My schedule here in Chambéry is a lot less consistent than the schedule that I had in Le Havre. To make it so that I could keep things straight I have literally written every single class meeting into its proper days in my planner for the entire semester because days, times, and room numbers change for almost all of my courses on a weekly basis. This does have its advantages and disadvantages though, because there are some days where I have no school at all, and others where I have 8-10 hours in a day, and likewise there are weeks where I have very little to do, and some weeks which are likely going to be very tough.
As for class specifics, at this point I am still definitively working out which classes I am going to take for the semester, and my list keeps getting shorter and shorter because so far I have not found many courses that I like. This is also probably because my business courses do not start up until next week so I haven't started them yet. I just hope that they are better (more interesting) than some of the other courses I have been to. Even though I will not be dropping the class because there is a chance that I can get transfer credit for it, my statistics course is horribly boring. So far we have done nothing but mathematical definitions pertaining to statistics during which the professor reads long sentences from a book for the students to copy. I am serious, the French are completely unfamiliar with the concept of a handout / PowerPoint. However, because my mathematical vocabulary is a little rusty even in English I figure I better not try to skip ahead to a higher-level course, and if I get back into the US and can't get credit for this course, at least I had the refresher so that my Miami course will be that much easier. But on the other side of the spectrum you have my European Economy class which is probably the first actually difficult course I have been in since in France (except Chinese last semester I guess). We were given maybe 25-30 pages of reading from various handouts and a massive timeline of economic events (5 pages) that we "don't have to know by heart" but should be familiar with.
For those of you who don't know, even though I have a great memory, I literally know almost nothing about economic events from a historical perspective so all that reading combined with the timeline (that I have actually only skimmed once at this point) had made for a substantial amount of homework. And even though I have taken a course of Micro-Econ back home and Macro-Econ out here in France, this class is a very high-level economics course for the final year studies of what would be our equivalent of economic majors. I find the course very interesting and it is in that course that I made my first friends in Chambéry, but nonetheless it is going to be difficult.Especially since in France they also have to study law with almost every single "major" and therefore these students are very familiar with both the economics and the laws that surround European economics. On the bright side, I can provide a very unique perspective since I come from America which makes me a happily accepted newcomer. I have the class this afternoon so I'll try to let you know if all my hours of homework paid off or if I'm still feeling a little clueless in the class.
General Update: I should be able to figure out fairly soon whether or not I passed my classes back in Le Havre, though I am not sure how because ISEP has all these rules about the processing of transcripts and stuff. Today my homework for myself is to contact my professors back in Le Havre and ask for my grades which is one thing I was told I could do. Believe me when I say though, the moment I find out I will let you know. As a recap the class I am most worried about passing is Analyse de Donneés because my group's presentation followed what we understood her directions to be, but was somehow not what she was looking for... But other than that I am fairly sure that I passed all of my classes. But I guess we will see.
Finally I have a gastronomic update: I made mussels for David and I because they were having a sale at Le Clerc (our grocery store) and we got them for 2 Euros, and he loved them!! I was really excited because I legitimately think that mussels might be my favorite food and I was worried that he might not like them (because a lot of people do not enjoy the consistency of mussels) but my fear was mitigated and I am very happy. Also, we ate a very traditional French meal which consisted of choux-croute (cabbage steamed in white wine more or less - kind of like my mom's red cabbage except not red and not quite as pungent, though still rather smelly) served on bread slices with smoked salmon. It was truly delicious and the package of salmon served us two meals meaning that our net cost per meal and per person was a mere 1.50 €.
Ok well I think that I'll leave you with that because it is time for lunch so that afterward I can rock economics.Woot.
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