Alright fine...I'll go out!

Sorry to everyone for not having blogged since Tuesday, but the weeks are starting to get fairly rhythmic here, so no one needs to hear about the day to day disasters in classes that appear be lacking the same sparkle and interesting material that classes at Union have. Regardless, there were a couple interesting events. First of all, there is a 28 year old Turkish woman in my class. She married a french dude, and the two of them along with their two friends live on a little farming compound a la Campagne (in the country). This girl is weird, OK? Like, she is the kind of weird that had the rolling back-pack up until the handle broke off of it in the middle of 11th grade. Then she might have even bought another one. Anyhow, we had this miniscule homework assignment. I think it took me about 15 minutes on the TGV home from Munich to actually do it. This girl spent 25 minutes arguing with the professor about how the assignment wasn't clear and blah blah blah, nobody cares, you didn't do your homework, get over it. I guess you could say I was pretty sympathetic towards her *sarcasm*.
The other thing that got me in classes this week was a more legitmate issue. Prof. Ndiaye had an afternoon discussion with us on Thursday to just talk about life. He mentioned to us that some of the professors had mentioned to him they had some weird experiences. For example at Union, every student goes to class puts a (silenced) cell phone, iPod, and a bottle of water, or a cup of coffee on the table/desk they are sitting at. That's just the way it is. Everybody walks around with a bottle of water. Not here. The french don't hydrate. Bottled water is pricey, and a Nalgene or a Sigg...what's that? So anyhow, we walk in to class with bottles of water and apparently it weirds out the Profs. The same thing with any kind of headcovering....ANY KIND. We have an Egyptian girl in on of my classes. She's Muslim and wears the typical Muslim Hijab (name for the headcovering I think), and the Professor FINDS IT WEIRD. It is kind of ridiculous. A baseball hat I can understand, but if you have a problem with it, come out and say it. We are all 20+ years old. We are adults. We can handle someone saying take off your hat. We're not going to run out of the room crying if we get spoken to. It's nuts.
In other news, last night was Thursday night...duh. O'Connell's is becoming the traditional starting point for our Thursday outings. I really want to get a job there, but I'm not so sure my visa will let me. It is kind of weird, but if I could work one night/week and make some extra dough, it might be good. Anyhow, we're chilling at the Pub and these 30ish French dudes roll up to the table and offer to buy the ladies a drink. We (as in those with Y chromosomes) somehow became invisible. So while these skeevy, smelly French dudes were crawling on the girls, I noticed a couple packs of BIIIIG guys in jerseys starting to come in. Somewhere in the midst of this inflow of dudes, the 30-somethings had offered to take the girls to a coke rave over the weekend (not CocaCola), and they ran away. By the time we were rid of them there were about 100 rugby players in O'Connell's. IT WAS A RUGBY DRINK UP! A REAL RUGBY DRINK UP! I was in rugger heaven. The game had been earlier that day and it was the Rennes Firefighters team v. The Welsh Firefighters team. In other words, more than half the people in O'Con's last night spoke some form of fluent English. And Welsh, now thats an intimidating language. Regardless, it was so much fun. We sang songs, we drank great beer, talked about rugby, and I made great buddies with the MBE/CEO of (from the research I have done), what may be one of the biggest brand management firms in Europe. Keeping to not mentioning names here, said new friend used to work for IBM marketing AND, he's a sailor and a rugger. The connections that you run into around the world are wild! Thats it for tonight. Normandy tomorrow. Bonne nuit.