I have now been in Dijon for exactly one month and it feels like so much longer! I'm feeling more and more at home here and am managing to find my way around the Droit-Lettres building about 80% of the time! This is impressive as it has three different entrances, innumerable staircases and an extremely strange door numbering system.
This week I was determined to start getting organised and I wrote a list of boring admin I had to do by Friday. I know I should really have sorted myself out with a bank account and handed in registration forms for classes long before now, but, as I'm sure I have mentioned at least once before, I am extremely disorganised! The reason I haven't opened a bank account is actually becuase, when I got to Dijon, I was planning only to stay here until after the exams in January and then move on to a town near Marseille to do a teaching assistantship. I didn't want to be living in Miramas with a bank account whose home branch was in Dijon - it just seemed a bit silly, and with what I knew of French beaurocracy, I thought it would be impos However, in the last few weeks, a combination of a lack of contact from my host school in Miramas and the fact that Dijon is starting to feel a little bit more like home made me decide to withdraw from the assistantship programme and ask if I could stay in Dijon until the end of the academic year in May. This turned out to be surprisingly easy, although I still don't have confirmation that I can stay in my room in halls after January, which is a bit worrying. Anyway, yesterday I finally dragged myself down to the nearest bank and asked the teller for a bank account, please. This, too, was much easier than I expected it to be, and involved less paperwork too. I didn't even have to give them a passport picture! Just my passport, student card and proof of address - no problem! I have to admit that banking vocab is not my strong point and I'm not entirely sure of all the details of my new bank account - I know that I signed an innordinate number of forms and that I get free online banking and a free atm card, which you usually have to pay a few Euros rental fee a year to have. What did get me excited though, was the free pen and keyring - woohoo! I had decided to bank with BNP, partly because they have a branch right next to the campus, but mainly for the name, which is still providing endless amusement for me. I especially love the keyring, which says 'la vie est belle avec le BNP'. Tee hee!
Apart from lots of admin, I decided to be a bit more proactive in meeting French people this week as I'm finding my conversational French doesn't hold up very well under pressure because I never get any practice. All of my friends are English speaking and the only time I really speak French is to ask for things in shops or in an academic sense in classes. With this in mind I went along to Catholic students' chaplaincy on campus last Thursday. They hold a student mass and then everyone goes to the chaplaincy to have dinner together - the students take it in turns to cook each week. There were a few English speakers there but we didn't sit together, so I got lots of opportunity to practice my awkward dinner conversation. Everyone was so friendly and welcoming to the foreign students and I had a really good time. The evning did bring up a question which I hadn't had too much need to think about before: how do bisous work? Everyone knows about the French cheek-kiss and how, in different parts of the country different nubmers of kisses are required, but I wasn't too sure how it worked here. And who is it acceptable to kiss? After how long of knowing someone? How many kisses? It was a bit alarming! It turns out that in Dijon, you give one kiss on each cheek. Men do kiss each other, but they tend not to touch their cheeks together, they just air kiss. You do not kiss the priest, as my friend found out with just a touch of embarassment! It also seems that to forget to kiss someone can be a bit embarassing too - one girl came in when we were all standing in a circle chatting, made her rounds, kissing everyone but stopping one person short of the full circle. Her cries of apology and frantic kisses when she realised her mistake made me even more anxious about getting it right myself. All in all, I am not very fond of the cheek kiss. I think I have too much of the famous British reserve. Such close physical contact with strangers makes me a bit uncomfortable and I always forget that people are going to do it, so they always catch me off guard and my first instinct is always to back away, looking confused and alarmed. Thankfully, most of the time I remember before I have a chance to offend anyone and dutifully give my kisses like a true Frenchwoman!
So after a month of living in France, life is good. I am also extremely excited about the upcoming week or so because my boyfriend is coming to visit in three days' time and my best friend the week after. I'm so excited I can hardly contain myself!
