Day 3 (May 16 - Tuesday)
It would have been nice to wake up my first day in France, and go for a nice
long run to get all the soreness from the long trip out of my bones, but that
didn't happen. GTL scheduled a day of orientation that started with breakfast
at 8:30, and I slept like a rock for 7 glorious hours. It was especially nice
after getting such little/crappy sleep on the plane and in Gatwick airport.
So I woke up, took a shower, and made my way over to breakfast, which was a
learning experience with French culture. So in America, when you think of
breakfast, you think what? Cereal, fruit, eggs, pancakes, sausage, etc? Well,
it turns out the French consider buttery croissants (and only croissants) breakfast,
along with OJ and little cartons of chocolate milk. I already miss my
Great Grains...
The orientation didn't really have any surprises. They just gave us a tour of
the building, computer account instructions, and other orientation-type papers
and explanations. Oh, and there is only one building that has all our classes
and everything in it. They are pretty efficient with scheduling since they are
holding all the classes for GTL students in only four classrooms.
The orientation ended around 3:00, and afterward, I took a couple pictures of
GTL and my apartment.
View from the back of my apartment. The building across the lake is GTL
My apartment building. My room is the first floor, second from the right.
Yes, I have a balcony attached to my room. :-)
The fun part of the day was our trip to downtown Metz. The administration wanted
for us to have a tour and to get to know the area, so they packed up all the students
(153 total) in two huge buses and carted us to downtown, which is about 2 - 3 miles
away from GTL.
I have some good pictures, but I'll try to get some more when I back to downtown
this weekend.
The buses dumped us out in front of a giant Catholic cathedral. The cathedral
was destroyed and built again several times throughout the 3000 year history of
Metz.
Sebastian, this one's for you. :-)
A beautiful Protestant cathedral. The tour guides didn't say much more about it.
More swans in one place than I have ever seen before.
I was actually trying to get a picture of the fountain, but this turned out
to be my only pic of our tour guides, Lea and Chris.
After the tour, we were treated to fine French cuisine: Pizza!
The pizza was actually very good, and they served us dessert afterward. Let me
just say that the French have crazy, but very delicious desserts. The dessert
was a sampling of lots of different things, such as rasberry sorbet, cinnamon
apple tart, whipped cream, and some kind of egg-tasting piece of yumminess.
But the highlight of the dinner was when they sang happy birthday to someone
in our group. We were eating dessert, and all of sudden, it sounded like there
was a helicopter buzzing by the diner. The lights all started going out, and I
was a little freaked out for a second. All of a sudden, disco lights started
going everywhere and the
Numa Numa song started playing!
The maitre'd of the restaraunt brought the birthday guy a dessert and grabbed a microphone and started speaking crazy French. Everyone in the restaraunt was clapping in time
to the music, and then he had everyone stand up and he led a cheer of sorts
from two different sides of the restaraunt. It was totally awesome, and some
of the guys have vowed to tell every restaraunt they go to that it's their
birthday. :-)
Miya hee! Miya hoo! Miya Ha! Miya Ha Ha!
When I got back from downtown, I found out that my internet was working, so I
stayed up late working on updating the website with pictures and stories about
my trip. I only got the page formatting and the prologue done, but I was exhausted
again from another non-stop day. I hit the hay around 1:30am, and slept like
a rock all night.
