Epic Pass

The other day I did my last “assessment” of the “semester”. It’s hard to say it went well… it happened and that’s the main thing. I feel a bit weird though because I didn’t really have a proper stuvac and the semester kind of, you know, didn’t exist. It’s amazing the amount of work I did in order to (I assume..) pass. Here’s a subject by subject rundown.

Erasmus French for Foreigners: Actually this class wasn’t affected by the strike, so it was on each week. The night before the exam I got my notes together and realised I’d skipped a third of the classes and had no way of getting the notes. 18/20 my friend.

Histoire de la Langue Française: I went to one 1 hour class in January. Sometime in May the teacher gave me a printout of the entire course. I read it and sat an exam one week later.

Pragmatique de l'interaction: I went to one lecture in January, most of which consisted of the professor explaining why they would probably go on strike. I missed the tute. One day in May I wrote an analysis (no word limit) of any conversation (an msn chat). I did no research, but took quotes and references from an essay I wrote for a subject last year.

Diachronie: I went to one lecture and one tute in January, but left the tute early. I then paid ridiculous amounts for a textbook and took an open book exam, unsupervised and with no time limit. Some of the questions were the same as exersises in the textbook. There were answers in the back.

Phonologie: Actually went to two whole lectures and two tutes. For the assessment I had to read a book then do a presentation on the differences between English and French phonotactics. The book was too hard so I didn’t read it and I talked for about 20 minutes about things I made up and stuff I read on Wikipedia. Then the teacher explained all the things that were incorrect about what I had said.

Morphologie: I went to two lectures and two tutes for this as well, but was (both times I think) still drunk from the night before. My assessment involved reading 5 documents and then doing an oral. The oral was actually just the professor asking me questions and then answering them himself when he saw I couldn’t.

Everything Tastes Better In France

You know those people who come back from living in France and complain about how bad Australian bread is? I always hated them I really did. It’s bread. Bread. You can’t exactly get it wrong.

Sadly though, after 5 months here, I’ve realised you can. The bread here is amazing. I think the baguettes are actually made out of heaven. They’re so serious about their bread here that when you go into a bakery they ask you how well done you want it. The other day the baker held up a baguette and said to me “is this one okay?” I got the feeling he would’ve let me taste it like one does with wine if I’d wanted to.

Anyway, bread isn’t the most important subject of this story. The point I’m trying to make here is that French food tastes delicious. Almost always. In every possible way.

So anyway, the other day I had to buy some cough medicine. It’s just your regular over the counter syrup (with no flavour specified) from a random pharmacy. So I took the first dose expecting some horrendous fake cherry attempt to cover up the blatant medicine flavour, when to my surprise it tasted kind of nice. And I thought about it for a while and realised it tasted like something. Something I ate quite often. Something delicious. And then it struck me: crème brûlée. My cough medicine tastes like crème brûlée. France is now officially better at cuisine than any other country I know.

P.S. I was about to publish this post when I paused to get a piece of gum. I’ve never had this gum before, but I bought it because the flavour is called “chlorophylle” and I wondered how on earth that was possible. Anyway, it actually tastes like the dye in plants in the most delicious way imaginable. That is all.

I bought a piano phone

On the weekend I went down to Lyon for their annual Vintage Market. The market was pretty rad. But what really upset me was the city in general. Lyon was my 3rd or maybe 4th preference for exchange. I knew nothing about French cities so I just assumed everywhere in France would be roughly the same apart from Paris which would be big and scary. But Lyon is amazing. Everything about it is cooler than Orléans. It’s pretty, it’s easy to get around, they have gallo-roman ruins for goodness sake. And a free zoo in the middle of a park, and a funicular, and a miniature museum, and probably 800 more shops than Orléans. Plus their river is a greenish blue colour instead of a greenish brown like ours. People in Lyon are actually interesting. I saw proper hippies there and a goth. And brass bands (plural) performing randomly in the street. In Orléans I’ve seen maybe two people in baggy pants and one kid carrying a French horn in a case. It’s as if people sat in their home towns and said to themselves “You know, I’m pretty boring, I think I’ll move to Orléans, I hear our kind are congregating there and planning something mild”. Meanwhile, other people all over France were saying “Wow, I am young and unfathomably attractive, why don’t I move to Lyon?” And another thing, in Lyon I did not once fear for my life. Here I can’t walk across the university campus without having rocks thrown at me by teens, can’t get to a friend’s place without guys on scooters trying to run me over and shouting things, can’t go to the supermarket without having obscenities yelled at me by men of all ages or being followed by a creepy boy who works in McDonalds. In Lyon I could wear a short skirt with no tights without fearing rape. When people on public transport spoke to me it was to ask where the bus went, not to ask if we could do a “cultural exchange” over drinks because they couldn’t help overhearing I spoke English.

Anyway that was fun. Now I’m back in Orléans surrounded by accommodation bills and uni work. W00t.

Other things

Complaining aside, I’ve done a bunch of stuff since my last post. The last one before the last one, since I decided to separate this one into two. I went to Disneyland, went to Versailles, went kayaking at the fake beach, went to a few Polytech parties, went shopping unnecessarily (you know when you get home and wonder whether your new tutu and cowboy boots will go with your purple suspenders, then you take a step back and disown yourself?). Also, May marked the annual Joan of Arc festival in Orléans. Joan of Arc is pretty much the hero of everyone in France since she drove away the pommy bastards who were trying to invade back in medieval times. After she saved them, the French turned her over to the English, who burned her because she saw dead people who told her to do things. Essentially. So anyway, the festival was pretty good.. personally I was surpised at the number of nerds in Orléans who owned their own medieval costume and/or lute and/or vulture. When we went to see a light show on the Cathedral we were also surprised at the number of people who live here at all; apparently this is the only night they leave their homes all year.

Anyway I was going to write more stuff but I just realised I have not studied yet today, despite having two extremely difficult courses to teach myself within the next 3 days. Bye.

Fac Off

On the first of May I received the following email in my Sydney Uni mailbox:
“Please note that as the Union and the University has reached an agreement the strike scheduled for next Tuesday 5 May 2009 has been called off, so all classes will be held as usual.”

I actually burst out laughing and could not stop. When I read it the university here had already been on strike for 3 months and the semester was technically over. Now most teachers have started trying to summarise their courses in weekly meetings so that everyone can sit their exams in June during what would normally be their summer holidays.

As a foreigner though, I am required to organise my own assessments with individual teachers so that I can get them done before I go home. In some cases this means obtaining the lecture notes for a subject, studying them for under a week, then sitting an exam.

Sure, this is the most study I would ever do under normal circumstances anyway, but usually there’s the bonus* of actually being taught things in class. As I said to someone recently, “what are they assessing me on? my ability to teach myself? if i can teach myself then maybe they shouldnt have their jobs”. Last week I was interviewed for the tv about how the strikes were affecting me and I was asked something about money. Obviously I’ve spent a hell of a lot of money coming to france and paying rent but I was never annoyed about it because I still got to live in Europe for several months. But suddenly I realised that I’ve spent $2500 in university fees this semester, to pay for my actual courses. I just payed $2500 for less than two weeks of class. That’s like $125 an hour, if you include the classes where the professors just explained their reasons for the upcoming strikes. I could’ve spent that on 200 movies and learned almost as much.

*Is it weird that when i wrote the word bonus my brain was like "Ah Latin, you're a fusional language. This is why I will never learn you. One morpheme for masculine, singular AND nominative? That's too much for me to handle."

I apologise

When you’re a poor foreign student it’s great to get free stuff. One of the differences I’ve found between French university life and Australian university life is that here you actually have to buy clothes. In Sydney you can live off free T-shirts for at least 2 weeks without washing any. However here there are still ways to obtain stuff for free. For example forgetting to tell friends that they left food at your place. It’s also good when 3 of your friends go away for the weekend leaving you behind with all the food they think may go off before they get back. Another hot tip: make friends with people who brought so many pairs of shoes that when one is slightly too big they can afford to give it away and people who buy 4 euro dresses without trying them on. In the past week or so I’ve managed to collect the following items: a tin of lentils, half a bag of curry powder, half a box of brownie, half a loaf of brioche, a capsicum, a tub of crème fraîche, a pair of shoes, a yoghurt, almost a whole garlic, almost a whole box of hot chocolate, a purple dress. Sure I may only be one step away from dumpster diving, but I promise I will never cross that line.

Moving on, this weekend was Easter. Back home when I pictured Easter in France I imagined hanging out with a whole lot of French people, maybe having some kind of civilised meal, possibly going to a French Church, eating chocolate eggs, maybe even painting some real eggs, etc etc. Instead I spent my weekend with Americans, didn’t eat or see one piece of chocolate, did walk past a church at one point but never went in, and ate nothing but pizza. I also realised today that I may have committed each one of the seven deadly sins over this weekend alone. I feel bad that this happened over Easter, but at least I’m being honest. So here are my confessions..

Lust: On Saturday we went to a waterpolo game. I’ve never seen so many almost naked French men. And I know I wasn’t the only one having bad thoughts.
Gluttony: Alcohol. Sigh. Both Thursday and Saturday nights. Lots. (According to the photos anyway… I have no memory to back that up)
Greed: I don’t think I’ve ever eaten as much pizza as I did tonight. That was ridic. Probably wouldn’t be so bad if we hadn’t eaten all that pizza on Friday as well. And fries. I’m never eating again.
Sloth: After going to bed at 6am on Sunday morning and getting up who knows when, I think I spent all of Easter Sunday watching DVDs and lying on beds. I didn’t leave the second floor of my building.
Wrath: I think I got pretty angry on Saturday night and started yelling at people because I was bored. Why am I such a horrible person?
Envy: I am so jealous of all the trips people have been planning. I NEED TO GO SOMEWHERE. I’m also jealous of people who have cars here, and people who are best friends with people who have cars here.
Pride: I don’t really understand this sin. Is it to do with vanity or self-esteem or what? I wasted a lot of money on makeup on Friday. Also I was pretty proud of the daisy chain I made today in that field of flowers where a donkey was pulling along a cart of children, followed by a lamb just wandering behind. Wow that really was Easter.

The good news is, I don’t think I sinned at the art gallery. (I can just hear Christian [linguist]s saying, “actually the good news [which is the meaning of the word ‘gospel’, from the Old English ‘god-spell’, a calque of the Greek word ‘euangelion’] is Jesus Christ and his resurrection”. Fair point, but did you really need that many brackets and quotation marks? P.S. If I read one more book or hear one more talk in which the meaning of the word ‘gospel’ is explained I may actually cry. Please just assume we already know. Please?)

I can't unitask

This is how I get assignments done...

Tab 1 – Gmail: 14 new messages. I’ve read them already. Reply later.
Tab 2 – Facebook: No new notifications in the past 3 minutes.
Tab 3 – Googlebooks: Language and the Internet by David Crystal. Can’t say it’s one of my favourite books but need to read it for an assignment. He’s talking about netizens (citizens of the Internet). I wonder if netizen has a wikipedia article.
Tab 4 – Wikipedia: netizen. Oh my god it does. Am I a netizen? I suppose I do have 6 email addresses, facebook, msn, a blog. Not sure if I “have a self-imposed responsibility to make certain that [the Internet] is improved in its development while encouraging free speech and open access”. Wow I like the word portmanteau. Why don’t I use it more often? Click. Why is it taking so long?
Tab 1 – No more new messages than before.
Tab 2 – Who’s online? No one worth talking to. 330am in Sydney. Click. Taking too long. I need to use all that spinach before it goes bad. What can I cook?
Tab 5 – Google: Spinach recipes. Click. Calf’s brains with spinach. Really? Surely if I’d wanted to cook that I would’ve typed calf brain recipes. Although I may have a spare calf brain lying around in the fridge. What do I have in the fridge?
Tab 6 – Google: fridge. Hannah. Think about this a second. Close tab.
Tab 5 – Spinach soup? Yeah maybe. Could work. What was I doing before?
Tab 4 – Oh yeah portmanteau.
Tab 1 – No more new messages. I wonder how many times I’ve used the word portmanteau in gchat. Zero. I’m not surprised.
Tab 4 – “The usage of the word "portmanteau" in this sense first appeared in Lewis Carroll's book Through the Looking-Glass (1871), in which Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice the coinage of the unusual words in Jabberwocky”. Oh wow. This is the best day of my life. Oh my god.
Tab 2: New message. CLARE I finally got the Humpty Dumpty thing!! Biggest coincidence ever. So I was reading about portmanteaux in Wikipedia (words that are made of two other words (like netizen) and apparently in Jabberwocky Humpty Dumpty makes some words up like that and then explains to Alice that it’s a portmanteau and shiz! SO apparently Mark Aronoff wasn’t completely off his head!
Tab 4: Porte-manteau means coat-hanger?? I thought coat-hanger in french was some other word. Hm.
Tab 6: Babel Fish: Coathanger, English to French. Manteau-cintre. Yeah cintre. That’s what I though. What was I doing before?
Tab 4: Ha. Bennifer is a portemanteau. I love linguistics. Linguistics! That’s right I was reading a book.
Tab 3 – I swear I know more about the Internet than this guy. He keeps talking about chat groups and virtual worlds. What the hell. What about chat? Just chat. Who uses chat groups? And virtual worlds?? Not since the Habbo Hotel of year 8 my friend.
Tab 1 – Still no one online. Bah. I wonder if the word multitask has an opposite. Do you think at a job interview you could tell them (if they asked what your weaknesses were) that you couldn’t (insert opposite of multitask here)?
Tab 6 – Google: multitask antonym. Urban dictionary? I think not. Let’s try… Wictionary: taking too long to load. I reckon the opposite of multi- is uni- so I’ll start saying unitask and see if it catches on. Yeah.
Tab 2 – Ooh someone has put photos online. These are boring. I wonder if anyone has commented on my blog.
Tab 7 – Nope. Maybe I’ll write a new post.