I don’t really know where to begin, since my last post I have been cramming in all the skiing I have had time for and suddenly I find myself at the official end of my year abroad and the start of my ridiculously long summer holidays! I still feel like I have only just got going and already lots of my friends have packed up and left Grenoble 😦 Despite having searched high and low for the past few months, it seems that it is much harder than I had anticipated to find a job that will take me on just for a few months. Last week I went to a bar in town to hand in my CV for a job I had seen advertised online, having located the street I marched down to number 24, CV in hand, and stopped outside a shady looking place with pictures of naked girls in the windows and a sign saying ‘club privee’ outside. Thank God I realised before I walked through the door what the job description ‘hotesse et serveuse’ actually meant. So, with the end of exams last week and still no job, I find myself at a bit of a loose end, especially now the skiing has sadly finished!
The season did go out with a bang though as I very wisely and in true Erasmus style, spent my last week of lectures on a girls skiing holiday in la Rosiere with some friends from school. Although I managed to catch the flu and felt dreadful for the first few days we still had the best week skiing, (if it can be called that when there is more grass than snow) and having our own apres sessions on the balcony since the resort wasn’t quite prepared for us 8 girls in the last week of the season! I was very happy that I achieved my years aim and was able to keep up with the group on my snowboard without falling over every few metres thanks to all the lessons I have taken advantage of since December. In my final assessment I reached level 4 out of 5- probably my best module of the year! Although I did have one horrible days snowboarding in March and in future I will avoid skiing in the rain at all costs!
The day was vastly improved however, with Erins delayed arrival that night. I showed her the true Grenoble student lifestyle when we went swanning off to les Deux Alpes for 2 days skiing and a hilarious day spent doing the end-of-season wacky races kitted out in 80’s onesies. We also of course, did the compulsory tour of Grenobles’ highlights including a walk up the Bastille and a trip to the market. Forgetting that we were in France, we took the bad decision to visit neighbouring Chambery on a Sunday where of course everything was closed and all we could do was wander around getting lost in the rain before we took the train back which unfortunately managed to get stuck on the track for 3 hours during what should have been a 40 minute journey. There had to be some waiting around involved in her trip or it just wouldn’t be the true French experience!
Waving Erin off from the station a week later wasn’t so sad this time as the following weekend I went home myself for a flying 5-day visit to celebrate some 21st birthdays and see as many people as I could. I had a really lovely and hectic 5 days catching up with everyone and even got treated to a trip to a beautiful hotel in the Northumberland countryside. 🙂 It was so miserable to come back but thankfully I only had a few days before our girls ski trip, but that meant double holiday blues when I got back to Grenoble again on Easter weekend for my final week of Uni and exams. However, with the end of the year upon us everyone has started to throw leaving parties and the campus festival nights have started up again so I have kept myself busy and managed to continue with volunteering too. We also couldn’t resist a trip to the funfair that has come to town, even if we didn’t have the guts to go bigger than the pirate ship ride!
I am looking forward to the rest of this month with planned day-trips to various places, a holiday to Barcelona with Jonny and a visit from Mamon I shouldn’t go too stir crazy but I am keeping all my fingers and toes crossed in the hope that at least one person might respond to my job application! In the mean time if anyone reading this hears of anything, please let me know or I could get really desperate and end up back at that strip club! Only 8 weeks to go… A la prochaine! 🙂
Solo migrations abroad 