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Published: October 19th 2008
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I finally got all my paperwork sent off/handed in to all the right places this week! At last! With that out of the way, it was a case of turning up to lectures (I have finished an entire pad of A4 already - I think I used 2 during the whole of last year, they really make you write here! Although my doodles, which get ever-more abmitious with every passing modern history and Non-specialist Spanish lecture may also have something to do with my rapid paper-consumption), and then planning things for the evenings.
On Tuesday we went to Tio Pepe's (where else?) for a pub quiz arranged by the English department. Despite the presence of tutors, which was a little strange, it was a good night, and a great oppurtunity to socialise with some French students. Elise, a French girl studying English joined Fiona, Rosy and I to make up a team, and we were delighted to discover she'd spent part of her year abroad in Sheffield! We also proved ourselves to be not too shabby at general knowledge, coming a close second to Adam and Ben's team, grrr!
On Wednesday, it was Tio Pepe's again for the erasmus
night, which I am tiring of a little, it has to be said. It was nice to see everyone, as always, but Fi and I left fairly early, having run out of enthusiasm to dance to 'shake it, shake it, shake it like a polaroid picture' week after week.
Then on Friday, we went to Perpignan's Irish pub to celebrate Rosy's flatmate Franzi's birthday. Although you feel like you shouldn't go to such a place while in a foreign country and thereby fulfil the stereotypes, the lack of alternative nightlife in Perpignan, and a desire to sit in a cosy corner of a pub, albeit a sort of fake, foreign version of a pub meant we submitted, and had a lovely evening, us British girls with bottles of cider and berating the French boys about their tiny glasses of beer (a quarter-pint glass, I ask you!)
On Saturday morning, cloudy, but still warm and humid - we've had a heatwave of 26 degrees for most of this week, and we're still waiting for the storm to come - Fiona and I got a bus out to Cabestany, a village 20 minutes away from Perpignan. We'd been informed by
my trusty guidebook and by our medieval lit lecturer that it was a must-see, full of medieval art and sculpture. In reality, it was a ghost-town, out of season there was nobody about, and the museum was closed when we arrived. We went cautiously into the church which we'd read about, and found a couple of medieval sculptures, but nothing that took our breath away. We considered hanging around for the museum to open, but there was nothing to do in the meantime, and as buses came and went so rarely, we thought we'd take our chance while we had it, and headed back to Perpignan. We spent a very contented afternoon shopping and drinking coffee, feeling like we'd returned to a metropolis after Cabestany!
In the evening, as it was Franzi's actual birthday, we went over to theirs bearing pretty peach-coloured tulips, which delighted Franzi. We spent a lovely evening eating dairy milk (brought by Rosy's mum from Britain when she came!) and watching 'l'auberge espagnole', a french film about erasmus students in Barcelona. It was brilliant, and very accurate about the erasmus experience, it was a bit like watching my own life on film! They even stuck authentically to the mix of languages you get in a group of foreign students, English, Spanish, French and Catalan, and a couple of others thrown in here and there.
And just like that, another week's gone. And still so much to do, like 12 hours of spanish study in the language lab when I finally figure out how to get onto my student space on the Perpignan intranet, because of course you have to sign up for a slot online, there is no other possible way in the universe you can possibly book yourself in. And my mum coming to visit, and a trip to Barcelona. And maybe actually getting round to sorting out my lecture notes. But that's all still to come.
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