A beginner's guide to living and studying in Paris

re-bonjour (part 1)

2007-08-08T19:35:00.000+02:00

I was going to put 'Hello world' as the title, but given that this isn't a new blog, and it's not my first program in a new language either, I didn't think it entirely appropriate. And 're-hello world' just didn't sound right, whereas in french, re-bonjour works quite nicely.

So there we have it. I've been thinking about blogging for ages, more or less the past 4 months out of the 5 since I last wrote. But inbetween exams and adventures and now work, I haven't had time.

Just recently though, it's sort of gotten to the point where I need to write again. Not only am I sort of alone again, but there are just so many feelings floating around my head, that I've got to let it out somewhere, if only for the sake of my phone bill and the poor ears of my nearest and dearest.

Since the March 20th, when I last blogged, let's see....
I spent A LOT of time writing letters in french and begging for stage, which finally came to fruit at the Salon RF et Hyper frequence where I met my current employer (ahem*), hence me currently working in France...

there were exams and birthday parties a plenty...

Oh yes, that's where I left off, we went to Lyon for the weekend on the TGV (zoomy zoom).
and this is what Lyon looks like at night:
Summer happened in April and we had plenty of picnics and ice cream on the banks of the Seine
More picnics were had at the parc de la Villette, and the Opera Bastille was visited for some (dodgy) Czech 20th Century Opera...

There were some exams...

Lovely Beth came to visit and we marauded around town and got very wet in a downpour at Versailles....
Becky turned 21, lots of beer was drunk (goes without saying, regardless of parties or not), and a small flotilla of rubber ducks arrived on the 7th floor...

We went cycling in the Loire valley, played in some Chateaux, and I had my first scrape with the french medical system (darn tonsils, and I'm still waiting to be reimboursed!)....

The Louvre was explored on a quiet friday night and all the Jan van der Heijden were duly sought out, along with some wombly looking statues....

Un beau weekend à Paris Part I

2007-03-20T13:52:00.000+01:00

I’m definitely getting more French. I’m currently sat on the Eurostar, waiting to leave Gare du Nord, and I am getting annoyed at the number of middle aged British Couples whinging to each other “it’s not as posh as Waterloo, is it?”. Well, actually, I much prefer it. But nevermind. I am obviously looking quite French today, draped in a new scarf and and looking intellectual (at least, I like to think I do) whilst reading “La Peste”. My disguise must be working better today – yesterday, a random shouted “Hello” at us as I walked Sarah to the Coach station, today, the chic French woman who should be sat in the seat next to me tells me in French that she’s going to sit elsewhere if the train isn’t too busy. Well hurray! I have two seats to myself to lounge about in.

And we’re off. Heading out into the scummier banlieues of Paris. I can’t really claim it’s better that the suburbs of London. In fact, I’d be inclined to say that the route into London is much more interesting. The route into London seems to be less of a wasteland of grey houses next to thick ribbons of train tracks headed north, less random tower blocks jutting out from nothing-y housing estates, crowned with garish neon signs advertising long forgotten businesses. If I lived here on the outskirts of Paris, I’d probably be inclined to set fire to buses too.

Ho hum. And so the hum drum of the wheels on the tracks nibbles away at the bliss of the weekend. It was rather unfortunate that the weather took a turn for the worse and our rambles around Paris weren’t as glorious as they could have been given the grey clouds rolling covering the sky and the disappearance of the summer temperatures of last week; but nonetheless, it was a pretty awesome weekend.

On Saturday, we took to the Marais after a brief snooze (Sarah having arrived at 7 in the morning). It wasn’t until we hit Rue des Roziers that the practicalities of Saturday in the Jewish quarter properly hit me. Saturday being Shabbat, most businesses were closed, the usually bustling falafel sellers and bakers closed and quiet, shutters down, but there was still plenty to be seen and eaten. We happened across a small deli selling lots of delicious looking things, and very happily found some gluten-free yumminess – marzipan balls rolled in pistachios or pine nuts. We took one each and continued to ramble around the streets in one of the oldest established parts of Paris. Every so often a Ferrari would cruise its way down the otherwise pedestrianised streets, reminding you that in fact this is one of the cooler parts of town. The buildings have a certain greyness about them, world weary and slightly down at heel, bearing witness to the many changes of the quartier and imbued with a sense of history.

Sprinkled with interesting designer shops and boutiques, perhaps Saturday was the best day to visit – fewer tourists, and less thronging masses pounding the pavements in their desire to consume. Contrast this with Rue de Rivoli (roughly equivalent to Oxford St in London, New St in Birmingham or god forbid, The Mall at Cribbs Causeway), and you begin to thing that keeping the Sabbath really is a good thing.

The Marais is full of fascinating architecture, scattered with old mansions, turrets and sculptures, little court yards, temples and churches. It’s easy to imagine how it could have been in days gone by. The Knights Templar used to have a fortress around here, which I believe was destroyed for fear of their power round about the time of the Revolution. I’ll have to check out my facts on this one. Just trust me, it’s fascinating. If the light had been better, I would have photographed more of the interesting buildings and architecture, but here is a little taster – can you spot the invader on the corner of the library?

Our meandering eventually led us to the Picasso Museum, where I was most pleasantly surprised to find that I do in fact like Picasso. I can’t say I loved all of his works, but know I know that there’s an awful lot more to him than lurid cubist women crying, I’m a much bigger fan. It might have helped that we accidentally went round the museum backwards and so started with some of the more mellow stuff from his old age. Admittedly, I was quite ignorant of the breadth of his work before visiting, but we found lots of interesting sculptures among the paintings, and I came away thinking that he was actually quite a genius. When we eventually got round to the beginning of his life, I was amazed to see the way he could just adapt to any style – some of his early works were very much in the style of Van Gogh, and you could see influences from Rodin in some of his sculptural studies, as well as a great many other artists. He could turn his hand to anything it would seem. And all of this beautiful work in a beautiful mansion in the Marais. I’d thoroughly recommend it to any art lover, even if you don’t think you like him. Nice building, nice work, not too crowded. Beautiful.

From the Musée Picasso we set out to find some lunch, and weren’t disappointed. We stopped on a corner near Place des Vogses, at a little table under some patio heaters, at a lovely little café perfectly poised to watch the world go by. Omelettes and salad wolfed down, we wandered happily into the nearby Place and peered into all the curious little shops and galleries, accompanied by a rather good street band.

After our pootle around the Marais, we eventually crossed the Rue de Rivoli (I swear their should be some kind of warning sign as you head south from the Marais – you need lights to cross the pedestrians), past the Hotel de Ville, on over the river and down towards Notre Dame. Our plan was to head towards Ile St Louis, which is supposed to be quieter and less touristy, but I suppose someone let the cat out of the bag there. It wasn’t really that quiet, which is a shame, because it really is a little gem of a place. It’s main drag is full of lovely little boutiques and Salons du Thé and ice cream parlours. I am told that it is here where the best ice cream in Paris is sold, but unfortunately it was a tad too cold and the queues were to long for us to bother. We did however find a wonderful little chocolate shop on our second pass down the street. On the first pass, from the corner of my eye, it’s windows seemed to be full of dusty old knick knacks and antiques. On the second pass, I noticed that everything in the window was actually made of chocolate – books, turtles, trees, even little chocolate ‘crottes’ (dog poo!). We had a quick poke inside to see if it was possible to get a sit down and a hot chocolate, but it seemed to be someone’s sitting room. There were about 5 tables and a piano, with a lovely serving counter along one side full of yummy looking cakes. Alas, it was already crammed to the rafters, so we moved on to a café over looking the river for our much needed coffee.

After a quick peek at the Institut du Monde Arabe and its fabulous mechanical-iris covered façade, we we hopped on the metro to the other side of town to investigate the greatest food hall of the Left Bank – La Grande Epicerie de Paris. It didn’t disappoint, not least because of all the tasters offered to Saturday shoppers. We tried some delicious cherry liqueur chocolates, unfortunately not realising exactly what they were before hand, bit into them, and both of us got cherry liqueur all over our hands and faces. D’oh! Had better luck with the ganaches – all together easier to eat. The aisles were packed full of festive sweets for easter, along with the marvellous sweetie counter and amazing cakes. I have made a resolution to try a small something from there every weekend. Mmmmmmmmmm…..

It was rather unfortunate then that we had to rush home and eat our dinner in a rather too hurried fashion so that we could leave in time for a party on a boat, which turned out to be a bit of a let down, but at the very least, we got to see a small bit of Paris at night from the river, including the statue of Liberty (there is a mini replica in the middle of the river, downstream from the Eiffel tower) and the Eiffel Tower in all its glory.......

PS. Does Richard Gere ever take the Eurostar? I’m sure I just saw him in the Buffet car……..maybe it was just one of those faces…..

In which, Emilie immerses herself in French culture

2007-03-11T19:27:00.000+01:00

After 5 hours spent strolling around the Left Bank in the sunshine yesterday, and a beautiful sunday at spent the Musée Rodin, I feel like I have undergone a small cultural transformation. In the last two weeks, there seems to have been a mini revolution in my frenchness. All of a sudden, I have not one but two langauge tandems, I have committed myself to studying Albert Camus' "La Peste" for a FLE project, I have visited the theatre, explored my arrondissement, engaged in 5 minutes of conversation with a random artist in the street, discovered new watering holes and micro-breweries, nearly partied the night away on a boat, and visited an independant cinema.

Oh, and I rode the tram to a french recrutement fair, had lunch at the Cité U and explored its parc. What a nightmare the recrutement fair was. Even as we were queueing up to go in, I was thinking how much easier it would be to just visit the Salon d'Agriculture next door and look at cows for several hours rather than put myself through the misery of trying to find an internship in France. We'll just gloss over that for the time being.....

So. We went to see Harold Pinter's "The Caretaker" in french. Given what Wikipedia says of this play - " there is inconsequential, random and at times surreal dialogue but deliberately no real story or structure" - it's not really a surprise that I didn't entirely get it. I'm not sure I would have completely understood it in English, but there we go. The theatre was pretty impressive, the seats were uber cheap (10 euros, gotta love that) and the acting was good.

We also tried to go to a gig on the "Guinguette Pirate" - a boat moored by the Bibliothèque Nationale, but it turned out that you had to have a reservation, and our names weren't on the list....so we crossed the river to the Cour St Emillion and found ourselves an "English" micro brewery among the converted former wine warehouses - a very nice part of town in which to spend an evening, even if the ginger and lemon blonde beer we tried smelled rather dubious. The river was ridiculously high and we could see cement mixers and double decker buses parked on the quais being inundated. It was just a lovely night to be wondering around with friends.

Becky and I also went for a massive walk into China town, and rather bizzarely found an Irish shop stocking Dairly Milk, Marmite and Chocolate Hobnobs. We bought ourselves a CurlyWurly each and happily strolled home munching away on our sweeties.

The weather has been just fantastic this week. I have been wondering around without a coat, just a scarf. It's been so sunny that it's a wonder my shoulders haven't burned. This afternoon was almost the perfect sunday (it lacked ice cream and really decent meal, but was otherwise nearly there).This is the Hotel Biron in the grounds of the Musée Rodin. The statue in the middle of the pond is called "Ugolin" (which I believe is also the name of one of the main characters in Jean de Florette....not sure what the significance is here). You can't really tell from this picture, but looking back towards the Hotel, you get an eyeful of Ugolin's bottom....
Unfortunately, we didn't see half of the collection because the orchards were closed for archealogical surveys, but one of my favourite pieces "la Cathédrale", was in the Hotel Biron, shown below
After the musée we took a long stroll into Saint Germain and saw the huge procession of sunday skaters go past. There are hundreds of them and they have to close the streets to let them pass. They all looked like they were having a thoroughly good time while I watched and ate a nutella waffle and got chocolate all over my face. I will definitely have to try the skating one day....

We finished our excursion with a trip to the boating lake at the jardin du Luxembourg, where we got in the way of many small children trying to push their boats around. Many small children and many big children in the form of dads comandeering their children's boats. We overheard one dad "helping" his child to control his boat saying "why didn't you push it?!" after he had totally dominated all his child's attempts to do so. They then proceeded to have a fight with their big bamboo boat-pushing sticks. Our mission now is to build a radio-controlled and/or artificially intelligent battleship to dominate those of all the small children. Additionally, it may be nuclear powered so that it doesn't run out of batteries in the middle of the pond... Just you wait......

Falling in love again

2007-02-27T02:25:00.000+01:00

We're over the hump everybody! Half way through the academic year, hurrah!

Having had a wonderful week in Bristol and Oxford and seen all my nearest and dearest (with the somewhat notable exception of dear Nicky, tu me manque!), I left for the airport on sunday with a heavy feeling, not just on my shoulders, in fact not at all on my shoulders - half way through the year and I have mastered the art of packing light. 13.5kg. Take that... anyway, I digress, I left for the airport with a heavy feeling in my heart. Bristol had welcomed me back and all of a sudden I felt that I belonged there, with its wonderful foodie-green scene, fantastic restaurants, kooky little shops, and beautiful harbour, not to mention all my friends and family. It continues to amaze me how much it is evolving and I just can't wait to live there again, even if it means getting soaked through on a friday night just to go to the cinema. I liked the rain, and more importantly, the fact that I could walk there and didn't have to take a smelly metro. It felt all airy and light and...sigh. It was good.

So I thought it would be difficult to settle back in again, and I suppose it is only monday/tuesday morning, but already things are beginning to re-excite me about Paris. In the dark days between christmas and the exams, we barely left the house. So to celebrate the fact that we all passed the unit we hated the most, we made 4 frying pan pizzas (no small feat in our tiny kitchens), drank some port, and decided to go out to the mythical rue Oberkampf. I say mythical, because although we are repeatedly told that it's the place to be, the only time we've been there before it was a bit dead. We had quite some luck tonight though. The scummy student bar we'd planned on going to was somewhat surprisingly closed, despite the erasmus student's bible for going out in Paris (parisetudiant.fr) telling us that there was a gig there. So we headed down rue Oberkampf, minding our own business when a girl stopped us and offered us free drinks if we went inside her bar and stayed there for half an hour. Who could refuse? She made it sound like it would be an ordeal - "you'll only have to stay for half an hour", but it was really quite fun. They were filming for some weekly cultural magazine thingy, with a band playing at the bar, followed by a stand up comedian (who we totally didn't understand) and some banter from the presenter. There were cameras and lighting rigs everywhere, and we kept being told to shut up and look interested, or not too interested, or more natural.... there were lots of conflicting orders in fact.

When the band had finished - I say band, but it appeared to be une chanteuse and her backing group - some TV types came round wanting to film people perusing her new album. First the woman asked my infamously camera-shy belgian friend, and so somehow I ended up in front of the camera turing the cd over in my hands following there directions - "et tourne, et l'ouvrir, ... , et ne bouge plus". Ne bouge plus? I was a bit taken aback by this last instruction to stop turning the disc over. I was having enough trouble trying to find my 'interested face'. I think I may have just flared my nostrils and spluttered a bit at this point. Makes me sounds a bit like a dragon, doesn't it? Maybe I'll never make it into her album adverts then...

The endlessly charming belgians managed to procure us some more free drinks, which we drank only too happily, and as the bar emptied, we were asked to go and stand at the bar and look cool (at least, I assume that's what they wanted us to do) whilst the presenter did his closing blurb. I didn't know where to look, or what language to speak. It was amusing. I came to the conclusion that french would be best so that we looked more pouty and french for all the viewers at home. So that we'd fit in better or something. I started to talk to my friend about the comic pair of teenage boys we'd seen rapping on the metro earlier in the evening, and we somehow ended up imitating their silly dance. They were about 13, and posed all over the train doing roly-poly thingies on the bars. The thing was, Deniz and I were imitating this dance in full view of the camera. I just hope they zoomed in on the presenter at that point.

To top it all, we got speaking to some locals who wanted to know what such a rag tag bunch of frallemanglish (that's french, german and english in case you're wondering) speaking foreigners were doing in such a part of Paris. He asked us where we were from, and it is here I suppose I just got carried away with the gallic tradition of gesturing. I threw up my hands and said "from all the countries of Europe", and the back of my right hand flew into the face of the presenter, who was trying to walk past. Poor thing. I apologised profusely, and he just told my it was ok, cos I had "un accent charmant".

So, let this be a lesson to you. Admittedly, there was port and wine involved earlier in the evening, but after a strong black coffee I thought I was quite sober. I don't really see how two small beers on top of that could have made me that silly. Apparently, even in my finest stripey top and chic new bob, complete with full on gallic gesturing, I will never ever fit in as a native even if I'm drunk enough to open my mouth and attempt it.

You'll have to watch France5 on friday night to see if we made it to the final cut.

Brizzle, Ingerlaaaand

2007-02-20T00:04:00.000+01:00

I'm back in the land of the living, the land of toast and crumpets and tea and roast beef and rain and cold and driving on the left. But only for a week. Hurrah!
After 5 months in Paris, I'm pretty well conditioned to look the wrong way when crossing the road, which makes navigating Bristol pretty interesting. Only 5 months since I left this city, 4 months since my last visit, and Bristol seems to have steathily evolved. Yet more pasta/coffee/juice bars crowd the Triangle vying for the student lunch market, the old newsagents and photo processor eeked out in favour of our ever changing faddy food trends. The Wills building is shiny and new, mostly revealed now from it's year under plastic covers and removal of a hundred years worth of pollution. We ask ourselves what it will look like in another one hundred years. Will pollution even still exist?
The marvellous Blue Monkey, famous as a cocktail-bar-cum-front-for-money-launderers has gone and been replaced with a designer chair shop. Most sadly of all, the last independant record store, Replay, has gone. I am probably personally responsible for it's closure, having never bought a record there, but the knowledge that I could get the most random independent labels there should I have wished always reassured me. Where would I go now? Alas, tis gone.
I almost forgot how to find the Epi in the Student Union and was most alarmed not to be asked for my student card on the way in. What happened to all the security?
The most outrageous Rubix cube coup led to our coming first in the pub quiz, the help of a penknife wielding geologist and a little pritt-stik winning us £1.90 each. Just enough for a student pint then. Aaaaah my wallet likes not feeling like it's been punched with each pint. It also likes student bars where you can get chocolate and crisps to go with you liquid refreshment, and open airy bars where you aren't smoked to death.
I'll admit though, as I popped to the ever convenient Tesco to grab a croissant for breakfast (some things you obviously can't just give up like that) I felt mildly dirty for giving my money to this behemoth of the high street rather than the smiley girl across the road in the family run bakers, not wishing the surly student cashier a bonne journée as I left as I would normally in Paris. I think they may just win on courtesy there. I was even almost convinced that my "chocolate croissant" was an insult to the french tradition of patisserie. I've never seen a chocolate croissant quite like that in Paris....
However, the closest we can get to a small local business, the Chandos Deli, definitely won hands down when it came to lunch, a crayfish and rocket sandwich on soft brown bread. I'm sure the french would have something to say about the spelling of rocket, but I was definitely spoiled for choice with sandwich fillings. Maybe I just haven't been looking hard enough in Paris, but you really don't seem to get much choice above ham, cheese, salad, and various permutations of the above fillings when looking for quick bite of lunch in Paris. And there's no escaping those bloody baguettes. I will have to try and prove myself wrong.
Perhaps one of the strangest feelings was once again finding myself in a small city FULL of students, all concentrated into one area. Coming from a small school where I recognised just about every one back into a real university with several thousands of students, I couldn't help feeling mildly lost. I looked for recognisable faces everywhere, but there's a whole new year of freshers in ridiculously short skirts out there. Suddenly I am old, all my friends are about to graduate and I find myself agreeing with the french that the stereotypical english girl and her buttock skimmingly- short skirt does look silly and impractical....but it still feels like home and I want to defend this 'non-fashion' (as the french seem to think it is), the hoody wearing, boots-tucked-into-ugg-boots raaahs. I don't know why I want to defend it when it's not a trend I go out of my way to participate in, but as something that seems to be definingly british, I feel I should.
Any way you look at it, it's still going to be incredibly difficult to fit in when I get back and all my former housemates have graduated.....

This way be poo!

2007-02-06T22:15:00.000+01:00

Last weekend, I met up with a couple of friends in the bright sunshine under the Eiffel Tower. Two of them having terrible hangovers, we went and found chips and pizza for lunch (as you do when in the vicinity of the eiffel tower, and everything costs an arm and a leg). We strolled along the Seine to the Pont d'Alma, which was where I realised we could go on a visit to the sewers. Having long suspected that there bist crocodiles in them there sewers (that's what gloucestershire folk say when prospecting in the sewers....), I was quite keen to check it out, to continue my strange fascination with subterrean Paris.
Note #1, sewers are interesting, but don't necessarily mix with Hangovers. Somewhat unavoidably, it smelt quite a lot like poo, but it was fascinating.
Seeing these nuts and bolts of functioning Paris is kind of like walking through a Stephen Biesty cross section, complete with obligatory person sitting on the loo (in case you're not familiar with Stephen Biesty's Incredible cross sections, they always include a person on the toilet. The first thing we did as children was look for the man on the toilet).
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, I didn't see any wildlife. No crocodiles, no terrapins, no Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles (although there are pictures of a TMHT gig back in the day. I wasn't even aware they'd formed a band!), not even a rat. The best part, apart from marvelling at the stuff that goes down the toilet, was the giant 4m diameter balls the roll along the sewers to clean them. Look! You can't tell how big the ball is from the pic, but it's honestly huge. And they just roll it through the sewers. I was pretty impressed.
From a dull and boring point of view of sanitation and civil engineering type things, it was fascinating to see how the city's sanitation system has developped through the ages. I'm a bit of a sucker for old maps, and most parisien museums have lots of maps of how Paris has grown, but I learnt that one of the city's main water providing stream/river thingies used to run about 100m from our building. We saw how the romans had miles and miles of aqueduct bringing water from far away, and how the river became more and more polluted and disease ridden as the population exploded. I just find these things interesting, I can't help it.
What's more there were lots of pictures of proud "égoutiers" (sewer workers) in their nice blue overalls and caps and kneeling by manhole covers staring into the middle distance. If I was younger and more impressionable (ehem) I'd want ot be an égoutier. It's a very important job you know!
If you can stomach the smell and don't mind poo (you don't have to watch it floating around, honest!) , it's really very interesting, so much so that my friends had it on their to-do list as written by a parisien friend. Perhaps best avoided if you have a hangover though......

Madeleine

2007-02-03T13:17:00.000+01:00

As I am wont to do when I have massively scary amounts of revision to do and I just can't concentrate, I just went for a walk in the park. It doens't hit the spot like a massive ramble around Bristol, through Ashton Court and across the Downs with Sarah, but it'll have to do.
As I sat on a bench in the sunshine contemplating the mysteries of life, several odd things happened. The bench started whispering to me. This makes me sound like I've lost it completely, but the benches do actually talk. I thought I was mad the first time I jogged past one and heard it, so much so that I stopped to check, but they do actually talk, it's part of an installation consisting of recordings of foreign students living in Paris talking about love. It's just a bit weird the first time you come across it.
Secondly, I witnessed one of the many hundreds of lycra clad joggers shaking her ass at a bush like Shakira for a full 5 minutes. It was most odd. I did wonder why she was dancing like that at a bush, her back to the path. She looked like she might be having a fit of somekind, perhaps also talking in tongues. She proceeded to do normal-person stretching after that. Whatever floats your boat....
Lastly, a runner in a fetching little knitted hat stopped by my bench, panted a bit and said "tu t'appelles Madeleine?" I didn't hear him properly the first time, so I asked him to repeat himself. I wasn't quite sure what to say, apart from, "no sorry, that's not me". He looked mildly disappointed and started running again.
I sat on my bench in the sunshine for a while longer, and then as the chill began to get me, headed out of the park, the pressing need to cram text books into my brain weighing on me. The thought occurred to me, what if I'd said yes? I could pretend to be Madeleine....where would it have taken me? Would I have been whisked away from the chains that shackle me to my desk, lifted from the agonising confusion of digital modulation and error correcting codes and transistors for an adventure in Paris and beyond.....
I'll never know. Perhaps I should go and sit on that bench more often....

one less tree

2007-01-30T19:38:00.000+01:00

I was sad to notice today that one of the trees lining rue de tolbiac had been shredded into the ground, right outside the bakery. There are trees every 3 metres or so all along the street, each one surrounded but it's own little iron skirty thing set into the pavement (which can be quite dangerous trip hazards), so it sort of upsets the balance of things when one just gets ripped up. I have no idea what was wrong with it. I hope it's gone to a better place. I wonder if they will replace it...

Since I last wrote, I have spent 4 days sliding down mountains, both with and without skis, I've been very bruised and generally tired, and realised that my whole year is pretty much in the balance these next two weeks. We have yet more exams, and if I fail any of these (probability of failure given previous experience = really quite high, not even lying like I do about these things at home) then my whole carefully constructed program of prerequisites comes crashing down, and I might as well go home. So. If you don't mind some temporary silence on the blog front, I'm going to go and assimilate some Proakis, forget stupid lecturer man and his incessant over the top equations and learn about some Galois Fields. I believe Galois fields have something to do with the number of smoking french men you can put a hedge around, or is that a gauloise field?! Maybe they're going to have to redefine that, given that the smoking ban starts the day after tomorrow. Couldn't be happier. Can't wait for the full ban to come into effect.

Culture Clash

2007-01-15T17:05:00.000+01:00

It is with much merriment today that I read that France once begged to be part of the UK. Never, I say never, would I be happy to allow such arrogant bastards to call themselves British.

This morning I nearly boiled over in anger at the sheer arrogance of one of my lecturers, but I refrained as I felt it might end up in me crying and him expelling me from his course. Twat. He is completely unapproachable, and so condescending that the second time we met him (he was supervising a lab) he reminded us that the lab report had to be written in French (as opposed to english). Why did he think we were here?! Since then, he has proved himself to be extremely intelligent and able to reel off complicated equations without so much as a glance at his notes. He even managed to show that a simplification made in an english language textbook was not 'trivial' as the english authors had said, but indeed extremely subtle and clever. I beg to differ. I'm British. I don't need 3 pages of equations to show where a factor of 2 came from. I could show that (albeit not very rigorously) with a small graph and a hand-waving argument (as the beloved Mini-Cradderz might say). But despite obviously knowing what he's doing when it comes to his subject, he just cannot teach it. What really annoys me about him is how you can ask him a question and he just brushes it aside by saying, "ah, but you know that. It's obvious". Clearly, the answer is not obvious, else I wouldn't have asked. I appreciate that he might be forcing us to think for ourselves, but when I've spent the lesson sat there with my face screwed up, I evidently don't understand it, and no amount of thinking will help because he has failed to teach me the basics. He never looks up from scribbling on the board to see if the class has understood, he writes illegibly, and he gets other students to explain examples, so that nobody ever gets a proper explanation of anything. In short, he pushed me over the edge today and I've lost my respect for him. He's just horrible.

I sort of apologise for this somewhat racist rant, but then after spending friday night being harassed by more arrogant french men, I'm not feeling that apologetic. It's not that I hate France as a nation and all it's people...maybe just half it's people...and the small kids who push in front of you at the zoo.... (that's another story).

Talking of asses, I found this in the menagerie. I believe it's a wild french donkey, but I'm not sure. He seemed to be enjoying his mud bath anyway.

Back in town

2007-01-07T00:24:00.000+01:00

I had started to write a "Happy New Year"entry a few days ago, but it turned into a massive ramble about the not very exciting things I got up to over christmas. It may yet get published, but I was beginning to bore myself with it's rambliness, so it will probably undergo some harsh editing first. Did you need to know that? No. Shit. I've turned into a boring person...or maybe it's the opposite. Maybe I've been too busy living so I haven't needed to write everything down in my blog for a while....
Any which ways... Happy New Year to you all. If I saw you over christmas, it was great to see you and catch up with you. Sorry for being so full of cold. If I didn't see you over christmas, you were lucky to escape my snotiness, but I'm sad to have missed you and I sincerely hope I will see you soon.
So, I'm back in Paris, and after a delicious week of lounging around in bed until midday, reading books, watching some TV, being very touristy and otherwise chilling out, I'm feeling quite sparky and upbeat about this new year business. I've just finished all my washing, so I everything feels fresh and ready to start again. Is it only my mum who says that you have to start the new year with a tidy house? Is it just us and our weird obsessions...? Anyway. I'm ready.
Paris is still unreasonably warm, to the point where I've been wandering around the house wearing a vest (ok, well I was running up and down 6 floors of stairs to do my washing) and leaving the house wearing just a t-shirt and a jumper. In a way I'm happy that it's so warm, but the other part of my is a bit sad that I spent so long at the airport rearranging all my luggage and cramming all my thick jumpers into Tim's holdall. Also a bit sad that my nice new warm winter coat should be relegated to the warderobe after such a pathetically short cold spell, but I expect things will get an awful lot colder before they get much warmer. With news of this year's El Niño and super hot summer's on their way, the first snow having only just arrived in the Alps, and Gordon Brown's new climate tax on budget airlines (thanks for the bill easyJet, I booked that flight in November!), who knows what on earth we can expect.... Maybe this year will be the second and last time I ever go skiing!
Moving on...
This week, I seem to have been following the entire anglophone world around Paris. On New Year's Day, the Père Lachaise cemetry was packed full of tourists. There was a big queue to buy the 5euro maps, and a big crowd around the map panel, so we just wandered round willy-nilly until the sun went in and the temperature began to fall. We didn't really find anyone famous, but one grave that struck me was that of Victor Noir. He grave is marked with a life size bronze effigy, but it was a bit of a mystery to me he was covered in verdigris apart from the toes of his shoes and his groin, both of which were polished.
On tuesday we visited the Catacombs, having waited in line for about 20 mins with what seemed to be every american student in Paris. It was a strange how inhuman a pile of bones can be....the way they'd stacked all the tibias with the knee end showing made pretty patterns...and they'd arranged the skulls in a decorative way too. I suppose it's just difficult to imagine that all these skeletons were once people walking around. It was an interesting place. Miles and miles of bones. Apparently, the number of skeletons heaped up underneath Paris is larger than it's current living population. But it's no way to build a city. It's not really that surprising that there aren't any skyscrapers (or "gratte-ciels") in central Paris when you consider that subterrainean Paris is holier than swiss cheese.
Having said that, we then visited Central Paris' only sky-scraper - the tour Montparnasse. I was mildly disappointed. The view from the top was great, and I was very happy to be able to spot home from the top, but I'd been told that the lift was amazingly fast. From this I imagined that large accelerations would be involved in a rollercoaster stylee, and I would at least get that "left my stomach behind" feeling, but in fact it was a really rather boring ride in a lift. Granted, it climbed 56 floors in about the same time as it takes the lift here in our student halls to climb 7 floors, but... you didn't feel any acceleration at all. Maybe I should just consider that the product of french über engineering, but it just didn't feel exciting. I won't labour the point further
Next time, we're going to visit the sewers and search for that elusive crocodile.....

On wednesday, we seemed to be visiting the Pompidou centre with all of Australia and half of Holland. The Hergé exposition was rather good fun and full of cool pics and interesting fact-lets, but the sheer number of people bustling to see everything diminished the experience somewhat. I'm growing to detest french children and the way they push in front of you. I always feel that I should give way to them, because, well...it's sort of a children's exposition. But they're just damn rude really. I think I will go back on a thursday afternoon after the holidays when it's not so touristy. I'm not a tourist, moi, J'habite ici! Je suis parisienne!
That's why I know about secret places like the Arènes de Lutece. OK, so they are pointed out in the Dorling Kindersly guide to Paris, but they were one of the places my hostesse took my the first time I visited Paris, so they're a little bit magic for me, and a little bit off the tourist track.Monkey wanted to play and pretend he was an animal in Roman times and growl from behind the animal cages....but he's not very convincing as a nasty animal....just not big enough...

We walked all around Paris, and it was no where near as cold as when we were here this time last year. This time last year it snowed for 2 or 3 days and we actually rode a whole metro line just to stay out of it.....
Our rambles took us to the Jewish quarter and Rue des Roziers, where Tim managed to find his chips and I managed to find the falafel I'd been wanting to try for so long. They were just falafel, but they didn't disappoint. I was quite hungry by that stage, but having walked all the way there, those falafel really hit the spot. It was, perhaps unsurprisingly, full of american tourists, but a lot of the bakeries seemed to be closed, so I will definitely have to go back there again to try out some Jewish bakery products....
For some reason, from there, we walked to le Jardin du Palais Royal, which was a lot of fun. I suspect it is even more fun in the summer, but even on a grey january day, trying to climb the pillars along with all the small children who are being helped up by their parents is a lot of fun.

Here is Tim doing his best statue impersonation in the Jardin du Palais Royal. From there, it seemed only natural to check out Place Vedôme, so we did... it is a square with a big column in it, surrounded by very expensive jewellery shops. I won't bore you with it. It's grey. It has a column. Like I said. There also seemed to be a lot of middle aged women checking out the windows of the shops. They have specially trained young men standing on the doors to tell you that you probably don't have enough money to actually go into the shop, hence all the people crowded round the windows. I had a quick peek in most of the windows, but I found most of it just incredibly vulgar. So... not one of my personal favourites in Paris. Maybe it's nicer in the sunshine...
Apart from that, I spent a lot of the week dozing, which was great, and occasionally popping out to check out some bars. We even went to the 'mythical' rue Oberkampf. Perhaps it was just dead cos everybody was still on their holidays or something. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't as bangin' as I'd hope either. Will try again later. Next time knowing how to get home. I wouldn't say I got us hopelessly lost, but we did walk up and down the same street 3 times, and at one point ended up on the Boulevard de Belleville. Belleville is like another planet to some Parisiens. Others love it, but I've yet to find out the truth...either way, as it's pretty much on the eastern extreme of Paris, I wasn't taking us in the direction of home... Now I know to just trust the compass. Don't wear the trendy watch. Take the knackered watch with the compass that people ridicule. It is useful, I swear.
And on that note I leave you. Tomorrow will be a sad day of crashing back into boring engineering land and homework to do, but with lots of fun things to look forward to. I will keep you updated.
Ciao bellas e bellos!

Raining in Reims

2006-12-16T23:37:00.000+01:00

So. I've nearly been awake for 18 hours now. Hang on, isn't that normal? No, I think my point is that I left the house at 7 this morning to get to Reims, I spent all day walking around in the rain, and I've only just got back. And it was 11 o' clock... dammit, I got all caught up in the Blogosphere and ... I'm so sleepy.

A brief resumé of the day:

We discovered that the French railway system is nearly as silly as the British railway system, in that we ended up killing time in a random french town and arrived in Reims 2 hours after our planned ETA. All because the internet told us to.
We tasted champagne with Russian Gangsters (ok, that's probably me spreading viscious rumors again. They probably weren't gangsters. They may not have been russian)
We ruined some champagne by shaking the bottle when it was busy playing "Dead Lions*" for THREE years. Apparently (if my french serves me correctly) champagne bottles have to lie very still for 3 years and not be disturbed... ho hum... not that one.
We went to not one, but TWO British pubs in one day, in one city. Shame on me.
We saw a cathedral that is not entirely unlike the Notre Dame de Paris. Cathedrals by numbers anyone?

Talking of cathedrals...There was a nativity scene in the cathedral, and all the magi- and shepard- looking people were staring at the crib, as were the cows and donkeys and whatnot, but Baby Jesus was not there! Had he been stolen? Someone suggested that they were patiently waiting for him to arrive on the 24th December. IS THIS WHAT HAPPENED IN BETHLEHEM? Was there some kind of communication break down with the angels and the shepherds? I can't imagine that to be the truth, 'cos then people would be getting suspicious and stuff, and it sounds to me like Herod's intelligence service/secret police/whatever would probably have tracked down Mary and Joseph at the city gates and put them in a detention centre and that's definitely not what happened now is it? The Angels wouldn't have let that happen! They are better spies than that!
Forgive me if my Biblical History fails me here, but it doesn't go:
"Mary and Joseph, refugees of suspicious origin, didn't have the right papers and so ended up in Sangatte. Some belgian chicory farmers just happened to be there (having mixed up the dates a little) and offered Joseph some Hoegaarden to congratulate him. Russian gangsters arrived 12 days later with a magnum of the finest millesime of recent years, some chocolate waffles and some incense."
does it?
I think the disappearance of the Baby Jesus was something to do with the Pagans... the nativity seen was surrounded by christmas tress after all. Maybe there were some gnomes involved too.....
ANYWAY... back to my pathetic-excuse-for-a-blog consisting of a list of useless stuff

erm.. no, I think I've lost the plot now.
I learnt some really important dutch phrases from my flemish friend. He kept over-hearing flamands wandering around Reims. He was excited to hear some dutch so I thought I should learn some. Dutch family - you'd better watch out. I'm going to bore you silly with my extremely limited vocabulary next time I see you (Kabouter!).
Erm.. I got quite cold and wet.
Reims is edging ahead of Paris is the competition for the dog-shittiest town in France (sorry Reims, but you really should do something about it!)

Did I mention that I was really tired and can't think properly anymore? Just wanted to get all of that out before I forgot about it really. I'm sorry, one day I will get back to writing proper prose rather than essay plans. You don't want bones, you want MEAT. I leave you with the question:

Just what is a "Roast beef Parlor"? Not to mention a "Gay Nineties Sandwich"...

Answers to any of the above condundrums gratefully accepted.
Night night.

* I don't know, is this game fairly well know internationally? If you don't know what Dead Lions is, it's the best game to play with children if you're babysitting. Just tell them that whoever lies still and quiet for the longest gets the prize. If they are seen moving, breathing, twitching, then they are out. Am I a mean person? I think I thought it was fun when I was little.... but then I like lying down... it makes me sleepy.

Blog withdrawal symptoms

2006-12-13T23:06:00.000+01:00

Sadly, real life seems to have been catching up with me a bit in the last week or so and my blog has passed me by. I don't suppose this really matters. Although I realise that reading trivial details about someone else's life can be massively entertaining, and almost soap-like (as in Neighbours, not savon) in its addictiveness, I don't think I'd be letting my 'audience' down not to provide them with the latest details of my daily humdrum.

Maybe it's some kind of weird relativity effect to do with Advent... the closer you get to Christmas, the faster time disappears... or something. I'm certainly very excited about Christmas. This weekend I visited the Marché de Noel at la Défense. It was great. And I had over priced tartiflette for the first time. I wasn't allowed it at the festival in the summer precisely for the fact that it was over priced and I wasn't starving enough, but somehow it's more justifiable on a cold, dark winter night when you know that the last metro home won't get you back before the supermarket closes, and in fact, there is nothing edible in your cupboards. Mmmm tartiflette. Lactose-intolerancenightmare. Tant pis...when in France....

I'm going to reserve judgement on just how good the Marché de Noel was. There were lots and lot of pretty things, and many pressies were bought, but we're off to Reims on saturday to see what theirs is like. I'll try and let you know...

In other news... I wandered round Montmartre hungover and bleary eyed in the brilliant sunshine on Saturday morning. Again, pressies were bought, and encounters with firemen were had. Don't worry, they weren't striking this time. It was something called the 'telethon' which I imagine to be a big charity fundraiser, but being the mean old stooge I am, didn't actually take the time to find out. There were people banging drums and firemen carrying small children up ladders for the fun of it, and it seemed to be a generally jolly day out so all was good. I was just a bit startled in my dozy state to see all the fire trucks on Rue des Abbesses.

I love Rue des Abbesses. As Becky's mum might say, it was full of little shops selling 'gorgeous little things'. And lots of artisan bakers with massive queues out the door. Large potential for epicurious food porn. Hurray.

Quoi d'autre? Gérard was pretending to be Père Noël last night at the school canteen where we had our christmas meal. It was hilarious. There was lots of lambrini type wine to drink and it ended up with lots of engineering lads doing the conga and singing french christmas songs. I didn't participate in the conga unfortunately. I sat and stubbornly sang the english lyrics to Jingle Bells... the french ones are definitely not about bells... it seemed to be about wind in fact. We'll have none of that now.

We have been teaching one of our friends colloquial and naughty english phrases. One of the funniest had to be when I said "shut it you slaaaag" and he thought it was all one word and tried to repeat it very loudly as we walked through school. Well, perhaps it's not the funniest, maybe you just had to be there when he came out with 'wonking' at the dinner table. It would appear there's a somewhat subtle difference between the 'a' in 'wanting' and the 'a' in pant. I suppose it just depends what version of english you speak. We have been having a mini crusade against all the american so-called english teachers. They don't teach English. They teach American!

Not that I'm trying to corrupt anyone or anything....

On the fourth day of advent...

2006-12-04T23:35:00.000+01:00

...we went and sniffed christmas trees outside the Pantheon. OK, so that's not really a good place to start, but I couldn't think of a better title.
Tonight seems like the first night in ages that I haven't been glued to my computer screen for aaaages writing a lab report, and it feels soooo good. I even managed to get some exercise, if you call walking back from the Hagen Daas cafe full of food exercise. I would, it was pretty much half of Paris. Even that's not the beginning... let's try harder.
We promised we'd hand in the last of our lab reports today, as much for our own sanity as anything - one of them was well over a week late. So we hurried them off in a rather gash fashion and still managed to miss our self-imposed deadline of 5pm by an hour. But that at least meant we were finally free from signal processing TPs. Hurray hurray hurray! We won't talk about the fact that we just started another unit full of communications TPs.
We decided that we'd reward ourselves with dinner out, and duly headed out towards Pigalle and Montmartre to try and find a vegetarian restaurant. I'd never been to Pigalle after dark before, but the first thing that hit me was all the shiny shiny neon lights. That and the 24 hour patisserie just outside the Metro station. Oh, and the Moulin Rouge just down the road. Oh and the giant flashing lights saying 'SEXODROME'. What on earth is a sexodrome? It sounds far too much like a venue for spectator sport for me. I'm going to stop questioning it now. It was shiny and the lights were pretty anyway, at least until you thought too deeply about what they were advertising. Enough of that...
So we headed up to Rue des Abesses, which I'm sure many many people would agree, is incredibly pretty. For example, here a blurry picture of the very pretty church. Trust me, it was really pretty and there were lights in all the trees, and it was generally magic. Finding that the planned veggie restaurant was shut (due to mondayness. Damnit! What are you? A bloody hairdresser?!) we headed back down Rue des Martyrs and happened upon a really lovely little Italian place. I say italian, it specialised in Italian, and had italian memorabilia all over the walls. The incredibly helpful and friendly chef didn't seem very italian and neither did the boss when she eventually turned up (apparently, we were dining rather early), but the food, whether italian or not, was wonderful. The chef seemed almost excited to be challenged to cook vegetarian dishes, and did a wonderful job with my Fennel salad with yummy orange and pine nut bits with raisins and balsamic vinegar dressing (ok, I'm not a food writer. yet.) and Becky's stuffed aubergine was pretty darn tasty too. And that was just the starters. We both took the gorgonzola pasta comme plat principal. It was really good, and not overpoweringly stinky with cheese either. And it was just the right quantity. I love that chef. Oh, and for you carnivores out there, I was just having an evening of veggie sympathy. The meat dishes actually looked really good too. And the decor was nice - nicely lit with pretty fairy lights and star shaped lanterns, yet not so dim that you couldn't see what you were eating. Generally wonderful and I'd reccommend it. They didn't even make us feel uncomfortable for being their only customers for the best part of an hour. If you have a craving for italian specialites when in Montmartre, go there, it's called Osteria Ascolani. It's good. And reasonably priced.
Phew. With pleasantly stuffed bellies (emphasis on the pleasantly here, it was the perfect amount of food) the plan was to have a quick skate at the Hotel de Ville. Unfortunately we got there 15 minutes before the ice rink closed, so we didn't. Probably a good thing, because there was a nice layer of water on the ice from the day's rain, and the only people on the rink were chav types skating very fast, spraying waters at spectators and knocking each other over. In a fun way of course. So failing that, we wondered over to Notre Dame, WHERE THEY HAVE THE BIGGEST CHRISTMAS TREE EVER. At least, it seemed that way to little-country-bumpkin-old-me. I haven't been to Galleries Lafyette yet (apparently, theirs might be bigger), that is on the list of things to do on my mad shopping trip this saturday. Failing that, I will visit the day before Christmas Eve. Christmas eve eve if you will. BECAUSE THAT SEEMS SENSIBLE. Can you tell I'm mildly excited by all this shiny shiny light business? Oooh ooh ooh, I nearly forgot to show you the tree The amazing golden-ness is somewhat lost by my small camera and amateur photographer status, but it was big and twinkly and shiny and red and tall and green and and and had baubles the size of footballs. There's no sense of scale in the picture on the left, but believe me, they were massive.... like the size of... a cow's head?! Big and shiny and red anyway. Very cool and exciting. And pagan. Just what you want outside a big old catholic cathedral thingy. Moving on....
We crossed the river to the left bank, which turned out to be oh so conveniently close to the Hagen Daas cafe. Meandering down Rue de la Huchette, avoiding the dodgy greek plate smashers and we pressed our noses against the windows of all the jewellery shops. We be magpies, we bist. Obviously, we like twinkly sparkly things a lot.
Armed with ice cream, and followed by cries of "it's far too cold for ice cream, come in our restaurant and eat yourself silly" (I'm imagining that said in the style of a muppet in "A Muppet's Christmas Carol". Clearly, it was actually said by a french man touting for our business, and therefore not as classy) we decided that we would walk home via the Pantheon (cue sniffing of trees in the mini forest situated outside the Pantheon, just across from the Mairie du Vieme).
Now, you should go and look at a map of Paris. Find Notre Dame. Now find the south east quarter of the peripherique, and head in a bit. That's where I live. We walked that. I think it's a thoroughly walkable distance and certainly a very pleasant ramble, but I think it's a good excuse for me feeling incredibly sleepy right now.
So on that note, I leave you. Enjoy the lights....

Vous avez de très bonnes expressions

2006-11-29T19:10:00.000+01:00

OK, 4 lab reports to write this evening, so I'm not going to blabber on for too long about how I've been living on crumpets for the past 3 days. It's got to be better than pizza eh? We need to go on a crumpet hunt on saturday. You think I'm joking, but you've no idea how difficult it is to find them here. Good job I was given 3 days worth on saturday. To be fair, I have invited all the other english people round for tea and crumpets the past 2 nights in a row. I didn't eat all of them myself.

Waaah I've forgotten what I was going to say. Poo. I watched my friend eat sea snails for lunch. It was pretty gross. Kinda put me off my canellonis. Because, let't face it, it's ok to pluralise italian words however you like. It's their own fault spreading their cuisine all over the world in such a willy nilly way. After much discussion, I can verify that panini is already plural, so the singular isn't paninus, which sounds plain wrong and somewhat silly, but it is in fact panino. Just bear that in mind next time you see panini's on a menu. What belongs to the panini?!

I digress....maybe that's why I'm here... to digress. Yep, I've completely forgotten why I'm here. I just don't want to write my lab reports. Maybe that's it. And maybe to feel linguistically superior for the comments on my french homework. Changed your mind now, huh, stupid french teacher?!

a balanced diet

2006-11-27T12:42:00.000+01:00

I've been longing to blog all weekend, but birthdays and exams have been getting in the way considerably. The birthday was fantastic. Let's just not mention the exams, eh?

So, in my brief break between exams, I present you with today's version of a balanced lunch:

demi baguette + cuppa soup
3 clementines
3 Ladurée macaroons (chocolate, lemon and hazelnut if you must know)
1 Booja Booja organic dairy free vegetarian chocolate truffle thingy.

So we have nuts, carbs, fruit and chocolate. I think I've got the essential food groups covered there.....who says I have to come back down to earth after my weekend?!

Just so you know, the weekend included (in no particular order)

James Bond
Cassoulet
Aliens
feuilletté (which is not unlike a sausage roll)
Biometrics
pink wafers
jammy dodgers
mini gems
haribo
complicated explanations of what constitutes a vegetarian dish, filtered via 3 languages (english french chinese)
macaroons
a nice bar near Bastille
night bus
roast chicken from the market
watching a heron in the park
sleeping a bit
minimal revision
a toaster
crumpets
a bowl of petunias
a whale

Hang on, maybe I made up the last two.

Unfortunately, as much as I'd like to describe my weekend in greater detail for you, I will have to leave you to fill in the gaps yourselves for the time being. Apparently theory of information waits for no woman.
Answers on a postcard please.

Vive la revolution d'écriture française

2006-11-23T20:13:00.000+01:00

At some point in the future, it's more or less certain that yet another revolution will come to pass in France. If you're not convinced, see this week's news of battles between the firemen and the police. Yes indeed, it's the state fighting the state. The country is falling apart... but I digress.

When the revolution arrives, and I am installed as minister of ermm.... everything, my first act will be an overhaul of the French education system. I'm not really talking about the way universities are funded or the giant chasm between universities and les grandes écoles, but more about one of the most fundamental forms of communication that one learns at school. I'm talking about handwriting. Let's face it, french people are utterly incapable of writing legibly. Oh how I wish I had a scanner so that I could present you with evidence of this. k's look like h's, n's look like x's, and that's not to mention when greek symbols enter into the equation. And it's not limited to handwriting either. A text may start discussing an equation involving p and, say k. Turn the page and all of sudden it's been capitalised, without any apparent change in sense. WHAT DO THESE PEOPLE THINK THEY ARE DOING?!

So, new law #1, everybody everywhere will be forced to complete at least 10 exercises from one of those fun little handwriting books where you trace the letters PER DAY until a room of 100 foreign students from around the globe can unamimously agree on what has been written at first glance without having to squint sideways and ask 5 different FRENCH people what has been written.

New law#2, will probably involve cake ..... or better still I will introduce the death penalty for owners of dogs who leave their beloved animal's shit densely scattered over the pavements, hiding underneath a thin but deceptive layer of autumn leaves.

Oh yes, Vive la France.

comfort food

2006-11-22T17:29:00.000+01:00

Dark, cold, drizzly evenings are surely exactly the right time to be eating hot buttered crumpets of muffins or pikelets or a big old scone fresh out the oven. My god I'm craving english bakery products. French bakery products are just too crusty or flakey. Not enough doughy buttery yumminess.
Heeeelp, just what can I have to satisfy this craving?!

Last night a (barman) saved my life

2006-11-21T15:46:00.000+01:00

The salty sea captain stands on a cliff top watching the omnious dark clouds roll in off the ocean. Replace cliff with balcony and ocean with the rooftops of Paris, and I'm right there. Right down to the chilly toes. This morning was fresh and crispy and breezy after the persistent cold drizzle of yesterday, but I think the storm is about to hit us.

Yesterday was the perfect weather for curling up in bed with a book and a cup of tea. I tried it with a laptop and some textbooks, but it really wasn't the same. Gérard the barman made my day though. Having struggled with our lab all day, we rocked up at Chez Eric just as he was preparing two massive jugs of uber-viscous hot chocolate. He gave us a shot each to try, but it was not enough. We purchased une tasse each, but no ordinary tasse - a funny little tasse with a rounded bottom so that you had to put it in a funny little wooden bowl to support it. Special cups for the girls! It was delicious. It steamed up my glasses in the most comforting way, filled my belly with its unctuous and chocolatey goodness like no other hot chocolate I've experienced. And to top it all, he sliced a croissant in two and offered it to us to share. A beautiful flakey pastry to dip in what was more or less pure melted chocolate... just divine I tell you. This man deserves a medal.

All the leaves are brown

2006-11-19T00:49:00.000+01:00

I really should be asleep right now, but last night we got talking to a visiting american in a bar in the Marais and I didn't get in till 4am. It would seem his jetlag is contagious.

So. Paris is feeling quite beautiful at the moment, if a bit drizzly at times, but that just adds to the autumnal feel. I went for a quiet wander today and marvelled at the beautiful colours on the trees lining the streets. Rue Bobillot was full of yellow trees, rue de la Butte aux Cailles was more pinky-red. I wish I knew what trees they were, and I wish there were some on Rue Barrault so that I could look out a soak up their colours everyday, but malheursement, non. I must walk those extra few hundred metres to find trees. It's so beautiful. I may be forced to go out with my camera tomorrow if it stops raining.

It's a cosy kind of weather that makes you feel glad to be holed up in a cafe chatting to friends. Tonight I went to les Gobelins (a nice little café, which may have just become my local) with an Iranian friend, and it would seem that either the barman remembered me from last time, or I just looked too gormless and excessively english, because he started asking me what I wanted in perfect english, even though I kept replying in french. I like to think it's the former, as I was wearing my new coat and doing my best french impression, but... obviously it needs perfecting.

We chatted away quite happily in pig-french to each other and had a very jolly time. It was lovely. We popped into the cinema to see "Babel" (Brad Pitt looks really old! I'd review it, but you can read about it elsewhere), and then found a nice pan-asian restaurant and chatted some more. I'm very happy to report that I found some good cheap thai food, just need to keep looking for the elusive pad thai. Some friends went to London last weekend, and introduced the french to Wagamama's . I miss Wagamama's, but we decided that we're going to open an Iranian restaurant in Paris. I've no idea what Iranian food is like yet, but Azin has promised me that she will find me some to try. I'm loving this cultural exchange business.

In other autumnal news, the third thursday of November is Sarmentelles - the arrival of the Nouveau Beaujolais. Buried under the weight of impossible labs as per usual, I didn't remember this until it was too late on friday evening as we wandered round the supermarket wondering what to make for dinner. For some reason we bought a bottle called "pisse-dru", which probably wasn't the best going, but was appropriately priced for the name. It wasn't bad. Put it this way, I probably wouldn't have been able to appreciate any thing better, and it was quite drinkable, but one thing led to another, and I found myself leaving for the Marais at 11.45pm. We had a very cosy time sat under a heater outside a cafe, drinking our Coronas (not the best chaser for beaujolais, I realise!) , and watched the world go by.

Yes, this is what Paris is about -Cafés you can sit in all night without spending a fortune, chatting to friends over some good food and some cheap plonk, and idling away the hours in good company. I see my master plan unfolding....

little things you might not know about me

2006-11-16T14:06:00.000+01:00

Je suis alto dans la chorale. There I said it, and hopefully you understood. It's good, it's a little island of happy-making in a week full of nasty labs. Ahh breathe...and sing. Niiiiiiiice.

In other news, I spoke spanish outside of my spanish class today, and the spanish person understood me. I like it when this happens. We then proceeded to have lunch together and we weren't really sure what language to speak. We'd just had a spanish lesson, they'd just had an english lesson, we were surrounded by french speakers, and Hugo had just had a japanese lesson and didn't like that we might be talking about him in Spanish. It was really fun. Though, it freaks me out slightly that I can understand people, yet not really be sure what language we're speaking, when it may well not even be a properly formed langauge, but a strange mix of several. Boundaries must be drawn more clearly.

I also keep appalling myself by tutoying adults I barely know. Total disrespect of french social norms. I then hurredly confuse myself by vous-voying them the next time. It's just that I find it easier to conjugate the second person singular and it comes to mind more easily. I have a similar problem when talking to 2 or more of my friends. I always say 'tu' then realise that this is completely wrong, as they are actually plural.

So.. maybe I will try to start vous-voying everybody then I can take a step back from that.
Phew. Languages and music. My brain feels bubbly and stimulated. I feel invigorated. Hurray!

Help

2006-11-15T22:40:00.001+01:00

What am I to do with myself? I have conned myself into thinking that I should be an engineer. I was seduced by the prospect of guaranteed employability. I thought I could make a difference as an engineer, but the truth is, I’m not passionate about it. Certain aspects of it I do find interesting, but it doesn’t make enough sense to me. At the rare moments when I feel I understand, then I begin to enjoy. There, I said it, I only enjoy it when I understand it. Therefore, if I try harder to understand I might once again find wonder and pleasure in the subject.

It’s so hard to get my head round though. I’ve lost the curious sense of wonder that should be part and parcel of the joy of learning. If I’m honest, it’s a long time since I questioned anything. This is what our totally inadequate education system has turned me into. It has turned me into someone who asks “right, what do I need to do to pass this exam?” or, “ok, but how on earth do I reach that conclusion so that I can get this out of the way as quickly as possible and hand in the lab report?”

It frustrates me massively having labs every week, because I know that given a bit more time (and possibly a bit more effort, though that would imply more time spent in the lab, and less time actually spent living), given a bit more time, I could strengthen the links in my brain and be able to more eloquently express my understanding of the problem, rather than the crude explanations that are currently given in my lab reports.

I keep telling myself that I am an engineer and not a mathematician, and that is why the overload of maths is making no sense to me. I am giving up at the first hurdle. For instance today we were given an equation that I didn’t understand after 5minutes of staring at it. I didn’t ask myself the right questions; I became blinded by my frustration and hence became quite terse with the teacher who tried to get me to think for myself.

I need to think for myself.

So I need to ask more questions. I need to rediscover my sense of wonder. I need to be bothered about being an engineer. I need more sleep. I need to live. I have become numb, and I need to rediscover myself and what I want from my life.

At the moment, life just seems to be one great big impenetrable wall of questions and I don’t know where to start asking. For some reason I have become afraid to ask questions. Which is entirely stupid, I know, but I feel that I have so many questions that if I asked them all, nobody else would learn anything. Because in my head the other students are infinitely clever French people who clearly understand everything that is said straight away because they have been through the legendary ‘prepa’. They are geniuses, who don’t need to ask questions. On reflection though, they’re probably a lot like me.

I have to be brave and ask more questions. I don’t need any more excuses, I know, but I just think I’m in too deep, I can’t just say “what?”, but that truly is the extent of my lack of understanding. Too much of it is over my head, and there’s nothing that I can latch onto, and say “well, I know what this is, so is that this thing? And does that mean that…?”. I am lacking that base.

Gosh, I have a lot of work to do, and only 11 days to do it in. Words of support would be greatly appreciated.

Divertissements

2006-11-12T13:46:00.000+01:00

"Waaaah" as my former french teacher might say. This is a positive sound, which for some reason I have adopted as my own. It sounds happy, and reminds me of the lovely Béatrice. It's a sound I should make more often.

I've become very much bogged down in my work this week. Unfortunately living right next door to school, and having all of 10m between our front door and that of the supermarket, means that these are the only three places I'd seen this week - our halls of residence, school and the supermarket. It seems I've been constantly battling to understand and write the report for one of our labs this week, and hence have forgotten to actually LIVE. This is a sad existence. So yesterday, having attempted and failed to do some studying with a german friend in the morning, and been and talked to a group of french students about english culture (c'était piègé! lovely teacher asked me to explain binge drinking and I didn't know what to say!), I decided I'd had enough of my tiny bubble and was going to break out and go exploring St Germain.

With a quick glance at my Rough Guide, I decided to go in search of "le Vieux Campeur" (an outdoors shop) and look for some equipment which I don't strictly need right now, but forms an integral part of my plan to escape from here come summer (which also involves a reunion with my beloved new bike) .

So, we took the metro to Maubert-Mutualité (which holds a special place in my heart, despite having only stayed there for one night in a crappy hotel , oh Mauuuuuuuuuberrrt), and ascended into a rather chilly and quickly darkening autumn afternoon in the nicer (ie less tacky and touristy) parts of le Quartier Latin/St Germain. Here we found not one, but about 17 Vieux Campeurs. I'd read in the Rough Guide that they'd "taken over an entire block" and had their own climbing wall. I understood this to mean that they had one massive shop (not unlike Blackwells in Oxford), but with every corner turned there was yet another distinct shop selling something else you never knew you needed. We were turned away from the first one by a very nice door man because we distinctly didn't look like we wanted to buy skis. But we soon found the one that had (extremely expensive) sleeping bags, followed by the "Cartothèque" (Like a Bibliothèque, but full of maps), a sailing shop, a shop dedicated to GPS systems, a shop full of camping stoves and drinking bottles (where I was extremely restrained), more ski clothes for small people, and a shop which appeared to sell just hats. It was great! We failed, however, to find their climbing wall, climbing shop, or tent shop, much to our disappointment. What a shame, we'll just have to go back one day! We then wondered on down Boulevard St Germain and did quite a lot of window shopping in this rather chic part of town, followed by dinner at the Bastille. There seemed to be lots of really nice looking restaurants near the Bastille (no big secret there I think) but despite it feeling very late because of the darkness, few of them seemed willing to serve us at just after 6pm. It's their loss I say. However, I think I will have to go back there and try out the Corsican restaurant, and maybe some of the mexican ones too.

Continuing on a foodie theme, I've added some new links (see right) to some foodie blogs I've discovered. I'm so happy to have found them. I am constructing a list of places to visit so that I can start selling my own gastronomic tour of Paris. I think next weekend I may go in search of Falafel in the Jewish quarter. Yum yum yum.

And in other news, my cinéphilic tendancies seem to be spiralling out of control. There is a wonderful cinema just up the road (on Avenue de Gobelins. I like that name), which is nice and cheap (comparable to Coleford!) with extremely comfortable seats. Our first trip there was to see "The Queen", which wasn't very linguistically challenging, but amusing to see the french subtitles for "bugger". On our second trip, we went to see "Indigènes" which is a film about all the soldiers from North African francophone countries (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia) who fought for the liberation of France in the Second World War and whose contribution was never recognised - all in all a very sad film. We were reminded by the cashier on the way in that it was in french (she had heard us talking english in the queue, with our german friends), at which we just laughed. Luckily however, most of the film was in arabic with french subtitles, so we didn't get too lost. For our third trip on Friday night, two of us went to see "Ne le dis à personne", a thriller based on the Harlen Coben thriller "Tell No One". Hmmm well.... this one was properly in french, which can only be a good thing for our linguistic development, but the plot was really quite twisty and little bit difficult to follow if I'm honest. It all came good though, and we did eventually work out whodunnit. I think I might have to go and read the book to make sure though.

So now I'm slightly addicted to the cinema. I claim that it's because it's my only form of escapism during the week (seeing as I have no Neighbours to watch). So next on my list are "The Science of Sleep" and I've yet to see "Little Miss Sunshine", along with "Babel" (quite appropriate for a bunch of linguists I feel) and of course "Casino Royale". It's just a shame that I've got exams in 2 weeks really... talking of which...maybe I should go and study now....

mensonge

2006-11-09T00:20:00.000+01:00

I feel dirty and a little bit ashamed. My first piece of FLE (french for foreigners) homework was handed back to me, having been awarded an A, and being covered in much less red pen than usual, despite my thoughtful double line spacing so that the teacher could scribble all over it. Her comments said words to the effect "next time, make it your own work". It was my work, it's just that... well... I asked a very friendly french speaker (a maroccan-austrian frenchspeaker no less) to help me correct it before I handed it in. But surely that doesn't mean I cheated!? MS Word does grammar and spell checks in french too you know! It's just that I'd asked for a little bit of help making my phrases more idiomatic.... where is the harm in that? In a class of 15, she wouldn't have had the time to explain such sublties to me.... why am I justifying myself? I am surrounded by french speakers, it would be unnatural not to discuss the finer points of their langauge with them.

So this week, I asked for help from a libanese french-speaker. And ignored most of his advice. She'd better be happy this time.

Enlightenment pendant les vacances de Toussaint

2006-11-07T00:10:00.000+01:00

Things I learnt this week:

a new word "quixotic" meaning "idealistic and impractical" like most of the fashion in Paris
there is actually more to life than the search for the killer jacket - for instance, living next door to the best organic/health food shop in the world, and/or having a kitchen, or better still, living with your bestest friends in said location
toast is good, as are crumpets and pikelets
it is actually a very long way from Paris to London, especially on a coach
Coaches aren't comfortable for sleeping on
Wikipedia is good, but you can't beat a good text book
Putting foil on a hot chocolate-iced cake is a sure-fire way to ruin the message you just spent ages writing in chocolate chips.
Too many students make a city feel small

Things I achieved this week:

I very nearly won a game of Risk. I turned my back for one second to do the washing up, and lost sight of the goal. Sigh. Next time.
I forgot how speak French
I remembered how to cook - it requires an actual kitchen
I detoxed - no coffee for a whole week! Now you mention it, I didn't even have a proper cup of tea as I had promised myself. And barely any alcohol either. Brownie points, please
I paid my rent with a cheque, and sorted out my online banking (gosh, this is getting dull now)
I had a very serious discussion at a careers fair about becoming a professional chef, and became temporarily obsessed with owning a knife roll and whites
Following said conversion, I splurged in the kitchen shop and bough myself a nice cheapish cook's knife to take back to Paris, a vegetable peeler and a whisk. Oh you nasty french carrots who formerly seemed so much harder than english carrots, prepare to be skinned alive and chopped into tiny pieces with my shiny new toys! Mwhahahaah

I'm winning the "who can be most french (on paper)" race

2006-10-26T18:07:00.000+02:00

Today was good for several reasons. I went to the bank to try and pick up my bank card (for the 6th time in 4 weeks) and the smiley but evil woman in the piggy-toed stilletoes said "oh, but you're still missing one piece of identity". It was fine. I garded my sang-froid (as the fire safety instructions tell you to) while she went to check. Luckily, she was completely and utterly wrong. I know damn well that I gave them to her 3 weeks ago, even if one of them did say "Mr Emily" on it. En plus, I got my cheque book, which apparently my friends didn't get because they didn't ask for it at the same time as their card. As one of them pointed out, you really shouldn't have to ask, it should be obvious that you want the cheque book as well as the card, and if it's been waiting for you for 4 weeks, you'd think that the bank staff would be quite keen to get rid of it too. But no, apparently you have to specifically ask for it. So in the respect that I have my french bank account fully functioning, I am more french than I was yesterday. "w00t!", as one might say.

Moreover, I have also applied for French housing benefit, as you are apparently entitled to as a student here. Nice smiley woman in the manager's office even said it was "pas grave" that I didn't have a social security number. It would seem quite easy to "toucher" les benefits here. I hope I'm not speaking too soon....

On the "things that made me less french" today list, we have laundry. I went to ask for a "jeton pour le sechoir ligne" and nasty dwarf looking woman at reception said "do you mean sechoir linge?". At which point, the cookie crumbled, and I realised that, for the past 6 weeks I have been asking for a token for the line dryer. It never made sense in my head that a tumble dryer was called a 'line dryer' in french, and now I know why. I had read "ligne" instead of "linge". "linge" comes from the same root as "lingerie" and in fact means linen or clothes. D'OH!

De toute façon, at least now I have clean pants, une carte bleue, un chequier, et je vais toucher le CAF. I, am considerably more french than, yow.

Gérard is my dealer

2006-10-24T13:01:00.000+02:00

It's official. I'm completely and utterly addicted to my french coffee. It would seem that I can no longer be happy and upbeat unless I've had my 10 o' clock coffee, with 2 sugars, from the lovely Gérard, who sometimes mocks my englishness, but always has a coffee waiting for me. Maybe it's his chirpy little "salut les filles!" or the way he sings my name.....

In response to the Italian's question, "Emily, why you always smile, yes?" It's because of the coffee. It makes me happy...or should that be mildly manic?

It keeps me going throughout the day and apparently long into the night, thus feeding the vicious circle of addiction - I never wake up feeling refreshed, hence need more coffee to put me in a proper frame of mind. This is a sad truth of my life in Paris. I may never be the same again. That is, at least not until I get back to Bristol and can return to my favourite sofa in Boston Tea Party with a large pot of Lapsang Souchong, where I can once again curl myself round my mug and look sleepy while the other engineers geek (or "guique" as i saw it written in french) for hours on end.

things I learnt this morning

2006-10-23T12:39:00.000+02:00

Apparently the entropy of the english language is 3.19. (This site disagrees.)
I have no idea what this means, but it's the only thing I learnt in 3 hours of lessons this morning.

It might be true that the entropy of the french language is higher because letters (or certain groupings of letters) are more equiprobable. Can one even say "more equiprobable"? This is the only way I can make sense of it in my head...but it's probably VERY WRONG.

Maybe I mean the probability distribution is more uniform....maybe I JUST DON'T HAVE A CLUE when it comes to Information Theory. Claude Shannon has a lot to answer for.......

mmm Sunday...

2006-10-22T12:40:00.000+02:00

...chouquettes and vanilla tea with heart-shaped sugar. Lovely.

It is all sunny here in la Buttes aux Cailles, and I should be working, but instead I am stuffing my face with goodies from the market. I recently discovered chouquettes (patisserie cabbagelettes perhaps? If un chou is a cabbage....what is choux pastry?) , which are little lumps of choux pastry doused in large sugar crystals. I would have taken a picture of them, but I was too busy stuffing them in my face. Ideally, I would have eaten them with a nice cup of coffee, but I have no means of making coffee here, and après avoir m'habituée au café français... well, I think to drink instant coffee after getting used to a short black every morning between lectures - it would just be WRONG!

So... friday night was "Insomnia". I failed miserably in that I was falling asleep against a wall by 2 o'clock, but seeing as it was just in the basement, it wasn't too difficult to find my way to bed. Apparently, I was quite drunk.... I blame everybody else for pouring me drinks......

And yesterday was another Rally. I hate them. They consist of being given a map and a list of 'enigmas' to solve. We were trying to think of the best english translation of this. It's not quite a treasure hunt because there's no treasure involved. Hugo suggested 'orienteering', but I said no, because there were no little punchy things and not enough running or trees. I think we walked about 10km around Paris in the end. We could have taken the metro, but towards the end the various places were so close together, and not on the same metro line, that we decided to walk. What a bad decision! But anyway, we won because we were the only team to answer all the enigmas correctly. Hugo and I were all for giving up and sitting down for a coffee at the very beginning but our french team mate took it very seriously. So we got to see lots of Paris. The two french guys we were with were from Nantes and Arras, and it turned out that Hugo and I knew Paris a bit better than they did. I never trust someone who has to turn a map round to orientate themselves, especially not a french person! But they were lovely guys and we got to see lots of Paris, it was just a shame that we were so incredibly tired from the night before that we weren't too chirpy about it.

However, I did gather more evidence for Parisiens not being the grumpy buggers they're made out to be. Towards the end, as my spirit was flagging, we just started asking people the answers rather than looking for them. In general, Parisiens seem very tolerant of this and are only too happy to explain their history and culture to you, even if their dog is trying to pee on your leg at the same time. Someone told me that real parisiens are actually a rare breed, as there a few people born and bred in Paris itself. Most of the people you meet in the street will be people who have moved here to work, so just like any other large city really. But I like these people, even if they do mock my accent when I ask for lemons at the market. They can't pronounce their "th"s so I win!

my biggest regret in life....

2006-10-18T02:25:00.000+02:00

..... is that nobody explained the Cauchy-Schwartz inequality to me before tonight. In fact, nobody explained it to me tonight. I explained it to myself. For about 6 hours. And my fellow french students and staff have been talking about it like they've known all about its significance since the age of 5. Flippin' eck. But now, even if I couldn't quite articulate its significance, I can use it to find you the fundamental frequency of an ECG heartbeat me-thingy using brain power alone. Not even that actually. I can use it to explain why the answer is ONE. Six hours to come to the conclusion that the answer is ONE. When it looked like it should be one for various hand waving arguments all along.
Aren't you glad I found this out!?
Silly mathematical symbols are going to be flying around my head all night long. I'm never going to sleep. I'm in the zone. Hell yeah.

damn radio controlled alarm clock

2006-10-16T13:06:00.000+02:00

This morning I got up and merrily had myself a shower. Only problem being, it was not in fact 7.20 as I thought, but 8.20. lectures start at 8.30. As a rinsed the shampoo out of my hair Becky started banging on the door, believing that I had perhaps slipped and knocked myself out in the shower. But no, I just had no idea what time it was. So I hurriedly put my clothes on and ran to lectures. Then sat there and grinned like a fool because I had no idea what as going on. I can safely say that I still have no idea what is going on, and I am still grinning.

We had a fun lesson of copying matlab code off the teacher and making funny noises, but gave up towards the end when we could no longer read his code. I have no idea what it meant, but it made the woman who was singing in our headphones sound very silly. We just ran away to get our lunch. I love this guy. Everything he says makes perfect sense, and he draws nice squiggly diagrams which make sense too. It's just when you ask him a question... the response is baffling. And his arms are hairy like a monkey's. Becky summed up the lesson nicely when she corrected me for saying "I think I have a vague idea of what's going on here", "No Emily, we have no idea what's going on here. Don't pretend you begin to understand". "Quick, he's not looking. Run away!"
So off we ran. I think I'm going to throw my radio-controlled alarm clock off the balcony. I've now lost about 3 hours of my life because of it. Where did they go? Why did it decide to become radio controlled in the middle of the night when I wasn't looking?

And just what does this sign mean?! I translate it as
"Watch out, yellow box on wheels. Your car may explode"
Crikey!

Je comprend rien de tout and I feel like the British Education system has failed me

2006-10-15T20:47:00.000+02:00

I am at a loss. I am currently looking up Reynolds transport theorem. Apparently it's vaguely related to the Navier-Stokes equations, which are definitely things that have been mentioned in Engineering Maths. But why don't I know all these things already? Because the British Education system is apparently a way of making idiots who think they know everything and go tramping off round the world imposing English on everybody.
Help!

This is much more fun: bzzzzzzzzzzpeeek ah the sound of french bees!

Je comprend!

2006-10-12T23:04:00.000+02:00

Today was very good. We went to see our teacher and we had a sensible discussion with him, almost as if we were talking to an english tutor. It was very satisfying to be able to ask questions so that all the small things fell into place and we understood! We felt incredibly happy when we came out of our discussion and walked down the street feeling all light and happy. Unfortunately it still meant that we spent our free afternoon in the computer labs typing it up, whilst all our friends went to the motor show, but we made up for it this evening by going to get takeaway pizza. There's a great little place on the Butte aux Cailles where you can watch them make it for you and it's really cheap and you get a mountain of toppings.
So pizza and cheap beer was had for dinner, which was also attended by our Ron Weasley look-a-like friend, who brought a brasilian guy along with him. I love meeting so many random people. We tried to practice a bit of our spanish and he looked at us funnily. I think I'm going to end up speaking spanish like a korean person speaks english - I just can't quite get my tongue round these doble eres y doble elles y enes y eñes. But at least now I can describe some simple things and ask "are you Ferrrrrrnando?" (where is the upside down question mark when you need it?) and reply "si yo soy Ferrrrrnando" or "no, yo no soy Ferrrrrnando, yo soy Emily. Eres tu Filipe?" and other such silly conversations. In fact we have our first homework to do. Hurray. Ich liebe das espangol. ik suis européenne. I'm going to bed esperanto stylee.

busy busy busy

2006-10-12T00:11:00.000+02:00

Hello!
What can I say? The work has kicked in and now I have no time to enjoy being in Paris. We have labs every week - TP notés (travail pratique - marked so that it contributes towards your mark for the unit), and most of the time, it takes me the entire allocated lab time to understand what on earth they are asking. Today was most frustrating, because the answer seemed obvious to us, it's just that we didn't understand the sublties of what each question was asking for. We spent 3/4 of an hour asking the wrong questions, and I suspect they knew that we were asking the wrong questions, but answered them none the less, then gave us a massively complicated mathematical answer for something that we knew from the beginning. And Matlab kept telling me the answer was 161.34... but it was not apparent what this was the answer to.

So our lives seem to be revolving around the TPs because it takes us so much time to catch up - they expect us to know what our fellow students in will only have learnt by then end of january. It's like we've missed an entire year out and gone straight into the 4th yeah. Aye my brain hurts. ....

In other news, this weekend I took the Thalys to Antwerpen, where I was picked up by my family and taken to Holland. I loved it so much. I got to see lots of family I'd never met before, I met beautiful baby Britt and I got to stay in a HOUSE with a proper KITCHEN and eat proper bread and jam and hagelslaaaaaag. It was briillliant. We walked around old Middelburg and discovered new parts of town; we sat on a terrace and lived the café life next to the canal; and we stayed up late drinking beer. I need to see more of these people. They are my blood and they have very very interesting stories to tell. I need to hear them. I love my van der Heijdens, I do.

I now have a certificate saying that Monsieur Emily is a student at this school!

2006-10-03T23:52:00.000+02:00

Whilst researching how to do my impossibly hard Signal Processing lab, I just found the following quote: "The following explanation is not mathematically correct, but since we are trying to get an idea of what is going on, and not trying to duplicate the thinking of geniuses, it is worth going through anyway. "
It amuses me that the website is called "Bores". Let's hope I don't end up this way. My point is, maybe someone should tell the french this. Or maybe just leave them to ponder their incredibly complicated maths with their strong coffees and their silly cigarettes, whilst the rest of the world exploits their findings and makes loads of money from them. I think I'd rather be in the second group putting it all to good use rather than losing myself constantly in infinite sums of silly squiggly things. Can you tell that I don't really know what I'm studying?

In other news today, we found out our groups for FLE (Français Langue Etrangère). I am in level 2 of 5 - PRE-intermediate. After 10 years of studying french and getting an A at A level. What do you want from me!?
Admittedly, my written exam was rubbish, and my oral must have been rubbish too. And I definitely need to reduce the amount of english I speak. I've trained les belges quite well to speak french to me, but occasionally we lapse into English. Now I need to train them and Tarik to correct me as often as they like. This is my problem.

Anyway. Must find out what on earth this windowing method stuff is all about so that I don't look like a complete fool and turn up at a help session and just demand that they tell me everything from scratch.

Should probably go to bed, but I just had a cup of tea, and the tea you buy here seems to be extra caffinated. Help me.

A demain!

eeek

2006-10-02T23:00:00.000+02:00

Today, it occured to me that I could just pretend to be paying attention in lessons, maybe learn a bit about engineering along the way, potentially fail the year, but have a fantastic time improving my french and spanish (yes! I'm now planning to take spanish classes). And if this happened to be the case, I don't think I'd find it that upsetting.

Not that I'm depressed, but I was happier when I didn't know the extremely vast extent of what I don't know. Maybe I just don't need to know all these things. I can still be a good person without knowing them... not necessarily a good student.... but it could be more fun

To say that the maths is over my head is an understatement. The maths is more like a distant planet that I can look at and go "yes, that exists" and maybe tell you its name, and yet not comprehend its inner working in any way, shape or form.

Must. Sleep.

Bon Dimanche à tous

2006-10-01T14:00:00.000+02:00

I've just been to the sunday market, which takes place on Bvd Aguste Blanqui between Rue Barrault and Place d'Italie. It made me super happy. I walked down it with a huge grin on my face. I did take photos, but unfortunately, I don't know how to get them off the internal memory of my camera.
I bought lots of olives and some nuts and loads of grapes and some figs and some tabouleh for lunch. And they had loads of nice jewellery and baskets and scarves and plants and flowers and mini cacti and fish who looked at you. And hearts and other offal.
You can even buy a whole roast dinner to take away if you were so inclined. Maybe I'll do that one weekend when it gets a bit colder.
They had lots of little cakey things and random vegetables which I feel I must find out the name of.
I'm so excited about living here. I can walk round the corner and stuff my face, without having to get on a bike or hike back to Harbour Cottage with a pumpkin on my back. Mmmmm I'll get a pumpkin next time I think! Just have to be more bold about asking the names of the different vegetables. Yum yum yum

la découverte de la Butte aux Cailles

2006-10-01T00:38:00.000+02:00

Today, we were sent of a fact finding hunt around our quartier - that of the Butte aux Cailles. It's very pretty and has a fascinating historic background which I don't yet fully understand. I will get back to you on that one. However, today was also "la fête de la Commune", and as far as I could tell, they were essentially celebrating a massacre. Well, celebrating is definitely the wrong word here, but that's what fête implies for me. Commemorating would be more appropriate. There were lots of impassioned speeches on the Place de la Commune de Paris about it's significance for the country. I'm not sure how the rest of the country feels about this, but I can tell that it's definitely something which forms a very important and moving part of parisien history. As I said, I will definitely get back to you when I've found out more about it.

In the mean time, I feel like I should definitely be wearing my red beret and having involved political discussions whilst smoking myself to death.

And to lighten things up a bit, here are some pictures. Firstly of a thingy commemorating the first human flight, though I'm sure that I read about them using Montgolfiers during the siege of Paris and in the commune (1871-), but maybe they were unmanned ones.

This commemorative plaque thingy is situated on the Place de Paul Verlaine, where there is also an art deco swimming pool (possibly the oldest in Paris) which is fed by thermal springs or summat or nuffink. There is also a big shiny complicated looking drinking fountain in this place, by which to remember the wells that came before the swimming pool. It is all right next to the Boulodrome and a nice little children's playground.

My final picture for today is of our local church, which I think is rather beautiful. It is called something like Ste Anne de la Butte aux Cailles, and I can see it from my balcony.I realise it's not a very good photo and is badly focused, but next time I will do better!

I also wanted to go back this evening and take pictures of the accordionists and chanteurs who were singing old songs about the commune with blackbirds and nightingales and things, but unfortunately it was raining. Hopefully I haven't missed my only chance to see old men singing in the historic quarter.
I felt a real sense of history as I wondered round today. It was really interesting to talk to the locals about it, and they were all so friendly and willing to help us answer the questions on our hunt-thingy. I feel very lucky to be living in such an interesting and arty and alternative part of Paris.
Vive la Commune!

random thing an Italian guy said in his English exam

2006-10-01T00:25:00.000+02:00

So. One of the essay options was "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle"- discuss. I thought this was quite a difficult thing to discuss in 250 words, for a foreigner, or even for myself.

However, my Italian friend came to the conclusion in that short space that actually, a woman needs a fish and a man needs a bicycle. ?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

le FLE est le fléau de ma vie

2006-09-28T19:26:00.000+02:00

Bonjourno!

On thursday I wasted an entire afternoon of my life. We had three hour long group orals to find out our level of spoken french. From my group of 10, I was the first to speak, so I then had to sit through several squillion more versions of 'where do I come from?', 'who am I?', 'where am I going?' and 'what am I thinking of?' questions. The last one was the most random. It was a bit like 20 questions, but the instructions were to think of an object. I don't know about you, but I would say that an object could be a living thing, like a plant. However, FLE lesson number one, in French, 'un objet' is always inanimate. It can never be alive. I think I may have failed for asking this question of everybody. 'Is it living?' Apparently not. However, one of my friends chose a rather unexpected object (the teacher had changed the rules by this stage so that it could also be a person).
We asked lots of questions, and found out that this thing was french, though not found uniquely in France; it was alive, and you'd find it in a house; it was about as tall as a human; not a plant and that you could potentially eat it. It might also have been famous. It turned out that he was thinking of the teacher! And you could potentially eat him... though I really wouldn't want to.

So this evening, after a long week, Hugo and I decided we were going out. Somewhere. We managed to drag Adam along, although he was initially reluctant, and went to Sputnik on the Butte aux Cailles, where we said we'd have a quick drink whilst waiting for others to join us. So we each bought a pint of something which had a pink elephant on the label. I failed spectacularly to ask for a pint of pink elephant and the bar man asked me if I wanted a 'big one or a small one' in English. Anyway, we bought our pints, found a table among the thick haze of smoke, and came to realise that it had cost us a fiver each! Ouch! So we drank them slowly. I quite enjoyed mine, but it apparently wasn't to the guys' taste.

After finishing our pints, it became apparent that no one was in fact going to come out. Who can blame them with those prices?! So we decided to explore, wander up to the Latin Quarter and find some crepes.

We found the Gobelins, which is in fact some kind of very old tapestry factory or summat or nuffink (and not a house for goblins, or Gringotts bank as I first thought), and had a very pleasant walk up Rue Mouffetard (apparently it's magic. Look it up in a guide book) to find a creperie. So, after our pints and a bit of a stroll, we found one with a toilet and bought some crepes. There was some banter with the guys selling the crepes, and a motorcycle alarm starts to go off. They tell it to shut up, but then one of them tells me that the other has a gun (un arme- literally a weapon, I just looked it up) tucked in the back of his trousers. The only thing I can think to say is 'merde', to which, I thought his reply was, 'yeah, it shoots red flowers' (fleurs rouge). 'Like a clown' I think. Adam however thought he said red fire 'feu rouge'. I am both scared and mildly confused by this exchange. But I think it's highly unlikely that I'm going to be shot is this pleasant studenty-touristy-magic street, so on we continue to Place Monge metro station. Right next to the station is the Arènes de Luteces, which is an ancient roman ampitheatre in the heart of Paris. It is very cool by day and still has little grills where the lions came from and stuff. It is now a boulodrome (see previous word of the day) and unfortunately closed at night. But it still looked pretty fun.
So next, to the metro, where there were no tickets to be bought, and we were forced to jump the barriers as Adam was the only one who had a ticket. Hugo seemed to be quite worried all the way to Tolbiac that we might not be able to get out of the metro without a ticket, but luckily, you can walk straight out at Tolbiac. High fives all round, 3 for the price of 1 on the metro. Only problem was the heavily armed police just outside the station, at which point we realised that they may have CCTV on the turnstyles and could in fact be using super-clever software to identify us and track us down. Only three engineers taking such signal processing courses could think this.
Hence, the moral is: late night illegal riding of the metro is good. Stop the pattern recognition research, it's too hard anyway. Wear hoodies and try to look like you're from the banlieues when trying to hop the metro late at night. Don't buy crepes from dodgy algerian men with guns. Drink beer from Atac, get drunk at home. Don't be so flippin' paranoid.

Che cazzo dici?

2006-09-27T23:59:00.001+02:00

This beautiful little Italian phrase sums up life as a foreign student quite nicely. I won't tell you what the literal translation is, just know that it is very satisfying to say the literal translation (for a girl like me anyway, always surrounded by male engineers), and don't use it in polite company. Or with the italian police.

:D

Ma chambre

2006-09-26T20:47:00.000+02:00

Enfin, here is my bedroom in all it's evening glory. Still haven't got a good pic of the balcony because my clothes were drying on it when I took the pictures

So on the far left is my "salle d'eau", and in the middle a view of my door, with my funny sideboard thing on the left. My warderobe is next to the door on the right, as is my "salle d'eau". How exciting?!

Below is my desk area with the lovely glass brick wall feature thingy. I haven't actually got a proper window in my room - have to go out on the balcony for that.

And here is my bed in all it's glory

That's it for today. Thought you might like to see all of it, but unfortunately I don't have time to write more. 2 days in and I'm already up to my eyeballs trying to make sense of it all. And it's an 8.30 start tomorrow.
Oh how I long for my bed.

le première weekend français-italiano-anglais

2006-09-25T23:56:00.000+02:00

Après un jour complètment épuisant de shopping avec Becky, nous sommes allées dans un bar du quartier de la Butte aux Cailles, tout près d'ici, qui s'appelle "Sputnik". C'était bien amusant!
J'ai appris même quelques phrases impolis mais très utiles d'italien. Pourtant, après deux bières blanches et quelques tequilas, je les ai oublieés.
Donc, voici quelques photos de mes nouveaux amis

Les Italiens: Nico, Davide Pizza (yes that's really his name) , le kiwi Hugo, le norvègien Petter, et l'anglais Adam.

Becky avec Davide et Paolo, un autre Italien.

Et moi (centre), avec un français aléatoire Benoit (à gauche) et un Italien encore, Giuliano (à droite)

vendredi de banking

2006-09-25T23:43:00.000+02:00

Vendredi le 22 Septembre

blukurk

I feel like I nearly achieved things today. I signed lots of things for my bank account, one of which I found out after the event, was an invitation for BNP Paribas to spam me. How rude! Smiley woman didn't even tell me what I was signing! Luckily the woman Becky was speaking to was a lot more helpful. I also got my login for the computer network, so I was finally able to access the internet, and find out that yes there are about 5 ikeas in Paris, but none of them are that easy to get to on public transport.

I suppose it would make a lot more sense if I did this chronologically.

So yesterday all the foreign students traipsed round the school together and were pounced upon the BNP Paribas lady to open a bank account with them. What else did we do? I can't quite remember now, but it was enough to make all the English students rush out afterwards to buy kettles so that we could make nice cups of tea. I think we also need to be wearing dressing gowns at all times. And carry a towel.

We managed to kit ourselves out with pots, pans, utensils and cutlery, but we are yet to find plates that we like. We are terribly picky, Becky and I. Anyway, we had enough to make dinner in our appallingly small and somewhat inadequate kitchen – the sink is about 5cm deep and has no proper plug. It is silly. We then sat on the balcony and drank tea til late at night, quite possibly annoying my neighbour, from whom I am separated by a glass screen which divides our balcony. We had all planned to go out to the Erasmix party in Tour Montparnasse, but half of us decided we were too tired for that.

Some of the others looked quite rough this morning. I don't think much sleep was had. We turned up for our timetabled event – “tests d'anglais” at 9.30am, and no staff turned up until after 10. The first member of staff told us we had to do the English test even if we were bilingue. I don't know where she thought we were from; we were sat there quite clearly conversing in English. Anyway, silly lady didn't ask the woman in charge, so we started doing the 45 min comprehension and writing test. It was actually quite difficult! All the texts were american about Roosevelt and the civil war or something. It was definitely quite a high level of language with some silly words and ambiguous inferences. However, I think I got away with it. I then wrote a letter to a fictional american student called Paul who intended to come to my country to study next year. In my finest English I told him how excited I was that he was coming to the UK. Finished off nice and early, only for the woman in charge to apologise for wasting our time because she hadn't realised we were native speakers. I managed to sign myself up for débutant Espagnol though. I had to toss a coin to choose between German and Spanish, but when it landed on german, I thought I'd actually prefer to do Spanish. Should be fun, as there are lots of Spanish Erasmus students. I think there are Spanish students just about everywhere actually. I could have chosen Chinese, Arabic, Japanese or Russian, but in terms of hitting most spoken languages, I though Spanish might be a more achievable goal.

Useful Banking vocab

le solde = balance

faire opposition = to cancel (cheques and cards) in case of theft of loss

prélever = to debit

les retraits d'argent = withdrawals

un virement = a transfer

un découvert = overdraft

à découvert = to be overdrawn

un bordereau = a statement

j'arrive!

2006-09-25T23:31:00.000+02:00

Mon arrivée à Paris, mercredi le 20 Septembre

Ta da! Je suis arrivée à Paris finalement. Après un matin brumeux, il fait du soleil. Huzzah.

Et il fait chaud dans ma chambre!

I've just been to see Muriel to get my forms signed and sent off to Bristol, so hopefully they will be authorising my grant as we speak and I'll soon have lots of money to spend. I have a big list of things to buy. I had intended to go and buy them this afternoon, but I'm expecting Becky to arrive soonish, so I thought I'd stay around and see if she wanted a duvet too. Just can't be doing with this sheet business. Tim told me I had to learn how to make a bed the french way so that I could post myself to bed every night, but it's not exactly snuggly and home-like that way.

So... I suppose the best place to start would be the journey here. Well, the coach and train were fairly uneventful, usual bunch of idiots talking non-stop on their phones etc, women being travel sick on the train and asking to swap with stupidly stubborn french men.

The real fun began once we actually arrived in Paris and started negotiating our way through the subway. I really will have to investigate taxi usage, but from what I'd read, they charge per item of luggage, aren't always very helpful, and often expensive. So we ruled out a taxi, despite my realisation today that you can get people to help you book them at Gare du Nord (there was also an absolutely huge queue for taxis). So we bought our aller-simples for the metro and jumped on the RER B to Denfert Rochereau. I say jumped, I actually mean dragged with tired arms, carefully avoided falling head first down escalators and squeezed ourselves onto the train. It was rush hour after all. That was the easy part – nobody even checked our tickets. The difficult part was all the stairs up and down to the metro. The scariest part was when it came to getting our luggage through the ticket barrier. Paying careful attention to the sign that said “push children and luggage through first” we tried to do that, and go instantly stuck. So, I was on the inside of the barrier trying to pull it back for Tim to get through, only my ridiculously large suitcase was impeding it somewhat. You see, the turnstyle has to actually turn before the barrier opens, but the Tim could not turn the turnstyle because the suitcase was in the way. Luckily, just as we thought all hope was lost and we'd have to try and climb out of the barrier and buy another ticket, an extremely nice young man in a suit put his ticket in right behind Tim. At first we thought he was just being pushy and unhelpful, and looked as though he was about to get squashed up against Tim himself, but as Tim shouted “it's stuck!” in absolute panic, they managed to turn the turnstyle and the barrier opened, so that we could get the bag through. We then had to hold the barrier open for this man whilst he hopped over the turnstyle. If I ever see this man again, I will kiss his face!

The stupidest part of all this, is that as I returned from Gare du Nord today, I noticed that just a bit further along there were special turnstyles for luggage, with a little pushy-through bit just for luggage. I'm so annoyed at myself – I just stopped to stare at them for a while.

Anyway. After that, it was an easy ride to Corvisart, and a pleasant walk past the Butte aux Cailles and down Rue Barrault and the school . I say pleasant walk, but it was bloody difficult by this stage because even wheely cases are quite difficult to pull when they're that big and also trying to support a holdall. One word of advice – hold-alls are rubbish for carrying long distance. To anybody else going abroad, don't skimp on your luggage – get the expensive Samsonite cases with multi-directional wheels. Get a nest of them so that they coordinate beautiful, and preferably so that they can all be connected together into one easy wheelie bundle. That or steal a luggage cart from Gare du Nord, and try to negotiate the metro with that!

So, reception bombarded me with bits of paper and words I couldn't quite hear clearly. God knows what I'm signed up for now. I know they sold me a crappy 'kit draps' consisting of some nasty blankets and sheets for 10 euros, but at least I can always not them together and use them as an escape rope. I'm only on the 7^th floor. If I was feeling particularly spiderman-ish, I could swing myself out of y balcony and up on to the roof of the school. If I had one of those stretchy sticky things you used to throw into your sister's face when you were young, I bet I could reach Muriel's window and give her a fright.

She asked my if I was pleased with my room this afternoon and I didn't quite know what to say other that yes. I didn't feel I could say much more than “it's just outside, if you open your window, I could climb in” or “it's adequate” but neither of these things actually left my mouth. I couldn't bring myself to say much more than “oui”, which must have been a thrilling conversation for her.

So yes, my room is adequate. It has a bed, which is bouncy, a “salle d'eau” (sink and shower), balcony, and lots of furniture. It's nothing special though – it's not painted in jazzy colours like my lovely room in Richmond Terrace, though it is similar in that it's at the top of about 14 flights of stairs, and has a lovely view. It hasn't quite got the character of Harbour Cottage – as you can probably see from the photos. But it is adequate.

There are mixed toilets just down the corridor. This amuses me. There are urinals screened off from the 2 women's loos by some frosted glass. There must be about 6 cabins in there, but only 2 of them are for women. I can see the advantages of this – toilet seat will always down... but apart from that why bother labelling the cabins 'homme' and 'femme'? Is it just so that women won't venture past the frosted screen?!

I haven't seen that many women around yet. I felt quite intimidated when I went in to find Muriel. I felt like everybody was looking at me. There weren't that many girls around. I think there are some living next door to me because I heard high heels last night.

Just another note on my visit to Gare du Nord today – the Eurostar staff were striking. It was most alarming to enter the station to what sounded suspiciously like a riot. I think the point was that they weren't actually employed by Eurostar and were unhappy with the standards of security, safety and hygiene. So we were met by people telling us not to get on the Eurostar because it wasn't safe. They then asked if we would be traveling today and wished Tim a pleasant journey. Friendly or what? They gave us a nicely translated leaflet too - “we are on our 3^rd day of strike...train movements are violent...a huge number of work accidents is caused. Injured staff are usually disposed of.” Disposed of?! How do they dispose of them? Is it like when you flush the toilet on the train?!

So good news is that at 4.30pm, Becky has finally arrived after naughty flight cancellations. I am very glad she is here. Having helped her from the metro station and to her room, I wondered up to Centre Commercial Italie 2 (why 2?! where is 1?) on a mission for duvets among other things. My first port of call was the department store 'Printemps'. Spotted a very nice woollen coat for 290 euros, but that is not today's mission, let alone budget. Having navigated my way to the homewares department, I looked at their duvets. They seemed very expensive. The woman asked me if I wanted help, I asked her if she had any 'moins cher' duvets, but alas, the cheapest one there was 109euros. God knows what it was made of to warrant that. I'd expect fairly traded cotton shipped to France on the back of very well looked after donkey fed only on organic carrots. Or hand plucked goose down.

So off I went to Tati. I first came across Tati in Barbès, which is quite a tatty part of town, so it seemed to fit in quite nicely; but here it was nestled alongside a Levi's store in a shiny new purpose built shopping mall. Anyway, I love the place. Lots of cheapness, and most happily, duvets for 15euros a piece. Bizzarely though, I had to provide my passport along with my debit card. I was fully expecting the woman to ask for my PIN number, and was really just hanging on there for any word beginning with 'p' so I was a bit confuzzled when she asked for my passport. It wasn't even as though I was spending a massive amount of money. I left happy and duvet-ly fulfilled, so that's all that matters.

Met some other Erasmus students in the lift on the way back up – I think one of them said he was from Germany, but he didn't sound very German. The other was definitely Belgian. I believe the French make fun of the Belgians (and Bretons) in much the same way we do of the Irish (and Welsh). However, I do not yet hold such prejudices. We'll have to wait and see what they turn out like. He was nice really, he told me my French was good. Nice start with the flattery!

Becky's dad very kindly took us out for dinner to a nice little Italian place run by chinese staff down the road. Very friendly, very good service. Becky's dad remarked that we must be in a nice safe neighbourhood to be able to sit on the pavement outside the restaurant, next to a couple of very well heeled grannies with scary cosmetically enhanced faces and Louis Vuitton bags, without fear of a drive by shooting. I like this logic. It is nice here.

And with that thought, I'm off to bed with my nice new duvet. Good night!

Mots du jour

épaules = shoulders or ham (jambon) – as found on pizzas

un boulodrome = somewhere to play boules!

Une serpillière = floor cloth

une couette = duvet

une housse à couette = duvet cover

un traversin = bolster pillow. Stupid things

Wonderful weekend

2006-09-18T01:18:00.000+02:00

What a wonderful wonderful weekend!

I spent all of friday baking for our family picnic on saturday. Overkill or what. But monster cookies yay, I'm well going to take a stash to Paris and comfort eat all next week. I keep panicking that their kitchen might not be at all well equipped and I'll have to spend loads of money kitting myself out again. But I was thinking of getting my own mug anyway... my own nice mug to wrap my hands around and hold against my face when it's cold. And maybe a teapot... I like tea I do. We'll have to see. I think next weekend might just be a frantic hunt for bargains in Paris.

Anyway. Yesterday I went Ape and today I'm feeling sore! Go Ape is a fantastic high ropes centre a few miles from home. 5 of us booked in for a session in the morning and had a picnic with the family by the lake afterwards. It was so much fun! The penultimate obstacle was a 'tarzan swing' where you jump off a platform, free fall for 2.5 metres before the rope takes your weight, swing around a bit and then crash into a cargo net and scramble back into a tree. It was mildly terrifying - for that 2.5 metres you feel like you might die because you've forgotten to clip yourself on, but then you are yanked by the front of your harness and it feels like it might just cleave you down the middle. But I like a bit of fear. I was so tired by that point though, I thought I might not be able to haul myself up the cargo net.

I have to go again though, and try and master my landings on the zip wire. I managed to get an awful lot of bark chippings in my pants due to my tendancy for landing backwards on my bum. Silly me. I'm of so stylish!

I feel like I've done a hundred sit ups today, my stomach feels really tight from all that trying to balance. Must sort this fitness malarky out! Maybe I should take my roller blades to Paris.....

Having got rid of the family in the evening, I then put my gald rags on and went to my old buddy's 21st birthday party. It was really fun to see everybody from school again, meet all her new friends from Uni and generally catch up with everybody. I really need to see these people more often.

Today we slept alot. And made breakfast pie, which I'm still not decided about. It's basically a fry-up in a pastry case. I think my ideal pie-type breakfast would be more likely to consist of bread-and-butter-pudding-esque jamminess. Maybe I'm just not a pie person. But the recipe goes something like this (all credit to Tim, for realising his dream):

make some shortcrust pastry and line a dish with it
Cut up and fry 6 rashers bacon and 4 sausages. Usually works better if you cook the sausages then cut them up.
Beat 3 eggs, stir in a can of beans. Stir in bacon and sausage bits, pour whole caboodle into pastry case.
Put pastry lid ontop of it, maybe decorate with the words "breakfast pie" in pastry just in case anybody get confused.
bake in oven for about half an hour.
Eat

We think it would work better if you maybe added some fried onions, tomatoes, or mushrooms, and drained a bit of the bean juice off - it was quite sloppy. But the pastry was good. yay

And after all that sleep and Gill's lovely coffee, there is just no hope of me going to bed anytime soon, depsite it now being 12.40am I'm gonna do some al-packing.

Night night!

With 5 days to go, she begins to realise what she will miss about Britain

2006-09-14T18:39:00.000+02:00

So I spent all afternoon baking cookies for my mum. I'm really going to miss her. She's taken a couple of days off this week, and it's been really nice just hanging out with her and doing lazy stay at home kind of things like baking and going for walks.

And another thing... why does british television have to start getting interesting just as I leave?! The new series of Extras starts tonight, which I'm very much looking forward too, but Spooks is on again soon too. Not to mention the Casuality episode that they filmed outside (nearly in) our house. What am I to do?! I think I will have to clear up the french laws on downloading and see what I can get... otherwise there's going to be a giant pile of videos waiting for me when I get home.

Marmite. There's another thing that I'll miss. And fruit and nut dairy milk.
Someone remind me why I'm going?!

T minus 6 days

2006-09-14T00:21:00.000+02:00

Today was rather unproductive on the readying-myself-for-departure front. I pretended to myself that I was going to throw some stuff out, but I just rearranged some junk so that I could find the things that I do want to pack. Got my big suitcase out of the loft and to my surprise, I've managed to fit my clothes in with some space to spare. Magick! I'm not convinced I'll be able to lift it once I've finished packing, but hey, when did that ever stop anybody getting through the Paris metro system?!
I keep thinking of things I need to remember to take and then forgetting them before I can add them too my list.
Must make lists...

In the beginning....

2006-09-12T23:56:00.000+02:00

....there was anticipation. Fear? Mild terror? Curiousity?

Well anyway, blimey, I'm blogging! I have truly arrived in Geekdom!
You may well ask why. I think I'm asking myself the same question. But with only a week to go until I leave for Paris, I thought it would be good to record my year abroad in the form of a blog.
It may well bore you to hear all about my life, but then, I didn't ask you to read this. But you're welcome to, and if you find it amusing or useful in any way, then yay, it has mildly enriched your life . Otherwise, it would seem you are wasting your time.

So, I'm going to Paris in a week! I think I just about have all the necessary documents and am ready to do battle with the monstrous beast of bureaucracy in its paperchasing capital city. I'm going to study electronic and communication type things at l'Ecole National Supériere de Télécommunications (ENST) , and hopefully master the french language, though that might be a rather big ask. In between all of that, I aim to eat lots of french food, make lots of friends and see lots of France. Woo hoo.

Only thing left to do now if pack! Given that it usually takes about 4 car journeys to get all my junk from home to Uni, I think this could pose quite a problem. But then I like challenges. Why else would I do what I do?! I was considering attempting a bilingual blog, but perhaps that is a bit ambitious at the moment. If anyone wants to give my any langauge hints along the way, they are more than welcome, especially random proverbs involving animals, colloquialisms, slang and swear words. I promise I will try and work as many as possible into my daily conversations.

So. The countdown to departure begins: T minus 7 days.