Getting Oriented!

Our first day in Aix was, as you can imagine, a pretty quiet one. We all tried to sleep late because we didn’t get in until so late (early?). The Institute for American Universities (IAU) who is the host university, had a welcome reception at 5pm for everyone to just see each other casually for the first time and see some of the staff members they’d been messaging back and forth with. Host families were also invited. Two of my students were being taken there by their host moms, and the other two wanted to get out and wander around a bit beforehand. I met them around 2pm and we searched for a place to eat lunch. We had a nice summer salad and enjoyed the sunshine for an hour and a half or so before we had to head to the reception. Their host mom met them there and invited them to have dinner with her and a few high school students she was hosting for dinner the next 4 nights – to give them a taste of French life without having them actually stay with a host family. As much as they wanted to, they couldn’t go to dinner because they were in more independent housing and had to go shopping so that they’d have something to eat the next day. They promised they’d have dinner with them another night.

 

Yay for summer salads!!

We left the reception at about 6:30 and went to the only grocery store open on a Sunday evening. Come to find out that it was only open because it wasn’t actually staffed on Sunday evenings. You just do your shopping, use one of the self-checkout machines, and then you had to use your receipt to open the door to leave. Interesting… the only issue was that the checkout machines kept malfunctioning, and when that happened, you had to press a button to call an operator and have them fix it by giving them the store number and then the machine number. There were two security guards who were trying to help everyone, but 5 machines that were malfunctioning in turn. The one we used worked fine for the first set of things and I was able to pay no problem. Then we went on to the students’ things, getting about a third of the way through the stuff, (we had about €100 worth of stuff) and it stopped working. The guy tried to help us, and it took about 15 minutes to get it back up and running. We were able to finish scanning everything, but then when we went to pay, it stopped working again. Another 10 minutes go by and it’s unblocked again and we go to pay… the CC that had just worked didn’t work the first 2 times, but then finally worked on the 3^rd try. We were finally done about 8:30! 

The two students living together and making their own food headed back and were pleasantly surprised that their host mom was still out in the garden having dinner with the high schoolers, so they were able to join in the dinner after all! The other student and I were headed in the same direction for a little while, and then she went another direction to get to her host mom’s apartment. I found at the next day that while waiting to cross the street at an intersection, some university-aged people in a car driving by threw eggs at her while yelling something about America/Americans! Don’t know how they knew she’s an American, but even so… Why? No one has any idea! It was understandably upsetting for her, but she has a really nice host mom and I think she helped to calm her down. But what a disappointing first introduction to the French and their culture :(

Orientation Time!!

The next day was orientation at IAU, and I thought they did a great job organizing it. They have almost 200 students here this summer, so they started in a large room with everyone – doing introductions of the staff, general logistics about classes, etc. For the afternoon sessions they broke them up into 3 groups: Renoir, Cezanne and Van Gogh. They rotated between a walking tour of the center part of town where the different class buildings are located (it’s not like a US university campus – the buildings are spread out in the town), an info session on culture shock and the basics about French culture, and a session specifically about navigating living with a French host family. I attended the sessions more out of curiosity and wanting to have the information to give potential future IAU students. I particularly enjoyed seeing the classrooms in the different buildings, mostly because our guide had a great French sense of humor. 

He was showing the student lounge and said “There’s a coffee vending machine down there… industrial coffee, so, you know, disgusting coffee!” All of the classrooms in one building are named after famous French authors. One is Simone de Beauvoir, another is name after; “Camus, you know, the crazy French philosopher.” I chuckled at that one, since I read a fair amount of Camus during my Masters program.

 It was a long day, but I was proud of my students for being attentive and respectful, which I can unfortunately not say about many other students during the orientation. I was particularly annoyed at the students who would snicker when a French staff member of IAU was speaking in English – for their benefit no less – and made a mistake. I was so tempted to turn and ask them if their French was as good as the woman’s English – which was very good! They were the same students who chatted through some portions of the information and then asked questions at the end because they hadn’t been listening. Sigh. Not my students.

After orientation, a couple of my students – and another student from a different school – decided to go get French SIM cards and change money. We arrived 15 minutes too late for changing money, but we were able to get SIM cards. We celebrated with ice cream, and then we called it quits and everyone went to their respective homes after a long day – with no repeats of the egging incident.