France Fantasmée

January

January was quite the mouthful month. I tiptoed to France on January 5th, barely excited about starting the exchange. I was more particularly looking forward to meet the other exchange students. 

And if I could trust them from not having stalked in advance our profiles (which I most certainly later found out that they had!) we would be complete strangers. And that felt positive.

Sometimes one feels freer speaking to a stranger than to people one knows. Probably because a stranger sees us the way we are, not as she wishes to think we are.

I didn't know it then. I know this now: the best kind of strangers are those you know you won't meet ever again. That's the thing about them: You could talk to someone for hours and never even know his name, share your deepest secrets and then never see them again.  

I found myself in Paris, in the every early morning and had a transit train towards Lille, a student-city in the north of France, 30 minutes away from the Belgian border and an hour away by TGV from Paris, Charles de Gaulle. Lille is what I was to call home for the next 5 months.

As happy as I was about being in a place where the locals speak French, the language that comes naturally to Mauritians before English, as deceiving remained the low temperatures and forever overcast grey sky.

Orientation week happened and it was the time of bonding and discovering. It was also the time when SP Jain Jags made quite an impression. Many were surprised at our friendliness and up front ability and courage to just walk up to them and start a conversation out of the blue. Mariam, Oumika and I received comments like, "Wow, you people are really friendly!", "You've been talking to everyone in the room!"

Well, after 2 years of constant shifts in what we call home, we did tap into the wisdom that everything is indeed temporary and one ought to make the most of the present moment. In any case, SP Jain has never trained us to leave a room without making an impression.

Yet, despite orientation and fresh new people, January was the worst month of them all. I didn't want to be where I was. I remember landing in Lille and staring outside from the train and already feeling like I was going to hate that place. It had nothing enticing about it.

January was the sucky month. I still was undergoing a hangover of Dubai because of how I loved it for the people I met there and the sunny weather I would never complain too much about.

And January was also the month of the least daylight. We would walk to school at 8.30 a.m. in the dark and come back home at 4.30 p.m. in the dark. On all fronts, January was the worst month in the whole of the exchange experience. There was not much to do. The only French people who talked to us were the members of the International Club who had the duty of entertaining us.

However, at the same time, January was the month of meet-and-greets. There were many after-class activities. January was also the month of getting used to a new education system.

We were enrolled in IESEG School of Management. The classes and their structure is that is the most amazing and what I enjoyed a lot. It was a correct balance of Extensives and Intensives. What are Extensives and Intensives? Basically, the system is different here. We don't have merely 5-6 modules where the classes for each run for 12 weeks, 3 hours on a weekly basis. These are called Extensives and they are taught at a Bachelor's level. We have these plus 6 more Intensives that are taught over 4 days for a week from Monday to Thursday, 4 hours daily with an exam on Friday. These ones are taught at a Masters' level and are conducted in a workshop style. I think that the latter is so much more worthwhile. I took 10 classes.

People were startled as to how dark-skinned Indian-looking girls could speak French fluently.

Here was also the time where I discovered the feeling of walking on French Streets.

And here is also when I had my first class: French History.

"How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?" - Charles de Gaulle, First President of France's 5th and current Republic.

Starting from the King Sun, to Louis XIV through Robespierre and Napoleon Bonaparte as well as Napoleon III. I went through European History with the two World Wars and the Industrial Revolution in much more depth than my basic knowledge of the subjects went.

We came to the country of revolutions, protests, and demonstrations. We couldn't possibly not have come across such movements at least once during our stay here.  I was just surprised how I witnessed a protest in the 3rd week of being in France!