Reading Commences

So, the past few weeks have had a lot less going on for me to write about. I received my acceptance emails and set about finding the books that had been assigned as summer reading. I ordered them all online and waited…. And waited some more. These books, coming from France took two and a half weeks to arrive. TWO AND A HALF WEEKS. I’m pretty sure I have friends that could walk to France from my house in that time. When they finally arrived I was faced with this:

 

 

This is (so far) my collection of books. Left-hand pile is to be read, right-hand pile is for reference. Eiffel tower for scale. In fact two books are missing from this collection, An introduction to reading Plato and Swann’s Way. The first because it had not yet arrived, the second because I was reading it at the time of the photo-taking and forgot that it was in a different place. Organisational skills functioning at 100%.

 

So far I have read 100 pages of Swann’s Way before realising that starting with Proust was a terrible idea and promptly reading La Princess de Clèves. This went a lot better, with me finishing it in two days and racing on to commence Jacques le Fataliste. If you find me melted to a sofa with a book in my hands it’ll be because I forgot to move for three days while trying to read this mountain.

Accommodation!

I WILL NOT BE LIVING IN A CARDBOARD BOX!

An email arrived this morning informing me of my acceptance to my final hope of student accommodation. Oddly part of the email arrived in wingdings. I’m dead serious, how does that even happen?

So now I actually do have to search for my grandparents birth certificates and enter into the catch 22 of French life.

You want a bank account? Do you have proof of address?

You want to live somewhere? Do you have a bank account?

I am SO PUMPED for that.

 

 

 

 

The Paperwork.

French Bureaucracy, it’s a common whining point. I was prepared to spend the rest of my summer hunting down the birth certificates of my great-grandparents. I’d even made sure my Dad was still in possession of the family tree he made once. I braced myself upon receiving a place, ready for the full weight of paperwork to hit me and demand to be signed and initialed on every page.

The first challenge was the mysterious “exeat”. A word I had never come across in my whole six months of reading and researching. Why? Because even when I asked French people what you need for university they never mentioned it, to them not having an exeat is like not having a passport. It doesn’t really need mentioning and it’s taken for granted. To m, having an exeat was mysterious and, upon discovering what it was, really very pointless. An exeat certifies that you have left your previous school. I would suggest that this is self evident, given my blatant lack of being in school. Fortunately I solved this problem by phoning up the lycée and encountering a woman who was very kind and helpful but clearly very confused at the fact I had been accepted if I hadn’t studied in France. I was informed that the exeat is more of a formality anyway and it really doesn’t matter. This seemed to echo my sentiments about the very existence of the exeat and leads me to question what the French government has against trees.

As it turns out, there was only one form to fill in. Just one page. I still managed to mess it up, the classic Nom/Prenom still tripping me up after thirteen years of French study. In fact what tripped me up the most was this tiny little box:

This is NOT the form I sent off, spot the deliberate mistake!

Firstly there is something deeply uncomfortable about writing your native language down as your first foreign language. It’s what the form wants, but in my case it’s simply not quite true. Secondly, it took me a very long time to decide if I was a beginner or not in Greek. Does an Ancient Greek GCSE four years ago count as enough to go into the higher class? Will I in fact drown in that class because I forgot it all and it’ll be in French? Who knows, how long is a piece of string? I went for beginner, seemed safest.

After that I toddled off to the post office, paid an obscene amount of money for them to put three stickers on it and maybe deliver it by monday. Here’s hoping!