Amelia is a third year English Literature and French student currently studying at Université Jean Moulin Lyon III. She desperately misses Leeds and being able to go to the shops on Sundays. So far her best French friend is a cat called Sushi but hopes to branch out soon. She enjoys fine supermarket wine and her biggest aim for this year is to try and not get run over whilst crossing the road; ‘look right left right’ just isn’t working out over here.
“Why are we wasting our time bloody revising? We should be out drinking in a bloody bar and actually speaking bloody French.” A few wise words from Lucy Purslow, one of my fellow Erasm8s (Erasmus + mates + 8).
What would come to pass would be a series of nights out that descend into utter shenanigans or, what I like to call, “how I spent my Erasmus Grant.”
Spoiler alert: tattoos and piercings are involved.
Firstly I just want to give you all a little backstory of the run up to these events. I’m not sure if anyone has noticed but the running theme in my two previous blog posts has been a light-hearted criticism of the French education system, and this post is no exception. To be fair, anyone who knows me well enough is aware of the fact that I myself am not the most organised person you’ll ever meet. Despite my penchant for fancy Moleskine organisers, my ‘to do list’ normally consists of ‘buy avocado!’ and ‘wine tonight?’ – but even I have my limits. Exam week at Lyon 3 was a right shambles indeed.
One tragic incident was the Translation Exam. I opened the exam paper to find a section that included vocabulary that we had never studied, despite our being continually reassured throughout the semester that it would be based on all previous work. Once it was over, the Anglophones congregated in the hallway to compare notes. Lets just say this exam involved a lot of guesswork. One of the translations included the expression ‘hors d’ haleine’ which, luckily, I was correct with ‘out of breath’ as the two characters in question were feeling distressed after just having gone for a long walk. On the other hand one of my Erasm8s thought the logical translation would be ‘out of snacks’. Well at least the exam markers can have a giggle about it.
So the exam period wasn’t exactly stressful. I mean, despite the fact my exams are entirely in French, the only specification I’ve had this year from Leeds is that I have to pass my modules, whereas some students from other English universities need only take a picture of the exam room to prove they tried. Nonetheless we got through it. However, coming back to my friend Lucy’s quote at the start of the blog, revision time was pretty disastrous for my spoken French. It didn’t help spending my days in the library as my brain just doesn’t do French when it’s tired. So naturally we all had some catching up to do.
Christmas time in Lyon was beautiful, and the best part was most definitely the food. As I am so popular over here (something my Leeds friend Callum picked up on by congratulating me on my recently being tagged in pictures with humans and not just cats), I was invited to not one, not two, but three Christmas dinners in the space of a week. The kind French people offered me caviar and champagne with the meal, I offered them The Pogue’s Fairytale of New York along with a running translation throughout the song.
One of my personal highlights of the festive period was the night I joined a band. In one of the booths of an Irish bar we found a genuine Franco-Irish band, they invited us to their jam session and naturally I requested one of my all time favourite party floor fillers: Britney Spears’ ‘Toxic.’ We had a man on a fiddle, one tooting a flute, another with a guitar and I myself played the wine. The low point came when I woke up and checked my online bank statement to see that 18 euros had been sent to DELICIEUX KEBABS. That hurt.
When I returned to Lyon in January I joined the ‘new year, new me’ craze. My resolution is to climb up the 5 flights of stairs to mine (which is basically ten as the ceilings are very high) at least once a day. I have been to the museum, gone to the premier of a skateboarding film and attended an improvisation comedy evening (all in French, of course).
What I have learnt from the year abroad thus far is that you can’t expect to learn a language sitting at home working. 2014 was a lot of fun and I can’t wait to pick up more French nuances as I’m forever a language geek. I posted the Leeds Study Abroad Handbook’s five stages of culture shock in my last post and I can say I’ve now settled in nicely. Stage five: Independence. But as great as it is to be here, I haven’t stopped clicking attending on Leeds Facebook events, I mean I have to stay relevant on the ol’ social scene, right?
P.S. Okay so I didn’t actually get a tattoo. To be honest that was simply me torturing my dear mother as I know she’ll be reading this. Sorry Jo.
Amelia Dunton
Images courtesy of Amelia Dunton