I'm sorry that I haven't updated my blog. It has been a really busy, stressful and long week. So last time I updated I was hoping to have registered for classes the next day but that didn't happen. We met with Caroline again but we didn't get anything accomplished. By the time we met with her we are all so tired that we were just pissed off. She tried explaining how the courses worked and gave us these little booklets to look at but we didn't understand them because they had weird charts in them. She took a few of us into her office at a time and tried explaining things to us but it all went in one ear and out the other. At the moment, she only had booklets for Italian courses for Hallie and I to look at. But I just wanted to sleep...
You see, Mamie, Sierra and I woke up early that morning and went shopping we walked quite a bit so when we met the others at Caroline's office the three of us were like LET'S GO HOME!! So we didn't get anything figured out with Caroline and when we walk outside it was snowing cats and dogs. haha I know that's not the saying but it was pretty much a blizzard outside. Everything was covered in slush and our faces were getting hit with huge ass snowflakes. I was getting so angry and we were all asking each other what Caroline had said and we were all coming up with different answers and yelling at each other because that's how frustrated we were. From that point on we decided to not talk the whole way home. The boys ended up splitting up and going shopping because Aaron had to buy some things.
So we got home and had dinner but everyone just wanted to go to bed because we were so upset.
On Wednesday we had received an e-mail from Frédéric, the guy who is helping us with registration here, saying that Caroline was searching for more little books about classes for us to look at for each department. These were the same books we had looked at before but she had "taught" us how to read them so she found them for each department and told us to go in tomorrow in the morning and pick them up.
Caroline had told us on Tuesday night that if she had time to visit with us the next day that she would e-mail us in the morning telling us what time to come in but if we didn't hear anything to not go into her office because she wouldn't have time for us. Well, we never heard from her.. just from Frédéric telling us to go in Thursday morning.
We found another person to help us and her name is Carine Berberi. She has been the most help out of the 5 people that have been trying to help us with registration and even finding classes we can take. We met with her on Thursday after picking up the little booklets from Caroline. Carine was frustrated and not necessarily with us, but we were lacking information about credits and credit hours, and exams that had to be taken and a bunch of other things but she helped us the best she could.
She asked each one of us what type of classes we wanted to take and gave us class options until we all had classes. There was one little problem though... Mamie and I need to take art studio classes and that is with a different part of the university and apparently it's not well-known because the 5 people that have tried helping us don't know anything about it. They have tried contacting the people of the program (l'école de Beaux-Arts) but no one has replied. They need to know if we are even ALLOWED to take classes there because apparently it's a special program. It is MONDAY, when ALL classes have started now and I still don't have my classes.
Another issue is that each department starts school at different times so my art history course started last Wednesday but I missed it because I didn't even know I was taking that class until Thursday. That is the only class I am signed up for right now and it is REALLY frustrating because everyone else has classes. There are still a lot of issues because we don't know how many classes we need to take in order for them to transfer to Concordia. Everything is so different and it's so frustrating because we were told that it was all worked out before we left the states. We all thought that all we had to do is pick the classes we wanted to take and go to them. It has been complete hell trying to figure all of this out.
The classes in France go by credits and not credit hours or something like that.. I don't even know anymore but it doesn't work with Concordia's system at all. In the end, we were told to take 200 credit hours by the end of the semester but that means that we might have to take 7+ classes. But some classes you only have once a week...or they end at half of the semester and then you take more/different courses. It's so stupid I'm getting angry just typing all of this out. It's so complicated.
On Thursday after visiting with Carine we were all even more upset than Tuesday because classes start today (monday) and we weren't registered for any even though some people had classes to choose from. Like I said, there is still so much to figure out that everyone whether they have classes or not are really stressed.
Anyway, after our meeting we went out to this cute little bar that Mamie, Sierra and I had found on Tuesday and ate lunch there. It's really cheap. You get a TON of fries, a huge sandwich and a drink for 4,50€ which is about $5.50. When we first got there wasn't anywhere for us to sit so we had to sit in the "game room" of the bar and there were 15 yr olds playing foosball and pool. It was so loud in the little room and we were all just sitting at our table not talking trying to not think about classes.
After lunch we went back to Caroline's office to ask about courses at the OTHER university where we will be taking actual French classes to learn and perfect our French. We were told that the courses start on the 25th and that we have to take a proficiency test on the 21st..which is this Thursday. We'll see how that goes. We went home after that and I crawled into my bed, cried and fell asleep. I woke up a little before dinner but I just wanted to keep sleeping.
Thursday night is a completely different story so I will write a separate blog for that.
I don't even remember what nights we had what dinner so I screwed myself over by not blogging because I want to remember every meal lol. We've had chicken with mushrooms and rice for one dinner, we had sushi last night which was delicious with homemade tiramisu for dessert, one night we had shepherd's pie. That's all I remember...Oops.
sorry this is so LONG and boring but this is what my life is about here in lovely france.
iloveyouall!
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