I strongly suspect however that I will not be able to keep up with this weekly rate. My time-table and work-load will probably see to that. A lot happened this week though, so I had to share J. Brace yourselves (yes you especially Rakay); this might be a bit long.
Well firstly, on Monday morning I
had a meeting with the programme co-ordinator and the other students doing this
MSc. I must admit, when I first saw the
co-ordinator, I thought he was probably a mature student in the course, only to
find out that he was a lecturer. I’m going to have to try and sneak a pic of
him one day. He has a ponytail, an ear piercing, wears a very “western” looking
belt buckle and some boot-like shoes. He looks like someone you would expect to
go speeding down the street on a huge motorcycle with flames coming out the
exhaust. Lol. He’s pretty cool though, nice guy.
We discussed the time table and
also got introduced to some of our lecturers as well as each other. As for my
classmates, there are around six British people (one Scottish, one half-German/Scottish,
another half-Filipino and a half-Irish/Jamaican!!!!), four from Spain, six or so from
France, one person from Greece, one from Argentina and me the random Jamaican.
I mean really random apparently. Everybody is like Jamaica? How did you end up
here? On the whole, everybody seems pretty alright so far, thank goodness.
Later that same morning, some of
us tried to open a French bank account (which is a requirement for a lot of
things smh.) There is a LOT of bureaucracy and red tape in France. Everything requires
host of documents and more importantly, waiting a lot. I’m sure you will hear
more on this from me over the next few months. Of course we couldn’t open an account at that
bank until we got some document that we weren’t going to get until our
inscription (registration) was complete; which was supposed to be the next day.
Not to mention, the accommodation people had made a glaring mistake on my
residence papers which the bank would not accept. That meant another trip to
that office to wait some more and sort it out. Ugh!
On Tuesday morning we didn’t have
class, but we had to sort out a lot of administrative stuff. We had to do our “inscription”.
Luckily for us, the International office helped us out a lot and helped to make
the process much smoother than it would have been otherwise. One of the main
reasons that we really needed to get registration over with quickly, is that’s
how you get your student card. There is so much you can’t do unless you have a
student card, even eat in the canteen.
So after that first attempt in
futility, some of us decided to open an account at another bank that didn’t
need the document from the school. I signed so many papers, I lost track after
a little while of what was what exactly, and at the end of it all we got a huge
dossier of bank documents. No credit card, no cheque-book or anything
sophisticated. Just an ordinary savings account. Never before have I seen it
quite like this.
We had
one last free afternoon before classes began. Someone came up with idea of
going to the beach. Based on my last post, you can probably guess that I was
not too enthused at first. It turned out though, that we had a couple persons
more than the people who had cars could readily accommodate. One guy had the
idea of going to a beach in this town called Arcachon. What got my ears perked
up was when he mentioned that there was a massive sand dune at said beach. Now
this sounded promising. Unfortunately, one
person in particular (with a car) wanted to go surfing. The best beach for
surfing was…you guessed it, the same beach I had been to the last time with the
killer waves. Ren = doubly unenthused. In the end though, four of us decided
that we would rather go to the dune, which then excluded us from the
car-travelling posse. So we ended to taking the train to Arcachon. On our way to the station we had no idea what
the schedules were like or anything, we were really just winging it. Luckily
when we got to the station, there was a train leaving in about 10mins. The
train ride took about 50 mins and then we were off in sunny Arcachon. We had to
take a bus to get to the dune, which took forever to come, but after a half-hour
ride and we were there! I noticed one of the guys checking the bus schedule and
assumed that he was noting which bus we would have to take to get back to the
train station on time. Note this…it becomes very important later on.
Simply put, the dune was awesome!
It’s over 100m high and seems to go on forever laterally. Upon approaching the
dune, I realized that there were some stairs going up for easy access. On the
other hand, one of the guys had other ideas. He expressly forbid the use of the
stairs and insisted that we did it the hard way. Smh. So up we went, and I
concluded about half-way up that that would be my workout for the week. I was
so happy when we got to the top…except it wasn’t really the top; we still had a
good way up to go. Ah bwoi.
 |
| So the peak you're seeing here...was not the top. |
The view from up top was really amazing, in every
direction. There were also a couple para-gliders on the dune; it was really fun
to watch them.
The guys wanted to go swimming, but the beach
was all the way downslope the other side of the dune. Climb back up afterwards?
Nooo thank-you, especially as I figured the water was going to be too cold
anyway. So I stayed near the top, watched our stuff, took pictures and a small
nap as well. When the guys came back up we spent a good while chatting and let
the time slip away, a little too much as we were soon to find out. By the time
we got to the bus stop, we realized that the bus would have gotten us comfortably back to the station on time,
had passed about 10 mins before, Great. Turns out my friend from earlier had not really been paying attention to the bus schedule at all. It now became
increasingly important that the next bus come on time. Why? Because we were supposed
to take the LAST train going to Bordeaux. Last meaning LAST.
Yes yes, they had spent so much
time regaling me with stories of their various travels to such exotic
destinations as Thailand, South Africa, Tobago etc etc. Experienced, savvy
world travellers no? I thought I could leave it all in their hands.....and yet
still here we were about to miss the train, the last train at that. I know
better for next time. Lol.
We reluctantly began thinking
about what would happen if we missed that train… the options weren’t too great.
Missing the last train is definitely not the same as missing the last tram
(which has happened to me). A taxi would have run us a couple hundred euros.
Maybe we would have to stay over (and thereby miss our very first class the
next morning; brilliant impression that would make.) Or maybe, just maybe, we
could camp out on the dune with those guys who invited us to do so. NOT!
As timed crawled by and the bus was
nowhere in sight, we became increasingly panicked. We even considered trying to
hitchhike our way to the station. One guy tried, but wasn’t so successful. I
think he might have been a bit intimidating. So we put our other friend, who
may not appreciate this, but is a bit on the pretty side, to try his luck.
Instant reaction, but unfortunately the woman who was ogling him had a car full
of people already. Fun times. To cut a long stressful story short, the bus came
a little late, but we seemed to have enough time to make it. We came to the
conclusion on the bus that if we caught the train, it would have been the best
trip ever, but if we didn’t……well yeah.
We literally dashed from the bus
stop to the train station, hurdling hedges and other obstacles in our path.
Adrenaline is a hell of a thing. We finally reach the platform, but OMG the
train makes that “shhhh” sound like it was about to move off. We completely
panicked and scrambled in different directions to find a door. It was every man
for himself at that point. Turns out, we were fine. We had like 10 mins to
spare. Once we settled down in our seats, with so much time to spare, we
realized that in the end, it was a little anti-climactic all things considered.
LOL! Though we were tired, we made an extra effort to stay up and alert after
one guy told us the story of how he fell asleep on the way from Amsterdam and
Rotterdam….and then woke up at the border with Belgium at 4 in the morning. He
then proceeded to spend what he calls the worst 7 hours of his life with no
money, at a platform that was little more than a bus stop. I wasn’t quite in
the mood for a similar occurrence.
Wednesday was the first official
day of class and it wasn’t too bad at all, despite the fact that it was
geochemistry for the whole day. Thursday now was a different story. Let’s just
say that the topic we were doing in our afternoon, 4-hour class, left about 85%
of us wanting to wrap up in our beds and cry. Seriously. Anyhoo, we got over it by going out as a class
that night. Eventually we even found a random dance party in the same square
that they have a flea market on Saturday. (Don’t think I mentioned the flea market
before, but I think I’ll leave that for another time.) They were playing a lot
of Latin music (of different kinds) as well as an occasional ska song. Yay! It
was pretty fun, dancing in the street like that.
I’ve actually had to leave out a
few things, but the last thing I will mention is a rugby match I went to
yesterday. Turns out two of the British guys got picked for a Bordeaux rugby
club team, so a couple of us went out to watch them. First time I have ever sat
down and watched a game of rugby in my life; I find I actually like it!
Hopefully it’s not because it’s so chaotic and violent at times. One of the
guys suggested that it’s because of all the fit guys on the pitch. I beg to
differ; in truth the good-looking guys were a little few and far between, so I
doubt it has anything to do with that. Anyway, our guys won their match and
were pretty happy about it.
Oh, but I can’t end without
mentioning my other group of friends! Where I live, I have a little fridge of
my own, but in some other residences, they are not as fortunate. Some of my German
friends and the original British guy (shout out to Nick!) bought a fridge for
themselves. In order to celebrate this drastic improvement to their lives, they
had a little party last night. It was good seeing them again; even though it
had only been a week, so much had happened in between that it felt like ages
since I’d seen them! Good timesJ.
P.S -While writing this I’ve been
having the sniffles, serious sniffles. Thank goodness for mommy and the wide
selection of pharmaceutical supplies that she sent me off with, otherwise I
would probably have drowned in my runny nose by now. The weather outside today
has not been very promising where that is concerned; it is windy, grey and
damp. I will probably not leave my room today. Hopefully it will brighten up
tomorrow.
More anon……
