This week I have been trying to arrange to change my classes for next semester. As I mentioned in one of my first posts, when we first arrived there was so much confusion about enrolling for classes; which classes we were allowed to take, which we had to take and what level they would all be at, that the British Erasmus students eventually got hauled into a classroom by the Erasmus coordinator and enrolled in English as a foreign language classes. This, of course, was fine, because the classes are all taught in French and all to do with translating texts between the two languages, so theoretically it should be just as useful to us as it is to the French students. There are a few problems though. Firstly, in France, language learning tends to be focused on economics and business where in Edinburgh it’s focused on literature. This means that all of the work we do is on texts taken from financial journals, which I find really difficult to understand, even in their English versions. Another problem is that, essentially, people in the classes are supposed to be there to learn English, not French, and the teachers tend not to be too happy at having to cater to two sets of language learners at once. Mostly they don’t really like having Erasmus students in their classes at all and don’t make much effort to include us. They never call on us to answer questions or let us contribute, so we often just end up sitting at the back, bored. The teachers also try to teach the French students as much vocab as possible, so when they put new words on the board they translate them with other English synonyms, rather than with the French words, meaning that we don’t learn much. If you’re only taking one language, like me, it’s possible to change from business-based language classes to literature-based ones, which I might do for some classes next semester, but in general I think I’m going to try to take some French history or literature classes which should help me meet more French students and hopefully stretch my mind a bit as well. At the moment I feel a bit like the year so far has been an academic waste and I really want to try to change that next term to get the most out of the year.
I really enjoyed going over to my friend Jenni’s last weekend and making a roast dinner. We cooked for her landlady too, a French woman who hovered around us the entire time we were cooking asking sceptical questions about our cooking methods (‘so…you’re putting egg, water, flour and milk into a tin and cooking it? Why? I’ve never heard of this Yorkshire Pudding….is it an English thing? Maybe you should use sugar?’) and insisting that she trusted us, but clearly about to call the poisoning department at the nearest hospital. In the end she took seconds though, so our strange English meals clearly weren’t too bad, despite the fact that we’d mixed up our vegetable lingo at the supermarket and bought what we thought were parsnips, but turned out to have a strange, bitter, entirely un-parsniplike taste! We even got her to admit that the roast dinner may in fact be a traditional English, not French dish! Incidentally, I’ve completely stopped trying to get people to differentiate between ‘English’ and ‘British’ or to explain that while Scotland is part of Britain, it is also a separate country. The smug reply to this is inevitably ‘that’s stupid. It doesn’t make any sense’ to which there can really be no reply! I was really glad to be able to cook properly again too, although I know that I’m lucky to be in a building that allows us to cook at all. Of the ten residences on campus, only about half have fridges available for the students to use. The rest of the buildings still have kitchens with hotplates, but the residents either have to buy their ingredients during the day and cook them in the evening, or they have to eat out every night, which is expensive and a hassle. In general I was quite lucky with my building I think; it’s also one of only three of the buildings that has internet access, although it’s quite unreliable and extremely slow. For everyone else, there is a computer lab on campus which has quite long opening hours, but is shut at the weekend, which is a major pain. So I’m counting my blessings in the halls department!
The upcoming week looks set not to be very exciting, it’s been bitterly cold lately so everyone’s pretty much staying indoors and watching films (thanks to my amazing boyfriend who sent a memory stick full of tv programs and films earlier this week!). Dijon’s looking gorgeous at the moment with all the Christmas decorations up and frost everywhere. It’s starting to feel really Christmassy, which is a feeling that’s only likely to increase with our trip to the Christmas markets in Basel next Friday. I’m so excited about the trip, and after that, we only have one more weekend (two weeks, but I choose to view it as ‘one more weekend’) until we go home for Christmas! Yay!
So it's now up to me whether I do the final exam or not, I'll probably do it because it's a bit of a gamble if I don't, but we'll see.
