Anyway, I'm on home straight now! 3 and a half weeks until I'm back in Angleterre for 3 weeks. To be honest, I am really excited. I have been in France just under 13 weeks now and I feel like I have hit a stalemate at the moment. I'm stuck in a bit of a rut! I go to my classes but do not particularly enjoy them. I have really come to appreciate the quality of my university at home. I know we pay a lot more with regards to tuition fees but here, the class groups are a lot bigger and we have
much more academic freedom in England. Not to say the French system is wrong, but my education at home is much more tailored to what I want to do and more personal. I have some very interesting classes here (I enjoy Latin and I have a great history and civilisation lecture) but I still find it odd that I am taking 9 different modules that are completely unrelated. It reminds me a lot of taking my GCSEs at school. As I said earlier, since the classes are so big and we only have two hours a week for each module it's difficult to build up a relationship with your teacher, and that's something I really cherish about UEA - I'm not just a number! Anyway, enough about my university life, I'm sure I'll have lots to say when my exams start in a couple of weeks .. eek!What have I been doing? Well, I was lucky enough to have my parents come and visit a few weeks back and it was so lovely to see them. I went to Lourdes to meet them and I took them back to Pau from there. I don't think my Dad has ever used so much public transport!
We did the usual tour around Pau and I showed them the usual things to see, I ate far too much but it was so nice to have hot food (another thing I am so looking forward to at home!). It was so
nice to let them see the mountains, as I have said before, I love being so close to them and it really is something special to open your curtains and see the Pyrenees each morning. I think that is something I will miss the most about Pau.
Also, we hired a car for a couple of days and I decided to make the most of this luxury so we went on a little excursion to San Sebastian, Spain!
It was so surreal to cross the border and see everything go from
being in French to suddenly being in Spanish! Being so close to the Basque country here, you can experience a little of the influence from this culture but in San Sebastian, we were completely immersed. On the majority of road signs, the writing was in Basque before it was in Spanish and believe me, Basque is something completely different to any other language I have ever studied (and I have studied bits and bobs of Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Latin, as well as the obvious French and Spanish). As a language student, it's really interesting for me since academics/historians don't really know where the Basque language originated from. Another interesting thing is that Pau actually offers Basque as a language option and I believe you can take it as a degree in it's Bayonne campus! Euskara is a bit too difficult for me though!
Anyway, San Sebastian is a beautiful town. We wandered along the seafront and it was so spectacular to be between the sea and the mountains, incredibly breathtaking. The weather was glorious, around 25 degrees in the middle of November and the town is full of so much character. We walked
round to the harbour and saw all the fishing boats and into the bay. Mum and Dad even went paddling, haha, but now as I'm fully acclimatised to the weather in the south of France it was a bit too cold for me ;) After a lot of walking we decided to stop for a bit to eat at a tapas bar - and it was slightly different to what I was used to working in La Tasca for many years - I've got to say though, I think La Tasca's patatas bravas is better though - less mayonnaise! It dawned on me how much Spanish I seem to have forgotten though, or suppressed to make way for French - let's hope it comes back to me by the time I have to go to Mexico!That's it for today! xo
(sorry if the format is all screwed up, pictures seem to mess with my blog entries!)
