Arrival in Montpellier/First Few Days

And I’m off! I shall be gallivanting around Europe with two suitcases and a messenger bag!

Thursday

To get to Montpellier I had two full days of travel ahead of me (including time zones). I left my house at 3 AM Thursday morning to head to the Eugene airport where I caught a flight first to Portland, and then to San Francisco. Once in San Fran I got to wait another four hours until I was able to board my flight to Paris – a nonstop, 10-hour flight that put me in Paris by 10:30 the next morning.

Friday

For those of you who are wondering, the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris is massive. I had the luck of arriving at the opposite end of the airport from where my flight to Montpellier was, and the letter of my terminal was on none of the surrounding signs, so I had absolutely no clue where to go. Did I mention that this was my first time outside of the U.S. and Canada? Fortunately, there was an American couple behind me who were also on the same flight to Montpellier and they were more than happy to find a fellow American to navigate the airport with (except they had done it a couple times before so they had a better sense of direction 🙂 ). After we finally made it to our new gate I met up with two other students from MSU – Emily and Reese – who are also studying abroad in Montpellier this semester.

Our flight down to Montpellier was fairly nice (except for a couple moments of turbulence that were truly amazing) and we arrived ahead of schedule where the Montpellier airport promptly lost part of my luggage. Welcome to France!

Before I left the airport I filed a missing luggage claim with a lady who, thankfully, knew exactly what I needed to fill out before I even made it to her. Even though she didn’t understand English and I didn’t understand most of the words she was using in French I finally comprehended that the airport would deliver my luggage within 24 hours to the place I was staying. At least, that is what I hoped she had meant as I was leaving.

After the luggage experience, I was incredibly glad that I didn’t have to try and navigate Montpellier by myself. I am signed up for a pre-session, so my group was picked up from the airport with several other girls and got to ride a bus straight to our dorm. My room is on the third floor of my building, which in France means you have to go up three flights of stairs since their ground floor is 0 (in America the ground floor is usually 1). With no elevator this means I get to do lots of stairs everyday. 🙂

While we were in our building we met a group of students from Australia, and we ended up deciding to all go out to dinner together. We ate at a French burger place, which is similar to American burgers pretty much only in concept. The food, however, was delicious! I went to sleep relatively early (I was exhausted) and woke up ready to start the day and explore the city – only to realize that it was 11:30 PM that same night. I had slept for a grand total of two hours. That’s about how the entire first night went!

Saturday

The next morning Emily and I decided that we wanted to go out to breakfast together. As we were passing by the front office, one of the clerks ran after us to tell us that my luggage had arrived! I was so relieved I nearly cried – it was my large suitcase so it had the majority of my clothes, all of my shoes, and most of my school items in it. I was so happy to have it back! Emily and I returned my suitcase to my room and then headed to the tram station to try and buy tram tickets. As it turns out, the ticket machine hated our cards and the only other option was for coins, which we didn’t have. We returned to our dorm again in time to meet our Australian friends from the day before, who got our tickets for us. By this time is was fairly late, so by the time we made it to our destination no one had breakfast available. We also learned that almost everything is closed on Sundays in France and that most things are closed on Saturdays, so we ended up going to the nearby grocery store to get breakfast and some food for the weekend.

Hey – I can buy American food! But, more importantly, I can buy peanut butter!

After breakfast we returned to the dorms for the first event of our pre-session: a short tour of part of Montpellier. We walked all around downtown Montpellier and went to the first botanical garden in France, the Jardin des Plantes. Each of the different species had different identification cards with their French and scientific names and some identifying characteristics on them. While I wasn’t able to spend any time reading the cards, my inner plant nerd was geeking out – I plan to go back and spend more time there. My range professors would be so proud.

From there we walked to the Cathédrale Saint-Pierre which is a gorgeous, massive, Gothic-styled cathedral. It’s open to the public most of the time, and a group of us might pick a Sunday to all go to Mass together. Like most of France, the cathedral is Catholic and we probably wouldn’t understand a word of what was said, but it would be an amazing experience.

Le Cathédrale Saint-Pierre.

Inside Le Cathédrale Saint-Pierre (near the front).

Once we were finished with the tour we had some time to roam around the city, which we put to good use before we all met again for dinner. So far everything I have had to eat has been absolutely DELICIOUS. Seriously – it takes a lot of self control not to just order everything on the menu (well, that I can’t afford to do that and still eat for the next 5 months 🙂 )! After dinner we met up with more people from our group early and we all went to Fitzpatricks – a small Irish pub near our restaurant. That was also amazing, but by the time we made it back to the dorms I was pretty exhausted.

Fitzpatricks!

Sunday

On Sunday I joined Emily and Heidi (another girl in the program from Washington) to go back and explore around the Place de la Comédie – one of the places we had stopped yesterday. We found a cute coffee shop called the Coffee Club which, as it turned out, was an English coffee shop where everyone was very nice and did not laugh at our attempts to order and pay correctly in French. Even though most of the shops were closed, we did see several that we want to go back and check out.

The remnants of an espresso.

Fountain in the Place de la Comédie.

Monday – Wednesday

On Monday those of us in the pre-session started our classes. First we had to take a test – both written and oral – to determine what level of French we were at. Most of us got to take this while still under the influence of jet lag (which has taken me a lot longer to get over than I thought it would) so you can imagine that it was pretty fun. After only a couple days here and relatively little sleep, I feel that my French is atrocious. At least I can only improve from whatever level I get placed in! I’m still in the information overload stage – almost everything here is completely different – but things are definitely starting to get better. I absolutely love it here and can’t wait to explore more! I am also super excited for classes to start (since I’m one of those people who loves school), and we find out about which ones we can register for on Friday. I have two more days of my pre-session left and then on Saturday our group is going to get a tour of Nîmes, which is about an hour to the northeast.

À la prochaine! (Until next time!)

The Château d’Eau, near the Place de la Comédie.

21 Jan This entry was published on January 21, 2015 at 7:44 PM. It’s filed under Study Abroad 2015 and tagged France. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.