15 Weird things I've seen in Montpellier

1. The Gipsy petting zoo (I'm sure this is some sort of scam...)
2. A woman on the bus mashing a stick around in her mouth (was later informed that this woman was probably from Uganda where they chew on a certain type of stick rather than brushing their teeth. Interesting!)
3. A mean speaking in tongues on the bus. Like, he was literally conversing with someone by making slurping noises. For half an hour.
4. Cat man. 
5. A group of French teenagers drunkenly singing I will always love you in Place du Peyrou. At 8 AM on a Saturday morning.
6. Someone walking a ferret. (And all the dogs going CRAZY)
7. A man drinking Heineken on the tram at 7:30 AM on a Tuesday. Get on his level.
8. My bus driver jump off the bus to grab a coffee and a croissant from a café when we were stuck in gridlock traffic.
9. Snow (which is just weird to see in Montpellier).
10. The international section of the grocery store filled with salsa and peanut butter.
11. Two people giving bisous with cigarettes in their mouth. C'est la classe.
12. A skate-boarding dog.
13. A guy on the tram who stood in front of me with his arms spread out like wings, made seagull noises for two minutes, and then thrust his hand at me expecting a coin.
14. A man smoking and jogging at the same time. Counterproductive.
15. Cat rock! My little name for the rocky area down by the river where I've made friends with lots of strays. Seriously, I've named them and everything.

We don't need no (French) education

Peur du jour- 24 Avril 2012: Final exam at the French University at la journée americaine

So today I took my first (and only) exam for my history/geography course at Paul Val. Gross.

Let's not even talk about how this exam was at 8:15 (INSANELY early by French standards) the Tuesday after a two week break. Thankfully, I had already planned to be back by last Friday to recuperate, so I did have time to study hard for three days. But, as I am the type of student that usually starts studying a week in advance for regular tests and TWO weeks for finals (yeah, go ahead and tape the "kick me" sign to my back, I'm a nerd), I was still really stressed.

Not to mention that I wasn't really sure what I was supposed to be studying. I had asked the professor, but he said that it wouldn't be fair to give me any sort of direction. Really, France? In the end I ended up going through my notes and trying to organize it into outline form so I could catch the big themes and memorize some small details/examples.

So the morning rolled around. I left super early to avoid being late due to any tram delays and breezed past the students enjoying a pre-exam cigarette outside the classroom. The prof passed out some scratch paper and the French equivalent of blue books (at least I didn't have to pay for it like at UNC! Silver lining.) and then began to explain the exam.

Because this class was taught by two professors, they thought it necessary to have two different essay prompts (normal). They had both professors develop a subject (also normal), but did not feel that there would be enough time for each student to answer both questions (okay). So, they divided the class up into two groups by last name (getting wonky) and then proceeded to have one student from the first group draw a subject from a hat (seriously?). As the French student deciding my fate walked to the front of the room, Jason was muttering "this would never happen in America," and I was singing the Price is Right theme (COME ON DOWN!).

I ended up getting the subject for the professor that I've been whining about all semester. On top of that, we recieved the prompt via dictation (here's to hoping I didn't mishear a word!). In a fortunate turn of events, however, it was the prompt I felt more comfortable with. In fact, it was the last section of notes I had read before getting off the tram to walk to campus. Not that I know how I'm going to be graded, but I didn't feel that the exam itself was that hard. I had an hour and a half to answer one essay question--kid's stuff compared to my poli and history exams at UNC.

I only need a 9 (maybe I'll talk about the French grading scale in a cultural lesson) to get credit at UNC. And if not, at least I got some great stories out of this class and a deep appreciation for my home institution.

"Bien"

Okay so remember that pop midterm I thought I was taking last week? Today we got the papers back and all mine said was "Bien."

My face

Yo ho, yo ho

Peur du jour- 29 Fevrier 2012: Pop midterm on maritime trade

Happy leap day, everyone! As you all know, 2012 is une année bissextile (I like the English phrasing better...).

Anyways, my Grand défis course is giving me plenty o' stories to recount. Today marked the first class with a new professor (it's kind of complicated, but the professor who was teaching Wednesdays is now teaching the Tuesday class, the Tuesday prof will be finished with his portion of the class, and we have a new professor for Wednesdays). I was excited to see that he was holding a stack of papers Is it a syllabus? Maybe an explanation of our final assessment? Something to read?As my mind (which is thirsty for some good ol' carolina schoolin') raced through all of the marvelous possibilities the professor said that today we would be doing a synthèse. A synthèse is a specific type of paper that all of the French know how to write which involves the synthesis of many documents to respond to a specific question (like a DBQ, for all of you AP scholars out there).

The subject: maritime trade

Most of the documents were just big charts showing sizes of ports and traffic flows of world trade and the ratios of road transport to train transport to boat transport around Europe. So, I'm thinking this can't be graded, right? Did anyone else know about this? Is this a pop-midterm? And the French students are getting kind of antsy. They actually stopped talking for a period of about an hour to work on this paper and feverishly asked questions about what certain words meant or why more information wasn't included in a specific chart. Jason (the other UNC student in the class with me) and I were considering asking the professor for some sort of alternate assignment or at least the chance to take it home and work on it, but I think we both realized it would be best to just dig in and do it and talk to the professor after class.

It was around the hour mark when they started talking. And then we realized that either the French are so laissez-faire about talking in class that they even allow it during tests, or that we were most likely just doing a practice essay. Upon talking to the professor after class, this synthèse was, in fact, "pour pratiquer."

But I did do my best to navigate around a maritime trade essay. And the new professor seems very nice and helpful. So all in all, it was a good class!

Occupy the tram back to centre-ville!

J'ai fait une gaffe! (I made a mistake) I'm not exactly sure if I have people anxiously waiting on the edge of their seats on Wednesdays thinking that I am going to post (probably not), but if there are those people, I am terribly sorry that I forgot to post yesterday. I was kind of in a funky, homesick mood and all I wanted to do was climb under my covers (because it is trop froid in this house) and read Harry Potter à l'école des sorcières.

Peur du jour- 11 Janvier 2012: Knowing when to walk out 

Yesterday I attended two fairly lousy courses at the lovely UPV III. For those of you who don't have a facebook or haven't seen the pictures, here are some lovely pictures of the lovely university that will illustrate how lovely it is.

These pictures are fairly generous too. Add clouds of smoke and rowdy French étudiants to the mix and it is just downright charming. But, I am not in France to attend a beautiful University (I already have one of those!). I'm in France to learn the culture and become 10x better at speaking French and have the adventure of a lifetime. UPV III is part of this French culture. Students don't pay very much in the form of student fees so the result is a university on which there is not constantly construction and renovation. So I've come to grips with the less than idyllic campus. But yesterday, I was forced to confront another difference: French classrooms.

On Tuesday I went to a great course. The professor was easy to understand, he wrote very clear notes on the board, and I found the subject matter interesting. I'm thinking "Great! I have this course if I need it, but I also want to go to two courses tomorrow that sound just as interesting!" Wednesday morning rolls around and onto the campus saunters a bright-eyed bushy-tailed Kathleen at 8h00, ready for Droit du travail (labor law) and Crises Internationals (International Crises) . I went to the front row of the classroom and sat with my pencil poised to write down every French word emitted from the professors mouth onto my weird, French lined paper. Here are some differences I noticed:

1. Class time is more of a suggestion: At UNC, you can count on there being some people in the classroom at least 10 minutes before. The professor (unless they are just coming from another class or something else) is usually there 5 minutes beforehand. In France, it's more likely that the students will arrive between the starting time and 10 minutes late and the professor will arrive between 5 and 10 minutes late. Those of you who know how freaky I am about being on time can probably understand how troubling I found this.
2. Bibliographies (reading lists) are about 10 miles long. In one class I went to, the professor spent 45 minutes of a 3 hour class talking about what we should read. On the list was the complete memoirs of Henry Kissinger. In another class, the professor pulled out a law manual. I know that as a foreign student, I'm not expected to be able to navigate through these texts. Our program director told us to ask the professor on which texts we should focus. However, I don't understand how the average French student (who I'm told studies far less than the average American student) gets through these lists. The answer: they're not. 
3. Attention is optional: Something that I've heard is common and which I have experienced is that students do whatever they want in class. They talk (loudly), file their nails, text, and do a myriad of other distracting things (I swear I could smell nail polish). In this particular class, the professor didn't even reprimand them. She just said "there are a lot of you, so if you could maybe talk a little less, that would help me save my voice." Professor Kathleen would be kicking students out of class or at least making some sort of effort to lessen the riff-raff.

So, you're in a (3 hour long) class and its terrible. You're thinking "I could be running some errands, buying lunch, working on homework, or doing ANYTHING other than sitting here, taking notes for a class in which I have no intention of enrolling, surrounded by students who really don't care." If you find yourself in this situation, do what I did in both of my classes yesterday: leave during the break.

I have never dropped a class or skipped a class or missed a class in my college career. This isn't exactly on the same level as any of those things, but leaving the class on the first day during the break is a little uncharacteristic of me. My new phrase is "When in Montpellier."

As my friend Tyler would say, "the moral of the story is": Follow your gut. Don't waste your time. Don't be too worried about offending someone that you're likely never going to see again. Don't ever take a class where the professor spends 30 minutes talking about how great a guy Henry Kissinger is.