Snow Snow Go Away... But otherwise, YAY!!!

So we've been experiencing some weird weather in Poitiers. In the last few days we had a few little flurries of snow, but then yesterday as I was taking the bus to Leclerc (which is like walmart only bigger) it started to become a full-blown blizzard outside.
And then I woke up today to see that it had snowed even more during the night. I mean I like the snow and everything, but I'm going on vacation on monday and I'll be super upset if everything gets messed up because of the snow. I'm so tired of it being so fricking cold here. I'm too ready for sping and summer.

Speaking of spring, guess who's coming on the first day of spring?? March 20th Luke will be arriving in France to spend his spring break with me! :))) I'm so incredibly excited. What's basically going to happen is that on the evening of the 19th, after I get out of class, I'll take the TGV to CDG where I have a hotel room booked. The reason I had to do this is because Luke's flight gets in at 5:30 am, and the earliest TGV from here to CDG leaves at 8:30 on that day, getting me there at 10:30, which means Luke will have had to wait in the airport for me for 5 hours. And I'd feel awful if he had to do this. I could have also taken the last train on friday, get to CDG around 11 pm and wait for him for 6 hours. Then we'd have to wait even longer till we could check into our hostel at 2 pm. So doing what I'm doing, it makes commuting a whole lot easier (staying next to the airport vs. in paris), and it's actually cheaper than booking a hostel room in paris. Plus check out isn't till 12 from the hotel, so Luke can come back and take a nap and a shower if he wants. So we'll be in Paris for 3 days, staying at St. Christopher's. I stayed there when I went to Paris in January. It's really new and nice.

Then we'll take the TGV to Nice. I've booked us 2 nights at a hostel that's a minute's walk from the beach. I hope it's decently warm.

After that, we'll take the TGV to Poitiers, which entails going back up to Paris and then down to Poitiers. While we're here, I'll show Luke where I live, maybe take him to the school (however I will NOT be attending class this week... it's not going to kill me at all), and I'm hoping to make it to Futuroscope. Maybe we'll take a day trip to La Rochelle. I was there in the summer of 2007 for a music festival, and it's a really nice little town on the Atlantic coast. Luke loves mussels, and they have great seafood. I hate seafood for the most part, but I think he'll be in heaven.

On the night of the 27th, we may have to take an evening train to CDG and stay the night at a hotel because his flight leaves at 11:30 the next day and since it's a sunday, the train doesn't leave early enough for us to get there at least 2 hours before his flight. We'd get there 45 minutes before his flight if we took a train from Poitiers to CDG the day of his flight. Not a good idea. But this part is still being figured out.

I just hope he's ready for the best spring break of his entire life!!! I am.

Behold the new crêpe pan I bought for myself a few days ago!! This will make much better crêpes than a stupid frying pan. Much more "à la française". As you can see it's a lot flatter and has a much wider diameter. I totally didn't need it, but I don't see crêpe pans like this at home. And it's a pink-ish color. I just couldn't say no.

I also made a couple new French friends at school today. I met Sophie in german class. She came up to me and started to talk to me because she knew I was american and she speaks practically fluent english because her mom is from the UK. Then I met Thomas in my interpretation class. Somehow in class we got to talking about sports, and after class he asked me if I ever watched the superbowl. I said occasionally, and he invited me to watch it with him on sunday. The only bad thing about this is that it's on TV here from midnight to 4 in the morning. I have a 9 am class on monday. So when/if he texts me, I'll have to tell him I can't. Plus if it were only going to be us 2, I really wouldn't feel that comfortable. I have absolutely no intention of dating while I'm here. And I went to Monoprix after I got out of class so I could print my train tickets for my vacation. I'm super excited now. I guess I didn't explain the whole story yet. The funny thing is, I feel like I've hardly gone to school at all, and we get a vacation this month from the 12th to the 22nd. Just randomly... I don't know. School hasn't even been in session a month. So I'm taking advantage of it and going first to Toulouse to meet my friend Stéphane who will be there visiting his twin brother, then after a couple days, we'll go to Marseille where he lives. Then come friday night, Stéphane will take me to Toulon, where I'll stay with Miléna and her family for the weekend. They were my french homestay family during my first trip to France in 2006. I haven't seen them in 2.5 years. There's no way I could have stayed in Poitiers. It's a nice town and everything, but I need to get out.

Monday is not my friend... and other realizations

I decided that mondays are the worst they've been for me in a long time. At least I have no classes on wednesdays and 1 class on thursdays that only meets 2 or 3 times a month. But still... Today I woke up at 7:00 and this is what I saw
I don't like being up before the sun is. Then I was at the Fac for 9 hours straight today. I had 4 classes with about an hour or so in between each. All of them were pretty good EXCEPT my last class, which was medieval literature, that I was going to try to take so I could get the requirement of taking FR 317 (medieval lit) here instead of at home. I was told it was easier to do it here. But those people must have taken a lit class that was for exchange students. This class was a regular class for actual french students, and I tried so hard to understand and take notes, etc. But by this time I was tired and my comprehension level had gone wayyy down. Basically the teacher went on and on about the stories and the types of prose we would be reading, with a ton of what seemed like technical vocabulary I didn't know. Towards the end she started throwing out all these page numbers and apparently there's a book I would need to buy and I honestly didn't catch what exactly we had to do for homework. The teacher seemed nice and everything, but I just don't think I can survive in this class. I know this would be the one class I would absolutely loathe throughout the entire semester. I hate literature classes like this anyway. So I think the final verdict is just to take it at home. I'll hate it equally as much, but I'll have to do a lot of reading either way, and I'd prefer to not be clueless. I feel kinda bad because I happened to sit next to a girl from Canada, who obviously wasn't from Quebec, because I totally thought she was american. If I drop the class, I'm pretty sure she'll be the only foreigner in the class, but she seemed to have a handle on it. She was taking all these notes on her computer and wasn't scared to ask questions.

This all being said, I've come to another conclusion. After 8 thorough years of study I can neither understand nor speak french as well as I thought I could. And I feel like a idiot. I can speak and understand retard/baby french. Where it's slow and uncomplicated. Not everyday conversational french between two native speakers. Not such an awesome feeling after you've devoted so much of your time and energy into it. It's very depressing.

And my last conclusion for the day: my degree in french will be practically useless, because I am realizing more and more that i could never do professional translation for a living. I enjoy doing it, but I don't believe I possess nearly enough grammatical/lexical knowledge to do it right and trust myself in doing it. I've never been good with either of these things. And teaching is out of the question because i can't do that either.

It's kinda sickening knowing that everything you depended on for your future success has practically been annihilated.

Some funny pictures

These signs were above the washer and dryer in the laundry room. You don't even need to speak french to know how awful this is haha

This was written on the sign at the bus stop. at the top it says "The rich are going to pay". Sounds like some sort of political thing. I thought it was interesting.

Funny weather we're having...

Today I woke up to pull back my curtain and see that it was snowing outside. That was quite a shocker. Unfortunately it all melted before i was able to take a picture. It started to snow again later, and i'll post a video i took. But today I saw snow, rain, clouds, and sun. It was really weird. The weirdest thing about it is that Poitiers is like Salem, it hardly snows. But there was snow on the ground when I got here and snow again today. This picture is just of the sun going down.

beaucoup plus compliqué que nécessaire

I know I haven't been doing any blog posts lately, but things have *slightly* evened out to the point where I don't need to write about me getting up, showering, eating, and going to school everyday. Nothing out of the ordinary has happened lately... except for a few days ago when I was walking downtown with two girls from Slovakia who live in my residence. We walked past a bar and there was a full blown band (the type with horns and drums and stuff) and a bunch of people dressed in very weird costumes. I tried to ask one guy what was going on, and I really couldn't understand him. It would have been a lot easier to if it hadn't been so loud around there. What's funny is that that was the ONE day where earlier I thought to myself "I don't need to take my cameras in my purse today... I won't see anything worth bringing them along" and this ONE time that I don't, I run into this. That's my life. But I was able to take some pictures and some crappy video with my french phone (my iphone doesn't take video). I'll eventually upload it and add it to this post.

Besides that I've just been trying to get my class schedule figured out. How it works here is that every student already has a "path" of study, and all their classes are pre-set for them. For us, we get to pick and choose whatever we want to take. That's just fine and dandy but the problem is deciding WHAT to take, and all the other logistical factors, like if it's the right level, what kind of credit will I get back home for it, etc. This process has NOT been fun or easy. I was about ready to lose it monday. All week any class I've attended has just been a test run. That's what they suggested we do. It's just so different than home. At home it's so nice and easy and organized. You go online, see all the classes with their times, locations, descriptions, etc. and register. Here I've been kinda deciding what to take by word of mouth. As far as I know, the classes are not posted online. You need to go to a specific bulletin in the school to find the schedule, and finding the stupid thing has been half the battle. And then there's knowing what you're looking at/for once you get there. Since there's so many different year levels, and types of study (I'd try to explain, but it's seems so complicated, and I really don't even understand it). I've had so many questions this week, and it's been tough because I'd really like to go see Sylvie (my director lady for the Centre Oregon) but she's always so busy and I don't want to bother her with my stupid questions everyday. I know that's what she's there for, but still... I feel like a nuisance. I still feel like I have so many unanswered questions. And here's another little challenge: they like to change class times and room numbers. This wasn't so awesome for me when I was 30 minutes late for my german class. What happened was that last week, when Sylvie suggested the class, she told me it was either in 1 of 2 rooms, but she couldn't exactly remember which one. So today I tried both, and I got there early for this reason. I went to one of the rooms, and there was a class going on inside. I waited until 4 (when my class was supposed to start) and no one left the room, so I figured that whatever class was going on in there was going from like 3 to 5 or something. So I went downstairs to the other room. Locked. So I got Sylvie and we went on this big chase asking all these people where the room ought to be. Turns out it was in the first room I was at the whole time, which made me look like an idiot. And then I get there half an hour late. Because they changed the time.

So this is one of the seemingly numerous examples of pretty much everything here being much more complicated than necessary. I could go into the whole situation of me moving into my dorm, and the money situation with my french bank account, but I can just make a few long stories short and say that these situations both were also much more complicated than necessary.

Ever since I got here, I feel like someone who's skiing, being dragged by a boat, and just can't get up on the water. I hope I can get on my feet soon though. I think I will enjoy life a lot more. I didn't expect this to be easy, but i also didn't expect to nearly have to lose my sanity over it either.

Day 14- 1/22

Today I got to sleep in until 10:30... when a guy from Orange knocked on my door. Basically long story short, my cell phone quit working. I went to the Orange store and they gave me a number to call. I went to Sylvie's office to ask her to call for me but she wasn't there, but her husband was. Leo was really nice and called for me and they said they could have another one delivered to me the next day. I left my old phone at the concierge just in case I wasn't here and there they could swap and I would pick up the new phone later. The guy went to the wrong concierge I guess, they gave him my room number, and came up to my room looking for the phone. I told him it really was with the concierge and i went downstairs with him and exchanged phones. I'm so glad to have a new one because before i got my own internet cord and not having a functioning phone, i felt really disconnected. When i got back to my room i fell back asleep and dreamt that i slept in till like 6:30, but i only slept in till about 1. For the rest of the day I just kinda chilled because this was the first day in quite a while since i've been here that i could just do whatever i wanted and had no plans. I thought about going downtown to look for a black scarf, but really didn't feel like going anywhere. At 6:00 pm my time Luke got online and I was able to talk to him through skype. I had a webcam in my computer so he could see me but I couldn't see him, but he's gonna get a webcam next week hopefully. My parents are probably going to get one set up too. After I talked to Luke, I went to the kitchen to get my milk from the fridge for my cereal (dinner) and ran into 2 girls from Slovakia that have only been here a few days and don't speak any French but really good English. There here on the Erasmus program and they said their courses should be taught in English, but other than that I really don't know how they're going to survive. There are French people who speak English, but a majority of them don't speak it well, if at all. In my opinion they should have gone to England or Germany, or really any other Germanic-language speaking country. After talking to them and having dinner, I went back to my room to upload more photos and finally got photos from day 7 on picasa (see day 7 for the link). At 11 my time Luke got back on after going to classes. We haven't talked in a while so there was a good amount of stuff to talk about. As for tomorrow, I plan on sleeping in and maybe going shopping.