Busy Busy Bee!

Andddddddddddd I'm back! Sorry for the delay in my posting of messages, but the past few days have been pretty busy with school and trying to get registration straightened out. It looks like I have everything done except for making an appointment for a physical to apply for my long term visa. I finally heard back from the ISEP program coordinators, even though it was not the same people who said they were in charge of me (that person still has not gotten back in contact with me...), and on Thursday night they scheduled a meeting for Friday morning exactly when I had class... so I was not able to make it. My supposed 'advisor' for ISEP told me to meet her at her office on Thursday with some papers, but when I arrived, she was not there and no one knew when she would be back. AWESOME! So I had to leave the papers there, e-mail some people, and probably go down there next week to finish things up. Other than that, my insurance is pretty much done, and I have a French bank account, I am just waiting for them to send me my debit card. The one good thing about walking around the city center in the early hours of the morning is that I was given two free newspapers and some free coffee packets! Winner!

Classes are going well so far. It looks like I will doing a lot of reading and oral presentations, which should make for some not so fun nights coming up, but it will help out my French a lot. Outside of school however, myself and some other exchange students have found the ping pong and foosball room in our dorm so we hit that up for a good 3 to 4 hours the other night. Right beside this room is a banquet room that students can reserve for events and a bunch of French students were having a joint birthday/going-away party for some people so we had some nice (American unfortunately) music to play to! Because of this however, I was able to talk to a few french people! And if anyone tries to convinces me ping pong is not an international SPORT I would have to disagree because we had, Americans, Canadian, Italians, Iranians, and French people all in the same room! Babam!

Last night, Dale, a student from Toronto, and I decided to go to a French soccer game! It was the city league here in Nantes called FC Nantes but they are still a League 2 team, so they are quite good!

The game last night was supposedly a big rivalry match against Le Mans FC. When we arrived at the stadium, the actual police were there, with guns and everything, which you don't see too often in France! Unlike in the United States, most of the action happens outside of the stadium itself. There were probably close to 30 venders set up outside selling drinks, food, and merchandise before AND after the game! The big ticket item seemed to be kabobs (aka meet sliced off of a rotating hunk of meet and put on a grill, then into a bun). For some reason fries are super popular here. You can even get them to put the fries on top of your sandwich which is called American style... and ironically enough, the even had a sandwich called 'the American' which was a hamburger, chopped into three or four strips and then put into a baguette haha. I refused to eat anything resembling American food here though!

We eventually made our way into the stadium after a little bit of meandering through the crowd and police, where we were patted down just to enter the stadium! After we passed inspection, even though we had bought the second best seats, we still had to walk 3/4 of the way around the stadium, but the seats were not good enough for a second pat down unlike in certain sections. Surprisingly enough though our seats were pretty awesome. We were the third row back in our section and had a great view of the field.

The rest of the night was filled with lots of clapping, people screaming 'Allez!' ('Go' or any other word to make someone run faster or do something good), people screaming obscenities in French, and the obnoxious never ending cheering from the visiting team. Like any good die-hard fan, the Le Mans team had a section of about 30-40 people who showed up brandishing their team colors with banners, drum, and of course, a bullhorn.

There are two things to notice in this picture: 1) the extra security fencing put up and 2) the poster that says "Fire Snake Worshippers" haha. We believe that the fire snake is their mascot, but we found it very interesting that it was written in English. Eventually of course, the Nantes cheering section showed up and started given the visiting section a run for their money, but unfortunately it is kind of hard to drown out a bullhorn...

Overall though, the game went pretty well even though we could have played better (managed to end with a tie 1-1) and one of the Nantes crazy fans set off a Green smoke bomb which incited twenty security guards to descend upon that area hahaha. After that, they beefed up security in that section with guards even sitting on the steps. There was also a little kid that was sitting in front of me that got bored so started climbing around and sat beside me for a while, I found me a little buddy! Three more things about the game that I noticed: 1) Unlike in America, everyone waited until the very last second of the game to leave, 2) They picked up their own trash, and 3) The vendors outside were more popular after the game!

To get to the stadium Dale and I had taken the bus since it is further out into the suburbs, but the bus we needed to get back to the dorm was not running then, so we had to take the bus to the downtown area, and then back up to the dorm. A plus about this was that I was able to see the city life at night, someone throw up on the tram, more people with french fries (oh how ironic), two dowgies, found the cooking school again, and had two drunk German guys try and talk to me in French (that was an experience especially since I couldn't understand half of it haha). After an hour of traveling, we finally made it back where I layed down for a good nights rest :)