C'est Nice

It’s Tuesday morning. I’m sitting in my bed listening to a little Frou Frou, feeling pretty chill. Today looks to be a day of errands: open a bank account, go grocery shopping, try and get the bags I left at the Lycée Masséna, go to the town hall and get a list of official translators so I can have my birth certificate officially translated into French. You know, the usual.

But enough about what may happen today: let’s talk about the last two days. After the movie Sunday (which, by the way, was in a terribly comfortable movie theater, with seats like recliners) I headed back up the mountain to the Lycée. The first official Assistant activities were starting that night, with a schedule like this: dinner Sunday night at a the Relais de Jeunesse (I believe that is just another fancy French way of saying Youth Hostel), which was way the hell up in the mountains. The dinner was optional, with an optional overnight stay, which we were supposed to make a reservation for. I wasn’t aware quite how far away this place was from civilized Nice, and thought “whatever, I have a place to stay, I don’t need to mess with no youth hostel, shiiit.” A lot of people showed up directly to the hostel from their country of origin, which sucks for them, cause this place was way the hell out of the way. Anyway, not having any food at the Lycée, I thought I’d go up for the dinner, come back down to the Lycée, and then go back up again in the morning for our orientation. A little crazy, I know, but hopefully that shouldn’t be a surprise for anyone.

Fortunately (or maybe, unfortunately… it’s difficult to tell) Charlotte, Magd and I double checked the bus map, and as it turned out, the bus they told us to take didn’t go near our Lycée, and being the resourceful bunch that we were, we found another bus that went close to where we were supposed to end up, and hoped for the best. The first thing that went wrong had to do with downtown Nice’s veritable paralysis due to the (very slow) construction of a new tramway: the bus was re-routed, and in the few minutes it took us to figure out where the bus did stop, we missed it. The second thing to go wrong was the next bus, which didn’t come for a freakin’ hour. The third thing was that the little staircase-type path that we were going to use as a shortcut to the Relais was also under construction (completely unrelated to the tramway), so it took us twenty or thirty minutes to walk around and up the hill to the relais.

After that things seemed to run a little more smoothly. We arrived to a pretty standard prepared-for-200-students dinner—salad, pasta, some type of meat… I think, dessert—and I sat at a table with a dozen Italians, an Indian (dot, not feather) and a girl from… I forget now, I think it was Honduras, and a girl from Ohio. And Magd. The girl from Ohio looked like she’d traveled by coffee can, her eyes glazed over frequently. Oh, how well I know the inherent inability to parler Francais when one is jet lagged. After dinner, there was massive socializing throughout the Relais, although most people congregated around the “bar” (it was really more of a canteen), which sold cans of beer for the breakaway price of 1€30! There were masses of people, most of whom had graduated from university, and yet, it had a certain reminiscence of high school socializing—can I join this group? Have these people established themselves as the “cool kids?” I did what I considered an appropriate amount of internal agonizing and then plunged in. I must have introduced myself (and vice-versa) to dozens upon dozens of people. I’ve forgotten many of the names…. We were eating dinner in a dining room that must have had sixty girls, and the guys numbered all of 4. At first I thought we were all the assistants in the program, it was only later that I realized that there were several other dining rooms. The guys are still greatly in the minority (which does much to promote the view that I’m consistently setting myself up for disappointment), and because of this and other obvious reasons (if they’re not… who are you? Why are you reading my blog? Just kidding, it’s cool. En general, j’aime les hommes), I’m having an easier time remembering the names of the gents. By this point, I had realized that my plan to return to the Lycée was folly, and, I think because they’d just rented out the whole place, the Assistant people were able to find me a room.

And despite the fact that the phone numbers I got were platonic (well, at least those I got from the guys… who knows about the ladies) the evening was fine. I ended up playing a Spanish guys’ guitar some, which was fun, even though it was freezing. I slept through the night without a problem, despite the unseasonably cold weather and the open window thanks to the two beers I had (and, okay, I slept in my jacket, so sue me).

The next day was… what it was. We had our orientation-ish type thing in the morning… it was largely useless. We spent half an hour just going over the breakdown of the Assistants by language and locality. It wasn’t that bad, because the auditorium we were in was (for some reason that escapes me) equipped with armchair type seats, like the ones from the theater. There was a “coffee break” which consisted of everyone in the auditorium squeezing out onto the balcony outside the entrance for cups of something that was definitely not coffee. Then it was back inside for the orientation specifically for the English assistants… in French. Yes, I know, cultural immersion and exchange, etc., etc., but if you’re going to tell me what I need to do to get my residency card and not get deported, then would you please say it in my native language, especially when everyone in the room speaks it? Okay, I’m done. No really.

Keeping up with their track record of coming in just above my lowest expectations, lunch consisted of pre-packaged sandwiches (the kind that have been sliced into triangles and put into perfect triangular boxes) and bottled water. I think they may have had something else, but I was at the end of the food line; my loss, I guess. I spoke for a while with a Canadian guy named Nick who spoke very, very fast. I found myself doing a lot of the struggling to follow the meaning of the sentence that I had to do with French. And the other thing was this kid’s eyes were WIDE OPEN; it was as if he was about to explode, and had to get everything out quickly, his eyes already bulging from the pressure. He was nice though. The Parc Imperial contingent also managed to meet up with the our other fellow assistants, an Italian girl named Annapaola and a Colombian guy, Hector.

Once the festivities were done, we (which now numbered 5; Joy was still with her mom) headed back to the Lycée, where there was another crisis of beds and keys, although this one seemed acutely worse, and seemed to take almost an hour and a half to remedy. After taking care of more paper-pushing, the day ended with our (meaning Charlotte’s and my) first dinner in the school’s cafeteria, which comes in on my radar as pretty standard cafeteria food, although Charlotte seems to think that it’s amazing compared to British school food.

Anyway. I’m way behind calendar-wise, although I think I may be reaching that time when the days become slightly more routine. But who knows?

Until next time.