Sunday, August 31, 2014
Wandering Dijon
Helena and
Katie (two of the English girls) and I decided to follow the Owl Path around
the city yesterday. This is a
self-guided tour, in which you can pick up a booklet for a couple of dollars
from the local tourism center, and then follow these little golden owls that
have been paved into the sidewalk. It’s
supposed to take you by all of the major attractions in the city, as well as
give you a bit of background about each one.
It’s really nice because the city has a lot of really cool buildings in
it (with really amazing architecture – I’m a bit of a nerd for gothic-style
architecture) and the city center isn’t really that big, so the entire tour can
be done in about an hour. The only thing
we wound up going into was the local Notre-Dame church (which was absolutely
incredible) but we got to see where all kinds of things were, such as the Fine
Arts Museum, the Palace of the Dukes of Burgundy, the local market (set up
Tuesday through Saturday) and various parks.
We also raided the tourism office
for pamphlets so we’d have plenty of things to keep ourselves entertained in
the upcoming weeks (museums, tours of the mustard factory, castles not far from
the city) and picked up some of the event flyers that were being handed out in
the streets. Personally, I want to go to
a salsa dancing class that is offered every week from Tuesday-Thursday for
various levels of dancer which is only 5 euro.
Apparently there is some kind of international music and dance festival
going on right now, so every half hour or so we stumbled across performers
dancing through the streets in full costume.
Clearly, this is going to be a very interesting semester.
“How was school today?” “School-like.”
Apparently
the way this semester will be working is I am first in a month long
language-intensive course with all of the CIEF summer students, and then in
early October I will be joining the Université de Bourgogne’s normal students
at the beginning of their semester. I
will be leaving about a month before their semester typically ends, so I’m not
really sure how all of that is going to work out, but I suppose it’ll all work
itself out eventually. We took a placement test on the first day, and
I tested into the 4th of 5 levels, so I guess my ten years of
studying the language are paying off. There
are nine other people in my class, however three of them finished their last
day in Dijon on Friday (it seems that the schedule for the summer classes isn’t
really set, there are certain days of testing that you can join on and then you
can stay as long as you like) so I guess our class is about to get
smaller. I think that the level five
class is even smaller, so I am pretty happy with where I tested percentage-wise
(I’m guessing there are about 100 students in the program.) One thing that we did find interesting is
that the majority of the English and Arabic speakers seem to have tested into
the upper levels, while the lower levels are made up mostly of the Asian
students. I suppose this is because
English is so close to French that we have an easier time grasping the majority
of the vocabulary, and many Arabic speaking countries also dabble in
French. I do find it interesting though
that so many people were willing to come to a foreign country with such a poor
grasp of the language. I feel as if I
would be terrified to go into a region where nearly everyone speaks a language
that I can’t really understand. I haven’t
decided yet whether or not level 4 really seems fitting for me. Some students do petition to change levels if
they feel that they are in over their heads, or aren’t being challenged enough,
but since it is only a month I think I am going to just stay put. Sometimes I feel as if I am in the right
level, as the material does seem to be about what I should be focusing on,
specific grammar points and such, however the pace at which the class moves
seems really slow to me. However, I don’t
think that I am the only one which feels this way. One of the English girls is also in my class,
and she says that she feels as frustrated as I do by the pace at which the
teacher moves. Maybe this is just
typical of French professors, I’m not really sure.
The Accommodations
I honestly
still haven’t made up my mind how I feel about the accommodations here. They aren’t really bad enough to be worth
complaining about (compared to some countries, I’m sure these residences are
wonderful) but they do still leave a lot to be desired. The worst part in my mind is the
showers. They at least have hot water,
which is more than I can say for the ones in Senegal, but they operate almost
the same way as those sinks where you push a button on top and it takes about 10
seconds for the button to work its way back to the top, at which point the
water shuts off. The shower’s button probably
lasts closer to 30 seconds, but it is still ridiculously annoying to have to be
pushing a button a couple of times a minute just to keep the water
flowing. The “kitchen” that we were
promised is also a disappointment, as we are merely given a fridge in each of
our rooms, and then a microwave and sink that is shared by the entire
floor. From what I have heard from the other
European students here, France is actually renowned for having really poor
residence halls for its university students.
I suppose this is what happens when the students aren’t being forced to
pay thousands of dollars for their education.
Still, I suppose it is nice to have our own space. I would definitely prefer crummy residence
halls to being in another homestay for the entire semester. It will be interesting to see if the internet
connection stays up this time. The
reason that it took me such a long time to start posting in the blog again is
that we are not allowed Wi-Fi in the residence hall, so I had to bring my
computer onto the campus to re-download the Ethernet driver for my computer,
which was apparently never properly installed.
I managed to get this task accomplished just in time to have the entire
residence’s internet crash. Thankfully,
it only took them four days to fix the internet, rather than the week we were
originally quoted. We all do find it
rather annoying though, as the residence that we are staying in is solely for
international students, so they are aware that everyone in the dorm is reliant
on the internet in order to stay in touch with their friends and family back
home. We’ve tried going out to cafés and
such to find Wi-Fi, but so far the only place in town we’ve been able to find
with a reliable connection has been McDonald’s.
Hopefully this time the internet will stay up, but I’m afraid I can’t
promise anything. Since I am staying in
the International Residence, there is quite a mix of students who are in the
hall with me. The majority seem to be
Japanese, since I think there was a large school group which all came
together. I have also met students from
New Zealand, Tunisia, England, Germany, Poland, Palestine and Brazil. Those with common languages do tend to drift
together, since it is nice to speak in our own tongue during our downtime, so I
have been spending a lot of time with the girls from England. We also tend to eat lunch with the Germans,
since they have a fairly good grasp of English.
Let’s Start from the Beginning…
Hello
again, everyone! I’m sorry it’s taken me
so long to get my blog going again, I’ve been having a lot of trouble finding
an internet connection out here. I’m in
Dijon now, but it’s been a bit of a journey getting here. I flew out of JFK on Thursday night, and
arrived in Dublin at 6am local time, with a 13 hour layover. I sweet-talked the customs officials into
giving me a day pass so I could go out and see the city a bit rather than
spending 13 hours sitting in an airport, and caught the first taxi I could find
into the center of town. I stopped off
at a McDonald’s in order to get some breakfast and message my Mom while I
waited for the city to wake up, and then set off exploring. Unfortunately, since I don’t sleep very well
on airplanes, I was pretty tired, and tired of walking around the city by about
10am. I was about to call it quits and
head back to the airport for a nap when I spotted one of those double-decker tourist
buses. I followed it back to their base
and purchased a ticket, and proceeded to spend the next 2 hours being driven
around the city and learning the history of all of the major stops. I decided to take a less traditional approach
to the city, and rather than descending to tour any of the famous churches or
the Guinness factory (Ireland’s second religion) I opted for a tour of a local
prison. It was called the Kilmainham Gaol,
and was active from about 1796-1924. The
prison had an extremely interesting history, as it was one of the first to
consider the role of a prison as a reformative institution, and to separate the
prisoners into separate cells and enforce silence at all times. Several prisoners were also sentenced to
death at the prison, and were either hung or shot by a firing squad in the courtyard. One prisoner was gravely ill when he was
sentenced to death, but they brought him in from the hospital on a stretcher in
order to kill him. The newer wing of the
prison was constructed in a similar fashion to gothic churches, where everything
is designed in order to draw the eye upwards, towards the heavens. This was meant to encourage the prisoners to
repent their sins. This wing has also
been used as a set in several films, such as the Italian Job. Once I had finished at the prison, I headed
back towards the airport, and caught a short flight into Paris, where I stayed
for two days at what may be the coolest hotel I’ve ever seen. It was called Citizen M, and everything in
the room (lights and their colors, TV, music, curtains) could be controlled by
a tablet that was right next to a super-comfortable bed. Sunday morning I hopped on a bus which took
me to Gare de Lyon (a Parisian train station) where I caught a train to
Dijon. I was supposed to be taking a
shuttle to the school from the train station, but I waited for a few hours and
never saw one so I eventually just gave a taxi driver the address that was
listed on my paperwork stating that the University had promised me accommodations. Thankfully, the address was for the building
where I was supposed to be staying, so I suppose everything worked out for the
best. I just wish the communication had
been a bit better going into the trip so some of these problems could have been
avoided.
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