Week 6: To the Seaside, and Beyond!

I can hardly believe that it's literally been a little over a week since I last posted! My time here is going by so fast. I only have 3 weeks left and then I'm jetting back home to enjoy July in Provo. My mind is literally blown. It's also a bit weird because last week and the week before were so slow at work, but this past week has been busy and I got to do more than input things into Agora!

So for work this week I worked alot with Rosalie. On Monday I scanned all of the Licence 3 students' intership agreements and uploaded them to Agora and even got to email students about their missing agreements. I had Marion help me fix the email I typed so that it sounded professional and had all of the mistakes corrected. This week I also suggested some changes to Hamdi for Agora. She was having me input the classtimes, but instead of inputing it in one place you have to go into each major and type in the hours manually. This little suggestion spun into an hour long conversation about the system, how it is in the US and how Agora came into being. Turns out that only the FGES (my department) uses Agora to have their students sign up for classes online. All the other Faculties still do it by hand. Then she explained how they've only been doing this for like 5 years and it blew my mind! Because in the states every university I know of uses some sort of online sign up software. But apparently here it is not as common as it is back home. Some other work things I did this week were scanning, more computation stuff for Agora, organized Marion's office, worked more with Rosalie on the Master's stuff and put together an exposition on the wall next to Rosalie and Agathe's office.

All Organized!

All the stuff to throw away!

This week was also "Les Crapauds Fous" which translated literally means the crazy toads. I'm still not quite sure what it was, but Didier had all of the interns go to this day long conference workshop thing where they had lunch and we split into groups and did a sort of thinktank situation.

From what I could acertain from the people around me, les Crapauds Fous is an organization of people from different backgrounds and walks of life who think that there are inherent problems in society and that unless someone does something about it the world will end? or at least that it will be really bad...that's about all I could figure out. The idea being that we can only change the world if we all try together or at least have a diverse group of people trying to change it. So like there was one group that was trying to create an integrated school where there were no teachers, only students and everyone from 6-18 would go and learn because they wanted to. Another was talking about light. Jakob and Kevin's group was talking about coming up with a business plan to ship small-farm french cheese to housewives in China, and my group was talking about how to create a self-sustained "commun" in a really poor part of Marseille.

Cecile, our project manager

Lunch!!

Other Projects

Some notes from the day!

The day was split up in two halves, the first half was coming up with the ideal and the second part was what can we do to get there. In my group it felt very much like Anthem by Ayn Rand, in that they were basically trying to build a Utopia, but I've read to many books and seen to many movies that show that Utopias can't be formed by imperfect people. So it made me extremely uncomfortable for awhile just because a lot of their ideas felt socialist or communist to me, which is unsurprising considering that France is a very centralist, socialist state. So for the most part they were all more okay with some of these ideas that in the states we really don't agree with. So that in and of itself made for an interesting day because I got to see first hand a big cultural difference between the French and Americans. So that was cool. It was still a very long day though, like, Wow.

Some fun things I did this week were that I went to the races! I went to the Hippodrome Le Croise-Laroche. The Hippodrome is in Marq-en-Barouel and so I took the tram out there and it was nice little part of town and the horses were really cool!

The last race had a false start and so here is horse number 11 who had no rider and ran free for awhile

Here is the end of the last race, number 7 won!

I also went to the seaside this past weekend! I went with the other interns to Hardelot-Plage, where we stayed with the Dean, his wife Marie, her colleague and his family, the dean's mother and  Adele whom we met at Les Crapauds Fous and who is a contortionist by trade. She performed at the Crapauds Fous and she can litterally fold herself in half. It is crazy! The beach was beautiful and I got to ride bikes to a château and to a bakery, to build a sand castle, I had Ratatouille and tried some of the famous Hardelot Biscuits which were very good!

The Beach! Only 50 meters from the house

Back we go

My newest sand castle became the new Atlantis;(

Beach Volleyball!

Bananagrams!

Here is Chateau Gato

From my bedroom all the way down to the first floor

All in all it was a very pleasant week and I can't wait for this next one! A bientot!