wheels and you will suddenly find yourself in a ghost town come Saturday. This also means that the likelihood of actually making French friends is kind of slim. Oh, yeah...
3. You've got to work to make French friends. Those guys are really afraid of the foreign kids. They look at you like you've got four extra arms half the time. Most of my fellow Erasmus friends have just stuck with other Erasmus friends, which means we can boast back home about "Ooh my new Brazilian friend [insert name here]!" but we still haven't quite figured out how to order a kebab in French without messing up after a night out. But French friends are cool. They teach you swears!
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| aggressive advice from a french mug |
4. Do not expect to get anything done on Sundays. Seriously! Do! Not! Expect! It! I don't know if I've mentioned this yet, but after 155 days of living here (I KNOW) I have only just found a pub which is open on Sunday afternoon. Some of the shops in the town centre manage to stay open 'til about 3pm, but if you're not a morning bird, this is really not for you. Accept it, move on, and spend the time watching Netflix and painting your nails instead, like a good little Erasmus student.
5. The "10pm rule" is just a pipedream for people living in small towns. This is for my Scotland-based friends - people will tell you that France is great because there is no 10pm alcohol law. However, the only people who get to exploit this are people living in larger towns like Paris and Lyon. For those of us in small towns where even the late-opening shops shut at 9pm, the 10pm alcohol law is a distant and fond memory. Remember that 24/7 living? God, those were the days, weren't they?
6. You will spend about 3 days thinking you can get by without iPlayer, and then you will crumble. Just treat yourself to a sweet VPN service (loads of universities offer their own) or gamble with your privacy on a browser-based service like Hola. This also means you get American Netflix and can finally watch all of Gilmore Girls, like I did, instead of doing any reading.
7. Do not assume the French university will have anything covered. As I'm sure I have already whined, when we arrived, we were assigned to the English department, and the professors not only were not expecting us, but asked us if we were there to learn English. None of the departments talk to one another. There is usually one guy who is assigned to take care of all the Erasmus students, and he will be prone to taking three-hour lunches and losing paperwork. It will take 3 weeks for you to find any of the classrooms. No one will know which courses are suitable for Erasmus students. You are likely to have to queue up to meet some course oeganiser, only to be told you're at the wrong office. Staff will not turn up and will not let anyone know. If there is a class mailing list, you as an Erasmus student will not be on it. It is very possible that you will get kicked out of classes halfway through because the teacher simply doesn't want foreign students
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| english muffin with bacon and a cup of tea |
7b. French classes can last anywhere between two and four hours. This is actual, genuine, mumsy advice: Make sure you eat a big breakfast and bring plenty of water, and definitely make sure you have your phone or a laptop for quick access to look up words you don't understand (and check Facebook when you inevitably get bored around the 1h45 mark).
8. You can find English food in France if you just believe. I know you're reading this smugly, thinking, "Ha! What? Cheese and baguettes are so good here, I'll never crave tea and a bacon sandwich again!" You are wrong. One day, probably around 4 weeks in, you will wake up, hungover, and wish you had a gross greasy fry-up. But do not fear, because if you know how to look, you will find your fave treats: Monoprix sells bacon (fumé à l'anglaise), crumpets and English muffins. Intermarché sells baked beans and Newcastle Brown ale. E.Leclerc sells Tetley tea. Don't settle for poitrine fumée. Don't be that guy.
9. You can find world foods in France if you just believe. The French are very big on French cuisine, which means their 'world food' aisles in supermarkets are largely fajita kits and spaghetti - they haven't really caught on to how delicious curries are yet. However, you can get some gr8 curry recipes from LIDL (yes they have those here praise Jesus) and there are plenty of Asian epiceries where you can buy proper hoisin sauce outside of the Chinese New Year.
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| église st maclou in rouen! culture! history! art! religion! |
10. You will never truly understand what the hell is going on. You're gonna miss home. You're gonna forget what the French is for "cupboard" every. Single. Time. You're gonna sit through a three-hour lecture and not understand a single word. And that's OK. Because apparently it's character-building. And you can always Skype someone back home if you get really bored.
And finally, my most important piece of advice for people about to embark on this adventure:
11. You're gonna have fun. How can you not have fun in a country that is home to this song and where actual adults in actual nightclubs do this dance and there are €3,70 bottles of Côte de Rhone? And that's not even mentioning all the cultural and historical stuff and the cheap train travel and the fact that it's so once-in-a-lifetime that my head wants to pop thinking about it. It's gonna be so great!
And at the end of it all, it's something to pop on the CV.
Josie
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