A Note on Exams and Frenchness.

Exams were more horrendous than usual, if I do say so myself. Imagine, if you will, three straight days of essays. Essays that open at midnight or one in the morning, give you the day, until closing again at 5am or 8am. Time periods that were carefully designed for people living in a different time zone to you.  Imagine supplementing these essays with one or two hours of classes with French students who are a million times more fun and interesting than essays.

But I am finished now, off to begin my year as a worldly traveller, the university of life, etc. I imagine I will just read books for fun and forget how to reference.

One of the damned essays, funnily enough, was about a French guy. French-born, American citizen, says he loves the United States for its adolescent culture. In America, it is "I do, therefore I am," in France, "I think, therefore I am". Have actually been thinking and talking about this guy so much more than one should with the subject of completed exams. To the students, other teachers, poor Tild. His name is Clotilde Rapelais (I think- give some credit to my ability to forget all I've learnt) and he is some sort of marketing god. There is this hilarious thing that he talks about, while discussing his work with a french cheese company who wanted to break the American market. In France, cheese is alive. It grows older, you buy it young or old, it matures. It breathes. He says like French people would not put their cats in the refrigerator, so too would they not put their cheese in there. Cheese is alive. In America, however, cheese is dead. Cheese must be sanitised, we would not leave dead things on our shelves, would we. It must be wrapped in plastic (a body bag) and placed in the fridge (the morgue). In America, safety comes before taste. In France, taste comes before everything.

Apparently, cheese related illnesses are far more prominent in France.

Australians are the same though, with our dead cheese. In France, my cheese is kept on the shelf, in Australia, in the fridge.

Over my final week of school- both uni and lycée (before vacation, anyway)- the last three nights had a combined total of 6 hours actual sleep. This culminated in the final hours of essay being handed in at 4am- before my train departure to Paris at 7am.
Not to be repeated-