Ciara has an absolute shocker part 3 (Yep - there is a part 3)
Booking my flight home this week was a very effective way of jolting me out of the francophonian sun-soaked stupor that I have recently been basking in and got my mind whirling thinking about everything that has been going on in the past 2 months - and how to even begin explaining what happened ‘this time’.
And so, for the benefit of trying to lighten the ‘matter’ I have written this poem..
Twas a warm summer evening (ok so it was February, but it was WARM, like WARMWARM) and all through my halls,
Not a creature was stirring, from beyond my room walls.
My dinner was cooking in the kitchen with care,
In hopes that in my belly, food soon would be there.
My laptop was nestled all snug on my bed,
With visions of ‘totally edgy house artists’ which I respect’ed’.
And me, in my jammys, postponing a nap,
Went to fetch my cooked dinner, leaving the door locked with latch.
When returning with pasta I hoped wouldn’t make me fatter
I realised that something was definitely the matter.
For my door was ajar, and I saw (in a flash),
That my laptop(and iphone) were gone, with a man on the dash.
I immediately ran out into the night shouting ‘NO!’
But the thief had departed, I realised with woe.
The security guard, appeared as one not to action take, saying
“Thieves here are common, and the security cameras are fake.”
So alas, alone to my room I returned,
With my appetite gone and my chicken all burned.
I called up my mother to tell of my plight,
and decided to sleep in my friend’s room that night.
I suppose, that what you can take from this tale,
Is that whatever you do, make sure you don’t fail,
In insuring your laptops and gadgets, for you see,
Otherwise catastrophically broke you will be.
Luckily, my Uni forced such insurance upon us,
And a new laptop and phone are a definite plus,
However, to you who stole my possession that night,
Well, I hope that your life is utterly sh*te.
So, as you can imagine it has been a fun couple of months trying to work out insurance documents (which required literally every type of proof possible, including my plane ticket to France, despite the fact that I had a police report from Aix-en-Provence police station..) However, luckily the lovely Geraldine who dealt with my situation was fantastic and all is back to normal now (thanks to my external hard drive.) Also, due to the whole - my room being broken into - thing I was allowed to move, so I am now on the other side of the building, with all my friends (yes it’s a plural I promise), meaning that I don’t have to lug all my kitchen equipment on a 20 minute (I may be exaggerating) AIXpedition (see what I did there?!) every time I want to cook with them.
This is, for the most part, a good thing, minus the fact that it was the only exercise I got in a week.. Luckily, the problem of a distinct lack of exercise in my life has been resolved by our decision to start going along to the free ‘Zumba’ classes put on by the Uni and run by a crazy Thai/Spanish/French/Columbian woman who doesn’t seem to know how to speak any of those languages properly, and simply communicates in a mixture of them all, muddled in with occasional grunts and an offensive amount of ‘wooo’s’.
Just after having my very own ‘taken’ experience - which was made all the more realistic by my mum, who decided to send a ‘we know where you live and if you don’t return this phone you will pay the consequences..’ text to my phone, and accidentally sent it to my French phone, resulting in me getting a rather confused jolt of anxiety when I read said message and thought that, not satisfied with my laptop and English phone the thief was after me as well…- I left for Ski trip take two which took place on what was to be known as my ‘birthday week’ (because I actually get a week not just a day) and what better way to take your mind of a severe lack of technology in your life than go somewhere where non of it f**ing works anyway! This did mean that any birthday calls I received were short lived and crackly.. However, a full morning on the slopes in the sunshine followed by champagne on the ski lift after lunch was more that enough to make up for it! Not to mention the ice cream cake..
My birthday week actually ended up mutating into a birthday fortnight (much to my dismay - not), as after the week in the alps I made the 16 hour journey to Scotland. Luckily, my ability to sleep (very embarrassingly and obviously I might I add) on public transport is second to none, so the vast majority of the journey was spent catching up on some z’s on the shoulder of some crazy french woman with no teeth who kindly, even after the ordeal I’d put her through, offered to buy me a sandwich when we got to the train station.. I honestly think she was worried about my health/general sanity..(she would be right.)
A week in Scotland came at exactly the right time as it gave me the chance to sort out all the insurance related stuff which would have realistically been a nightmare from France. I don’t want to ‘diss’ the french post system but my last letter from Scott arrived almost a month after it should have.. although some would say I’m perhaps being too trusting to believe he actually sent it when he said he did. (Anyway valentine’s day's more about the thought isn’t it..)
Being back in Scotland also reminded me how, despite a series of unfortunate events, I am still incredibly lucky to be getting to spend my 3rd year worrying about getting weird tan lines instead of sitting half my degree. It also gave me the incredible opportunity to have theee most depressing bank balance ever upon leaving the apple store with a new laptop:
Bank balance for savings account: £0.00
Bank balance for current account: £-1,249.31
...Greggs for dinner it is then.
I returned to Aix in blazing sunshine - a clever ploy, I am convinced, on its behalf to make up for the oceans 11-esq excitement of the previous weeks - (It totally worked). Unfortunately, with my first Spanish exam looming I couldn’t commit to the rays in the way I would have liked. As it transpires, myself and two other ERASMUSees may have made a slight misjudgment in thinking that the stipulation that you must be of at least ‘B1’ (GSCE/AS-LEVEL) standard in order to take the course, was actually serious/unattainable, and it turns out it is in fact actually quite difficult to learn an entire language from scratch in a week, especially when you have missed the last two weeks of classes. Not to be deterred, I did as any good student does and went to the internet for help and I am please to announce that myself and ‘hoot’ the owl from the online learning website ‘duolingo’ are now making excellent progress..
Having started to feel the strain and stress of being 6 weeks from operation ‘get all my stuff back to Scotland’ - which will be no mean feat. considering I have spent the vast amount of my ERASMUS grant replenishing the diminished wardrobe I took over here because I didn’t have enough space.. and also worried that our various plans to visit enough small French towns to never run out of things to say about /picture to show of our year abroads, may now be out of our reach. I hadn’t even done all the things there were to do in AIX yet, surely?!
Luckily, the answer to this came when Scott paid his second visit. Wanting to ensure that we did something vaguely more cultural this time than taking a ‘selfie’ with the ‘fountain de quatre dauphins' as we stumbled home from a night full of tapas, german beer and chocolate milkshakes (nailing the French thing), I decided to check trip advisor’s list of ‘top tourist attractions in Aix.’ This to my dismay, did not fill me with the pang of guilt at how little I had seen whilst living here. In fact, attraction number 14 on said list is ‘the mossy fountain’ which is exactly as exciting as you might imagine. So exciting in fact, that I had walked past it almost every day and never even noticed it was there. However, the ‘fondation Vasarely’ art AIXhibition (lol) came to the rescue, and although it must be said that it didn’t go far in convincing me that modern art is not, the vast majority of the time, to art what One Direction are to the Beatles, (So yes they are both British and ‘musicians’ (this being used in the loosest term possible) as such, but I’m not expecting to see three of 1D’s albums in the top 10 of NME’s ‘greatest albums of all time’ (or even one of their albums, anywhere on the list) anytime soon/hopefully ever/if that ever happens I hope I am 10 feet under at the time, if not deeper. That said, some of the magical carpets of 3D looking shapes were actually quite cool - and we got some edgy photos, which, I’m sure you will agree is what it is all about anyway.
With my exam timetable now out and a mere two weeks left of holidays to make the most out of the south of France in its prime, I have compiled a, rather large, list of all the places I want to go/see before my year in AIXile (weyhey! did it again!) comes to an end! This will start tomorrow when my mother and sister arrive for a four day visit so that we can, at last, answer the one question that’s been on everyone’s lips this year: If these rooms are too small for two people, then how fun will three people be! Current hypothesis: Not very fun.
Anyway, I hope that next time I’m writing an update about my year abroad AIXperiences (sorry i’ll stop now) I will be the culturally enriched, hopefully completely franco-fluent individual I dreamed of becoming when I set off to France in September. But for now, there is a bug buzzing in my ear and it’s really annoying me so I’d better ‘fly’ (no? ok..) Until then, Ciao, Hasta Leugo et Au revoir!
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