Casse-toi et ton système éducatif!

France, I like your: literature, your food and your architecture. You can keep your: weather (mainly aimed at Paris), your vibe, your pervy men, your 'Keep off the grass' parks, your traffic and transport in general, and your education system!

Latest news from the Sorbonne: Lectures restarted yesterday. Which I was informed of: yesterday. From my chat with my German friend Amelie, a fellow Erasmus student, over hot chocolate (yummy!) and croissants (also very yummy) this afternoon, we have established that the semester will be made up for over the next FOUR weeks (bearing in mind this semester was meant to be what, 12/13?), followed by an exam period of ONE week, in which ALL exams will be crammed in back-to-back. (Amelie worked out that, if she were to take said exams, she would have THREE in a single DAY on a Monday, from 12-2, 2-4 (yep, that's right, no break!) and 5-7pm. THEN she would have her next one on Tuesday morning!! A JOKE, I ask you..!! We both felt so fortunate that, luckily owing to our respective universities (Dresden and Manchester) being understanding about the situation we have been put in, we do not have to partake in this month of hell...and then proceeded to talk about how nothing like this would ever happen in our respective countries, lol. It's true though..! PAH..

I went to her building afterwards with her (some of her lectures have been on, so she has some essays to write at the moment), and the place was strewn with painted banners and scrawled signs with slogans like "SARKO, CASSE-TOI ET TES LOIS" - '"Sarko" (President Nicolas Sarkozy's somewhat derogatory nickname), get lost with your laws', amongst others. I read some of the literature they'd printed off from www.liberation.fr , a French newspaper which has published numerous articles on the progression of the Sorbonne strike, and vowed to read more of these later to keep abreast of the goings-on, before picking up a couple of free magazines lying around and wandering to the Jardin de Luxembourg near by. On an upside, the Palace is truly gorgeous, and the gardens looked beautiful, even in the cloudy weather we've had today following the brilliant summer weather of the weekend and the thunderous storm which abruptly drew that to a close last night; I pulled up a chair next to one of the central patches of grass with a view of the Palais and sat to read The Da Vinci Code (my latest read; I started it earlier after a good year or two of promising to start it and am loving it! Reading it in Paris makes it all the more vivid and exciting - also probably why this entry sounds a little more cogent and literary than my usual mutterings :$). Unfortunately the wind and cold drew me away from this after not very long; it was simply too cold to enjoy it! But yes, very pleasant to spend some time in the gardens and to finally see the Palace itself. It's been a really nice, relaxing, leisurely Parisian day :)

Love you all, can't believe it's my return on Sunday!! Though it is days like today that make me think I really am going to miss this place....well, some aspects of it anyway :p 

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