day #217 - hey there, mr blue!

Alternative title: Here Comes The Sun or Help It's Sunny And There's Not Much Longer To Go
 
After a fairly abysmal March (save for the wonderful week I had in my last blog post, where I was bragging about the warm weather - is it possible I got myself bad karma for being too smug?), the sunshine is finally back in my life again, and I couldn't be happier.

jardin des plantes, the first sunny day

It sure has been a long, cold, lonely winter. I feel like the winter in France has felt considerably longer than it ever did in England or Scotland, and I think most of that is due to France's café culture - a lot of little cafés and brasseries in France are not made to be sat in, and rely far more on the warmer weather, when they can get plenty of punters to sit out on the pavement outside with a glass of white wine and a cigarette. It's also really, really difficult to drag yourself out of bed to go to classes which are led in awkward, complicated French, the teachers are becoming increasingly strict as exam season approaches, and it's still dark outside.

Of course, now it's still difficult to drag myself to class, but at least that's because it's much easier to skip class altogether, and, say, go and eat sushi in one of the public gardens in Rouen, or run away to the beach on Cabourg for a day and sunbathe and eat great salmon tagliatelle in the sunshine (which are both things that - if any university personnel are reading - I definitely did not do. Nope. Not at all)

You can't blame me for not wanting to stick around in hot, sweaty classrooms though. The countdown has officially begun - as I am writing this, there are exactly fourty days until the end of the May exam season. That's less than six weeks. For a girl who was bragging about being here for six months just a few weeks ago, I'm actually feeling a little overwhelmed.

my new year's resolution was to learn how to cartwheel... still working on it

My family visited last weekend for the bi-annual Easter trip we make to a town near Amiens, where we have some friends. I headed over there with them and we had a cracking trip; we visited Saint-Quentin (lovingly named Saint-Qu by the locals... have a go at saying it out loud in a French accent, you'll hear something a little more edgy), Meaux (famous for yummy brie) and some other good places. It was nice to see them and they came and took a ton of my stuff away in the hope that it will make the move easier in five and a half weeks' time. (Five and a half weeks. What the dean.)

I'm also now at the stage where I'm trying to squeeze everything in before I get on my ferry home. Because French universities are terrible and hate international students, I have absolutely no idea when my exams are, so I'm not sure how long I actually have left here in Rouen. I am therefore excitedly booking trips willy-nilly - Montpellier, check, another jaunt to Paris, check, go-karting, why not, that weird old charity shop sale that happens every month where it's a kilo for a fiver and you always meant to go...

Fourty days... isn't that just weird? It really rushed up towards me. Obviously, there's plenty left to do - I'm in a play, and there's exams to revise for, and all my trips to get in - but in fourty days, I will be able to turn around and say, "I did it." It was really, really hard, but I made myself a little family here, and I figured the crappy stuff out, and... yeah. It's a lovely feeling.
And hey, even if the weather doesn't keep up - that's good enough for me.

Josie
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day #155 - what to expect when you're expecting (a year abroad in France)

There may be a few people reading this who are considering doing a year or a semester abroad in France. Some of you might have a vague idea of what you'd like to do; others have already received the details of their receiving institution. Heck, some of you might have just arrived in French for your second semester placement.
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!

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

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.

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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day #130 - war is over (if you want it)

Safe to say, it's been a weird week.

I don't know if you've been watching the news lately, but a lot of really crappy things happened in Paris over the past week. I thought I might address that bit first, because it is a heck of a lot worse than anything that might have happened to me lately.

a je suis charlie sign at the bus stop

Basically, to everyone who wished me to 'stay safe' or 'look after yourself!' - your fears are unfounded; the attacks happened in Paris, which is a safe 84 miles away from where I am right now according to Google Maps (it's probably more, since the kosher supermarket which was held under siege was in the East) (feel free to correct me, any pernickety rouennais who may be reading this).
Rather than reciprocal violence, the attacks in Paris seem to have been followed by an outpouring of grief - the newspapers are calling it the French 9/11, my university announced a minute's silence throughout the campus, and every single bus stop and shop window is showing the now-famous Je suis Charlie sign. There have been a few vigils and marches to show support of Charlie Hebdo, although I haven't been able to make it thanks to a really, really inconveniently-timed bus strike.
Safe to say, rather than feeling threatened, the French have really risen up in support of the victims and their families. Whatever you think you know, whatever you have to say about the events of the past week, this country is still in shock and trying to find whatever way they can to claw back some feeling of control and normalcy - whether it's through holding a pen to the sky in solidarity, or buying the last copy of Charlie Hebdo on the shelf.
(Sidenote: I have to say that I've been incredibly irritated by a lot of the self-righteous Facebook statuses and tweets talking about the magazine being racist, bigoted and islamophobic - my thoughts on the subject are fairly neatly summed up in this Huffington Post article.)

the je suis charlie sign displayed in the corner of the tv screen

In other far, far less important news, I have just finished my exams. These were the end-of-term exams for semester one, and I had five - I took one of my exams in December. The first thing I did, naturally, was head straight to the pub to celebrate. I now get a four-day weekend before I have to start the whole rigmarole again and sign up to all my semester two classes and start learning again.
The bus strike was a real pain in the arse (when isn't it?) and was handily scheduled to be spread across 5 days of the examination period, but I made it through - after having to take a couple of disgustingly early trains to replace cancelled buses.

I'm now officially and academically halfway through my year abroad and I have to say, I'm feeling pretty comfortable and optimistic. Now that the January exams are out of the way, I have a month or so until my Next Big Thing - my 21st birthday. I don't know what will happen until then - probably the trips to the pub, teas in cafés and the parties in tiny town-centre flats that I don't bother to blog about - but I know that I am armed with my student loan and a list of places to go and people to see. May the rest of 2015 be better.

Josie
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day #118 - guess who's back

OOPS I did that thing where I didn't post for a month (ha ha ha, hee hee hee, ho ho ho)
Do not blame me; simply blame the magic of Christmas/exam season/the unnecessarily unorganised nature of the French education system. Here is a photo of me in a festive hat from this festive season so that you are all fully aware that I am not lying:

of course i'm joking, haha. this is me in 2012.

However, as I have not posted since December 4th, I'm sure there's a couple of things I can update you on: (This is a long post, I'm afraid)

1. La Fête des Lumières
My two favourite things in life (after Gilmore Girls, fresh bed sheets and, you know, family and friends) are sparkly lights and alcoholic drinks. Therefore Lyon from the 5th December to the 8th (that's somewhere around day #90ish, if I remember rightly) was a kind of Josie dreamland where there are literally lights everywhere and plenty of makeshift stalls hawking mulled wine and lots of people wearing light-up headbands.

According to Wikipedia, "the Fête des Lumières is a time when France expresses gratitude toward Mary, mother of Jesus on December 8 of each year. This uniquely Lyonnaise tradition dictates that every house place candles along the outsides of all the windows to produce a spectacular effect throughout the streets. With over 4 million tourists coming to Lyon for this event, the festival is probably one of the three biggest festive gatherings in the world in terms of attendance (after the Rio Carnival and Oktoberfest in Munich)."

I headed down on a TGV (the French high-speed train service. Well, it was suppose to be high-speed. It ended up being 4 hours later than intended) to Lyon, and got given a complementary lunch by SNCF, the train operator, because the train was late and they clearly felt guilty. When I finally arrived, I got to spend the entire weekend with my pals Nel and Kate, who are both studying French with me up in Edinburgh and who are both now scattered across France too! The whole weekend was cracking and involved plenty of alcohol and complaining about the bitter cold and wandering around Lyon at night.
Lyon is lovely, by the way, you should visit.

still not clear whether this animatronic dragon featuring two men in white jumpsuits on its back playing guitar and synth was part of the festival or not

2. The terrible French assessment season.
Imagine that you are a student who has, through no fault of their own, been forced into taking 6 subjects. Imagine that each of these subjects takes up a minimum of 2 hours a week, but most of them take up 3 hours. Then imagine that all of these subjects require you to do three pieces of assessment in the months of November and December. Mm, doesn't that make you feel cosy?
Then imagine that they also have January exams to put the cherry on top of a wonderful academic semester. Then imagine that they don't release the exam dates until after everyone has left to go back to their own home countries, and that there are 4 exams scheduled for the same time.
These are all things which have happened to me over the past few months. I'm *this* close to banging my head solidly against my lovely French wooden flooring.

3. I bought a space heater.
€14 off amazon.fr. I would just continue to use the space heater from the bathroom, but I think my housemates have noticed and if I don't put it back soon, I'll never be able to put it back.

4. My housemate's cat stopped loving me over the Christmas break.
Pretty self-explanatory. She's called Desperado (yes, after the beer) and we call her Desper or Despet or something - it's one of those French words that I'm not 100% sure on so I tend to mumble the last bit on purpose.

5. I went on a little jaunt to Paris.
I almost forgot this one! Just before the Christmas break, it was my good friend Fede's birthday, so I headed out into Paris a day earlier than I would have done for my flight home and we spent a day stomping around the capital city, seeking out tourist attractions. Unfortunately, l'Orangerie was closed, but we found Galeries Lafayette in all its Christmassy glory, saw the Eiffel Tower from a distance and spotted that bridge with all the padlocks that has had to be boarded up because it's so heavy the council think it's going to fall into the Seine.

the christmas ceiling at galeries lafayette, a huge shopping centre in paris

 

 

the padlocks have spread down the sides of the river now

It's the first chance I've had to see the kind of tourist version of Paris that most people have seen; whenever I've visited in the past, we have seen maybe one or two monuments and then driven (yes! Driven!) away. This time, I had to buy a carnet of tickets for the Metro and use my actual legs to get places.

jardin des tuileries shot, feat. fede's head

The day was rounded off nicely because I stayed overnight with my friend from Edinburgh, Meg, where we stayed up late nattering as we are wont to do (however, note to self: staying up drinking until 3am is not a good idea when you have to get up at 8.30am for your flight). Not only that, but my old flatmate from Edinburgh was also in town! We had grand plans to get a nice meal, ended up missing all the restaurant hours, and ordered slightly drunk kebabs in Frenglish instead. What can I say? You can take the girls out of the UK...

This has been quite an Edinburgh-centric post, really, but it is so wonderful meeting up with old friends in new places. One of my new year's resolutions is to visit as many people as I can in as many wonderful places as I can; me and Eleri sat down yesterday and wrote a list of Things To Do Before We Go.

can you spot the eiffel tower?

There's plenty of things left to cram in to the next 4-and-a-bit months: Strasbourg, Montpellier, Omaha beach, Le Havre, more Paris, my 21st birthday, Toulouse, Grenoble, Giverny, Versailles, possibly trips abroad to Belgium, Italy, Germany and Scandinavia, maybe Bordeaux and Champagne too! Thank you to the ERSAMUS gods for your generous grants. We salute you!

Anyway, before all of that, I have to pass my January exams, which isn't looking likely, so, wish me luck and tell me to stop procrastinating!

Gros bis,
Josie
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day #87 - feeling festive

After a cheeky month-long hiatus, I'm reviving my blog. You can't really blame me, because nothing much worth documenting has actually happened. I've spent a couple of weekends doing things like wine and cheese tasting (very French), something called a 'Semaine des Zazimuts' which seemed to largely involve taking over the town hall and blasting music and handing out free condoms (also very French), and trying to wrap my head around the mere concept of midterm assessment, which is something evil and should immediately be burned out of public conscience. I also managed to head out to the Opéra, where we watched a Charlie Chaplin film (Les temps modernes, or Modern Times) which was accompanied by a proper orchestra. It was very cool.

But why should the blog crank back into action now? After all this time we've spent apart? The title is a little clue.
There's something in the air. It's the tinsel strung up in shop windows, it's the market taking over the square outside the Notre Dame, it's the mulled wine filling up my belly. It's Christmas.

a christmassy chocolate shop on the rue du gros horloge

 And I'm a total sucker for Christmas. It's not just the fact that Jesus was born - which, let me be clear, is pretty cool, and I've heard he did a lot of really good things with it - but it's the romance and the schmaltz that seems to appear the moment that the fairy lights switch on. There surely has to be a reason that the holiday season coincides with, to quote Doctor Who, the point at which we're "halfway out of the dark"? Just as the weather begins tumbling down to freezing point and the days start turning to night at two o'clock in the afternoon, we start switching on the Christmas lights and ice skating and buying each other presents and putting up trees. You get to give up on life for a week or two if you're lucky, and go home to your families and your loved ones. You get to sit on the sofa and drink slightly too much alcohol and eat slightly too much food and complain about how old we're all getting. I might be sentimental, but it really does make it the most wonderful time of the year.

the two-tiered carousel outside the cathedral

The only problem with Christmas in France seems to be that nobody seems to think it's Christmas in France yet. I know for a fact that the Edinburgh German market popped up around the 21st November, a full week before Rouen's Christmas offerings. And as for the Christmas decorations, then it's go hard or go home, my friends - some of my neighbours have bedazzled their houses to the points of eye-watering gaudiness. However, the village council has offered up this:

That, my friends, is the third and final Christmas light in my cosy little town. There are two others: A banner that says JOYEUSES FETES and a tree that they've strung some fairy lights across. It's a nice thought, I suppose. The other amusing thing is that as I got off the bus last night, having done a bit of shopping and run a few errands (and, of course, indulged in a glass of mulled wine at the market, duh), I saw a dude dressed as Santa Claus crossing the road right under that Christmas light. He had the beard on and everything.
A bit of Yuletide magic for you.

The Christmas market itself is quite sweet and deceptively expansive - it seems to stretch not only across from the Vieux Marché to the square in front of the Notre Dame, but there are also stalls sprawling all the way up to the town hall and I've even spotted the little wooden garden shed-type huts selling croustillons all the way down to the Seine. The vendors are very nice, and having them attempt to speak English while we try to convince them that actually yes, we speak French, is jolly good ERASMUS fun. The best bit about it, however, has to be the mulled wine - at €2 a cup (maybe €2,50 at a stretch), it's much more fun than the £5 mugs back in the UK. Heh, heh, heh. The British are such suckers.

couple of christmassy stalls outside the cathedral

Now I'm counting down the days until I can throw myself headfirst into the festive season. It's a little under two weeks before I head back to the UK, but before then I'm spending this weekend in Lyon for the Fête des Lumières with some buddies from Edinburgh who are also spending their ERASMUS years in France. I'm also attending a Christmassy pot-luck (a follow-on from a lovely Thanksgiving pot-luck spent with some of my anglophone friends), a birthday party, and there's still a visit to Paris on the cards for some Christmas markets and hopefully a few glasses of cheap wine before I go back to the country where I pay £7 a bottle. I'm also almost out of exam season now - only one presentation, one exam and one essay hand-in to go. Then I get to go home and start cramming for my January finals. Lucky me.

All in all, there's light at the end of this gross, cold, exam-filled tunnel, and I hope that you're enjoying the Christmassy countdown wherever you are. I will definitely be writing a little post about the Fête des Lumières, so watch out for that!

Joyeuses fêtes,
Josie
x

Day #66 - funfairs + where is the wifi

I am typing this from my deathbed. I have caught the common cold and have therefore been a coughy, coldy ill-bag for the past week. Some may call it man flu, I'm calling it The End of Days.

To make it worse, I was forced to the realisation this week that we are officially in l'Université de Rouen's essay season, except, unlike in Edinburgh, it's not so much an essay season as an each-individual-class-expects-an-oral-presentation-plus-a-written-essay-plus-an-in-class-exam-over-the-next-two-weeks season. Safe to say, peeps be stressed, and by "peeps" I mean "people with 7 different classes", and by that I mean me. Me. I have so much work.

an unrelated photograph of the sunset over saint-hilaire

Of course, I haven't actually been doing any work, because what's the point in that? I'm an ERASMUS student! ERASMUS students don't do work! ERASMUS students take long weekend trips to Barcelona for literally no reason and take instant photographs of each other drinking wine on balconies and riding bikes. That's it. There is no essay-writing. Most of my free time is spent sleeping or eating biscuits in bed, if I'm being quite honest with you. The rest is filled with trips to funfairs, day-drinking in cafés and going to the cinema.

My increasing laziness is only exacerbated by the fact that the French seem to have a sort of "you make it up" system. They can feed you as much information as you like, but none of it ever appears to be useful, and you end up waffling for six pages. The most common type of essay that I am asked to write in university is a synthèse, where they say to you, "Right, write about [insert topic here]," and you have to come up with your own problématique - that is, you come up with the discussion point, because the professors are too lazy to come up with their own questions. And the whole thing is in French. 

The other point is that the universities seem to be very wary of the Internet, as though it's not something that all of their students and professors access every single day. One of our lecturers legitimately said to us: "Why should the university pay me if I put your homework online?" Also there is NO WIFI IN THE LIBRARY. HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO WRITE ENTIRE ESSAYS WITH A LIMITED COLLECTION OF BOOKS AND THE PALTRY 3G ON MY PHONE???? It's enough to make anyone want to run away to Barcelona.

I quite fancy Barcelona, actually, if anyone fancies lending me a few euros for a plane ticket. I haven't been able to find the time, unfortunately, but I did use this Tuesday's jour férié (it's a bank holiday. Sort of) to head down to la Foire Saint-Romaine on the Seine.

the funfair (it's much bigger than it looks)

La Foire, or the fair, was absolutely flippin' massive - it's been there since the end of October and it's sticking around until November 23rd, but it's huge, stretching all across one bank of the river. There are 3 rollercoasters and 14,000,000 opportunities to win a goldfish, as well as food stalls - I tried my first croustillons - and other classic funfair rides. I was there for an hour and a half or so and I only managed to get about a third of the wandering in. If I was feeling lazier, I would have taken the bus to get from one end to the other, except there is only one bus every hour and a half on the jours fériés so I had to use my feet like any other common or garden peasant.

The fair is clearing off just in time for Rouen's Christmas market to get settled outside the Notre Dame (Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Rouen, guys, I'm local now) and I have to say that I am possibly the most excited human being ever. Apparently the Christmas market is terrible, but from November 28th there will be a ferris wheel and an ice skating rink and mulled wine and that is all I truly want.

nice lil photo of the cathedral taken from the top of the funfair ferris wheel

 I hope that the exam season works itself out, in a way, because I've been occupying my brain with far more exciting things, like planning trips to Lyon to see the Fête des Lumières and trips to Paris for the Christmas market at the Champs-Elysées and the jardins du Trocadéro (the bit right in front of the Eiffel Tower). Rouen itself is currently in the middle of something called the Semaine de Zazimuts (me neither), but that means that there's loads of little things going on around the town; for example, I'm going to go watch a Charlie Chaplin film on Saturday, accompanied by a live orchestra. Pas mal.

I haven't got much else to say besides that. I feel like I spent my first 6 weeks here wishing I was busy, and now I am, I just want to stay in bed all day with a cup of Earl Grey and maybe paint my nails. My French has improved tenfold though, and I am a happy little bean in spite of the fact that I have about three friends with whom I can actually speak fast, fluent, flawed English. And that's OK! As long as I pass all my classes and I am allowed to return to Edinburgh for fourth year, where I will be able to speak fast, fluent, flawed English for the rest of my life if I so desire.

being just slightly problematic at the funfair

Hope all is well my good friends.

Josie

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