Martin & Marseille

Hi.

Welcome to my eblog! This is where I'll be posting all my adventures in France.
You might wonder why I call it eblog. Well to be honest, I didn't want to spend the weekend thinking of a profound, extremely clever name so I just chose the first one that came to my mind. 'e' can stand for elsewhere, étranger (because that's where I'm going), excitement (because that's what I'm going to have) or étudiant (because that's what I'm going to be). You can combine them (excited étudiant étranger) or think of your own words starting with 'e'.

For those who've just stumbled over this page, here's a short summary of how it all started:

Being jealous of all my friends having wonderful and exciting study séjours all over the world, I decided to do my own. I always wanted to learn french, so it had to be a french-speaking country. Ruling out Africa and Canada for academic and lazyness reasons, I quickly decided to go to France, more specifically to Marseille, because the department of engineering at my university in Karlsruhe has ERASMUS contacts to Marseille, they actually teach something I'm interested in (The Grandes Écoles in France are more specialised than german universities) and because I thought I could have more of a summer this way (Others actually go to Siberia, imagine that ).

The paperwork for participating in an ERASMUS programme was more complicated than I had thought (I recommend watching the movie L'auberge éspagnole, the beginning gives you a good idea what you have to go through) and it actually took me until July to get all the paperwork done. This has left me with a few problems, e.g. I haven't got anywhere to live yet. Well, that'll have to be part of the experience.

So, equipped with barely any grasp of the french language but a huge confidence that my language skills will be enough, a dictionary, a towel, a toothbrush and a train ticket (you might have noticed that I like 'literations) I will nervously wait for my train to depart - wednesday afternoon.

Au revoir! Or, more likely 'au relire'.

PS: This blog looks pretty basic and plain right now, I hope I can get round to giving it some colour.