Party Time

I have to say I told you so. I told you I fail at keeping journals and thus am also failing at updating this blog AND I bet it's just going to get worse as the semester wears on. Either way, here I am again backtracking on the last week or more.

I spent most of last week settling in to life in Grenoble after all the random travelling thus far. Grocery shopping, getting internet at home, doing laundry and catching up on the things I hadn't accomplished during the first week which Jess and I spent in Spain instead. We also had more orientation sessions to attend and had to get our supplies for school. Unfortunately I learned that France does not like to use regular, lined, looseleaf paper. Nope. Instead, they use some weird graph paper type thing and their paper sizes and binders are all longer than ours in Canada. I accepted this eventually and went searching for a clipboard to carry notes back and forth to school. Nope. Couldn't find one of those either. An agenda with a monthly calendar also? Nope. And yes, randomly, peanut butter? Nope again.

Anyways, it was clearly a discovering week, discovering all the things France doesn't have that made me miss Canada just a little bit more. In the end the week was not a bust as we spent Wednesday (Sept 15) on a team building adventure where we hiked up the the Bastille on the mountain and got to play a variety of sports, eat baguettes and pain au chocolat, explore tunnels and just enjoy the 26 degrees it was that afternoon.

Let me tell you that the French like to party. It all started Wednesday evening. Yes, school was in session for some people but there was a party in one of the residences for the Mexican Independence Day from 9pm til oh, 5am...however, I decided to be lame and hit the hay that night since the sun at the team building event about drained my energy. Probably the best plan since you couldn't move within the room and I heard the police ended up at the residence to break it up anyways.

Then came Thursday. Jess and I decided we needed to integrate ourselves more with all the other students at GEM so we signed up for the Bureau des Estudiants' (BDE - Student Union type thing) Integration Weekend or Week End de Integration (WEI) as the French would say. We were to leave for an unknown location in the south of France, on the Mediterranean, on Friday at 1:30am in the morning. Well I figured I'd sleep til then, get up and catch the bus and fall asleep again til we got there in the morning. Boy was I wrong. We soon found out we were supposed to meet at 7:30 for dinner and then at 10:30pm for the pre-bus party at someone's apartment. Let's just say everyone was pretty drunk by the time it was 1:30 and time for us to board the bus. Did the party stop? Hell no, this is France. And it continued all the way until 6am, about an hour before we arrived and the point when everyone decided it was finally time to put down the microphones and sleep for a bit.

I eventually found out we ended up in Canet du Plage, France which was very near to the border of Spain. Needless to say the weekend was awesome even though it proceeded to rain most of the time. Some of the activities included hanging at the beach, paintball, bumper cars, human slingshot, mini rodeo, foam party, random drink parties, inflatable slip n slide, etc. Some sleep was had and also a lot of fun. The 6 hour drive took us home Sunday afternoon and I prepared to start classes for the semester on Monday morning! Yup...that's the boring part of this all. Haha.

The only thing about Integration Weekend that I would mention to future students of GEM is that it seemed to be mostly French students who went. As a result, not much "integration" actually happens unless you are willing walk up to a random stranger and strike up a conversation in French. They do appreciate the effort though but sometimes the conversations are short-lived.

So...I'm headed off to Switzerland tomorrow with Jess to meet up with a friend and head to Oktoberfest but when I get back I'll share a bit of my first week of school experiences as well as some of this upcoming trip.

PS- I just sucked it up and bought a replacement camera today so there should be more pictures to come on Facebook. And one of these days I'll add some to the blog so your eyes don't start to cross from all the reading.

A la prochaine (no I can't figure out accents either on here for the French words)!