Typing 'day 2' there was a bit surreal. It really does not feel like yesterday that I said my (extremely) tearful goodbyes at Edinburgh airport and boarded a plane to Paris with my mum. I think the goodbyes have definitely been the hardest part so far and going through the airport bag checks was something of a tragic comedy - I was in tears and my mum was attempting to comfort me, assure the staff that we had indeed packed our own bags, put said bags through the scanner and remove all the coins from our pockets all at the same time! Once we were on the plane though I started to quite look forward to the year ahead and get very excited about the adventure ahead.
When we touched down in Paris we were informed that the city was in the middle of a rail strike, but no one seemed to know whether we would be able to catch a train to Dijon later in the afternoon or not. After almost an hour wait for our luggage to come on the carousel (well - my luggage, I used my own and my mum's allowance despite her protests that I wouldn't be able to bring it all back myself without paying horrific excess baggage fines) we boarded a bus to the Gare de Lyon where, we fervently hoped, we would be able to get a connecting train. Thankfully, it turned out that it was only the RER train workers that were striking and we got a TGV train with no trouble. I was quite excited to be getting one of the famous TGVs but they were rather disappointing. I did, however, get to see two 5 year old French boys with an ipod belting out Whitney Houston's 'I will always love you' in extremely dodgy english, so that was fun! We pretty much just crashed into bed after we checked into our hotel - it had been a very long day!
Today I set about trying to register for uni and get the keys to my room in halls. This would have taken about an hour in Edinburgh. Here it took all day. The uni campus is out of the main town so we caught a bus, which was quite novel - you buy your ticket, which costs 1 euro and is valid for an hour, then you have to put it in a little orange machine to 'validate' it - it prints the time on it and there you go! Registration was a hassle, although it wasn't as bad as some people seem to have experienced at French universities. I had to pay twelve euros for public liability insurance and then I had to hand over a ridiculous amount of paperwork - copies of my birth certificate and passport, a form with all of my details including my parents' places of birth and professions (which I made up because I wasn't sure of the vocab for their real professions in French), a letter from Edinburgh confirming that I'm a student there, a photocopy of my edinburgh student card and my EHIC card, a copy of my Highers certificate and innumerable passport pictures. The French seem very keen on paperwork - I even had to provide a photocopy of my passport and my French address to buy a mobile phone today! After filling in all the forms and handing over all the documentation, I was made to go and stand in another queue where a man with a computer asked me all the same questions that were in the form I'd just spent over an hour filling in. Eventually I was handed my shiny new student card. YAY!! Then we headed over to the halls where I had to go through the entire rigmarole again and hand over 200 euros and promise that I would be back in person every two weeks to pay my rent. No direct debit it would seem...
The halls are quite basic - I have a bed, a desk and a sink in my room and there is a kitchen with a hotplate and a fridge divided into comartments with your room numbers on them and a padlock so that everyone only has access to their own food. There are signs all over the kitchen insisting that we only use it for making breakfast - I'm not sure why! I choose to brood on the positives - I have a balcony!!!
To be honest, I was expecting the first few days in Dijon to be extremely stressful and unsettling, but apart from a few pangs of homesickness I've found the whole thing really exciting. It gives me a real buzz to find myself perfectly able to communicate with people and to feel a bit of a sense of belonging. I think it will get much harder when my mum leaves in a few days - maybe the sense of familiarity comes from her being here more than anything else - but I really think that I'll be okay here, which I had severely doubted before I set off from Scotland yesterday afternoon. Tomorrow I'm going for a drink with an Edinburgh coursemate who I have never actually met - she's aleady been here a week or so, so hopefully she'll be able to introduce me to some new people!
A bientot!
