My First Day of School (Seems to be a recurring them of my life)

Today was my first day of classes.  I woke up to an empty house (at 8:00, mind you, not that late), all the others had already gone to work or, in Thibault’s case, school.  So, I took my petit-déjeuner alone in the kitchen, put away the breakfast materials, and then caught the bus.  It was a crisp walk to the bus stop, the sun was still trying to pull away from the horizon and the air felt clean.  I was pleased to discover a small pasture with horses near the fence, who were enjoying their own breakfast on the late greens of a bush.  The bus stop that I will be using during the first part of the week is a short, five minute walk from where I live. This line usually does not stop at the stop near my house, however, because very few people use it.  Therefore, I was told several times by my host mother and Thibault that I had to actually wave it down in order to be picked up.  Sure enough, after waving my arm frantically, it pulled aside and I clambered aboard.  It was a simple enough ride to the end of the line, where I caught the Tram to the University of Minnesota Student Union (henceforth called the Bureau) where my first class was.

Class passed quickly and without incident and I had an hour and half or so before my next class, which I used to journey with a group of my fellow program students to the campus of Paul Valéry, where our other classes would be held.  Along the way, we stopped at a small sandwicherie and purchased our lunch for fewer than five euros.  It was a good deal.

A problem arose trying to find our classroom.  We knew it was in Building F, which was found easily enough.  The actual room turned out to be a tougher nut to crack.  The number was 004, which meant it was on the ground level, but inside we discovered that room 4 was occupied by Spanish language class.  We were there for French grammar. We circled the building.  There was another room numbered 004 next to the occupied room, but it was empty and the only door was on the onside of the structure, accessible only be grass.  It was bizarre.  We debated whether or not this was our room.  The class schedule on the door seemed to indicate the contrary, but we also noticed that it was from a year ago.  Hazarding a chance, we went in.  The five of us were joined a few minutes later by another small group of puzzled students from another American program that is sharing some classes with the University of Minnesota program.  Ten minutes rolled by past the official class starting time.  We were getting more nervous that we had chosen poorly.  At last, a French woman stuck her head in and asked if we were there for a grammar class.  We replied in the affirmative.  She walked in and began to teach.

After class, I wandered in a slight stupor towards the entrance to Paul Valéry in order to inquire as to the location of my next class, which wasn’t scheduled to start for another hour and a half.  The previous had taken quite a bit of mental concentration, but the bright sunny air helped me recover fairly quickly.  At the gate, near the map, I discovered a group of my classmates from the U of Minn program.  Turns out, they were waiting around for their classes as well.  Apparantly, I had the same phonetics class as one of them, so we set off to find our classroom.  We soon found it, on the upper level of a building, but, having an hour to kill, we sat out on the top of a vast staircase that was in a nice mixture of sun and shade and talked about our courses, our studies, our travels, and politics of all of things.  It was quite pleasant. 

When it came time to go to class, we walked inside and found a group of American students waiting outside of our classroom.  Not even a minute later, a young French woman came and placed a sign on the door.  Phonétiques 202 est annulée (Phonetics 202 is cancelled).  She told us that the professor was sick.  I said that was good and all, but we were waiting for Phonetics 201 in the same classroom.  She got a curious look on her face for a moment, and then asked if anyone had a pen.  My classmate gave her one, and she crossed out the second “2” and replaced it with a “1”, handed the pen back, and then walked off with a “au revoir, bonne journée!”

My host family not expecting me back until much later, I took the opportunity to travel to a supermarket on the Place de la Comédie to purchase some more notebooks.  I had only brought one with me to save on space.  I took the tram back to University’s stop in order to find the bus stop that I would have normally taken back, just to familiarize myself with it.  Unfortunately, night had fallen and I could not for the life of me find where I was supposed to board the line so that it would take me in the direction I wanted to go.  Resolving to find it tomorrow, I took the tram back to the Place de la Comédie and found the bus line that I took previously to get home.

I arrived back home forty five minutes to an hour before expected and was able to join my pleasantly surprised host family for dinner.  When told about my class being cancelled due to the professor being sick, my host father scoffed, “She just wants and extra day of vacation.”  Dinner was good, we had soup made from red-cabbage.  I was told that it was a dark purple colour due to the reaction of red cabbage with vinegar, which Thibault had to do for a science experiment in his school.  I told them that I had performed a similar experiment in high school biology in my dad’s class, so I’m sure that mentioning that I mentioned it will make him smile.  You reading this dad?  Smile, we talked about science-stuff.

After dinner, after homework, I showed Thibault and my host family my harmonicas and played a few tunes for them.  Apparantly my host mother is a huge Bob Dylan fan, so Thibault and I are going to have to learn some Dylan songs (he plays the guitar in addition to the piano, so together, the two of us make one Bob Dylan, sans the ability to write era-defining lyrics).  After that, Thibault and I talked for a long while before turning in for the night.

I have class tomorrow, so I will wrap this up by concluding that my first day of classes was successful, even if there were obstacles along the way (such as successively mixing up the words for forty and fourteen and then fifty and fifteen within a minute of eachother, which I’ve known since my sophomore year of high school).  Take this to be a metaphor for life and keep on the bright side, because it’s not the little difficulties that you have that define you, but the little triumphs each and every marvelous day.