Day 27

Day 27:

Thursday, April 16, 2009: Today was awful until dinner time. We had writing class which was fine except that the students decided to strike again today. The professor told us that they had decided to strike now of Tuesdays and Thursdays – American students would have chosen Mondays and Fridays without a doubt. The worst part of the strike is that there is never anyone with a key to the classrooms so we are forced to wait in the hallway until the professor can find someone with a key and that is willing to help us out.

We had class and wrote a poem about our first reactions to being in France for the first day. It was more creative but I have to think that I’ve written about three of these for different classes now.

After class, we had a four-hour lunch break. This is the worst part of Thursdays. I ate at the cafeteria and used the internet. We tried to make plans for our four-day weekend in May. We’re going to the beaches of Corsica! Shawna, Melissa, Lance, and I then played 18 holes of Golf (the card game). We were so bored!

After we got tired of that, I Skyped some American friends – shoutout to Aimee Rancer, Caroline Flynn, and Haley Smith! Then it was time for class again. We met by the locked classroom for the professor. At the same time she was searching for someone with a key, the students held a rally in the lobby of the main school building of which we immediately became bystanders of. I’m not sure what came of that but they had to cancel our class because no one would let us in the classroom and they didn’t want to put American students in danger if it turned bad.

We were content with no having class. It was a nice day. I was mad because we waited all this time for class to just be cancelled. I was there so I wanted to have class. Some people in our group went to the bar to celebrate. I went to Lance’s house and we sat outside until dinner.

I ate with Bernard and John and then went to Melissa’s. Her host mom’s favorite foreign student was visiting this week and she was going to go out with us tonight so I went there to get them. Every time I go there, I always have to have espresso with her host mom. After that ritual, Melissa, Josephine (the 17-year-old German), and I went to Lance’s.

Lance and Kelby live together and have their own guesthouse (if I haven’t included this in a previous blog entry) so we can go there and chill and be out of everyone’s host family’s house. We were hanging out there when someone got a text from the assistant Katy… she had some excellent news! It seemed that after our class was cancelled, the students were still protesting and one of them punched an administrator and Friday classes were cancelled for the entire university as a safety precaution!

This was excellent for us! But we still wished we knew earlier so we could have planned something for this unexpected three-day weekend! It quickly became known to the group as Greve Jour! (Strike Day; comparable to a snow day at OU.)

We decided to celebrate by going to a new discotheque that was larger and much closer to everyone than the one that we discovered first. On the walk there, it thunder stormed and we arrived just as the hail began to fall! What an excellent end to a day that otherwise would have sucked.