Beach trip!

I'm back!

I have once again completely missed my blog deadline, though this time it was not out of laziness but instead a lack of anything interesting. There was almost nothing that happened between the Wednesday that I posted and the following Sunday so I decided to leave the next post until today.

In the past week, I have again been working diligently to get all of my things together. Since my courses keep getting cancelled and rescheduled, nearly all of my work is now packed into the next two weeks. As a result, I have been having a hard time splitting up the amount of time I spend on each course. As you  may expect, I have spent nearly all of my time working on my expose and fiche for the History and Civilization course because the professor does quite frighten me. It may seem difficult to understand that anyone could be so intimidated by a teacher in a foreign country who is supposed to be the one helping you learn and accommodate to the culture, so I will do my best to explain. Every time someone presents a fiche or an expose, she spends an equal amount of time telling them why it was not good enough (not incorrect or necessarily insufficient, but not what she would have done, thus not good enough). She is, literally, impossible to please. As one of the French students put it: every time you turn something in she repeatedly tells you why it was not what she would have done and why her way is better, until you finally get it exactly the way she would do it, which is when she says to you "That's plagiarism!". Surprisingly, it gets worse. In class on Tuesday she spent 20 minutes telling a girl who looked bored that she should leave if she didn't want to be here because she doesn't care if we show up and does not keep track of attendance (which is a lie). Then, on Thursday the first thing she said after a student gave his expose were the following: "I'm bored and kind of annoyed...". Granted, his presentation was imperfect, and needed improvement. But, as it happens, this was also the student who she admitted to giving a difficult topic (hand chosen because he arrived to school late after returning home to Scotland to take his fall semester exams) and proceeded to give absolutely no guidance on the subject. Whether or not he should have done better or she should have helped more is not really my problem, but instead that she was (and not just in this case, but in general) extremely rude. So, I think it is clear why my work for my more reasonable (and generally very helpful and nice) teachers has been put on the back burners.

Nevertheless, I have made some good progress on my fiche, one of my papers and my expose. My French exam is also this coming Thursday, which has me a bit worried but I am fairly confident I will do well. So, my past week has been spent almost entirely doing work. In order to ease the tension a bit, we decided to take a trip this weekend. We were initially planning to go on a day trip with several international students to celebrate our friend's birthday, but the group went somewhere fairly expensive, so we went to St. Malo instead. For those of you who have not seen on facebook, I just recently booked a trip to Amsterdam with some of the other students and to visit a friend, so I am trying to save money where I can. Luckily, St. Malo is close and fairly inexpensive to get to.

Train station in St. Malo

We took an early morning train and arrived around 8:30. We wandered around the town for a while until we found a suitable beach to hang out at for the day. We spent most of the day laying on the beach. I did some reading, took a nap or two and walked out briefly into the ocean (it was very cold). I managed to find some cool shells and I even found my first piece of sea-glass! It was a beautiful day in St. Malo (about 75 degrees, though a little chillier with the wind on the beach) so we of course did some sunbathing as well. We saw some of the sights, wandered aimlessly, and got some delicious ice cream (of which there is little to none in Rennes). Overall, it was a wonderful and relaxing day and I managed to get some good reading done on the Centre Pompidou, which is the subject for my expose. Upon our return, we met up with the group who had gone to Vannes for Cindy's birthday for a soirée and some cake. It was an eventful and relaxing weekend that helped distract from the stress of my work, even if only momentarily. I've included some more pictures below to give you an idea for how the trip went. I hope all is well state-side and everyone is enjoying the beginning of spring!

Ferry to England

Thought this was interesting...

Cool retractable bridge

Garden outside the city

Wall around the city

Island fortress

Same fortress at low tide

Yea, they have them here too...

Pirates?

A bientot!

Tom