Cool Cherry Cream

Yesterday was my first real day of classes and it started at seven. I realized too late that I had forgotten to find where my class was the day before, and so I’d have to wing it. I ate a pop tart and had some apple juice I’d stocked away in my fridge since the cafeteria didn’t open until 7:30. In hindsight, I could have woken up and 7:30, since I mostly sat around until a quarter to.

I ended up getting a little lost looking for the room for my class, which was French by the way. Fortunately, they have little maps throughout the building which have helpful “you are here” signs, and when I noticed the sticker had moved farther away from the room I was supposed to be going to, I went back and started again. I got to the hallway to the room, which had another map outside, looked at it, and thought I was still not there yet, so I wandered away, and wandered back and decided it would be a good idea to ask all the girls sitting on the floor what class they were waiting for. Turned out to be a good idea.

We got into the classroom which once again surprised me. For one, it had desks, which was not surprising, but these desks had computers. And of course I decided to bring my laptop with me that day. Great. Even more surprising was the fact that there were only thirty seats. Quite a shock to have a first year class with that few students, especially after Astronomy with five hundred.

The teacher came in, and unshockingly, started speaking entirely in French. What was shocking was that I could hardly understand him. I’ve always been pretty good at French, always one of the top of my class (which wasn’t hard, considering there are usually less than ten people), but apparently my level of French is hardly “intermediate”. I thought for sure everyone else would go “huh?” and not understand a thing, but there were several girls in the class who managed to carry on conversations with him in French. Luckily, I was sitting near one of these girls, who explained to me and another girl what the homework was (writing five sentences summarizing a movie we watched, which I will get to).

After class, I was a little more reassured I was not the only one feeling this way when I overheard some girls saying basically that they understood most of what he said, but that it was hard to understand. I’ve forgotten the exact words since then, but it made me feel better.

I couldn’t give you an even close estimate of the percentage of what I understood, but I could pick out a few words here and there and get the gist of what he was talking about. But it’s basically like when your teacher is going over an assignment: I would know that there is an assignment and that it is probably about that thing we were just doing and it needs to be done on Monday. But I don’t know that it should be about Hamlet’s Oedipus complex, four pages long, in Times New Roman, with a cover page, with a title and your student number, or else you get zero. I’d end up talking about Hamlet’s struggle with existence for one page in Garamond (which non-fontaholics would probably mistake for New Roman anyway) and failing.

My mom suggested that I get a tape recorder, but I really don’t see the point. I’m not going to want to listen to an hour and a half lecture all over again and not understand it all over again twice a week for the next three months.

Some people might think “well, you’re obviously not at the level you thought you were. So drop it”. I don’t think I’m going to do that. It occurred to me once but then I realized that I really want to take French. I really want to learn. And this is going to force me to learn. Going into a beginner’s class, which will be much too easy, will not force me to learn. In this class, I’m going to have to learn fast or I’m screwed. I don’t like being screwed, so I’m going to learn fast.

The class mostly consisted of him reading the (luckily) English syllabus (which is just a silly English teacher type word for “course outline”) in French, which I understood mostly, if only because the thing was in front of me. He also made a comment about forgetting people’s names, which I smiled at because it was appropriate and the smart French girls were doing it, and to show that I remember what “oublier” means.

After that was all done, we watched a movie that apparently has an episode for each chapter in our book, “Bien Vu, Bien Dit”. It goes without saying the entire thing was in French, and again, I got the general gist of what happened, and I understood that the end was a freaky cliff hanger.

Unfortunately, we got to a scene with these people filming a television show and I was distracted by the male host. He looked exactly like an actor named James Read, who I know from the eighties mini-series “North and South” from my mom’s collection of Patrick Swayze movies. I don’t know so much if it was the way he looked or his voice; he sounded even more like what I would imagine James Read would sound like if he were French. However, I must conclude that it was not him, because he is much too old now and this movie is clearly a recent one. I also looked him up and he’s from New York, which doesn’t seem like a very French place to me. I can’t find any mention of the actors in the movie (“Le chemin de retourner” I think?), so I guess I’ll have to pay attention to the credits during the next episode. So yeah, that turned out to not be good, because I kept trying to figure out if it was him or not and stopped paying attention to what was happening.

My next class was math, which made me so unbelievably happy after that freaky French class. “Math? Pfft, I can handle that!”. Which, you know, I wouldn’t be saying back in June, when I was being told to go to summer school. Or back when I was in grade 12 and freaking out over Calculus every night. But now? Math is just fine with me.

And luckily enough, I didn’t jinx this class by thinking so. It turned out to be my favourite class so far, but then again, I’m still waiting for computers. There is no required text for this class, which is awesome. The professor seems a little, mm, confused. There’s a lot of people I know like him, who try to explain something and then partway through the explanation, they realize they don’t know where they were going with it and end with “uh… yeah…” and then go on to something else, which is really annoying. What we’ve done so far was really easy though: propositions, which are exactly what they sound like. It’s a statement that’s either true or false. “It is raining” is a proposition; “Go away” is not. “the earth is flat” is a proposition; “la la la la la” is not.

He showed us a slide (by the way, nearly all of the teachers use Power Point presentations, which is really cool) that had a list of statements and we had to decide whether they were propositions or not. We decided that yes, 1+2=3 is a proposition, but 1+2 is not. Then came x+1=2, which I knew was the one tricky one that would throw everyone. Most people seemed to say no, it’s not a proposition, but a few said yes. I was with the latter group.

The professor tried to steer us in the right direction by going a little abstract: “well, let’s say that there’s… uh… let’s say… I don’t want to use the actual word… umm, let’s say that there is this ‘God’ that exists, we will say that he exists, and then he knows everything…” which, in itself, this was all rather funny, just the way he was attempting to not offend anyone but still explain. So then he goes on “well, if this ‘God’ knows everything, can he know whether or not ‘x+1=2′ is true or false?”. And everyone goes “umm… no”. And then just as I was about to raise my hand to say the exact same thing, a guy in the back goes “well, if God knows everything, then he knows what x is!”.

That was basically the awesomest thing I’ve ever witnessed in a classroom in my life.

Next up was Linguistics, which could hardly live up to that awesomeness. The teacher seems nice, but she referred to herself as “doctor” rather than “professor” and I kind of got the sense that she’s a researcher first and a professor second. And I mean, we’re paying all this money to go here and learn this stuff, you would think the people teaching us would be putting some effort into, you know? I could be mistaken though, it was just a first impression. She seems nice otherwise, but the lecture is two hours and I think it could get kind of boring. Some of the material seems interesting (like this video we saw about how bees communicate), but two hours sitting and writing notes on a Friday afternoon is not going to be fun any way you slice it.

Shortly after classes were done, it was time to go to the International Student barbeque with Kayce, Natalie, and Hailey, even though 75% of us aren’t international. We had to take the bus all by ourselves down to the downtown terminal and then to the beach, which was kind of scary, because I thought we were all going as a group and I had no idea where we were going. We did kind of end up going as a group, and so I got to experience two nice long bus rides standing up in a crowded bus, trying not to fall over onto the people sitting down.

The food itself was a little disappointing because I went to the barbeque thinking hot dogs and hamburgers. Instead, there was salad, corn-on-the-cob, bread, chicken balls (I think?), and some weird meaty sloppy stuff. I opted for the former three, and when I sat down Hailey commented “vegetarian?”. Me? HA HA HA.

After that, we walked down to the beach for awhile, which Kayce really liked because it had sand. Apparently the beaches in Britain don’t have sand! Hailey and I also walked down the pier, hoping to see Toronto, but it was much too cloudy. We later stood in front of a goose that was pure white and looked angry because it had like a black eyebrow or something for five minutes. We joined Kayce later playing a game with a bunch of the other kids playing a game called “Larry, Curly, and Moe”. They would call out a name and the person would have to crawl through their team members’ legs, run around the circle, back to their team, run in the middle, and grab a ball and get back to their spot, and whoever didn’t get something was out. The first time, they had forgotten to take out one item, so everyone was still in. The second time, they called Larry, which was me, so I crawled through the other two girls’ legs and started off running… right into everyone else, who was running in the opposite direction. Smack I went, right into two other people, and down I went. “Sorry!” I cried. “Are you okay?” everyone asked. “Yeah!” I yelled and went running. We managed to stay in that round, but lost the next round, when Hailey got tackled grabbing for the last item. Afterwards, the back of my head was pounding and I woke up this morning with a terrible aching left hip, but it didn’t really hurt all that much, surprisingly enough.

After all was done and it was raining and pretty miserable out, we headed up to a bar for the next few hours. Kayce and a couple of other international students are of drinking age, since most of them are in upper years, so they ordered drinks, but I of course had none. I sat and watched Hailey and Kayce playing pool and a bit of poker on television.

There was this one older guy (I’m terrible at guessing ages, but I would say probably in his forties?) who came up to us and talked with us for a bit. I don’t remember what all he said, he asked me if I played pool and I said no and he said why not and I said I’d be terrible and he said do you know geometry and I said a little and he said it’s all angles. Most of what else he said was just commenting on their silly moves and rules (“what was that?”, “is that a British rule?”) and whatnot, but it was a little weird. I couldn’t quite place it, but he looked a lot like some actor. I wanted to say Kiefer Sutherland, but then thought Kevin Costner, and now I’m thinking Dennis Quaid, but with longer hair and scruffier looking and shorter. After the girls played two games, he wandered back to the table and offered to play partners with another international girl named Jenny versus the other two girls.

Afterwards, the other girls were discussing the creepy factor and how they thought he was just trying to look down their shirts and things, but I didn’t really sense any of that and I didn’t hear him tell them to “get down lower”. Maybe I’m just naive. I’m have a very pessimistic attitude towards life, but not towards people. I assume people are good, which I’ve been told is a very stupid thing to do. I don’t trust people blindly, but I assume they don’t have bad intentions unless they give me reason to believe otherwise. And besides, what is so wrong with that? So he’s looking down your shirt. He’s not touching you, so I don’t really see a problem with that. Sorry feminists, you guys (oh, I’m sorry, people) just complain too much about things that really don’t matter all that much. Why don’t you get us equal pay first, and then you can start complaining about horny old men.

It wasn’t actually all that late when we left, but it felt like it was. A whole big group of us left at the same time, since buses stop coming so much when it gets later. We tried to figure out what bus stop to wait at and kept going back and forth in the rain until some helpful people at the bar across the street pointed us to the right one, by the ice cream shop.

Kayce went into the shop and came back and asked us what a “pita” was. We explained and she was like “ohhh, you mean a ‘pit-uh‘!”. After determining that we were speaking of the same thing, a p-i-t-a, a flat bread concoction, and that it was just a pronunciation difference, she said “oh! I thought they were offering me a piece of a guy named Petah! I was like, no, I don’t want that!” (It’s their accent, she’s British, you know? Ha ha ha?)

Onto the bus we went, and I tell you, I’ve never heard a whole bus spontaneously burst out singing “Alouette”. (That was the French people, of course). There was also a discussion about the “backwards peace sign”, which North Americans apparently all think still means peace, which the UK people all found hilarious. I set them straight and showed that at least some of us know that it’s rude (and some of us do understand what “fanny” and “fit” and “taking the piss” (which I always heard as “taking the mick(ey)”) mean).

So, all-in-all, Friday was nice and eventful, as was today, but I’ll get to that tomorrow, because I’m planning on sleeping and overall, not doing much then.