As a quick update on some ongoing issues before I fill you in on the banter of the last week I should tell you that we are still on strike and I still have no passport but I am keeping all my fingers and toes firmly crossed that I make my flights home on Thursday – I invite you all to do the same!! Thank you!
The last week has been pretty busy and was quite full of exciting things, which made a refreshing change! There are cheap return train trips to Paris every Saturday which lots of students take advantage of – it costs €15 and as you leave Dijon at 5.30am and get back at 10.30pm you get a full day in Paris for not too much money. I’ve never done the day-return thing before because I love my bed too much and also because I’ve been to Paris so much already during this year abroad that I’m actually starting to get a bit bored of it, though I know that that statement will draw gasps of horror from loads of people I know who really can’t get enough of the place. Anyway, last Saturday the entire Scottish contingent of Dijon decided to head to the capital to watch Scotland play France in the 6 Nations. I think the idea was started by someone who actually likes rugby and understands the rules, but then the rest of us crashed her plan and all decided to tag along and be loudly and brashly patriotic even though none of us have a clue about rugby at all! We got to Paris at about 9.30am, though it felt much later because by that time we’d been up for five and a half hours. We didn’t really have much of a plan about what to do in the morning before the match but we ended up going to the Catacombs, which is an enormous mass grave under the streets of Paris. It used to be a lime quarry and then in the 19th century, when an open mass grave in the middle of Paris was starting to cause lots of disease the mayor decided to relocate it to the abandoned quarry under the town. At first they pretty much just threw the bones and bodies in there in a huge mass, but a while later the mayor decided to have the bones rearranged in a decorative way and opened the catacombs to the public. It’s a really weird place. I couldn’t decide if it was disrespectful and undignified or if the people whose bones they were would have been glad to have this as a kind of memorial. After all, the kind of people who get buried in mass graves are usually forgotten by history and the catacombs get millions of visitors every year. Either way, it was quite an unsettling experience, though I think everyone was glad they had been.
After the Catacombs we walked through Jardin de Luxembourg, which I’d never been to before, and had some lunch before we headed off to The Thistle, the Scottish pub where we were going to watch the game. The original plan had been to try to get tickets to the actual match but because we’d been a bit late in realising that it was being played in Paris, there weren’t any cheap tickets left, so we settled for the pub. We stopped off at Starbucks to paint each others’ faces with Saltires (and Tricoleurs for the two Sophies and Beatrice who all have French blood, though we made them get Saltires as well).
The pub was packed out when we arrived and we had to sit on the floor in front of the screen as we drank our Irn Bru and munched Walkers salt and vinegar crisps (which was really exciting because they don’t really seem to do salt and vinegar in France). I think Kirsty was the only one who actually watched the game – the rest of us spent the time getting more crisps and debating whether number 10 or number 11 was better looking (it was number 10)! The Sophies were confusing everybody by cheering no matter who had scored and covering up the appropriate face flag so a good time was had by all! In the end Scotland lost 22-13 but we decided that since they had only had one try each it was a tie. Also – we didn’t really care by then who had won! It had been a really fantastic day out and the train trip back was hilarious as well because by then we were so tired that we were a little bit hysterical and everything was ten times funnier than it would normally have been!
We have had a few more classes this past week because the teachers are starting to realise that they have to put us through exams in a couple of months and we haven’t had any lessons yet. Their workloads are starting to pile up and the government isn’t giving in to their demands so quite a few of them are starting to teach the odd class here and there. I went to my first French literature class, which a comparative study of the way mermaids are portrayed in fairy tales from different countries, which is a strange but really interesting topic to have a class on! I’m doing a really useful French expression class this term as well which makes a big difference from the completely useless one I did last semester, so that makes me happy!
Other than that I don’t have too much to report from this week. I was ill for quite a lot of it with a horrible throat infection which lead me to constantly dream that my mum was here looking after me, which in turn made me wake up very sad to realise that she wasn’t. It was tragic stuff. It’s finally starting to warm up a bit as well and we’ve had quite a few sunny days lately which make everyone walk about with massive smiles on their faces, even though it’s still quite chilly. I’m quite looking forward to when it starts to get really warm! We don’t have too much planned for the upcoming week. It’s Sophie’s birthday during the winter holiday which starts on Friday so I think we’ll be doing something to celebrate that before everyone goes home. It’s hard to believe we’ve already been back in Dijon for nearly seven weeks since Christmas – the time’s really flown by and it’s starting to feel like I’m running out of time to do all the things I want to do before we have to go home. I’m also quite interested to see how everyone has suddenly started to change to saying ‘we have to go home’ rather than ‘we get to go home’ – I guess it’s not just me who’s falling a little bit in love with Dijon!
