Octobre Part 2

Hey again,

My last update took us to Friday, leaving you to wonder what happened to me over the weekend. Well, here's the rest of the story...

Friday, before I went to my first French-as-a-foreign-language language class (as opposed to FAAFL culture) I saw an ominous notice taped to the wall in the hallway on my floor. I found out that Skype doesn't work here because they're intentionally blocking it; it's a "security threat." It's incredibly frustrating because I had this great way to communicate for free, I bought a mic and a camera, and it only lasted a week or two. Skype is the only thing that has worked reliably here, besides my cell phone, which costs people calling me 20 cents a minute. The pay phones just don't work.

I talked to Emily that afternoon and found out a few more things. The kitchens in this building are now closed after 4:30; you have to go to another building and borrow the key if you want to cook dinner. This is because people came from the other wing, which isn't completely finished, and used our kitchen, and they left two small bags of trash plus two wine bottles. It's a punishment, I think. So now the 150-plus residents here have to take an extra 10 or 15 minutes every time we want to eat dinner. Also, the kitchens are the only common areas in the building. Last week, a security guard was walking the halls and yelling at people who were outside of their rooms after 11:00. The rooms are just too small to accommodate more than four or five people, so there really was nothing we could do. I think that guard was transferred to a different building, though; there were a few complaints after he threatened, manhandled, and sexually harassed students while he was drunk on the job.

Things got better, though. Friday night, some of the exchange students were commiserating over the state of things, and once again it helps to have people going through the same thing. There really is no one here helping the exchange students. Questions go unanswered, problems remain unsolved, things go from bad to worse without any sort of administration working on our behalf. It's just so different from what I'm used to. In the U.S., it's so easy to get help when you need it, almost no matter where you are or what you're doing. Emily offered a really helpful perspective that night. She said in a book she's reading (the best book written about French culture) it was described like this: If we went to South America or Africa or China and everything was radically different, we could accept it. We would adapt. But because this is France, we expect things. We expect that, because it's a developed country, it's going to be like ours, but it's not. There are some things we just don't understand. The Polish students and the Germans and the Portuguese all feel the same way. And that bothers us. It helped to hear it from that viewpoint. I'm coming to grips with it.

Saturday was the bike ride to Naours. I went with seven other students. The way there wasn't that much fun, because the weather was bad and we weren't exactly going at a leisurely pace, so we got pretty spread out. It took a little over 2 hours to get there. When we arrived at the park/village thing, we ate lunch and waited for their lunch break to end (people work 5 hours a day in France. Literally.). We then took a tour of the underground city of Naours. I didn't really understand what was going on, but I gathered that it was a refuge during World War II and up to 2600 people lived there at one time. There wasn't a lot to see besides an occasional giant sculpture, but it was a pretty impressive setup they had. There was a lot. After the underground part, the tour progressed into a history of various Picardy occupations. After that, we visited the windmills. I'm not really sure how the three things were connected (there also was miniature golf on the property), but it was a nice little park. Actually, going up in one of the windmills was about my favorite part. The sky had totally cleared up by that point, and I could see miles of rolling French countryside. It was beautiful; I had a "I can't believe I'm in France" moment. On the way back, I had a similar moment while we were resting. I just looked out across fields, eating a baguette and taking it all in. When we got back, we ate a snack at the park in Amiens. As we were leaving, a kid checked out the bike I had rented (I think he had one from the same place) and challenged me to a race around the lake. We were leaving, I was tired from riding for almost 5 hours, and--oh yeah-- the kid was about 12, so I turned him down.

One more thing. Last night, right before I wrote my e-mail, I had an interesting experience. The day before (Monday), a French student came here yesterday with something he needed to translate into English. I told him I could help, but if he wanted it done completely, he'd need to find someone else. He said he understood and went his way. Then Tuesday night, he came back to my room with a French girl (who he had just met) who knows a little English. We looked at the essay he wanted translated, and we had barely done anything after half an hour because the grammar in the first paragraph was so convoluted. So we gave up, and he started singing songs he knew in English and the French students (he had another friend with him) talked to each other a mile a minute as I tried to keep up. It was really strange. I guess it's never a dull moment in Amiens.

A bientôt,
Stephen