Education Education Education...... and some other updates.

It's been a while since I've posted now, and I'm sorry if I have disappointed my vast followers. Three! The excitement that prevailed at seeing this was overwhelming, thank you, loyal friends... But thanks also to those who have not yet declared themselves 'followers' but have also complimeted my blog. Please blame tardy updates on my limited access to internet, not my enthusiasm. At present I am currently battling with a rather confusing French keyboard in university. Numbers are replaced by punctuation, and full stops by semi-colons. I would have thought that even in French full stops are used more than semi-hyphens, but there you go; another French oddity to add to the list.

I started at The University of Pau et Pays d'Adour one week ago. Like all courses in French Universities the hours spent in class exceed my ten hours a week contact time in Leeds by a long way. This underlines the question asked by so many British students: Where the hell do our three thousand pounds a year actually go? French students pay a third of what we do and get triple the amount of contact time in small groups, with enthusiastic and knowledgable teachers. In England we get the equivalent of this three hours a week, while the rest are spent in enormous lecture theatres amongst a crowd exceeding two hundred, while a mediocre 'Doctor' drones on about 'sexual connotations' for an hour. In my French lectures, the lecturer barely even speaks in French! Despite the sense that I'm feeling slightly like I am back in school, I feel I will progress a lot more in University in France than I have in my two years at Leeds. Another thing that's better about France than England. Hurrumph.

It's also worth mentionning that it's ever so fascinating learning a language. Although the University does seem to be rather good at teaching French, I definitely believe that the majority of my language learning will be outside of the classroom. I've always thought of learning a language like putting together a puzzle. In primary school you gather the most basic, big peices, like alphabet and numbers. Later on you learn some vocabulary, some verbs and eventually some tenses. In college and at Leeds I have been perfecting my knowledge of these and putting the puzzle together. But the 'glue' will be speaking and listening to Cecile and my other French friends all the time, so that I eventually, fingers crossed, become fluent.

Talking of French friends, I've now become firm friends with the rather eccentric gay couple downstairs, Seb and Juan. It all started when I couldn't get my internet to work. Cecile mentionned that the guy downstairs was a bit of a computer whizz, so I turned up at the door, laptop in hand and a distraught look on my face at the idea of no facebook for the year. At 6ft 5, Seb is rather intimidating to have answer the door to you for the first time. He assertively grabbed my laptop and got to work without complaint for about half an hour, eventually and ingeniously starting up the little symbol with two computers and a world in the middle (yes, that is the extent of my computer knowledge). All the time he was tapping away, I played with the very cute black and white cat and chatted to Juan, who is very friendly and sweet. I went home happy, thinking what a nice fellow to help me with my computer. Alas, the internet failed to work again a few days later. I traipsed back round to Seb and Juan's. And a few days later. I've now given up hope with the internet, but I've made some great friends out of its failure . Liam came to visit me this weekend, which was wonderful, but we also spent rather a lot of time with Seb and Juan, who plied us (and Cecile) with drinks on Friday night, took us to Lourdes on Saturday, cooked us lunch on Sunday then drove Liam to the airport at 7 o clock on Sunday morning. They are unbelievably kind and generous and great fun to be around. And we can stay up til the early hours chatting... in French!