Why I am I saying this because lifs here is becoming so ordinary, I'm in a routine even though I am on the other side of the world.. however everything is not as it seems!
For starters I walk to school and back everyday so don't take the metro and it is a really nice walk everyday. Here are a few snaps...Afternoon Sun
Autumn Leaves
Fresh baked baguettes anyone?
A round of boules underway
Thankgod I walk because there has been a transport strike on, it started on Tuesday and I believe it ended yesterday (a total of 4 days). The strikes are actually really well organised, they know how many trains aren't going to run and put on extra buses etc. But it is still a pain in the neck, for example on Friday there were no trains into the city from 12-4pm...absolutely none, they closed the station. Do you want to know why they are striking? Because the government raised the retirement age from 60 to 62. Now I'm pretty sure Australia has put in a plan to change the retirement age to 65 by 2014. I only know this because I looked it up, pretty sure it wasn't a big thing. The upside to this is that we didn't have a few of our classes as our lecturers couldn't get here but we couldn't actually go anywhere exciting because there were no trains... catch 22 situation!
Now I don't actually work, but attending class all day every day pretty much counts, on Thursdays I'm at school until 8.30pm with language courses, on Wednesdays I have a petit boulot teaching english to a family (2 kids and their mum) which is nice to get some pocket money but also a pain because its another whole day gone with no personal time... My course is still pretty disappointing but the complaints are piling up, both from exchnage students and the french students so hoepfully something will be done. For example, we have a class called Quality Control, basically it gose over ISO14000 and ISO9000, incredibly boring and I'm not sure we need 9 hours of our life dedicated to it since it is a well documented process and doens't really need you to be particularly savy. But, that is beside the point, the lecture slides that were presented to us were just downloaded from the internet (no citation etc.), they were just presented as if they were his slides. So unprofessional and he just read them from the screen anyway..so unimpressed especially with the amount of money I am paying for this supposedly 'world class' education!
On the 'dodo' side there is not a lot of that going on either. We usually end up in one anothers rooms, drinking cheap bottles of wine and listening to music at all hours of the night.
We eventually get told to shut up - at which point we move to another room and piss off another corridor! We are sharing cultural differences so I maintain that it is a learning experience, for example, on Thursday night I learnt the different noises that animals make in the world...pigs turn out to be the funniest - how did english end up with oink oink?
Think we had drunk a little too much at this stage
In conclusion, while life is routine it is still amazing to be here and I'm having the time of my life apart from the occasional issue at school :)
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