The-morning-after-the-night-before. Well, the afternoon after. . .

Last night was awesome! I’m so glad Holly convinced me to go to that Erasmus do because I had a really good time and saw loads of people there that I recognised and met loads more new people! I’ll start from the beginning (As Maria said “A very good place to start” :op): Holly and I dolled ourselves up to go to this thing and headed for the Bastille via the trusty metro, as we had made plans to meet some of Holly’s mates there before making an appearance at our final destination. When we arrived I was introduced to: Bernie (Bernadette), a sweet little character from Singapore with absolutely fantastic English; Anna-Marie, a quiet girl from Finland who will be in my “Histoire de la langue” classes from now on; and Daniela, a Swedish girl who I got on brilliantly with :o) With these first few introductions out of the way we went for a quick drink/bite to eat in Mackie D’s before we found the bar we were aiming for: SanzSans.

When we arrived the party was already in full swing, but we were to see it MUCH busier! :op Straight away I recognised a girl from one of my classes at the Sorbonne, Marie, and upon greeting her, she informed me that she was working for Parismus that night and hoped we had a lovely evening :o) We headed for a table in the corner of the bar (the only one free) as a group and all of us sat down to people watch for as bit. Gradually throughout the evening, one or two of us got up to visit the bar and acquire drinks for the others and we began to introduce ourselves to others in the room, friends and strangers alike! The Parismus company had a game organised for us all to play; we all wrote our names down on a sticky label and popped them in a little tin, then later on in the evening we were all asked to pick a name from the box, find that person and introduce ourselves to them! A fantastic idea I think, especially as, although I didn’t have time to put my name in the box, I managed to find my label person! :o)

Recall me describing a house party that Holly, Mel and I went to at my friend Steph’s place? Well, I saw Steph again last night, very drunk and very happy :oD Hehehehe! I also bumped into quite a few people from various Sorbonne classes, including Siri, who came to sit with us when I found her. After about an hour’s deliberation and discussion, Bernie and I realised we’d been in the same French language classes without noticing each other! She had sat at the very front for every lesson and I had been at the very back. One contributing factor to this revelation was a guy called James, who I instantly recognised from my class, when Bernie called him over to be introduced to me! It was very confusing, but James and I chatted for a bit before he went off to mingle again. He is actually English as well, so it was nice to see that Holly and I aren’t the only ones here from good old Angleterre!

Although it was lovely to be in this pleasant, reverie-like atmosphere, I was soon jolted out of the delusion that my international world was perfect; on my way out of the bar with Holly and Kristin (a good mutual friend from Germany) we stopped to talk to some people who had also just left the bar, but we were quickly accosted by a strange French bloke who introduced himself to me, asked me how I was, and invited himself back to my flat for “ a good fun time” all in the same breath. Silly man. Why do blokes think lines like that work on us girls? I informed him in no uncertain terms that I was NOT a prostitute, and that he would not “get any” from me! One thing’s for sure, I won’t be wearing that outfit again in a hurry!

Anyway, on another note, earlier today I went into Uni to meet Siri for lunch, and then I actually managed to find my classroom for the class I missed last week. It was really interesting! We were taught about ancient runes, Anglo Saxon England and we’ve started learning how to translate Old English texts. :o) I think this will be a great subject! We only have to write one essay for it too! We should expect to have that set about 2 weeks before we finish the term. But then again, it shouldn’t be all work and no play. . . ;op

Here are some pics of Siri and me in a park down the road from the Sorbonne, which is where we had lunch today. We found some rather odd-looking children’s toys there; see if you guys can work out which animals they are meant to be:

We think this one was some kind of dinosaur. . .

. . . with a weird meerkat-ish, fox-like, kangaroo kind of thing in the background. . .

. . . this one, I reckon, was a cat (although from one angle it looks like a warthog!)

I think it’s quite ridiculous to have weird non-animals in a children’s play park; if you were all parents, would you want your kids playing on toys which look like mutant hybrid creatures?! I think not!

Anyways, I’d better go now, got to read the Tempest in preparation for tomorrow’s morning lecture.

Til next time! xxxx

Not much to report. . . .

Well I’m enjoying my weekend off this week, as, come next week, I shall have to start doing some serious work! I have my first French oral presentation to do (with Siri) on Wednesday this week on the subject of “London” by William Blake. We have no idea how to do this so on Thursday, Siri and I arranged to meet up and discuss how we might present the poem.

We are the first in our class to do a presentation so we have decided that there are two ways of looking at this:

Either,

a.) We are screwed. (We have no idea what we are doing, what is expected of us, or how we should be approaching this presentation!)

OR

b.) We are expected to set the standard for the rest of the class and everyone else’s will be based on ours. (Does that mean we have an obligation to make sure it is really good so that following presentations are reasonably interesting to watch?)

Whatever the case may be, we are lucky that Siri has done similar presentations in her own classes in Germany, so we have at least got some ideas for how to start. We met up on my day off this week, on Thursday, to discuss how we were going to start the project but we ended up writing the whole thing then and there! :o) At least it’s out of the way now, anyways, for now. Siri had heard of some computer rooms in the Sorbonne building which are available to students for working on in their free time, so we headed first for one of these workrooms. When we found one, there was no-one in the room, but all the computers were on, screensavers frequenting every screen and the door was unlocked and wide open. We went in, found a computer and started to work on the presentation; people came in every now and then to ask us if it was OK for them to work there too, but of course we had no idea if we were meant to be there or not so Siri had to explain this to anyone who asked.

Eventually a teacher came in and spoke in fairly rapid French to Siri (she was the only one not looking blank when he addressed us) to which she responded in kind. He seemed angry, so, whilst they shared words, I saved our work and began closing down the computer. She told me, when we had made a hasty retreat from the room, that he had been telling us off for using the university’s equipment “unguarded”, as though we were going to walk out of the room with a heifer-sized pc on our backs! Silly man. The computers are there for OUR use, and we have had proof of that since the incident, so I don’t know what his problem was. Anyway, we toddled off feeling thoroughly chastised, and then spent several hours sat in the MacDonald’s just down the road from the Sorbonne. There, we could use their public wireless internet connection to research the poem and get some interesting facts about William Blake. A very useful way to spend my day off and then after we’d finished the presentation, we chatted and went for a walk. I now have until Wednesday afternoon to polish up our work and to make copies of our presentation summary to give to the class as handouts. It could be said that I feel very proud of our work :o) I’m not normally this organised, as most of you know!

Anyway, yesterday was nearly as traumatic (though in a passive sense) as I was forced to listen to an extremely boring lecture on the subject of American literature. We are studying The 42^nd Parallel by John Dos Passos and my teacher really doesn’t make it easy to like the book . . .

She attempts to sound clever by saying really abstract phrases which seem to make very little sense to me; and I’m the best “blagger” in Norfolk! My essays never lack length, merely the required content (and often sense!) :op I can honestly say that not one of my essays for Uni last year, was under the word limit (or even ON it for that matter!); every single one surpassed the limit, even the essay I wrote through the night and finished at 7am!

Here is an example of her silly turns of phrase:
“Subversion is an active process; fiction, merely a product.”

“Dos Passos uses nature as an agent of subversion to undermine and subvert fictional conventions within the novel.”

“The characters are agents or victims of their own times.”

Oh and by the way, these are stated completely out of context, so we have absolutely no idea what she’s going on about because suddenly her discussion topic will just switch from one thing to another!

Well, no matter now, don’t need to think about the silly book or the silly teacher until next week; now is the weekend :o) Time for “chill-laxing”! Tomorrow I’m supposed to be going to an Erasmus “Soirée” run by a company called Parismus. They focus on bringing the Erasmus students together in a “family” kind of way whilst we’re all here in Paris. I don’t know if I really want to go at the moment. Am feeling a bit like becoming a recluse this weekend.

Oh well, shall let you know :o) Laters! Xxxx

Still settling in. . .

Sorry, sorry, sorry! This week has been pretty stressful so far and that's my excuse for not writing at all these past few days!

I began the week in a bad mood because on Monday I should have been in a class called "Histoire de la langue". However, due to the Sorbonne's silly planning and organisation, I couldn't find the room for my seminar! Either, they changed the room without broadcasting the news, or I wrote down the wrong room number for that particular class when choosing my modules. I searched for half an hour for the wrong room before considering double-checking the boards, and by that time it was too late for my 1 hour long class. Oh well, will try again next week!

Anyway, so far I'm really enjoying most of my lectures! :o) The course modules that I have chosen for this term are perfect for me, and it's not an obligation for me because I love learning about all the topics we are covering this term! That is one of the reasons I was so annoyed about missing the History class on Monday; I was expecting that to be really interesting! :o) I think my favourite class at the moment is the Tuesday morning "Civilisation de la Renaissance". It is practically non-stop story-telling for the entire lesson, which makes the bombardment of information easier to absorb. The lecturer clearly loves his subject and with him being a Shakespeare scholar, I feel a certain affiliation with the man. Unfortunately he seems keen to drop me in at the deep end with my French language lessons; at every available opportunity he bursts into a stream of very fast French which he expects me to decipher and respond to! Well, hopefully he'll forget about it in a few days or so.

Yesterday afternoon made my brain ache in the same way; my teacher is proud of the fact that she can translate her lessons from English into French and vice versa, so suddenly, mid-sentence she will switch languages and it confuses ALL of us, even the bi-linguists! This is especially tough on me when I have my very English days; sometimes I'm sure the French words jump right out of my head! It HAS made me realise, though, that it is necessary to maintain regular bilingual conversations in order to remember all you know of a language! I hope I'm able to keep up my French like this when I come back to England. If not, I might have to move out here! :op Something productive did come out of the afternoon's lesson though. . . I now have a presentation organised for the 20th November on the topic of "How women are represented in Chaucer" and more specifically for my specialisation, "How Chaucer's representation of women in The Wife of Bath's Tale (Canterbury Tales) differs from the typical descriptions of female characters in Old and Middle English texts". May sound boring to you lot, but that is an absolute DREAM of a topic for me! I'm doing a joint presentation with my friend Diana, so we'll be sharing the work-load a bit :o) I'm quite looking forward to tackling the subject, actually!

Today I had my first class for my Masters module, Shakespeare! Just before the seminar started, I started talking to a girl outside the room called Noémie who was also in the class. It was refreshing to have an entirely French conversation for half an hour, and then I was pleasantly surprised to see that the lecturer for the Masters class is none other than the Renaissance professor! It made the lesson extremely easy to bear, especially as it is (understandably) much more difficult to follow than my other classes. I am in a class with people who are at least 2 or 3 years older than me! Throughout the whole class, the tutor made constant references to different Shakespearean plays, many of which I have not yet read or studied. I felt pretty dumb during that class and I have vowed to read some more this weekend to try and catch up with the others, who all seem to know what they are talking about! That's one thing I've noticed about the Sorbonne; the students are much more hard-working, and committed to learning here! I don't know whether it is due to the Sorbonne being such a fantastic institution, or whether it is a French thing, but it is incredibly awing to see how devoted they are to their studies :o)

This afternoon brought took an irritating few hours of my life; they are gone and never coming back :o(
The English literature class was taken by the same very annoying lecturer from last week, who, as Siri pointed out, looks like the old tortoise from the Never-Ending-Story film, "Morla"! He has a faux English accent which only appears in some words, but most of the time you can tell that he is very French. He seems to have singled out Holly and myself because we are English and he has deigned to remember our names, but not many others, which is slightly embarassing! Last lesson, there were less than 10 students in the class (probably because not many knew that the lessons had already started), but this week the classroom was absolutely choc-a-block! For the second week running, Holly and I found ourselves separated by people, so Siri and I passed her notes along the table. Yet again he seemed to be stumped by the uncommon English words in our answers to his silly long-winded questions (which I think is ridiculous, what with him being a qualified English tutor and all!) so he glided over our comments and made silly remarks such as "Blake is not a cloud." I mean, come on mate! He is giving us waaaaaaaay too much material with which to mock him! Siri and I chose our presentation topic for this module too; we are going to discuss Blake's poem "London" and we have agreed to meet tomorrow to talk about it and start planning our speaking parts! Grrrrrr somebody took "The Tyger" :o( That's my favourite poem!! Smelly person.

I can't believe that we only have a week before we have to do our first oral presentation! It's going to be very scary because I have absolutely no idea what he is expecting from us or how he wants us to analyse the poem! Hopefully Siri will have some idea, so I'll post again soon letting you know what she suggests.

Anyways, I'm off to bed now. I may have a day off of lectures tomorrow, but I still have to get up at a reasonable time to meet Siri and start work on the presentation.

Night all! xxxx

P.S. I shall leave you with this lovely image:

Holly and I seem to have a bit of a thing about collecting random objects, and also, it seems, we have a slight addiction to Diet Coke. . .

La semestre a commencée!

Well, again, it's been a week since I last posted an entry but I'm going to warn you now, that I may not have time to post as often as I did at the beginning. It looks like I will have a LOT of work on my hands and a stupid amount of reading to do which means less time online.

Anyways, here's a brief overview. I'm afriad there aren't many pictures because I haven't had much chance to take any :o(

Monday - Holly and I went in very early (8am) in case any of our modules started that day. Luckily none of ours started that early so we had plenty of time to sort it out; in fact, my first class didn't start until the following day so I was pretty pleased with that :o)

I'm going to be taking the following classes:

• L3AN6212 - Découverte de l’Angleterre médiévale - This is a 2nd yr class


• L5ANH301 - Histoire de la langue - This is a 3rd yr class


• L5ANL303 - Littérature - This is a 3rd yr class


• L5AN6311 - Civilisation de la Renaissance - This is a 3rd yr class


• L5AN6318 - Littérature américaine - This is a 3rd yr class


• M1AN403S - Shakespeare et son temps - This is a Masters/Postgraduate class

Am really looking forward to getting to grips with them all! Shall I remind everyone that I'm in my SECOND year! :op Not being big-headed at all. . . hehehe!

We DID discover the Shakespeare company bookshop on the edge of the river though! It is an English bookshop on the ground floor but when you go upstairs, there is a sleeping area for penniless writers to use when they can't afford to rent a room, and, thousands of old books that you can sit and read til your heart's content! It was utter heaven to us!

This is the "Wall of Love". It is a mirror where past visitors to the bookshop have left little messages thanking the owners for welcoming them with open arms. Holly and I plan to leave our own little message here just before we leave Paris :o)

As you can see, Holly dove straight into the books. . . :op

We stayed to read for a little while in the shop. This was on the upper floor.

We also found a book written by one of our lecturers at Brunel! :o)

Back to the studies, the Renaissance class was my first, on Tuesday:
The class was fantastic; to begin with, I was the only student in the class, so the professor just started describing the course to me, but gradually people started to arrive until there were 4 of us pupils (most people though that this week was purely admin-related and that the classes don't start til next week. More fool them :op). After one girl, Vanessa, mentioned that the Sorbonne is like a maze to try and find all your classrooms in, the professor took the word "Maze" and used it to give us a history of how the idea of a labyrinth came into British theatre through greek mythology (which I adore!!) and then found its way into Shakespearean plays! It was so interesting, and I wrote pages and PAGES of notes on the topic! It was the perfect first class for me, and I can't wait until next Tuesday!

After this class, I didn't have any schedules classes until the next day so I decided to explore the other Sorbonne building which is on the other side of Paris, at Clignancourt. This turned out to be a long-but-well-worth-the-trouble plan as I got lost trying to find the building. However, when I had worked out where I needed to be, I climbed several staircases and found myself in the English department where I signed up to take the Medieval England course. As luck would have it, the class was due to start in an hours time from when I arrived, so I went in search of something to drink in the cafeteria before settling myself to wait outside the room. That is where I met Gwenn :o) She introduced herself and explained that she was also taking the same class as me, and after we had chatted for a while it was time to go in.

I spent the first 20 minutes of the class feeling utterly bewildered; the professor was speaking entirely in French and the only reason that I did not speak up sooner about the fact that I was finding it difficult to understand, was that I knew she had not yet begun teaching. She gave us some printed information (in English, luckily) on how to do research, on the topics we would cover, in French libraries and then started talking about presentations we would have to do in class. At the first available opportunity I explained to her that I was English and would find a lesson taught in French very difficult to cope with, but she told me not to worry because the classes would be taught in English. Panic over, when the lesson ended, Gwenn and I got the metro home together because as luck would have it, she only lives 2 minutes away from us! Literally across the road!!! It's amazing!

Wednesday afternoon was the Literature class: Holly and I are both in this class, and we both managed to find the room by ourselves even though the building is like a rabbit warren! There are so many staircases that you have to think really carefully about which one you need to climb to get to certain rooms, especially as they aren't always connected by adjoining floors, so when you go wrong, you have to go all the way down again!
Anyway, in the class we have a mad teacher who phrases things weirdly, makes things more complicated than they really need to be! We also met a German exchange student, Siri, who is also on the Erasmus exchange, and, luckily for us, she speaks excellent English :o) Siri and I spent the lesson laughing at the professor as he asked everyone absurd questions. He asked me to explain something in a line of William Blake poetry and when I answered with words like "sibilance", "assonance", "lyrical" and "trochaic meter", he was stumped. He just kind of looked at me as though I was speaking another language and then he moved on as if nothing had happened! :op Looking forward to more lessons like that? Hmmmm. . . I'm not so sure!

Thursday was a totally wasted day in terms of lessons: I was supposed to have my Masters lesson on Poetry and the Poetic style in the afternoon, but as there was the option of a tutorial around noon, I decided to go to that and speak to a professor about the course. When I got there, I got chatting (in French) to a really kind Parisian girl who was also doing the course but she explained to me that it would be taught in French and that I would probably find it extremely difficult. Worried by this, I went into the room and spoke, in English, with a very pleasant male professor who agreed that with only an adequate level of French, that I would find the course impossible to comprehend. Disheartened by this, I asked him if he knew of any other courses I could do (I have a quota to fill in order to complete my term here and I have a certain number of classes to take if I want to qualify).
He was extremely helpful and gave me lots and lots of advice for other Masters classes. It would seem he is keen to get me on a Masters class rather than a 3rd year class like my other modules. Bless him :o) I did see him later on in the corridor and he stopped to check up on me and see how I was getting on with things. Awww!

Anyways, my American Literature class has been changed to Fridays now, so I went to that yesterday and it was good :o) I have a lot of reading to do for it, but it would appear that most people are having problems getting hold of the texts very quickly.

I hereby URGE universities everywhere (especially the Sorbonne and Brunel): PLEASE release your suggested reading lists BEFORE the start of term! You really cannot expect us to have the texts, let alone have READ them if you only give us 1 week's notice!

Anyways, rant over, I believe I have brought you up to date :o) I feel proud of myself, and, to celebrate I am going to make myself Boeuf Bourguignon for dinner :op

Will write again soooooon! Don't forget to comment :o) xxxx

P.S. here's a funky video of some street entertainers (only the best for you darlings!)