Martin & Marseille

Salut!

Finally managed to post something. Here's the short version: Everything's going well, I moved into a pretty awful student accomodation and am making
myself at home.

Here's some detail:
My start in Marseille was a lot better than imagined. The day before I left to France I gave up ringing the CROUS (they're like the german Studentenwerk and they're the ones renting out my room) and called the EGIM. The secretary for foreign students was extremely helpful and sorted everything out and even organised a pick-up service for me at the station - imagine that! However, she's german - which meant I had yet to find a helpful french person, which seemed near impossible during August and even the beginning of September.
I did find him then, though - a french student from the same school as me picked me up at the station and drove me right to my place. As they were still renovating my room, he let me stay at his place that night and he helped me through all the paperwork, too. That made things so much easier, I hadn't slept that well on the train and my french isn't that good either, so without him I would have taken ages for all of that - So if you read this, Fred, thanks a lot again.

The accomodation really is in bad shape. The rooms are OK, but the kitchens are nearly useless (just 4 hotplates for 35 people, no plugs, no kettle, no microwave and no oven. You have to rent a fridge and it's tiny) and the loos and showers need some getting used to. But it's cheap, accomodation in general is extremely expensive at the south coast, and even more so in France's second largest city.
It's pretty hard creating a community on the corridors the way I'm used to, but we kind of managed. I met a couple of english guys (they live right next to me) and we will force some friendliness into the place if we have to

Living next to french people doing an ERASMUS year is nice for a lot of things, but of course it doesn't improve my french. However, I suppose it's entirely my problem to learn some french here.

The school seems OK, but everyone's telling me I won't see much daylight once the lectures start - 3rd year seems to be hard work even if you're french. The school is quite small, right now there's just a couple of hundred students around altogether. It's supposed to grow to have about 900 students, which is about the number of students at my old school - seems weird coming from a university with more than 15000 students.

Grub's pretty good at the university, the Resto U is a bit like a german Mensa, good food for cheap money, and it saves you having to eat in your bedroom (the kitchen in my student's home isn't big enough).

So far there hasn't been much going on, just some stuff for the foreign students doing 1st and 2nd year, but I just joined them.

Next week's the rentree for the 3rd year - let's see...