Patrique

Okay, so it's been over a week since my last post, and now I've left myself in a bit of pickle because I have to have my entire blog entry done by 2pm (50 minutes). A lot of us are traveling for the next week and then coming back on Thursday, July 1st to pick up our stuff, so they are taking it from us today to lock it up somewhere. That said, I'm going to move on to my next entry, covering the 5 days of my Scotland trip. We left on Wednesday afternoon to catch the 2:43pm train from Troyes to Paris. We arrived in Paris and took the metro to our stop where we were to catch the shuttle at 8:10pm. So, we walked around a little bit, ate some food, and came ... read more

So these past two days have paled in comparison to the weekend. It's crunch-time here in Troyes, meaning that we are loaded with projects, presentations, and final exams. This week is super hectic since many of us are leaving Wednesday night for Scotland and our projects are due early next week. Quite a frenzy. Yesterday, Monday, we only had Project Management from 10am-12pm. It was fairly uneventful, but we did some work on our project (planning the conference for the Society of Women Engineers). After class, we picked up where we had left off, and worked on the project the rest of the night after eating lunch first. The girls in my group (Amanda, Ellen, and Melissa) were the only ones that actually did a significant amount of work while Jason and I pulled off an ... read more

I'll start this with information relevant mostly to those of you back in Michigan, I will be returning on July 4th in the late evening! A number of factors influenced my decision to do so, but I won't go into them here. How exciting, I know! So since the champagne tasting on the 5th of June, not all that much has happened. The next Sunday, June 6th, was a free day, which means we were given the entire day to do our own thing. Oddly, everyone seemed to sleep in until 11:45am, at which point we all woke up and hung out on Facebook for a while. Facebook is a way of life here since we really don't have all that much to do during the weekdays, so you'll probably hear me reference it a lot. ... read more

To ease the pain of playing catchup, and because the weeks are much less exciting than the weekdays, I will be grouping the past 4 days into one entry, and it shouldn't even be that long! Here we go! Tuesday was a great day! We went to Beginner's French in the morning, but our teacher didn't show up, which would be the theme of the day. So we went back to the dorms and hung out for a while until our next class at 10am. As it turns out, the French teacher thought class was the next morning, and he felt absolutely terrible for the confusion, so much so that I heard he was almost in tears. In Project Management, our teacher showed up probably 20 minutes late because his flight from Vancouver was late arriving, ... read more

Following the beginning of classes on Tuesday afternoon, Wednesday and Thursday have been filled with class and pretty much nothing else. On Wednesday, we had our first French lessons. I am in the "total beginners" French, obviously. Our teacher is a complete nut. He switches in and out of French so frequently, and he talks so fast! Most of the time he'll just start talking in French, and then point at someone. Naturally, whoever it is just stares at him until he clarifies what he wants (which is usually to repeat what he just said). He doesn't really seem to have a solid plan for what he wants to do, but French class has been the class I'm enjoying the most so far, so it's okay. I am learning bits and pieces, and the classes are ... read more