That's two weeks
Ça fait déjà deux semaines?!
So here I am back in my room in Cachan after another day of laboratory work. I've done a terrible job so far of staying in touch with everyone since I left, so I should probably start from the beginning.
I left my apartment in L.A. with basically zero minutes to spare. It was the day after my last exam and I had just enough time to get everything in order. The flight over was relaxing, and the layover in London was quite amusing for me. I realized two things after landing and purchasing my RER ticket to the Bagneux station:
1. Just by buying the ticket, I had just used more practical French than I had ever had to use before, except maybe when I lost my hat and gloves in Quebec City. Except that I spoke entirely in the present tense back then.
2. I would eventually be using a lot more French than that out here, so I'd better tune my ear for it.
Generally, listening has been harder for me than speaking out here. Vocabulary is coming back to me pretty quickly, and most of the words used in the lab are sufficiently similar to their English equivalents not to cause a problem. The most difficult times are during casual conversation with people my age. People my age talk fast, and they talk about anything. Listening activities in the language classes I took were generally scenario-based; you're at the train station, or at the bank, and you expect to hear certain vocabulary words. Casual conversation, of course, is nothing like that. Now we practiced casual conversation in classes too, but needless to say, high school and college students don't talk about the same stuff casually. However, I'm happy to report that I can now head off to lunch with my lab colleague Romain and have casual conversation without TOO much trouble.
The first week I was here was sort of a mess. My professor took me and another person in the lab out for Korean barbeque, and there was a lot of wine-drinking. More than I was comfortable with. Dr. Audebert definitely got me to a point that I would consider uncomfortably drunk. Trouble focusing on conversation and trouble walking down the stairs - I had to clutch the railing pretty tightly. Not very cool, but I didn't want to insult my professor on the first day by refusing his "generous" offers.
On the plus side, I met a really great group of international students in my dormitory. Most of them are master's students, so I'm on the younger side, but what's most amusing to me is hearing everyone's accent in French, i.e. what an Indian accent, an Australian accent, a Romanian accent, etc. sounds like to a French person. They have communal dinners and go out from time to time, and they were my crutch for the first week or so while I didn't really have solid access to money or the internet.
Speaking of money. Professor Duran, who is in charge of the REU program that's sponsoring me out here, looked at my ATM card and told me it would work out here. He was dead wrong. After having lost both my ATM card and its backup in a machine for almost a week, I finally managed to find a place where I could charge euros to my credit card. That should keep me going until I get a new ATM card that should be arriving in the mail any day now. I was pretty frustrated, but fortunately that's pretty much cleared up.
Internet was the other trouble spot. There is a student club at the ENS Cachan that is sort of the "club" club, i.e. if you want to join any of the student clubs or partake in any of the university activities or amenities (including the school network), you have to join this student association, the BdE (Bureau des élèves). So I joined the BdE and filled out the paperwork to get an internet connection. The process of getting online also took over a week because the network is actually overseen by its own student club, and they only offer internet connection services a couple of hours each week. Oh the bureaucracy. Same deal with piano access. In order to use either of the pianos on campus, you have to be a member of the Club Piano. So I joined it, which again took a few days, and just today I was put on the list of people eligible to check out one of the piano rooms. Whew.
Based on all I've said so far, you might get the impression that I've had a bad time in France so far. This is not true. Honestly, I've been having a great time. Those few days of commotion were troublesome, yes, but they were also somewhat exhilirating because I was being presented with real-life challenges. I come across my fair share of challenges on paper for classes, but to really tackle a living-conditions-related problem in a new locale with all new people, to solve the lemmas of the big problem that crop up along the way - it was quite exciting. So far I don't think I could have made better summer plans for myself, at least, among plans that involve having a job :)
Now I am quite well-situated, though, which is also a relief. Get up around 7:30am, run or what-have-you, shower and have breakfast, and get into lab by 9. Lunch is between noon and 1 ish, and usually I'm out of lab between 4 and 6pm. Then I head back to my place, grab some dinner either then or soon after, and read. Right now I'm working my way through my organic chem text from last year again, because I've forgotten so much of it and i don't want to look like an ignoramus by scoring strongly on the physical chem part of the GRE and flunking the organic part. Plus, this stuff is interesting and practical. Might as well get it down better. Later on the reading list are inorganic, a couple of light-reading math books (one a retrospective on a career as a mathematician, another a history of modern mathematics), and a few chapters from a quantum text. The goal is to get through them all. Currently this seems quite unreasonable, but I'm going to stick to it and see how far I get.
And yes, don't worry, I've gone into Paris already and started to visit the major sites. Abby, Michelle and I wandered up to the second deck of the Eiffel Tower on Saturday. I checked out Notre Dame cathedral with J.J., and I stopped at the Pantheon with Adina, Akshay, and Klaus on the way to a little bar called Pantalon. I'll be updating about more sites as we hit them.
So here I am back in my room in Cachan after another day of laboratory work. I've done a terrible job so far of staying in touch with everyone since I left, so I should probably start from the beginning.
I left my apartment in L.A. with basically zero minutes to spare. It was the day after my last exam and I had just enough time to get everything in order. The flight over was relaxing, and the layover in London was quite amusing for me. I realized two things after landing and purchasing my RER ticket to the Bagneux station:
1. Just by buying the ticket, I had just used more practical French than I had ever had to use before, except maybe when I lost my hat and gloves in Quebec City. Except that I spoke entirely in the present tense back then.
2. I would eventually be using a lot more French than that out here, so I'd better tune my ear for it.
Generally, listening has been harder for me than speaking out here. Vocabulary is coming back to me pretty quickly, and most of the words used in the lab are sufficiently similar to their English equivalents not to cause a problem. The most difficult times are during casual conversation with people my age. People my age talk fast, and they talk about anything. Listening activities in the language classes I took were generally scenario-based; you're at the train station, or at the bank, and you expect to hear certain vocabulary words. Casual conversation, of course, is nothing like that. Now we practiced casual conversation in classes too, but needless to say, high school and college students don't talk about the same stuff casually. However, I'm happy to report that I can now head off to lunch with my lab colleague Romain and have casual conversation without TOO much trouble.
The first week I was here was sort of a mess. My professor took me and another person in the lab out for Korean barbeque, and there was a lot of wine-drinking. More than I was comfortable with. Dr. Audebert definitely got me to a point that I would consider uncomfortably drunk. Trouble focusing on conversation and trouble walking down the stairs - I had to clutch the railing pretty tightly. Not very cool, but I didn't want to insult my professor on the first day by refusing his "generous" offers.
On the plus side, I met a really great group of international students in my dormitory. Most of them are master's students, so I'm on the younger side, but what's most amusing to me is hearing everyone's accent in French, i.e. what an Indian accent, an Australian accent, a Romanian accent, etc. sounds like to a French person. They have communal dinners and go out from time to time, and they were my crutch for the first week or so while I didn't really have solid access to money or the internet.
Speaking of money. Professor Duran, who is in charge of the REU program that's sponsoring me out here, looked at my ATM card and told me it would work out here. He was dead wrong. After having lost both my ATM card and its backup in a machine for almost a week, I finally managed to find a place where I could charge euros to my credit card. That should keep me going until I get a new ATM card that should be arriving in the mail any day now. I was pretty frustrated, but fortunately that's pretty much cleared up.
Internet was the other trouble spot. There is a student club at the ENS Cachan that is sort of the "club" club, i.e. if you want to join any of the student clubs or partake in any of the university activities or amenities (including the school network), you have to join this student association, the BdE (Bureau des élèves). So I joined the BdE and filled out the paperwork to get an internet connection. The process of getting online also took over a week because the network is actually overseen by its own student club, and they only offer internet connection services a couple of hours each week. Oh the bureaucracy. Same deal with piano access. In order to use either of the pianos on campus, you have to be a member of the Club Piano. So I joined it, which again took a few days, and just today I was put on the list of people eligible to check out one of the piano rooms. Whew.
Based on all I've said so far, you might get the impression that I've had a bad time in France so far. This is not true. Honestly, I've been having a great time. Those few days of commotion were troublesome, yes, but they were also somewhat exhilirating because I was being presented with real-life challenges. I come across my fair share of challenges on paper for classes, but to really tackle a living-conditions-related problem in a new locale with all new people, to solve the lemmas of the big problem that crop up along the way - it was quite exciting. So far I don't think I could have made better summer plans for myself, at least, among plans that involve having a job :)
Now I am quite well-situated, though, which is also a relief. Get up around 7:30am, run or what-have-you, shower and have breakfast, and get into lab by 9. Lunch is between noon and 1 ish, and usually I'm out of lab between 4 and 6pm. Then I head back to my place, grab some dinner either then or soon after, and read. Right now I'm working my way through my organic chem text from last year again, because I've forgotten so much of it and i don't want to look like an ignoramus by scoring strongly on the physical chem part of the GRE and flunking the organic part. Plus, this stuff is interesting and practical. Might as well get it down better. Later on the reading list are inorganic, a couple of light-reading math books (one a retrospective on a career as a mathematician, another a history of modern mathematics), and a few chapters from a quantum text. The goal is to get through them all. Currently this seems quite unreasonable, but I'm going to stick to it and see how far I get.
And yes, don't worry, I've gone into Paris already and started to visit the major sites. Abby, Michelle and I wandered up to the second deck of the Eiffel Tower on Saturday. I checked out Notre Dame cathedral with J.J., and I stopped at the Pantheon with Adina, Akshay, and Klaus on the way to a little bar called Pantalon. I'll be updating about more sites as we hit them.