These few days were the worst I've felt in Paris so far. The spring break was amazing but the brutal transition back to school is more than I can take. Makes me think that coming to France for exchange was a horrible idea. I miss home and familiar souls and the feeling that the world is good. All I've seen after my return is people either being very unhelpful or trying to take my money away!

Too young to perceive beauty.
Thoughts clog the mind.
They're not enough.

What's the magic word?

*
Mom and John landed this morning in Paris, so for the time being, we're all jammed up in my tiny room! I can't say that I'm real comfortable right now, so it's a VERY excited thought that I will be meeting up with Melanie in Milan on Sunday morning! The current itineary is: Milan - Venice - Florence - Livorno - Pisa - Roma (then Liverpool with extended family, and back to Paris) but there might be some changes along the way. Travelling with parents is weird. I think I still need to add 10 more years before I can fully appreciate the romance of it. I love my mom obviously but some situations and Mom just don't mix! Traveling is one of them.

Trying to get things done in Paris is mental and physical violence. I try to learn from my mistakes and avoid the whirlpool KOs that the administrators throw at us, but I'm running out of ideas about how to do that. The problem is that I want to leave one month early from my residence, and according to the contract, I need the approval of my host university. I went first to the residence office, who sent me to the international office on campus (30 minutes away by foot may I add), who sent me back to my residence office, who sent me back to the international office 1 minutes before it closed, which made the lady very spasmic and the scene was U.G.L.Y.

I swear that EVERYTIME you need to find out an information in Paris, they will send you in circles. No one sympathises with you and everyone feels like they're being incredibly lenient for taking their precious time to listen to your troubles!! And once you run out of patience and try to talk over them like they consistently do to you, they feel like you're harassing them!!! (She actually said "arreter de me harceler et me mettre de la pression"...ME?) So I can't be a push-over nor can I use reason... can someone just tell me the magic word? like "open sesame please?"
*(Notre-Dame at night, during our walk)

Lab RANT

Time to celebrate the end of all labs for the semester! This week's had a rough beginning, as I've had two physiology labs (or TP for "travaux pratiques", they call it here) covering two afternoons already. The lab session that I have on Tuesdays is probably the worst I've ever endured. It's just terrible because the report is due at the end of the session and I always end up with gravely retarded lab partners. We have to hand in the lab report as a pair so not only do I have to worry about the parts I write, I also have to drag the other person along with me. Last time, I'm sure my lab partner was on some powerful painkillers and after escaping from him this time, I was paired with a girl who writes the most senseless things. The level that people aim for over here just seems so much lower than what I'm used to at McGill. No suprise though, here's what I recently learned.

Post-secondary schools in France are categorized as "les grandes écoles'' and "les universités". Students who do better go to the first kind of schools, which are usually private and very selective. On the other hand, the universities accept anyone who apply. I knew beforehand that Pierre et Marie Curie was the best university in France, which is part of the reason I applied here, but turns out it's only the best of the worst and there's a whole untapped realm out there! It sucks for students over here because alrealdy in their early twenties, they have to deal with the weight of a division between classes ie. the intellectuals vs commoners.

Back to the subject of my physiology lab on Tuesday. We were supposed to study the action potential on a frog's nerve. I didn't expect the sample to be simply given to us but I was also not prepared for what followed. Without even a warning, the TA's brought in live breathing frogs in glass jars (we're talking huge ass toads too), took them out one by one and repeatedly planted a sharp rod into their brains to "desensitize their central nervous system." It was disgusting and inhumane. I know they kill rats in laboratory all the time by decapitation but I just couldn't bear this one. And what's worse, they don't provide gloves for the dissection and we had to gut the poor frog with our bare fingers and nails! I also recently fond out from a friend in Chemistry that they don't use glove to handle organic reagents. I really can't understand the principle behind that.