All booked up!

Finally did it!

I pulled my finger out and actually booked everything for my jailbreak from UK! :

• Getting the train from Sunderland to London King's Cross
• Staying in London for 6 days with a friend.
• Getting the Megabus from London Victoria Coach station to Paris (with awesome ferry ride too)
• Then staying in Paris for 4 days, staying in a hostel called 'Friends Hostel' in Montmartre. 
• And then getting the train to Aix-en-Provence, via Marseille!

all for literally -just- over £100..... 

I'm properly shitting myself now though! Still haven't been greatly lucky accommodation wise, and the owners haven't been so great about even just simply responding to e-mails, but I guess that's part of the excitement of being potentially homeless for the next few months! Wooooo!

Friends Hostel, 122 Bvd de la Chapelle 75018 Paris, France:

Blatantly going to be a massive shit-hole...but for 10€-ish a night,  I wouldn't care if they ask me to hand over a kidney as downpayment......

How to travel Europe for diddly squat (from the king of corner-cutting himself).

I have just made an extraordinary discovery. More extraordinary and life-changing than the Higgs-Boson quantum particle could ever be, and certainly more useful to the layman:

I just found out today that the Megabus has a new European service from London.
This actually brightened up my day. It was that good.

On the Megabus, which trundles through UK cities with their bright, bold, blue exteriors and instantly-recognisable fat controller mascot Sid, you will now be shuttled to Amsterdam, Brussels, Boulogne or Paris in an attempt to make crossing The Channel a much cheaper, simpler affair. Ooh la la, indeed.

With tickets from the minimum (but nearly impossible to get) £1 + 50p booking fee to anywhere on their route map, travelling Europe and getting onto the continent has never been so promising, especially to me, a skint student from the North of England who has previously found it impossible to get anywhere onto Mainland Europe without it biting a sizeable chunk of a budget.
Not only that, but every Megabus journey that i've ever taken has been an experience. I've either been stuck next to some random tramp, or there was this one time some poor doddery old lady fell asleep on my shoulder and drooled everywhere, or the dog that barked from Birmingham to London, or the stag (coach) parties or breaking down in the middle of the motorway and having to walk up the hard shoulder for miles to the nearest service station to be rescued a few hours later.

My point, is that it is an experience. I kinda love it. And the price isn't half bad too....

Actually, today I've been looking at prices for trains all the way from London to Provence and they range from £100-£200 depending on time of day/week, whereas a train from Paris to Provence costs a meagre £35.

The Eurostar is officially dead then, you'd think. You'd probably be wrong. The main reason that the Megabus can afford to keep such a route is because so many people don't want to spend a great deal of money on the Eurostar. But on the other hand, the only reason that Eurostar hasn't been killed off by the big, blue 6-wheeled monster is because the journey across La Manche takes a fuckload of time.

It takes 8-odd hours to get from Victoria Coach Station, right in the heart of London, to the drop off point in Paris which lies outside the city itself (but is still served by the RER) but as long as you've got tons of books and a comfy pillow, and you get the lucky seat next to someone who isn't a tramp or a general sexual deviant then you're sorted.....

LDR = FML

 "Sex makes everything more complicated. Even not having it, because the not having it... makes it complicated. 

That's why it's better to have it... some say"

While i'm not psychic, nor a perfect example of what someone in a relationship should be like (and i'm certainly not some sort of fucking relationship guru either), I can safely say that if you find yourself in a relationship before a long period of living abroad, you should get out of that shit as soon as possible....

Not only will you end up wracking your brains to find a perfect arrangement for you both to no avail, you'll probably also argue and cry and writhe in the fear of losing each other, or trust in each other and you may even lose yourself in trying to make the other happy without fully thinking about how happy you yourself are.

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I know this certainly isn't a good advertisement for the Erasmus project, but i'm a realist and I don't have my head in the clouds most of the time and I wouldn't want anyone else to be like that.

I'm now a single man, after being in a long-term relationship, who is embarking on an Erasmus exchange for 1 academic year in France and Germany. I can honestly say I can't wait.

I've heard it many a time, that relationships that for one reason or another become long distance can't and never do work, and that going into a LDR [long distance relationship] especially across borders is never as easy as it sounds, However, I've been in one LDR in the past so I can empathise totally:

 I used to be going out with a guy from Germany in my first year of university. I'd fly over and stay very regularly (so regularly that I ended up living there for a few months), and he would fly over to England only very sporadically and that really took it's toll financially, emotionally and of course sexually.

Arnaud Clément is a retired French tennis player
born in Aix-en-Provence. He reached the finals of the
2001 Australian Open.

I still wonder how me and my now ex-boyfriend would have fared with such an LDR.
Not only would he be in a full-time job, with extra after-school work to do, I'd be travelling as much as possible and probably not be able to afford to fly back as regularly as I did with my previous ex in Germany. I would be at university for a massive chunk of the week and trying to socialise with as many people as possible to really make my Erasmus exchange worthwhile.

How possible is it for a relationship to survive that constant barrage of problems?

Consider also the language barrier issue if/when your partner visits you in your host country, it must be stressful being the only person in a group who doesn't speak a language, so no doubt it would be awkward having to interpret everything to your significant other, or end up just falling back into the use of your L1 even when abroad.
Not to be so cynical to suggest it would be a ball-and-chain scenario, but it would definitely makes things a little bit strange.

I don't want to be on Facebook or Skype with my partner all evening, when I could be socialising with others in person, nor do I want to be flying back at every given moment.


However, i'm not going to dwell on the past too much. I wish him good luck, in life, love and work etc but I am going to go nab some hot, single Euroboys now thank you very much....

Almost there.....

Progress! Finally!

Sorted out the application process for Provence! I had to apply here online first and now I have to post of the application with two photos, a photocopy of my passport and a phtoocopy of my EHIC card, of which I have neither, because i'm a drunk and I lost my passport in the back of a taxi somewhere in Newcastle after too many tequilas, and because i'm too relaxed to bother with (free) insurance. Whoops!

So it's a day trip to Durham to visit the passport offices to get one sorted pretty sharpish in the near future.

All that needs done now, is to send off these forms, potentially apply for halls and also potentially apply for an intensive language course (a week-ish) before the start of my semester in France, and do a similar thing for Germany.
And it's true that Erasmus aren't giving you anything for free....to get these monthly grants you have to jump through so many bureaucratic hoops and fill in so many forms!!! Nothing's easy while on the continent, I assure you of that.....

MODULES

for Aix-Marseille I've chosen:

• ALLA02 German Civilisation + Littérature
• ALLA08 German Grammar
• EFE212 French Civilisation + Littérature
• EFE213 French Grammar
• IAAC13 Translation (Erasmus)
• and ETHL07 Intro à l'Anthropologie de la France.

I wasn't allowed to choose Beginner's Greek, since my lecturer didn't think it was appropriate to take it as a uni module ,but I can freely take it as a community language class, or evening class if they exist.
Pretty gutted. Still, i'd like to take on as many classes and do as much as possible in this year....I felt like he was holding me back, but I kinda understand his decision now....

François Hollande, le nouveau président socialiste de la France dans les yeux de Plantu, le dessinateur qui fait des images sur la politique regulièrement pour 'Le Monde', comme un capitaine du Caravelle, ici Christophe Colomb:

Quand il est parti, il ne savait pas où il allait. Quand il est arrive, il ne savait pas où il était. Et tout ça avec l'argent des autres......

France is only 500-ish miles away (so, why does it feel like a million miles away?)

If that image doesn't grab your attention, then i'm not sure what will......

All will be explained further throughout the post :P

Okay, so i've been working on my application to both universities recently, and been feeling prettttty good about it all. I'm really really excited to go away, can't wait to go to be honest!

Emma from the International Office at Sunderland Uni has been infinitely more helpful that my actual lecturers / year abroad supervisors, who i'm not going to name or talk about in too bad of a light anymore (since I am a changed, more positive, individual :D)

I've chosen my modules for Provence, i'm taking French grammar, German grammar, Cinema (some sort of 'Cinema through the ages' module) and Erasmus Translation. Don't have my application to hand so I don't know for certain that these are the modules though.

For Koblenz (which is primarily a teacher training university) I'm still undecided. I found their website really unhelpful and ridiculous to navigate, same with Université de Provence, but on a greater scale.
It's all good practice though....(actually reading the website text helps a lot!!!!)....as i've learned quite a lot about the French education system, certain acronyms and what the word for 'module catalogue' is (une plaquette)

For anyone next year who may be looking at this for help in choosing modules for Université de Provence, the place to go to find out module details is here and look for la plaquette when selecting a module, to find dates and times and course codes and all the rest of the boring stuff......

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The photo, by the way was taken by a friend on his year abroad in Darmstadt, Germany. He went to a gay club in Frankfurt, and was absolutely astonished to see how different it is to English 'club etiquette' (not sure if oxymoron :P). This guy was just walking around completely bollock naked, pun most definitely intended, without a care in the world. Quite refreshing really....if not a bit creeepy :P

I'll be reporting back on here with the quality of the nightlife, I am determined to go to uni over on the continent but i'm finding a second home in the form of a nice drinking establishment over there! I think i'll miss my local pubs and bar-banter. Hopefully the Germans will teach me something about beer, and the French, wine ;)