Exhaustion sets in...

Today I spent much of my day frustrated for two completely different reasons. Firstly, because the whole registering for classes thing in a French university is just a complete nightmare, requires way too much energy, and is just ultimately quite unproductive. The good news is that at least I kind of sort of know in which classes I should make a presence during the first week. The bad news is that some of the classes have time options but some slots work with my schedule and others don't, and rather just being able to see the state of these classes on my own, I have to go all around the school to meet up with individual "secrétariats" who will then tell me which slots are available. Grrrrr, so much unnecessary busy-work! However, I am sure that after the first week or two I will get everything worked out and I will be much more calm and happy.

The second thing that is frustrating me right now is just how insufficient my French is. Especially when communicating all day long on the topic of every subject imaginable my brain has grown more and more tired to the point where I feel I can barely speak French! Of course I am aware that that is not the case, but I definitely am looking forward to this weekend of recuperation so I will be ready to face my first week of classes.

An interesting linguistic note: Days 1, 2, and 3 I didn't start suffering from what I am calling "foreign language exhaustion". I might have been a little slower in the mornings, but throughout the day my French did nothing but improve until I went to bed. By Day 4 I would start out, warm-up, improve, then peak and start falling apart near the end of the day, which is extremely frustrating. That syndrome has happened for about the last three days so I am hoping that this weekend will be a sort of respite for my brain so it can recover and prepare for next week.

As a happy side-note, I would also like to add that I went to an open-air market yesterday and bought a litre of mussels for just 2€ and cooked them up in butter, garlic, chives, and white wine and they were absolutely to die for. I ate around 25 mussels in one sitting! Even though Le Havre is a very industrial not-so-pretty city, there is no denying the benefits of living right on the ocean -- Fresh seafood and a beach!

Needless to say I am off to an early night of sleep because I do not think I can convince myself to stay up much longer.

Climate Update: I haven't seen the sun in 4 days, and it hasn't stopped "bruming" all of those days. I made up this word from the French work "brume" for fog/mist because the air basically condensates into a sort of extremely light yet clearly present rain.

Though my discontentedness really has nothing to do with France itself (except a bit about my linguistic shortcomings) I had to mark today pretty low in terms of emotional contentedness. I just can't believe how unorganized and inefficient the course-finding progress is at this university. Also, I haven't adjusted to the cold and sunless weather because I am still in Summer mode.