Well, I've got good and bad news. The good news is that Brad, Dora, and I all placed in the 3rd and highest level of French for foreigners. The bad news is that the resulting schedule is completely incompatible with my potential work in the lab, since the days I need the most, Monday and Tuesday, also happen to be the days when I have class from early morning to late afternoon. In full accordance with Murphy's law, Wednesday and Thursday are almost completely free - and useless.
We're finally beginning to meet real French students! There's a small club at the university called Café Polyglotte, which is essentially a group of students learning English who invite foreign students learning French for a weekly 2-hour-long informal chat over tea and biscuits. Everyone speaks only French for the first hour and only English for the second. It got off to a very good start, and yesterday we already took a little trip to Cannes with the Polyglotte gang. Adventures began in the train station, where we realized, ten minutes before the scheduled departure, that ticket machines accept neither Euro bills nor American credit cards. Since not a single one of us had the required 9 Euros worth of change, it was a frantic scramble to either exchange bills or find French people willing to put our ticket on their credit card - given the limit on the number of single card transactions, our French friends couldn't buy tickets for all of us. When the problem was finally solved, it was too late. Or, rather, it would have been, had the train not been delayed due to technical reasons. I can only guess as to what these reasons could have been, but the station supervisor seemed to be playing a little game with us: every five minutes or so, he would go on the intercom and tell the passengers waiting for the Cannes train to move to a different platform or a different area of the platform we were on. When the train finally did arrive, it was already full - but apparently there is no limit to human compressibility, and trust me, the sardines have it pretty easy in their allegorical can.
Once in Cannes, we took a ferry to a nearby island and walked through its groves to a rocky beach with a view of the city. The day was, in two words, a language overload. The younger generation uses such enormous amounts of slang that their conversations are basically incomprehensible if all you've learned is textbook French. I feel like I'm slowly getting the hang of it, but there's a lot to learn... Which only makes everything more interesting, of course. One surprising fact that I picked up from the students is that good contemporary French music is practically nonexistent. They listen to British and American rock and German sonic experimentation, but when it comes to their own language, the list of listenable bands is sadly very short.
Check out the Cannes pictures on Picasa!!!
The wrinkles in inter-group relationships are clearing up a little, at least no one is banned from our apartment. I still don't understand what exactly happened in the first place, but I talked to the warring parties (read: party, since the problem was pretty one-sided), and everyone is cool. Which makes me happy, because frankly, although we're enjoying a very courteous relationship within the apartment, we really have very few common interests. And since we had given up speaking French at home, all the more reasons to look for friends from other sources!
The Germans that briefly came into the scope of my roommates' interest left back to Germany after a heartbreaking (well, not really) farewell party. They were somewhat entertaining and more German than you can possibly imagine. They also lived far away and were hard to find, which explains the quote in this post's title (cell phone minutes are extremely expensive and are widely regarded as one of the most valuable resources of city life). Speaking of city life, I'm really beginning to feel at home as the people working in local bread stores start recognizing me. I even had a deep conversation with a lady from the nearest bakery a few days ago when there were no other customers and she was visibly bored of not having anyone to talk to...
I can't believe I'm here for almost a month already!
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5 comments:
I have a love/hate relationship with these 1 and 2 Euro coins.
The machines don't take Visa/no one had a Visa? Here in Spain everyone/thing takes Visa cards.
No, the machines only take the special Visa with the built-in microchip, i.e. not your regular American Visa. Most places here take normal American credit cards though, but I just use cash all the time because every time you use a credit card there's a currency conversion fee.
You're having so much fun!!! ARGH!!! :P
<3 Vera
I hope that you'll find a couple of new french bands to listen and share =)
Me too!!
I haven't heard any good contemporary Australian bands so far :/
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