Starting my 3rd week in Geneva
Ok so I haven’t had any time to write at all. Everytime I thought ok so today I have a day off and I will find time to write something would get in the way!
Everything has been so hectic!!
So I will try to write a summary of everything that has been happening. Where to start?? So since the last time I wrote I have successfully been food shopping in France (which is so much cheaper than Geneva and actually affordable), I have been to one of the clubs in Geneva (which sold a vodka orange for 25 francs!!!!! and I couldn’t get home til like 6am due to a lack of buses), went on a city ralley with the erasmus group where I learnt some pretty cool things about Geneva (I will write more about this in a bit), I have started classes (a week earlier than I thought), I have been emailing back and forth with my uni in England about which modules I can, should, cannot and want to take (it is a pain!!), I have been to an erasmus party (where I met lots of nice people and ended up walking home for like 40 mins at 3 am because the buses stop running really early) and I went to Neuchatel (a city about an 1 and a half away from Geneva) on saturday for this grape picking festival, although I saw no grapes or wine.
Right that should about summarise the main events here and explain why I just haven’t found the time.
Now in a little more detail. My first night out was the day after our induction (so on friday about a beek ago). We went to this erasmus pic nic thing and afterwards we decided to try and go out. It was a bit of a fail to be honest because we had no idea where to go and ended up wandering around Geneva for an hour in the middle of the night. Eventually we found this pub which sold reasonably (for Geneva) priced beers. So we just got some drinks and sat in plainpalais which is sort of like a square/park (don’t know how to describe it any better) close to our university. In the end it turned out quite nice. We just sat there in a group and chatted/ listened to music on a phone. There were some swiss guys there too who asked us if we had weed. A bit random I think.
The next evening some of us ended up going to this club called platinum. It is so different from the UK. Apparently to get a table you need to buy a bottle (not sure of what, maybe champagne??) which costs like 250 francs. Not sure how true this is but that’s what someone told me. The place was empty til about 1:30/2am so the beginning of the night kind of sucked. Afterwards it started to fill up, and despite the very randomly picked music, I had a good time. The only problem is that we got stuck there til 5am as the buses stopped running. And walking was out of the question because it was raining. So we ended up having to get an over priced taxi back. Luckily for me one of the guys I was sharing a taxi with was really nice and only asked me for 5 francs. A friend of mine bought a class of vodka orange for 25 francs. Absolutely crazy prices. It’s not worth it, not even if the orange juice is freshly squeezed right in front of you!
On Sunday I ended up sleeping til late. Not a surprise as I didn’t get home til about 6 am. We spent a good hour looking for a taxi, in the rain, because none of them would take 5 people.
At around 2pm the ESN Geneve (erasmus group) organised a city ralley where divided us into groups. At the end one of the groups was meant to win some chocolate or something like that. I wonder who won??
They took us to many different areas of town and told us a bit about Geneva. I had no idea how little I really knew about this city. I will be putting up some photos of this day with some more explanations. They also made us do a bunch of things like ask randomers in the street where they were from. They were trying to prove a point: very little people actually come from Geneva. I ended up askking like 5 very grumpy Parisiens who just looked at me funny. But while I was doing this I also saw the Genevan version of Bethoven (the dog). He was so huge! Imagine a very furry and drooling pony and you pretty much have the right image.
We also went to this square which has a bunch of little stones where you can read different things in 9 different languages. It’s called the place du Molard. We also played a game there. We had to try and cross the square with as little feet touching the floor as possible. So this one guy carried TWO girls across on his back and another crossed it on his hands! It was really impressive. I also got carried across on someone’s back. It was a lot of fun and we must have looked like complete idiots. But who cares right? I mean no one knows us anyway. We also played another game where we had to try and fit as many people into a swiss phone booth as possible. We ended up with 18 people in a phone booth. Hope no one was claustrophobic ;)
So on Monday last week we had an introductory meeting at the ETI (ecole de traduction et interpretation) which is my host faculty in Geneva. And surprise surprise calsses were meant to start last week on Tuesday! NOT this week on Monday like I had originally thought. So that is when the stressing started. I hadn’t picked my classes and had no idea what to take. So the first thing I did was sit at home for 3 hours and go though all the classes trying to desipher which ones were first, second and third year classes. Then I just decided to go to a bunch of different ones and see which ones I prefer. So at the moment my timetable is something between 20 and 30 hours a week. A little crazy and I must admit, a little geeky. But I just can’t decide which classes I really want to take. They are all so interesting. And this is such an amazing oportunity. My university doesn’t really offer many translation and linguistic classes and here that’s what most of them are. I don’t really find literature classes that interesting. I prefer the linguistic aspet of my course and i love translation. This is what I want to do with my life, so trying to pick my classes here is hard. And my home uni isn’t making it any easier as they require me to do a culture/literature module, which the ETI doesn’t offer. So I have to either take a politics module (as I do study politics in England as well as languages but in French it’s just not that easy), a literature or culture module offered by the faculty of lettres (which means I can’t take a bunch of classes I actually find interesting due to them clashing) or one of the erasmus calsses that are about swiss or french literature. As this is making it harder to pick the courses i like my timetable just keeps on growing and growing. Also, something I noticed over here is that classes are just a lot mroe work. I spent a good 2 hours yesterday translating half of a text (so imagine me translating the whole thing) and this is only half of the work for my spanish/english translation class. I till have at least 2 more hours of work to do for it. A lot of the classes seem to be like this. It’s just much more work. Something else I noticed is that when the lecturers over here say: “this lecture is not complusory” all the students still go. Whenever a lecturer told us this in Leicester by the next class half the students wouldn’t be there. People here seemm a lot more responsible and ON TIME!!! Seriously! I walked into a lecture at 2:15pm, maybe 20 seconds late, and the woman had started her power point presentation! One of my teachers already said “if you’re late you’ll have to wait til my 10 minute break which I will take 45 minutes into the lesson. I won’t let you into the class before that.” Scary! So lesson learnt last week: DO NOT BE LATE. In fact come 5 minutes early.
Something else about the classes here: they can start as early as 8:15am and end as late as 8pm. They definitely use ALL of their time over here. My spanish/english translation class for example ends at 8pm. But since the teacher is a professional translator and conference interpreter she sometimes has to fit us around her schedule. Meaning that sometimes we won’t finish til 9pm or start as early as 8am. If we start at 8 I would have to be up at 6am for me to make it one time. Lets hope that never happens. Fingers crossed.
Last week wendesday there was an Erasmus pub night which the ESN here organised. These pub nights seem to be weekly events and an ok way to meet someone. Also, some of the bars we go to will give erasmus students a discount. I met some really nice people there. I even spoke, or tried to, speak some french. But most of the time it was either English, German or Spanish. At least my Spanish is improving. It’s impressive how many people here speak spanish. Even at the bank! The woman who opened my bank account for me spoke to me in Spanish/French because she noticed that sometimes I couldn’t find the right words in French. I like living in such a multilingual city. It’s great!
Well going back to the erasmus pub night, we ended up missing the last bus so we just went to a friend’s house for a bit and around 3am me and one of my friends from England started walking home. It wasn’t as bad as I thought but sadly I did catch a bad cold. But I had a good night notheless. It was worth it I think.
On Saturday I got invited to go to this grape picking festival in Neuchatel. It’s called the FĂŞte de Vendange. We went in th afternoon (and the train tickets were really expensive. Remind me not to complain about UK train prices ever again) and stayed til 5am and caught the first train back. It was amazing. Such a great experience to go. There was a lot of music and so many people on the streets. We pretty much danced all night. There were even some people dancing on the bar of of the place we went to (the bar was outside by the way). So me and a frien decided we wanted to dance on the bar as well. I think we were the only two sober people on there. But it was really fun.Â
As a result of not getting home til 8am yesterday i pretty much had 2 lazy days to catch up on some sleep and for my throat and voice to recover. Many hours of sleep and like 50 cups of tea later and my throat is starting to feel normal again. All ready to face a full day of classes tomorrow.
Well I will stop here. I think this post is already long enough. Photos will follow
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