Un petit monde

Wow...a whole school week to catch up on. I'm a little behind! I'll try to just hit the highlights from this week. :-)

Monday

     I had my Thème class, which is translation from English to French. I think this class will prove to be just as helpful as my Version class, but a little easier. Only problems I will run into involve not knowing french vocabulary. Crazily enough, I found out my professor for the class is American and spent a good chunk of his childhood/adolescence in Wauwautosa...shrinking the world by about a million degrees. Never thought one of my professors in Lille, France would have roots that come from 15 minutes away from my own! After class, Angela, Mandi, and I went out to find a café for some mid-afternoon coffee. We stopped at some little place that was kind of mediocre...didn't have the charm I was looking for, but man...the french know how to make a darn good pastry. Even though the place we went was pretty sub-par, the pain au chocolat was flaky, buttery, melt-in-your-mouth chocolatey glory! Delicious. Dear USA: take some notes!

Tuesday and Wednesday

     Mostly just lots of long classes these couple of days. Wednesday night was super fun, though! We were starving after a long day of class, so we went down a little before 7 to start making dinner in the kitchen. We were cooking and chatting for quite a while, and waited down there until the welcome meeting for our residence, which was interesting...we've been having some prime conversations as of late. After the meeting, we celebrated the Feast of the Three Kings in traditional French fashion...with a galette des rois, which is a cake that gets baked with a little porcelain figure or a bean inside it. Whoever get the figure/bean in their piece becomes "king" for the day, so you see a ton of little kids running around wearing paper crowns this time of year. Very cute!

Thursday

     We had a monumental discovery on Thursday. We found the elusive crêperie for lunch!! Serious deliciousness for dining hall food...or any food for that matter! For a meal ticket you get a drink, a lunch crêpe, a salad, and a dessert crêpe. Yum:

Also monumental: a sunny afternoon in Lille! It's been super overcast the entire time I've been here except for the first couple of days and Thursday. Nothing like a little vitamin D to perk you up and make Lille look even better. :-) That afternoon I had my French class...of which I tested into the highest level. How this happened...I have no clue! It was a little intimidating at first, but I think it will be good. It's definitely not over my head. We actually spent the majority of the class introducing ourselves...haha. Thursday night almost all of the international kids went to a bar called Le Zeppelin, which was...overwhelming. The atmosphere was just kind of intense for me...techno music, super mod, and WAY too many flashing lights. Oye. I also ended up going to my first dance club as to avoid not getting left walking home or at the bar alone. It was kind of fun, but I was glad to leave after about 10 minutes. Again...too intense for my liking. Definitely not a club kind of girl.

          

Friday

     Friday was our first Geography class. It's an international student class, so the teacher spoke EXTRA slowly...bordering on boring, but it was overall pretty interesting. We were talking about the physical geography of Europe and at the end of the class, he basically was like, "so, as you see, france is the best situated country out of all the countries in the entire world." Hilarious. Don't think I'll come out of that class without a bias... Friday afternoon we chilled out for a while then went shopping for a bit. Pretty fun--went through the Gallaries Lafayettes, which was pretty cool. Still a little cher for me! We also went to the bookstore in centre ville called Le Furet (?), which is ENORMOUS! I need to get back there to check all of it out. We got kebab after shopping, which was delicious as usual. When we got back from dinner, there was an explosion of OIE (Office of International Education) drama, which resulted in an hour long phone call to their office. So frustrated with them right now...got an e-mail on Monday telling us we owe OIE some random $1000 tout de suite for housing fees they paid for us and I should be getting an e-mail soon telling me the credit ratio is changing from 5 ECTS equals 3 MU to 2 ECTS equals 1 MU. Awesome...just because MU hasn't started doesn't mean I haven't, and we've already passed the add date! Thanks for that one OIE. Besides frustration from that, I was feeling really upset about the French students because I really feel like they don't like us. In fact, I got yelled at twice by the same girl yesterday for being too loud, when I really wasn't doing anything wrong. After the second time I went up to my room and started sobbing out of sheer frustration and stress. Definitely hit a low point in my adjustment to France. Hopefully that means it can only get better??

Today was my trip to Brussels, but I'll save that story for tomorrow!