School

Today marks the last day of my second week in school, and though I am here to study, this is the topic I least look forward to writing about, hence the procrastination on the posts. But here it goes.

French school system is a lot different than the U.S. First of all, students pay very little to study in the universities, they only pay a small fee (I think around 300-500 euro) each semester to cover something, I don't know what. Otherwise the government pays for it all, even health insurance for students. Great right? Because the government pays for school, it costs them a lot of money each year to keep students in school (degrees are 3 years long), so I think teachers here are a lot more rough and fail students often because it's cheaper if students just fail out of school. I think they literally fail half of the class.. it's a rumor I have been hearing. There are no office hours, no talking to your professor after class, professors tend to skip classes for reasons that I don't know of, and you only have each class once a week. Lastly, students take about 20-30 credit hours each semester, and there is no homework, just finals and some midterms.

The university in Poitiers has.. um.. probably one of the ugliest campuses I have ever seen, even the citizen's think it is ugly. The university is located on the edge of town and most students commute to school every morning. Unlike college cities in the U.S, in France the university is not the center of town. Students spend minimal time here, and there is not much that actually happens besides classes and some clubs. Every morning I take a bus into the city center, and from there I take a bus to the university. For me, it takes in between 40-60 minutes to get to school, which is quite a drag. I am used to biking onto campus in five minutes (with my strong cyclist leg muscles).

I have been prolonging the arrival of photos, but I know you are all curious.. so here it goes..

 There is a (sorry to be so negative) ugly pyramid thing in the middle of this quad. Behind it is a library, and to the left is the law building.

This is the building in which I take like 90% of my classes, it's the liberal arts building. I am sorry the pictures are not that great, but I was not too motivated to take better pictures.

I thought this image was cute, the little cigarette bud waste (name?) overflows every day. A large percentage of people smoke here. I hope I don't start smoking also, but it would be such a great conversation starter: "Do you smoke?" "Yeaaa, you?" "Yes, sometimes I find myself smoking all the time." ... and instantly, a connection with a stranger...

Sorry for not keeping the blog up to date. Have a great day everyone, don't be shy to leave comments, I love reading them and it shows me that people are actually reading my blog! For those of you in Oregon: enjoy your last days of summer and have a great weekend!!