Surviving daily life at the ENS

Daily life in a French university is always going to be an adventure. My two big projects of the week were surviving the computer lab and the dorm laundry. Which I successfully navigated, but not without some serious effort and wasted time.

The building where the computer labs are located can only be described in one term, and it's not a nice one. I tried to think of a more polite way to say it since this is a family blog after all (haha), but there was really only one word that could possibly do it justice: clusterfuck. It's a new-ish building, and the labs are in the basement. But there are no signs on how to get to the basement, nor where the labs are once you finally find the stairs. I wandered around two different floors in the basement, literally took me 20 minutes of wandering two hallways before I even found someone to ask. Turns out I was right near the labs but that I had to walk down one more dark hallway to an unmarked door. Obviously. Who could miss that?

Once I got to the lab, I discovered something that's going to be the biggest hassle so far: the computers don't run on Windows. It's a PC lab running on some bullshit program, the name of which I couldn't even figure out. Must be a funding issue, that they couldn't afford the licensing or something. Now, I'm no fan of vista (or of PCs in general), but running an entirely different operating system is an even bigger pain. Their version of word can open word docs, thank god, but there are formatting issues that it can't seem to handle. Like the reformatting from an 81/2 x 11 page setup to A4, which like a dumbass I forgot to do on my mac. So I had to print everything on A4 paper even though it was formatted for American paper and hope for the best. It worked out fine, other than for the stupid 3 inch margin at the bottom and slightly narrow margins on the sides. What I haven't figured out yet, however, is what it's going to look like to print PDFs formatted for American paper, since I didn't think of that issue when I made a few PDFs of microfilms back in the States. I suck.

The laundry facilities are equally noteworthy. I live in a dorm of about 80 people, and there are...drum roll please...two washers and two dryers. One large-ish one and one microscopically tiny one, of each. So to do two full loads of laundry you pretty much have to rely on the one machine that can actually fit a full load. I finally got my stuff in there and ran it through, and there was a girl using the small machine for two towels. Her load finished a few minutes before mine, and she literally put one towel in each dryer. I called her out on it, and she was like, "yeah but they won't dry otherwise." I was like, "um, yeah, but that's two towels, can I at least use the small dryer since we have to share the space?" She said no, I made a comment about how rude that was, and she was like, "je m'en fous" (literally "I don't give a fuck," although it's not quite that severe...but it's bitchy nonetheless) and slammed the door behind her. I was pissed, particularly because I had to leave for a meeting an hour later and therefore couldn't wait. What a bitch. I'm clearly going to have to do my laundry at 6 am from now on. It's worth it to do it in the dorm, though, because it's free. Laundromats are super expensive here, so sucking it up and doing it in the dorm will save me easily $30 a month. humph. In the meantime, I'm pretty down on the French 18-year-olds who are supposedly the best and the brightest of the country but who apparently have no social skills and have never had to think about anyone other than themselves.

Speaking of which, tonight we're leaving for the freshman orientation field trip. ohhhh yeah. We actually have no idea where we're going. The school is trying to be all cool and generate buzz by not telling us, but it's really just rather annoying because we can't look up the weather report, haha. They tell us to bring a bathing suit and a beach towel. We are taking an overnight bus (ouch...), so it has to be fairly far away. Rumor has it that we're going to Les Landes in southwestern France (just above the border with Spain on the Atlantic coast), but that's unsubstantiated. It should be pretty cool, though, since it's a part of the country I've never seen before and the international grad students are all going. So we figure we'll hang out together and make the best of it. In any case, I'll be offline until Monday, but I'm sure I'll have some good stories when I do get back, haha.