May 25th: And so it begins...

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Today was the least active day of the trip yet, as classes started up today. Briefly, I will be taking 3 classes here at UTT. They are Project Management, French Civilization, and Beginner's French. I only had French Civilization today, so I will put a more detailed description of these classes on here at a later date (it's also 12:30am and I have to be up at 8am, so I need to stop soon).

We had to be up at 8:30am to be ready and at the informational meeting by 9am. We made it on time, and were actually some of the first people there. At this meeting, they gave us a rundown of the UTT and what we will be doing in the next few weeks while we stay here. I'll save the parts about what we're doing for later, as obviously I'll be blogging about them as I do them. As for UTT, it was very interesting. Each student here is required to get a Master's, so they all do 5 years here. It is 2500 students, so much smaller than Michigan. They have 9 specializations to choose from, but I don't know them, and neither do most of the students except for what they're in. Anyways, at the meeting they told us a bit more, and to shed some light on future activities: 1.) I'll be doing Canyoning, Paragliding, Rock Climbing, and Bungie Jumping this weekend (more later in the week) and 2.) I won't be going with the group to Versailles and the Eiffel Tower, as it was optional and at cost, and I've already done them before. I need to conserve money, too, because (for those of you who haven't seen, here's the link: http://www.topdecktours.co.uk/content.asp?Document_ID=1379&Display_Type=1052) I'll be doing a tour after the program ends, plus a trip to Portugal and Spain with Mandie. Anyways, this will all be elaborated on later. For now, the meeting was over, and it was time for a tour. The tour was just around the UTT, and there's not much to say. It is a very nice, modern campus, but it was really hot today and the school is without air conditioning (like the rest of Troyes...), so the tour was long. After the tour: lunch time.

We ate lunch at a Chinese place on campus. It was a huge amount of food for 4,50 E, so that was a great deal. I couldn't even finish it all! Then, at 1pm, we had a class on French Civilization. The professor was a British man named Bob Whitchurch, and today he gave us a condensed summary of European history started around 3000 BC. 3 hours is a VERY long time to be in class, so I zoned in and out, especially since a lot of what he said has been taught to us before. I imagine it will get better when we get to more specific topics, so I'm looking forward to that. I better be, as we have class again tomorrow from 2-5pm.

After class, we ran to Carrefour, pretty much a French Meijer. There, I bought sunglasses, cheap tennis shoes for the adventure weekend, bottled water, and notebooks for class, all for 33 Euro. I was very impressed at the price. While we were there, a vicious, vicious thunderstorm began, but thankfully it stopped before we got out to ride the bus. It was as bad as any I've seen in Michigan before, so that was impressive. We headed back to campus for a 6pm meeting with our UTT student assigned to us.

At 6pm, we were given more white wine + fruit liquor and also given a student from UTT to whom we could ask questions if we had any. Mine is named Yasir, as I've mentioned before. We talked for a while about nothing special in particular, until around 7pm when we had to go to dinner. Since he lives downtown, he went there and I went to the University Cafeteria. There, I ate an orange, a cream puff thing, fries, and something made from pig intestine (antelloute, perhaps?). It was all pretty good, and I got it all for 2,95 Euro. I'll definitely be eating there to save on money from here on.

After dinner, we just went back to the dorms and did nothing. I've worked on catching up on my blog, while others sat around on their computers. We played ping pong for a while, but that died out fast. It was a mediocre day because we're starting classes again, but hey, that's what we signed up for! It's about 12:50am here now, so I'll need to stop writing soon and hit the hay. I know I keep saying this, but the entries will begin to get shorter during the week because the days will be class-filled and much less exciting. Tomorrow: French language at 8:30am, Project Management at 10am, and French Civilization from 2-5pm. Wahoo!

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