So… after my fun first day things settled down; I don’t know where to begin so I’ll start at the beginning and work forwards…
Sunday night I still had no idea what was going on; I knew my French course started on Monday but where or when I had no clue, so I did what anyone else would do: shrugged and waiting for instructions. Monday morning I receive an e-mail:- ‘oh by the way you have a French test today at 13:30’, wonderful! No one told me there would be tests, and I realised that perhaps I should have revised over summer, just a little bit because I’ve forgotten all my grammar!
A ten minute walk later and I find the right building (this place is huge), finally I was getting somewhere and there were other people! Other people who hardly had any information and who felt as lost as me! Funnily enough a lot of people I spoke to that day were put in the same French class as me, so on Tuesday we all turned up for six hours of intensive classes, in Edinburgh I didn’t have six hours in a week let alone a day! All the Erasmus students group together for safety I think and I ended up talking to a guy who lives opposite me and who invited me to out with some German and Belgian people that evening, our French was a mix of half the European languages but we got by.
The French course turned out to be really interesting, we spent a lot of time comparing cultures and I found the most interesting thing was that people who live in mainland Europe consider themselves European- that’s something I would never use to describe myself, the British culture is very separate; on a lighter note we found great amusement in the fact that in most other languages cockerels go ‘cokericoo’ where as ours go; ‘cock-a-doodle-doo…’
Wednesday I finally managed to get to the chemistry building which was a whole new experience; I had to fill in forms which all of the other chemistry students did Monday whilst I was in a French test; I met a student from Glasgow and it felt strange to be speaking English; I was introduced to people as if I were interesting- ‘this is Melissa, one of our Erasmus students and this is the professor of spectroscopy, the person who sorts out third year timetables, someone else whose name you’ll never remember!’
The upshot of it all was that I managed to be enrolled and find out that all my courses are fine and I will probably be able to take Japanese as well, which now I think about it might be quite difficult… The strangest thing is that my French course is with the USTL (university of technology and science Lille) students but I’m enrolled with the ENSCL (Ecole nationale supérieur de chemie de Lille) which does everything differently- it was a bit confusing, I went to the Erasmus welcome by the USTL which I don’t think I was meant to but I did find out a bit about the Cité Scientifique.
But now that the French course has finished I’m at a loss again, I have meetings, and possibly lectures on Monday but I’m not really sure about anything and I have to meet a whole new lot of people. The second hurdle approaches but for now it’s the weekend and the Braderie (more about that next time) and time for moules frites!
