Bordeaux update 2!

I strongly suspect however that I will not be able to keep up with this weekly rate. My time-table and work-load will probably see to that. A lot happened this week though, so I had to share J. Brace yourselves; this might be a bit long.

Well firstly, on Monday morning I had a meeting with the programme co-ordinator and the other students doing this MSc.  I must admit, when I first saw the co-ordinator, I thought he was probably a mature student in the course, only to find out that he was a lecturer. I’m going to have to try and sneak a pic of him one day. He has a ponytail, an ear piercing, wears a very “western” looking belt buckle and some boot-like shoes. He looks like someone you would expect to go speeding down the street on a huge motorcycle with flames coming out the exhaust. Lol. He’s pretty cool though, nice guy.

We discussed the time table and also got introduced to some of our lecturers as well as each other. As for my classmates, there are around six British people (one Scottish, one half-German/Scottish, another half-Filipino and a half-Irish/Jamaican!!!!), four from Spain, six or so from France, one person from Greece, one from Argentina and me the random Jamaican. I mean really random apparently. Everybody is like Jamaica? How did you end up here? On the whole, everybody seems pretty alright so far, thank goodness.

Later that same morning, some of us tried to open a French bank account (which is a requirement for a lot of things smh.) There is a LOT of bureaucracy and red tape in France. Everything requires host of documents and more importantly, waiting a lot. I’m sure you will hear more on this from me over the next few months.  Of course we couldn’t open an account at that bank until we got some document that we weren’t going to get until our inscription (registration) was complete; which was supposed to be the next day. Not to mention, the accommodation people had made a glaring mistake on my residence papers which the bank would not accept. That meant another trip to that office to wait some more and sort it out. Ugh!

On Tuesday morning we didn’t have class, but we had to sort out a lot of administrative stuff. We had to do our “inscription”. Luckily for us, the International office helped us out a lot and helped to make the process much smoother than it would have been otherwise. One of the main reasons that we really needed to get registration over with quickly, is that’s how you get your student card. There is so much you can’t do unless you have a student card, even eat in the canteen.

So after that first attempt in futility, some of us decided to open an account at another bank that didn’t need the document from the school. I signed so many papers, I lost track after a little while of what was what exactly, and at the end of it all we got a huge dossier of bank documents. No credit card, no cheque-book or anything sophisticated. Just an ordinary savings account. Never before have I seen it quite like this.

  We had one last free afternoon before classes began. Someone came up with idea of going to the beach. Based on my last post, you can probably guess that I was not too enthused at first. It turned out though, that we had a couple persons more than the people who had cars could readily accommodate. One guy had the idea of going to a beach in this town called Arcachon. What got my ears perked up was when he mentioned that there was a massive sand dune at said beach. Now this sounded promising.  Unfortunately, one person in particular (with a car) wanted to go surfing. The best beach for surfing was…you guessed it, the same beach I had been to the last time with the killer waves. Ren = doubly unenthused. In the end though, four of us decided that we would rather go to the dune, which then excluded us from the car-travelling posse. So we ended to taking the train to Arcachon.  On our way to the station we had no idea what the schedules were like or anything, we were really just winging it. Luckily when we got to the station, there was a train leaving in about 10mins. The train ride took about 50 mins and then we were off in sunny Arcachon. We had to take a bus to get to the dune, which took forever to come, but after a half-hour ride and we were there! I noticed one of the guys checking the bus schedule and assumed that he was noting which bus we would have to take to get back to the train station on time. Note this…it becomes very important later on.

Simply put, the dune was awesome! It’s over 100m high and seems to go on forever laterally. Upon approaching the dune, I realized that there were some stairs going up for easy access. On the other hand, one of the guys had other ideas. He expressly forbid the use of the stairs and insisted that we did it the hard way. Smh. So up we went, and I concluded about half-way up that that would be my workout for the week. I was so happy when we got to the top…except it wasn’t really the top; we still had a good way up to go. Ah bwoi.

The view from up top was really amazing, in every direction. There were also a couple para-gliders on the dune; it was really fun to watch them.

 The guys wanted to go swimming, but the beach was all the way downslope the other side of the dune. Climb back up afterwards? Nooo thank-you, especially as I figured the water was going to be too cold anyway. So I stayed near the top, watched our stuff, took pictures and a small nap as well. When the guys came back up we spent a good while chatting and let the time slip away, a little too much as we were soon to find out. By the time we got to the bus stop, we realized that the bus would have gotten us comfortably back to the station on time, had passed about 10 mins before, Great. Turns out my friend from earlier had not really been paying attention to the bus schedule at all. It now became increasingly important that the next bus come on time. Why? Because we were supposed to take the LAST train going to Bordeaux. Last meaning LAST.

Yes yes, they had spent so much time regaling me with stories of their various travels to such exotic destinations as Thailand, South Africa, Tobago etc etc. Experienced, savvy world travellers no? I thought I could leave it all in their hands… and yet still here we were about to miss the train, the last train at that. I know better for next time. Lol.

We reluctantly began thinking about what would happen if we missed that train… the options weren’t too great. Missing the last train is definitely not the same as missing the last tram (which has happened to me). A taxi would have run us a couple hundred euros. Maybe we would have to stay over (and thereby miss our very first class the next morning; brilliant impression that would make.) Or maybe, just maybe, we could camp out on the dune with those guys who invited us to do so. NOT!

As timed crawled by and the bus was nowhere in sight, we became increasingly panicked. We even considered trying to hitchhike our way to the station. One guy tried, but wasn’t so successful. I think he might have been a bit intimidating. So we put our other friend, who may not appreciate this, but is a bit on the pretty side, to try his luck. Instant reaction, but unfortunately the woman who was ogling him had a car full of people already. Fun times. To cut a long stressful story short, the bus came a little late, but we seemed to have enough time to make it. We came to the conclusion on the bus that if we caught the train, it would have been the best trip ever, but if we didn’t …well yeah.

We literally dashed from the bus stop to the train station, hurdling hedges and other obstacles in our path. Adrenaline is a hell of a thing. We finally reach the platform, but OMG the train makes that “shhhh” sound like it was about to move off. We completely panicked and scrambled in different directions to find a door. It was every man for himself at that point. Turns out, we were fine. We had like 10 mins to spare. Once we settled down in our seats, with so much time to spare, we realized that in the end, it was a little anti-climactic all things considered. LOL! Though we were tired, we made an extra effort to stay up and alert after one guy told us the story of how he fell asleep on the way from Amsterdam and Rotterdam….and then woke up at the border with Belgium at 4 in the morning. He then proceeded to spend what he calls the worst 7 hours of his life with no money, at a platform that was little more than a bus stop. I wasn’t quite in the mood for a similar occurrence.

Wednesday was the first official day of class and it wasn’t too bad at all, despite the fact that it was geochemistry for the whole day. Thursday now was a different story. Let’s just say that the topic we were doing in our afternoon, 4-hour class, left about 85% of us wanting to wrap up in our beds and cry. Seriously.  Anyhoo, we got over it by going out as a class that night. Eventually we even found a random dance party in the same square that they have a flea market on Saturday. (Don’t think I mentioned the flea market before, but I think I’ll leave that for another time.) They were playing a lot of Latin music (of different kinds) as well as an occasional ska song. Yay! It was pretty fun, dancing in the street like that.

I’ve actually had to leave out a few things, but the last thing I will mention is a rugby match I went to yesterday. Turns out two of the British guys got picked for a Bordeaux rugby club team, so a couple of us went out to watch them. First time I have ever sat down and watched a game of rugby in my life; I find I actually like it! Hopefully it’s not because it’s so chaotic and violent at times. One of the guys suggested that it’s because of all the fit guys on the pitch. I beg to differ; in truth the good-looking guys were a little few and far between, so I doubt it has anything to do with that. Anyway, our guys won their match and were pretty happy about it.

Oh, but I can’t end without mentioning my other group of friends! Where I live, I have a little fridge of my own, but in some other residences, they are not as fortunate. Some of my German friends and the original British guy (shout out to Nick!) bought a fridge for themselves. In order to celebrate this drastic improvement to their lives, they had a little party last night. It was good seeing them again; even though it had only been a week, so much had happened in between that it felt like ages since I’d seen them! Good timesJ.

P.S -While writing this I’ve been having the sniffles, serious sniffles. Thank goodness for mommy and the wide selection of pharmaceutical supplies that she sent me off with, otherwise I would probably have drowned in my runny nose by now. The weather outside today has not been very promising where that is concerned; it is windy, grey and damp. I will probably not leave my room today. Hopefully it will brighten up tomorrow.

More anon…