30Mar / 2013

Ciao from Italy

Hello! Remember me? The rain is streaming down the window outside, as it has been for the last week, and it seems as good a time as any to start blogging again.

I’m living in Italy now. Verona, to be exact. I’ve been here since the first week of February, and it is approximately one million times better than Paris. Smaller, obviously – I can walk from one side to the other in thirty minutes, as opposed to having to navigate the RER of doom – but also cheaper and full of other Erasmus students. It’s very pretty, especially when the sun comes out, and also very well-located within Italy. Lake Garda is thirty minutes away, Venice an hour, and most northern cities (Milan, Bologna, Trieste, Genoa, Trento… not to mention places like Austria and Slovenia) within three hours on the train. I honestly don’t think I could have picked a better place to spend my second semester abroad.

This is me on Valentine’s Day, expressing my love for Verona.

Since arriving here, my days have been filled with watching too many episodes of Gossip Girl, and my nights with drinking tequila at the Irish pub (inevitable, when you study abroad.) Classes are optional, believe it or not – there’s no homework or coursework and they even provide you with a bibliography for ‘non-attending’ students – and seem to be cancelled more often than not. In the last three weeks I have been to two classes, which is 95% not my fault, between teachers going off to conferences, final exams for graduating students, graduation ceremonies and Easter.

As wonderful as it sounds, however, the novelty of having nothing to do all day does wear off after a while. I’ve been trying to use the time to explore Verona and to see more of Italy, but my bank account is looking somewhat depleted so I’m trying to restrict myself. On the bright side, I’ve been getting back into writing again (yay, Moleskines!) and so I’ve resolved to restart this blog as an outlet of sorts. I’m still trying to decide what direction I want it to take – do I keep it secret from people I know? Pay someone to design a proper header? It still looks exactly the same as it did in November 2011 – but in the meantime I’m going to keep on writing about life in Italy.

Starting with this:

This is apparently considered a toilet in Italy. Discuss.

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05Dec / 2012

Cue manic laughter

Imagine if I had 15 pages to write, three books to read, two exams and three tests all within the next 10 days, hardly any of which I knew about before Monday and none of which are in my native language. HAHAHAHA THAT WOULD BE RIDICULOUS, RIGHT?

Emergency Puppy

………I’ll see you on the other side.

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01Dec / 2012

Paris: a bucket list

When you’re on your year abroad, once you get past the initial excitement of being abroad in a new city and the random outbursts of “OHMYGODISTHATTHEACTUALEIFFELTOWER!!!” in the street, time starts going by really quickly. You begin to develop a routine which isn’t too different from life back home, with the same stress of coursework and exams and spending too much time in the library. You look forward to getting home and vegging out on the internet with a bottle of wine, instead of taking the time to explore. In fact, it would be easy to forget that I’m even in Paris full stop, aside from the daily dose of hell on the RER and the omnipresent view of La Défense from campus.

I’m conscious of the fact that I have a limited amount of time here, and I want to make the most of it. It’s hard, trying to balance the desire to be home for Christmas and be able to eat copious amounts of Dairy Milk and see people ASAP, but at the same time knowing that I shouldn’t be wishing time away and I’m going to be looking back on this in a few years time and wishing I could turn back the clock. I’ve tried to balance the two by making a list of everything I want to do in Paris. I know it’s not going to be possible to do everything on my list, but hopefully by writing it down I’ll be more likely to be able to cross some of them off before I leave at the end of January.

Food and drink.

Have a falafel from L’As du Falafel, the famous takeaway place on Rue des Rosiers. (I have tried falafel since I’ve been here – about four times, actually – but I’ve been unlucky with the opening hours/queues at L’As.) Did it. Honestly? I prefer the falafels from the shop opposite.
Eat fondue and drink wine from baby bottles at Refuge des Fondues in Montmartre.
Try the macarons from Ladurée.
~~Learn about French wines and find a favourite.~~
~~Eat soupe à l’oignon gratinée on a cold day.~~
~~Visit 10 different cafés, and 10 different bakeries.~~
~~Learn to cook at least a few typical French meals.~~
Drink champagne on the Champs Elysées, and then spend a week living off instant noodles to compensate. Also get drunk on 1 euro wine on the banks of the Seine or underneath the Eiffel Tower.

Experiences.

~~Take photos at the Parc de Buttes Chaumont in the 20ème arrondissement.~~
~~Visit some art galleries for free while I still can, and find a piece of art I actually like. (I’m not the most cultured of persons.)~~
Cruise up the Seine on a bateau mouche, and cycle on a Vélib bike next to the Canal Saint Martin.
~~See the Christmas lights on the Champs Elysées.~~
View the rooftops of Paris from the top of the Centre Pompidou. [Okay, so I've not been to the Centre Pompidou yet - but I did see the view from the top of Printemps department store which is kind of the same thing.]
Get thoroughly creeped out by the catacombs.
Spend an afternoon at the flea market (Marche Aux Pouces de Saint Ouen) and the bird market (because HELLO? A BIRD MARKET!)
Get absurdly drunk on a night out, and catch the first train back the next morning.
~~Recognise a celebrity, for the first time ever. Bonus points if they’re French.~~ Diane Kruger on the Champs Elysées !
Take a photo of the gargoyles from the top of Notre Dame.
Brunch in the Marais (did I really just use brunch as a verb? Yes, I believe I did.)
Visit Versailles, Bercy village and another French city for the weekend (Lille? Dijon? Lyon?)
Act half my age at Disneyland.

It’s not a comprehensive list, obviously, so feel free to make suggestions! I’ve not included obvious things like the Eiffel Tower and the Sacre Coeur because I’ve done both about a million times. I also bought a Moleskine Paris planner (bringing my total of Moleskines up to something like 25, DEAR GOD) to write things down in, because I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve read about a really cool shop or seen an unusual café and promptly forgotten about it, or wasted so long trying to work out how to get there on the Metro that it’s gone dark before I could leave.

Anything I’ve missed out?

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29Nov / 2012

What’s French for “power cut”?

It’s a Sunday evening, and I’m about to leave to collect Steve at the airport. The camembert is in the fridge, ready to be turned into fondue à la Jamie. The bathroom is sparkling clean. The flat is tidy for the first time in a fortnight – dishes washed, floor swept, tea stains on fridge cleaned… even my books are arranged in height order on a shelf, as opposed to being scattered across the floor. I’m feeling very satisfied with myself, and I’m about to walk out the door when all of my lights go out with a pop.

“Shit,” is my first thought. “Followed by “shit shit shit shit bastard shit what the hell do I do aaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrggggggggghhhhhhhhhh.” I’m not very good with the whole “adulting” concept, as my former flatmates and Steve can attest to. Wine is my forte, not household emergencies.

Case study #1: last winter’s broken boiler. I didn’t even know we had a boiler, let alone where it was located.
Case study #2: the incessant smoke alarms which kept going off during February. The one time I was home alone, I climbed onto a ladder to try unscrew the alarm and couldn’t bring myself to touch it in case I electrocuted myself. Then I fell off the ladder.
Case study #3: July’s power cut. Trying to be useful, I phoned Dave hoping that he could fix it. His instructions were far too complicated (“Dave, what the f*ck is a fuse box?!”) so Mat and I went out for noodles instead.
The aforementioned noodles.

So when I find myself having to deal with a power cut on my own in a foreign country where I have only a tenuous grasp of the language, I go into panic mode. To make matters worse, of all the possible days when this could have happened, it’s a Sunday evening. As I’ve mentioned before, France essentially goes into a coma on a Sunday. No chance of buying torches or candles from Monoprix, like I would back home. I don’t even know if EDF will have people working their call centres on a Sunday. Oh, and on top of that, my phone is about to run out of battery. And credit. And I can’t get more credit, or charge my phone in a coffee shop, because -again- it’s a Sunday. Shit.

A quick glimpse out the window confirms that it’s just my flat which is affected. I run through a list of options in my head. Hibernate until the power comes back on? Tempting, but Steve is waiting at the airport. Try living without electricity until I move to Italy? (It would be like camping! How quaint!) Phone EDF? Deciding I don’t have any other option, I steel myself to phone EDF. After an excruciating ten minutes listening to some of the WORST hold music ever, I get through to ‘Julien.’ Julien is understandably quite frustrated at my inability to understand words like “fuse box,” “voltage” and “circuit breaker” in French, as well as the fact that I don’t know where my fuse box is located, but after about half an hour he agrees that I need an electrician to come and take a look at it. (Yes, thank you, Julien, that was what I told you the second you answered the phone.) As I’m already late for meeting Steve at the airport, we agree to send somebody later after I phone him back. “Make sure you ask for Julien!” he hastens to add. “I will remember you. JU-LI-EN!” I can feel his unspoken addendum hanging in the air: God forbid anybody should go have to go through this ordeal again.

Unfortunately for Julien, by the time I’ve managed to find Steve at the airport, my phone is dead. Resigned to spending a night sans electricité, we get 2-for-1 pizza from Pizza Hut and eat it in the dark with a bottle of wine. It’s not quite the reunion I’d hoped for, and I think wistfully of the cheese fondue I’d had planned, but it’s fun in a way. It’s like a lucky dip, not knowing what’s on each slice.

****

The next day I decide to skip class, something which will come back to bite me in the derrière later in the week but at the time I don’t care. All my panic from the previous night has come back ten-fold, and I’m envisioning worst-case scenarios left, right and centre. It might take them weeks to fix it. I’ll have to return to Scotland. What if all my adaptor plugs have blown the entire system up? What if it costs me hundreds to repair? What if it never gets fixed because they can’t work out what the problem is? What if, what if, what if?

Fortunately, I discover that my phone can be charged via my laptop using a Kindle cable – something which surprises me enormously, considering my phone looks like it came from the year 2000. I spend another thirty minutes on hold before being put through to a customer service rep. This one keeps trying to speak to me in English, but it doesn’t help matters. “Ze button. Is he hard or soft?” he shouts at me down the phone after one particularly frustrating run of questions. He also berates me because apparently I don’t live at the address I say I do. I miss Julien. Eventually I persuade him to send out a technician to fix it. He’ll be there before midday, he assures me.

Naturally, this means the technician doesn’t turn up until 2pm – but by this point, I’m so happy to see him that I nearly kiss him. He takes one look at the box and immediately knows what to do. Fifteen minutes later, I have a new fuse box, and as if by magic, the lights come back on. No charge, he tells me. It’s been less than 24 hours without electricity, but I’m so happy I frolic around the studio like a lamb in springtime turning lights on and off just because I can. (No, really. Ask Steve.)

Realisation: maybe I can be a self-sufficient adult after all.

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21Oct / 2012

Sundays in Paris

I wake up late this morning, and it takes me about three hours to work out that the incessant pounding at the back of my head is in fact a hangover – une gueule de bois – no doubt an after-effect of the 1€ bottle of wine I finished last night. My initial plan is to head for the famous flea market at Saint Ouen on the outskirts of the city, but the lure of the internet proves to be too strong to resist after three weeks spent in technological wilderness, and I end up spending most of the afternoon catching up on blogs while eating Nutella straight from the jar. Productive. Eventually I tear myself away from the screen, and head into the centre of Paris to see what happens.

I’m on the hunt for posters and postcards to brighten up my studio, but it’s harder than you’d think – this is Sunday in Paris after all. My first stop is the Marais, the Jewish quarter which is supposedly livelier on Sundays than anywhere else in the city (Saturday being the Jewish Sabbath, obviously.) It’s not a particularly successful expedition, probably because I have no idea where to look and the only places I can see are the dreaded tourist tat shops emblazoned with “I ? Paris” merchandise. However, I do buy three postcards from a bookshop – all black and white scenes of unusual activities set against a typical Parisian background. I also stumble across the Place des Vosges — a beautiful medieval square surrounded by cafes and warrens of side streets leading to nowhere. Overhead, residents hang out of their multi-million euro balconies, smoking in tatty dressing gowns. It’s packed on this particular Sunday afternoon with people making the most of the late autumn sunshine, and there are street musicians every few hundred metres — one dressed in Renaissance robes singing opera; another dressed as a tiger and playing about five different instruments at once. I make a mental note to bring Steve here next time he visits.

(Credit: malias.)

I have no plan and no sense of direction, so I wander across Paris and keep ending up back on the same street. I spend a little bit of time at L’Hotel de Ville, which is looking particularly pretty in the late-afternoon sunshine, but I keep getting pestered by older men while I’m trying to read my book. (Girls, take note: this happens any time you sit somewhere on your own in Paris. Men, take note: if you do this you’re a dick.) Eventually I come across a stand next to the Seine selling all types of posters – from diagrams of flowers looking like they came straight out of a 1950s classroom, to antique maps of Europe going for 80€. I spend a good fifteen minutes looking through them all, before settling on three black and white scenes of Paris (one of which I already own in Edinburgh – the clichéd image of a girl in a red coat crossing a road with the Eiffel Tower looming in the background.) The vendor gives me a discount because he says I have a cute accent and a nice smile, and I decide to employ this tactic from now on in the hopes that my bank account will look less depleted at the end of my stay.

On my way home I decide to stop for a beer. The sun is going down and the sky is streaked pink with plane trails, and there’s a crescent moon over the Sorbonne – the first one I’ve seen since coming to Paris. I end up in a cafe on Boulevard Saint Germain in the Latin Quarter, “Le Stop Cluny,” where the waitress brings me a pint of 1664 with a free bowl of peanuts for 3,80€. Paris is expensive, but I can’t help feeling that this is a bargain compared to Edinburgh where I’d probably end up paying a fiver for the same thing. I sit and write a bucket list of things to do before I leave Paris, and I can’t help but think: this whole ‘year abroad’ thing is actually quite fun.

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19Oct / 2012

Is it time to go home yet?

Well.

Where do I start?

To say that the last couple of weeks have been a bit stressful would be a bit like saying that the Pope sometimes goes to Mass if he can be bothered getting out of bed, or that bears are prone to farting silently in the woods and then spraying Glade air freshener around in case anyone notices. After the stress of moving flats twice (including such joys as hauling everything I own across the Parisian metro system in rush hour, setting up an electricity account with EDF and having to furnish my empty shell of a studio), my bank card deciding that it didn’t want to let me withdraw money in France and the monumental pain in the derriere which they call ‘registering for classes at Nanterre,’ in addition to the fact that I have no internet access at the moment to sort anything out AND my wisdom teeth have chosen the perfect time to make a (painful) appearance, I would be lying if I said I haven’t considered giving up and going home – not that that’s an option, considering that this is a mandatory part of my degree.

As an avid reader of year abroad blogs, I feel that they can often be very good at portraying everything through rose-tinted glasses and glossing over the bad parts – so hopefully this might come in useful in the future for anyone preparing for Erasmus. It’s not all crazy parties with your new best friends, or sitting outside a cafe drinking cheap wine in the sun. ESPECIALLY if you go to a Parisian university.

My selection of courses has proven to be a complete and utter cauchemar, as the French say, necessitating many a panicked email in the direction of Edinburgh University. In between admin offices being permanently closed, secretaries being astonishingly inept and the French department back home turning round and saying that “oh yeah, didn’t we tell you that X, Y and Z don’t count for credits because they’re not directly related to French culture?” (something it would have been nice for them to mention in either the “comprehensive” year abroad handbook or in any of the three year abroad meetings, no?) it’s a wonder I haven’t impaled anybody with a baguette yet. Trust me, I’ve come close.

Besides, French administrative staff are awful, awful people. One of them nearly reduced me to tears yesterday for daring to interrupt her lunch hour (which was supposed to have finished 15 minutes previously.) I overheard another screaming at a French student for asking to join a translation course – paying fees isn’t enough to ensure that you can actually attend classes here, it would seem. Naturally, none of this was helped by the fact that the international office gave me both the wrong date for classes starting AND the wrong email address for the learning coordinator who was supposed to help me sort out this whole bloody mess in the first place!

(Deep breath, count to ten.)

It feels like I’m tempting fate by saying it, but I think that everything might finally be coming together with courses at the end of my third week. I’m currently registered for seven classes: 20th Century Literature, a comparative European literature class called “The European Domain,” advanced French grammar, writing practice and translation — all with native students — and Autobiographical Writing and C1 written French, both aimed at foreigners.

That may sound like a lot, especially compared with my puny three classes a year at Edinburgh, but in fact only takes me up to 16.5 ECTS credits. Bref, a full course load would be 30 ECTS credits per semester, and 15 is the absolute minimum that Edinburgh requires us to take per semester. Our best 10-15 credits will count for our final mark, and so most people are taking around 20 to give themselves some breathing space if they fail. (Of course, in most universities a class would be worth 5ish credits, whereas Nanterre’s are worth 2ish because it’s a piece of merde, but I digress.) In theory I could add another course or two, but that would involve more peering into my crystal ball to work out if Mercury is passing through Venus, which might lead to the relevant office being open, and the secretary might be in the mood to help me…. and frankly, I really can’t be arsed. I’d like to add at this point that I am NEVER complaining about Edinburgh’s system again.

HOWEVER! I don’t want to leave things on a negative note, and it’s not all doom and gloom here. There have been some good moments too – exploring Paris; Steve coming to visit one week and my mother and grandmother coming the following week; being complimented on my French multiple times, buying 2 euro bottles of wine, walking around the town where my new studio is and so on… But those will have to wait for the next time I have internet access, because I have to go stationery shopping before my next class (a traumatic experience in itself.) I’ll leave you with this picture of Steve and I, because it makes me happy.