Paris Pride Photo Essay

Let's get this party started


There was an old man inside this bus stop who looked like he couldn't figure out why the bus was so behind schedule


D&G – "Drunk and Gorgeous"


Rockin' the rosé on Boulevard St-Michel


Crazy girl who came up to us and said "You're from Cananda?! I love you!! Whaaaa!" – Best picture ever!


P with hottie French police officers


A looOOong story!


The end!

"'Ay will heet you with my baguette!"

I was walking down the street to visit my friends Cindy and Michael and a young woman was riding her bicycle down the sidewalk. Slightly irritating, yes, but in the grand scheme of things, completely inconsequential. I didn't see exactly what happened next, but I turned around and this older couple was in a full-out shouting match with the girl on her bicycle. "Your filthy bicycle belongs on the street!!" — "Why don't you have the decency to look where you're going?!" — That kind of stuff. And next thing I knew it, the man was threatening to hit the girl with his baguette! If it hadn't been so completely hilarious, I would have scandalised.

She just rode away from their screams and no baguettes were injured in the course of the altercation.

A Trip to the Supermarket

Aimlessly searching through the shelves: "Excuse me sir, where is the cocoa powder?"
"Pfft!" Looking me up and down, "It's in the coffee aisle!"

Oh, well, excuse me. Not with the baking products then? Or next to the chocolates? Oh of course! With the coffee – How stupid of me! I mean, I know the marzipan is between the laundry detergent and chicken breasts. So how could I possibly not know that the cocoa powder is next to the coffee?

A Quarter of an Effing Point — Update

I finally got a response to the second email I sent to the director of my programme regarding my eighth of a point fail. (My first one having gone unanswered). I tried to appeal to her sense of logic, reason, compassion and pity to let me pass, rather than failing me for a ridiculous 0.125 of a point.

Surprise surprise, that harpy bitch troll said there "was nothing she could do."

...Bah! As if I didn't hate that place enough already. Now I have to resit that awful bloody exam all over again.

On a happier note, my new favourite song:

A Quarter of an Effing Point!

Yesterday end-of-term marks were finally made available. Being France of course the marks were not available on the internet, or put in the mail. No. Don't be silly. That would make sense and be convenient. To get your grades in France, you have to go to the school in person and sign a form in triplicate.

Generally I consider myself smart enough to pass an exam I studied like a maniac for. But I've been here long enough to know not to take anything for granted. Just scraping by seems to be my norm. (Does it have something to do with the suspiciously high rate of failure among the non-francophone student body? Perhaps). I was not the least bit surprised to see a string of 12s and 13s (a 12 -rather than 10- out of 20 being the required mark to pass, since ÉSIT thinks it's so much better than anywhere else). And there it was. Staring at me. A shiny red 11. In 'Introduction to Law' – a course taught by one of the most horrible people I've ever had the misfortune of meeting. A terrible professor and all-around terrible human being. Sample quote: "I know none of you want to be here, but trust me, I want to be here even less."

Thankfully, French universities have a ridiculous system of averaging grades between certain courses, so if you got, say, 8 in Astro-physics and 16 in the History of Comic Books, you still pass because the average of the two classes is still 12. But nothing is never that easy here... Further down my report card it's marked that I have to rewrite the Law exam. (No indication as to why of course). So I went to the registrars office to find the reason I was supposed to rewrite the exam if my 11 in Law was averaged with a 13 in Economic Environment and 12.5 in Economic Theory. She didn't know. I'm then directed to talk to a different woman in a different office. She tells me that the Law mark is not averaged with any other course. "Oh, really?" I reply, "I thought it was." "No. It's not," all snitty, "I think I know my own job better than you. You all did very badly in Law. All the students who should have studied harder have come to me complaining. You have to rewrite the exam, point final."

Charming.

And, as it turns out, I did know her own job better than she did. A look in the course calendar when I got home clearly stated that the two Economics classes are averaged with Law – problem being that they are averaged with each other before being averaged with the Law mark. Meaning I am a quarter of a bloody point away from avoiding the nightmarish hell that is restudying and resitting the exam for that awful class. A quarter of a point!

I was so mad. Furious really. I still am. That school is like a black cloud poisoning my life. I can't believe I still have two more years to go (...assuming I don't fail by 3/16ths of a point the second time too).