Life in France… c’est la vie!
Well it is official. I have now been in France for 3 and a half months. Wow.
Now is probably a good time more than ever to réfléchir à my experiences, living life in a different country for a long period of time, my first time truly away from family for a long period and studying in a country with an entirely different language.
Studying in the small town of Alés in the heart of the Provence in the south of France has been an amazing experience. Life here if very different from that in Sydney and yet there are shared similarities as well. I would, however, have to say that the greatest thing about being in Alés (even though it is a small town and everything is closed on a Sunday) is that it is at most 2 hours from everything - from the beach, from the snow, from the mountains, from the rivers, from the ports, from a large town - it’s incredible.
Ecole des Mines d’Alés is a great place for a student to study. The student life is top class, as are the students themselves. Everyone is very welcoming and there is a good mix of local and international students to make things interesting. Because it is a grande ecole, there aren’t many students (I think probably about 600 in total) which means everyone knows everyone in some way. That has its positives and negatives of course (depending on which way you take gossip to be!)
I haven’t done lots and lots of travelling so far (although I still have plenty of time for that, especially in summer). I have visited a lot of the nearby towns though - Nîmes, Montpellier, Marseille as well as some of the smaller but famous Cassis and Le Ciotat. I was in London in December 07/January 08 before coming to France, but really, England and France are completely different worlds.
Learning and practicing a new language is fun. It of course has its hurdles - I remember my first day in Alés attempting to open a bank account and hardly understanding a word of the bank manager. One of the best parts is learning French slang or l’argot as it is officially called. It really is true though - attempting to learn a language can only really be best done if you are in the country. I have learnt more in 3 months than I did in 3 years of studying French!
Seeing as how I have a blog now, I guess I will keep some sort of log of the rest of my trip. So expect something more pretty soon!
Above is one of the photos of the early parties at the Meuh (Maison des Elèves).
