OK, the long-awaited much-hyped fourth installment of my blog. Back by popular demand. Now I will try to bore you enough that you won’t bother me about the next one.
LEARNING FRENCH
My French is progressing extremely slowly because I am so busy with school and it is all in English, but at least once so far I have arranged a meeting with my landlord. We attempted to communicate in French and English over tea (and milk from a box). She’s a really nice woman who speaks a little English and I think it helped me. For some reason, old ladies love me, what can I say.
THE STRIKES
Some of you may have heard about all the strikes we have been having recently. OK, you’re Americans, so probably not, but anyway, we’ve been having a lot of strikes recently. They’re all over now because it’s cold as hell, but even when they were happening it didn’t affect me because I don’t take public transportation or use any other services.
All you need to know is that they were pissed off that they were moving retirement age from 60 to 62, and made everybody’s life horrible for like a month. Bunch of whiners, right?
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| In the strike there is a dream. |
SCHOOL
School began at the very end of September and as I write this today I should be studying for Finals week starting on Monday, but whatever. The semesters are extremely quick here, it’s unbelievable the amount of stuff we’ve done. Included below are some pictures of the actual campus that I attend.
Despite the fact that the program is a tad janky, I don’t regret my decison. I actually expected the school to be a joke as all universities are. For example, what they didn’t tell us clearly in the “brochure” is that the facilities at my campus are pretty weak. The library’s rinky-dink and mostly in French (even though our program is in English), there is no study hall (there’s no where to sit down at all, really), and the professors/administrators don’t really know or follow their own rules, or they do so selectively.
They give us group work and then provide no place to sit down and meet. Several times my teams have been accosted for being on a floor where “students are not allowed to be on” (even though there is no documentation anywhere) or told we “have to sign up to use the tiny student area with five tables that are already full.” You would think these things would be items of discussion at orientation, no?
The biggest conflict I’ve had so far is being “kicked” out of the cafeteria and being told to go “eat in the sun” because even though the school CANNOT arrange internships on our behalf because, as they say, they cannot partner with businesses due to their being a public school, but they CAN run a “restaurant” in their lobby where they kick kids out even when many tables are empty. Luckily a friend and I did our marketing project on an IT start-up company that may be able to give us internships. We meet with them after my trip to Paris (more on that later).
The craziest part of the whole system here is the grading. It’s based out of 20, but 10 is a B-. What?! Basically, what we’ve been told is 19 is for the teacher, 20 is for god, but in fact, no one really expects to get anything higher than 15. The system is basically designed to remind students everyday they will never be good enough; they can never meet expectations. The problem with this is that they now generally don’t try. Many kids just talk through the class or chat over SMS. It’s frustrating to the rest of the students, especially those from countries with less advantages than France, who paid large sums of money and took huge risks to come to Nice. This system works out in my favor though because sometimes, in classes like accounting where grading is not subjective, what literally is a C gets you an A-
The great thing is though that unlike my experience at SFSU, the classes are small, intimate, and you get direct attention from professors (and more importantly they grade your work not some graduate assistant a year older than you).
THANKSGIVING
Three of us Americans were able to get together with some other friends for a sort of Thanksgiving feast at their Italian landlord's luxurious house. We had some really good macaroni and cheese type stuff (and some weird stuff made by a Slovenian doctorate student I can't even describe to you), but alas, no turkey. You don't really realize how much you like your own holidays until you can't do them right.
CHRISTMAS PLANS
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