à la plage and classes start!

This past weekend my friends Amanda, Connie and I went to the beach at Arcachon with all the Erasmus kids. It’s only about 45 mins from here by tram, and only costs 10 euro to go there and back! And it was amazingly beautiful on Saturday too. The other kids doing the Middlebury program at sciences-po and Bordeaux 3 (concentrations in the humanities like languages, history, literature, law, etc.) are starting to arrive, which is exciting!
(Me and Connie -->)

I found a huge, amazing farmer’s market along the Quais (the area along the Garonne river, which runs to the right of the center city) on a run this weekend – which had everything from fresh produce to regional specialties, many types of pastries and breads, who knows how many kinds of cheeses, and even home made spices, honeys, and other special products. Can’t wait to do some shopping there!

This week we start the extremely confusing process of choosing our classes, and Monday was a disaster of a day. So the way the French system works to sign up for classes is: you attend whatever classes you want for the first two weeks, and only officially register for them after that. But since most of the classes are 1.5 hours per week and Midd is requiring that I take 14 hours of class per week, this comes out to about 7 or 8 different upper level classes (in French!) per week – and these classes would be hard enough in English! Which means in this ‘shopping’ for classes period, I’m trying out 10 or 11 different classes in order to eliminate any ones I don’t want – where I either don’t like the material or completely can’t understand anything the professor is saying at all. I was supposed to have 3 classes Monday, but only one actually ended up happening. The first two were cancelled within the first five minutes of the class with no notice before! Gotta love the efficiency of the bureaucracy here.

When I finally finished at sciences-po on Monday after wasting my entire day there and only going to one class, I went to take the tram home but after two stops it stopped for good. Someone came on the announcing system to say that there had been an accident with another tram, and that this one wasn’t going anywhere for a while. So a bunch of people including me started walking towards the center city – with no idea of when we’d be able to get back on. I passed the tram that had been in an accident – from what I could tell it was a head-on collision with a car! The trams don’t go very fast here, but it still could’ve been really serious! Not sure if anyone was hurt or not, but there was only one ambulance there and the entire front windshield of the tram was shattered. I ended up having to walk halfway home – about 8 stops on the tram. I live north of the center city, and my university is about 10 minutes south of the city, so it was a long trek! Instead of it taking around 45 minutes to get home as it normally would (or a little longer when it’s super crowded), it took me an hour and 45 minutes.

The process of trying and failing classes is pretty aggravating, but everything else is going super well! Isabelle never fails to cook a great meal whenever I eat here, and I’m exploring new parts of the city and discovering new, cool things about it all the time with my friends. Mostly we do a lot of window shopping, which may eventually lead to a major shopping spree…but we’re trying to hold back as best we can for now!