First Day of Classes

Hello, bonjour, hola! 

Monday was the beginning of the term at La Sorbonne (the university I'm studying at), which meant I had to stop relaxing and eating pain au chocolat and start attending some seminars, a scary prospect considering I've barely spoken French or Spanish in the last four months! 

Something I didn't really expect to do and didn't really enjoy doing, was making my own timetable. I have definitely been spoilt by my school and then by my university, as I just told them what subjects or modules I fancied taking and come September, there was my readymade timetable waiting online for me! So this was an unexpected and unwelcome struggle (read: near impossible task). 

One of our rules from York was that we had to take at least 30 ECTS (ECTS are credits, modules are worth a certain number). I thought that finding enough classes to make up these credits would be simple. Oh how wrong I was! It seems to me that most of the departments here didn't fancy making any sort of useful information available to us - I'm talking about credits, times and places of classes. So I've sent about seven hundred thousand (I never exaggerate) emails to different people, hoping that at least one of them would point me in the right direction, but have I had even one reply? Don't be silly, of course not. 

As you can probably guess, the lack of information available didn't exactly lead to a smooth and simple first day. 
Sam and I had a seminar at 8.30am, so we left an hour early to give ourselves plenty of time to find the classroom, but luck was not on our side - we live near two metro stations, and obviously there were serious delays on the line we chose, which led to us being about 15 minutes late. Not ideal. 
The seminar was a Spanish module called Analyse Cinématographique, and oh man, it had to be the most terrifying seminar I've ever been to. She spent the entire hour and a half dictating to us at top speed in half French/half Spanish something to do with 'una reseña' and different types of 'planos'. I'm not at the stage where I can just cut out translating things back to English, so I was juggling three languages and as you can imagine, it didn't go well! I'm hoping next time I'll be slightly less clueless, but I'm not holding my breath at this point!  

Alice, Alex, Sam and I then managed to miss our next lecture because we were led to believe it was in a building in the 17th arrondissement, twenty minutes away from the previous seminar. Turns out it was actually in the same building we had just come from... I'd like to thank Sorbonne's website for that one. 
We managed to make it to the seminar for that module in the afternoon, but it turns out it was an English module - not French as it had been advertised - which meant we spent the following two hours sat in a room being told about Shakespeare and the way people interpreted his plays into films. It was interesting, but it was English, and not at all what we thought we had signed up for. 

All in all, an absolute epic fail of a first day. 
I really hope it can only get better from here! 

À bientôt! 
Bean x