A Malaysian among 29 French

First day in U. I've never imagined that I could go this far. There're so many things to worry about especially everything that has to do with the french, people and language.

Class starts at 9 am, but since we haven't got our time tables yet we were given the chance to be late for the first day. My first class was English. I thought it was easy. The professor asked me if i wanted to continue the class since he thought that i have a fairly good level of English. I told him that i would like to continue his class. My english had never been good. I've never considered myself good in english. I can understand; yes, I can write; maybe, but i certainly can't speak good english. Ask the people with whom i mostly converse in english.

Then i had accounts. We learn from the basics since there were also students who came from science stream. After class we had a 1 hour break for lunch. At this time i thought i would be eating alone, but i was wrong. We went to lunch in a group of 7 but since the tables were 4 seaters, i sat with a girl that was sitting next to in my accounts class, Mélanie and a Parisian rugby guy who i think is very rich (from the way he talks about the reasons why he came to lille "because i know people here"), Gregoire. Lunch was horrible. We ate at the sandwicherie because everywhere else was full of people. Just something i got from a book about sandwiches in France; Since the French hated so much the 'englishification' of their language, they always have an alternative terms for each new english word. For example email is also courriel, short for courrier electronique but hardly anyone uses it. And for sandwich, i think they ran out of ideas, is alternatively 'deux tranches de pain avec quelque chose au milieu' ( two slices of bread with something in between).

After lunch we had a subject called 'entreprise'. I like the subject but not the prof. After that we had a 2 hours free slot. Finally i got the chance to really get to know my group. They're all what the french call 'sympa'. Nice people. Talkable. There's a rastafarian, Yoann, a tomboy, Aurélie, 2 blonds Hélène and Anne, and the others, Johanna, David, another Aurélie and Hélène, Alex, Mouloud, Nicolas, Bruno, Loïc, Pauline and Guillaume. Guillaume. The guy that sat next to me last Friday during the fill in the forms session. He was the one who asked me why did i not answer the BAC (french ALev) question. I said because i did not do any BAC par contre i did a special PreU programme in Colmar. He made a remark that I did not expect."Then how did they let you in? How could they accepted you? You must've used inside people" . I not only do not really like him because of that, but also because he keeps on making bubbles out of his saliva; which i find cute when a 3 year old does it but disgusting when a 19 year old does it.

After the two hours break, we had informatique or IT as we called it in Malaysia, for another two hours. Class ends at 8pm. I was really hungry and did not feel like cooking so i bought a kebab from a kebab shop 10 minutes walking from the campus. I read a few pages of the book that i was reading and i went off to bed.