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.