Thursday, January 20, 2011

Settling in

My goals for the week that I have met were to get bureaucratically settled in (this is, after all, France); to locate the people I might already know in the dorm and maybe meet some new ones as well so as not to become a crazy dorm-room dissertation hermit; to get the not-so-mini fridge I'd stored, then kind of lost track of until some gooey cheese in a bag on my desk reminded me this was urgent, up the many stairs from a storage room; and to work on my dissertation.

Still to be done:

-Get groceries, now that I can shop for more than a meal at a time.

-Meet with profs here and email profs elsewhere.

-Try the dining hall, to see if French cafeteria food is as good as Jo claims Belgian was. (The dining hall is in any rate closed "en raison des mouvements sociaux," which is also presumably why there are police guarding the entry to the building.)

-Get on some kind of reasonable sleep pattern. (Falling asleep definitively at 6am, only to be woken up by construction on the wall right outside my room not long after, only to eventually wake up past noon, is not sustainable, even if I did get some work done in the middle of the night.) Libraries, food markets, other human beings keep schedules.

6 comments:

PG said...

(The dining hall is in any rate closed "en raison des mouvements sociaux," which is also presumably why there are police guarding the entry to the building.)

At least the school itself is open. I was talking to an American student in Buenos Aires in October, and she was having a horrible time because the students at the college where she was studying for the semester had gone on strike, so there were no classes.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy said...

Maybe classes have stopped as well? I'm not taking any - I will most likely be sitting in on some, but am long since done with coursework. Although I feel like there are too many prof-types around for that to have happened.

FLG said...

École normale supérieure?

Fancy schmancy.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy said...

You figured that out from the fact that there are police out front?

Things are much fancier and schmancier since I have a fridge. A private bathroom and shower, and I'd be Marie Antoinette.

FLG said...

No, I figured it out because I got a bunch of hits from there today. :)

Phoebe Maltz Bovy said...

Ah. It was a very bloggy day for me - after moving the fridge and then carrying back some heavy groceries quite a distance, I couldn't do a whole lot else. A long library day for tomorrow...