First French law lecture ...

It's been a while since I've updated, just over a week I think ... but not much has happened! I had my first experience of the west coast last Sunday when a massive group of us (pretty much all the Erasmus people) went to the beach at Arcachon, it's beautiful! I had a lovely day playing crap volleyball, and guess what ... I actually tanned a teeny weeny bit! This never happens to me and is therefore quite exciting. The rest of the week was pretty much just carrying on with French lessons and doing not much else. I got my French bank account sorted, but sadly I have no money to put into it because the student loan company is rubbish. Still have no internet in my room, and the woman who works here just keeps telling us that the technician's coming to fix all our internet sockets in our rooms but he hasn't yet made an appearance, we're all getting pretty angry with her now .... supposedly he's meant to have done it by Wednesday, but I'll believe that when I see it.

I started my lectures today! I've only had one so far, which was droit civil (civil law). Luckily most of what we did today was about contract law, and we did a bit of that in our French law module at Notts last semester so I have a bit of basic knowledge. I understood more than I thought, but the lecturer was talking quite slowly and I felt like I could understand all the words and sentences, but the difficult bit is actually putting them together to form some kind of French legal knowledge! And if you lose concentration for a second you're basically screwed for the next however long. But, I did still manage to make notes and I think I got the general idea, which will have to do for now.

My timetable's pretty heavy. I have 18 hours of lectures a week, and in a couple of weeks we start tutorials (luckily we only have to do tutorials for one module - they call it "travaux diriges" (with an accent on the e of diriges), or TD), and I think that adds another two hours a week. I have four 8:30 starts a week, and on Tuesdays I'm pretty much on campus from 8:30am till 7:30pm. All the lectures are 2 hours long which obviously I'm not used to even in English. 4th year is going to seem like a proper doss after this year!

I discovered the uni swimming pool as well today. From the outside it looks crap - all the uni buildings do to be honest, university is free in France so in terms of the facilities you get what you don't pay for. The swimming pool inside is amazing though! It's olympic size and also free. You have to wear a swimming cap which I haven't done since I was about 10, but you can buy them there for 1 euro. Despite feeling like a twat in a cap, and not realising how low-cut my swimming costume is till I stood up and nearly flashed the whole swimming pool, it was a really good swim and good to get back into the pool and actually do some proper exercise for the first time in a while. I'm now sitting on the stairs eating chocolate and probably undoing all the good work ... oh well.

I'm going to go and have a nap now I think. Some of the Belgian people on Erasmus are apparently having a party tonight but I'm not sure any of us can be arsed to go ... we've got another 8:30 start tomorrow morning so it's probably not a good idea! Early night, film and chocolate sounds like a plan.