In Like a Lamb

With temperatures in the lower 70s for the first couple days, March has been fantastically beautiful so far, but it's all going by too fast! It feels like I just got here and I'm already halfway through my stay. And since I only have each class once a week, it feels like we've gotten nowhere in any of them. They've all just barely started.

So ... now that I've settled into a little bit of a pattern (doesn't feel like a rut yet!), let me tell you about it a little bit.

Monday is my rough day. I get up and go to Histoires des Minorités ("Stories of Minorities") which consists of this French professor, who is definitely a pretty smart guy and is fairly well accomplished and stuff but the way he conducts class is just .... incredibly boring. Three hours of "uhhhhhh"s and "euhhhhhh"s .... This is supposed to be a typically southern thing and I mean things are supposed to go a little slower in the south of France, but that's a little ridiculous. In any case, there are glimmers of brilliance that come through in that class and I think that and the attendance sheet are what keep me getting up early to go to it at 9:15. To do this, I have to get up at about 7:30 or 7:45 so I can eat breakfast, take a shower, and catch La Ronde which is the only bus that takes me from my host family's house to the university without me having to walk at all really.

Then I have about an hour off after Hist. des Min. before I have my CM (not sure exactly what that one means) for Culture Littéraire: La Rhétorique et la Littérature ("Literary Cutlure: Rhetoric and Literature"). A CM is like a lecture section, just with some random French acronym for a name. Anyway, this class would be kinda boring if the lecturer wasn't a pretty decent presenter. He gives material which normally be too technical for me to care about enough pretentious French energy that I can actually pay attention. The lecture hall is definitely the shadiest place I've ever had a class, though. The rows of seats are all accompanied by a long bar-desk thing to write on and the front of the room is decorated by somebody's graffiti tags. There's cheap lighting, no insulation, and the clock is stuck at 8:50.

After another couple hours off I have my TD for the same class. A TD is like the discussion section and the teacher of this class is definitely my favorite. He's definitely got the best pretentious French intellectual attitude of them all and I'm pretty sure I've talked about this class on this thing before, so I won't repeat myself.

Then finally, at 6:45 I can go home, get some dinner, and hopefully, go out again with the 8:30 bus. This is always a big deal. Am I going out tonight? How am I getting to town? My host family lives far enough away that the last bus from their house is 8:30 and it's hard to finish dinner before that time.

And then in order to get home, I take the last night bus at 1 a.m. and walk about 20 minutes home.

Tuesday starts for me around 9:30 when I get up to get ready to go to class at 11:15: my Semiotics class which is focused on advertisiing images, actually, but don't tell the CSCL department that, 'cos I wanna use this class for credit. Anyway, we do go over theory, but we get a little caught up in Advertising sometimes, and, well ... that's technically what this class is supposed to be about ........

Right after that is the class that I had to take in order to take Semiotics: Médias. In that class I'm pretty much reliving everything that I hated about my Mass. Comm. major, but .... still ... I have a little bit of a soft spot for this sort of thing, and this class is about a million times more critical than any Mass. Comm. class I took (which is a pretty easy feat to accomplish, actually ... Fox News is more critical than the J-School). Then I spend Tuesday afternoon doing whatever (like writing blog entries?) until it's time to go home for dinner and catching the 8:30 bus ......

And Tuesday night gets to be a long night since I have no class until 2:15 on Wednesdays!! But it's Phonetics, the class I've always avoided. It happens to be required for a French Major, which is part of why I'm just a French minor ... anyway I hate it. The phonetic alphabet is just as arbitrary as any alphabet and way harder to learn. BUT since I had to take it to be studying abroad, I may just as well declare a French Major when I get back to the U.

On Thursday morning I have three hours, starting at nine fifteen, of Grammar. And this couldn't just be regular grammar... no ... unfortunately it involves way more than just that. But in trying to type up my complaints, I realized that it's probably all good for me in the end anyway, so maybe I won't complain about it.

Anyway, my weekend starts on Thursday at 12:15 and so I get to do whatever I want from then until Sunday night. Last weekend that entailed going to the beach Friday afternoon and enjoying the fantastic weather there. It was a little windy but it was okay. Oh and my friend got stung by a fish thing that hides under the sand and stings feet when it gets stepped on. Yeah ... it seemed very painful: "It feels like I shot myself in the foot!"

And then again on Sunday we tried going to the beach because Sunday was definitely the nicest day since I got here, but unfortunately, transportation is a big problem on Sundays because, well, I don't know if I've told you yet, but the entire country of France all but shuts down on Sundays. Supermarchés, épiceries, tabacs ... they're all closed and the public transport is a million times less frequent. So we had to scratch our beach plan because we missed the 12:30 bus and the next one wasn't until 5:00. Instead of the beach, though, we got to go to the banks of the Lez, Montpellier's river. The river front is extremely artificial, but I guess that's what makes it pretty. We found a nice little park area to sit in anyway where there was some drum circle that I more or less recorded with the sound-record feature on my camera.

One thing typical of Sundays which I actually didn't do this week was the famed Marché aux Puces: the flea market. But it's not really a flea market like you think of in the U.S. The ones in America are lame but the ones in France are awesome. You can pretty much find anything there at low, negotiable prices. As someone who appreciates a good second-hand store in the United States, the flea market is a utopia. They just get a big parking lot and fill it with whoever has stuff to sell. And so you get these people who just circulate through Southern France, Spain, and Morocco, picking little things up along the way to sell. There's also a fair share of stolen and counterfeit things there, but that's part of its charm.

So there's a typical week for me in Montpellier ...