I am lost somewhere in Montparnasse. It is not a big deal that I am lost, I am not in a hurry and the university semester has finished, the last exam page turned, the last pen put down. Wandering along under the shadow of the Tour Montparnasse in the Avenue Maine, I am stopped by a group of girls in their early twenties, my age. Flustered, in English, they ask me the way to H&M. I don't know whether to laugh or cry at where I'm having to give directions to where they could be going in this amazing city, but as a twenty-something year old female myself, I know the importance of retail therapy. I reply, in English, and hope my directions are clear.

"Are you from here?" they ask, clocking my grasp of the English tongue weighed up with the knowledge of the nearest H&M to the fifteenth arrondissement.

"Yes, I am," I say.

And it's true.

University life.

The first difference? The hours. My timetable is effectively, doubled. I have 1/3 more in classes than I had in the UK, with twice as many hours in teaching time. Last semester, classes started at 8am, everyday from Monday to Friday. And at 9.30 am on a Saturday morning. (Believe me, 9.30 am even on a Saturday felt like a lie-in.) Most lectures are three hours' long. The queues for the coffee machines at the Sorbonne at 11am are long. The queues for the toilets? Even longer.

My life now revolves around getting the moyen= 10/20. Before, a pass was 40%. Doing well was a 2.2 - 50%. Doing really well was a 2.1 - 60%. Being exceptional meant 70% and over. These days? Even the exceptional students are becoming pleased with 8/20. We have failed not for our lack of knowledge for the subject, but rather because we didn't conform to the exact méthodologie meaning that the essay will be divided into two parts, I and II and then further subdivided into IA and IB, IIA and IIB. Content is irrelevant. Style? Everything.

Not that I've been able to maintain a sense of style too much. Whilst I believe that it is wonderful that university education is essentially, free here, the system does not fail so much on that point as it does letting (for all intents and purposes) everyone who has their bac in. The result? Not only scores of students unwilling to do sweet FA at uni but too many of us for the administration to be able to deal with. * The result at face value is quite often, having to sit in a lecture, on the floor. Sometimes, there's no floor space left. Fast forward ten weeks to the exam period and there are no seats to sit in for an exam. There is not only no seat available for 50% of the students but during the exam, two of the inviligators tie up another with sellotape.

From the sublime to the ridiculous.


*I'm not advocating that any other university entrance system is any better, but there has to be a compromise somewhere.

I have been living in Paris for 5 months now and so far, university has taken up approximately 99.9% of my time. Through 25 hours a week of classes, constant essays and spending more time in the library than in my little Left Bank flat I have forgotten how to live. Today was my first day off since September. By day off, I mean nothing to do: no classes to go to, no assignments to complete, no reading to be done, no studying to stress over. We are in between semesters here, and yesterday was the final of the six exams I've done over three weeks. On Tuesday lectures start for the second semester and by next week, I'll be well into the rat race of classes, essays and the library. I haven't written all this down mainly because I haven't had the time but also because then, it didn't seem worthy of being put into words. Today I slept for 12 hours, got up and tidied my poor flat, neglected since I moved into it in November. And afterwards, once the notes were put away, ready for a reairing no doubt in September, when I have to re-sit, I didn't know what to do with myself. The plan of action tomorrow is to read the paper at the Café de Flore and walk for a little while, probably ending up at WHSmith on the corner of the rue de Rivoli and rue Cambon to take my fill of terrible magazines and books in English, which, most important of all, do not contain an index. I think I owe it to myself. But first of all, I will write down what the past few months have been like to try to give them some semblance.