Foreign Perspectives

Last week was seriously exhausting!

I’m glad that I arrived back in Belfast the day before the exam. No way was I awake at exam time on Wednesday!

You’d think that we’d be all organised for the exams as that was the third one. Nope. Well, we were all organised but it all fell apart on the day.

Jackie: worth reading for an OU newbie…. The OU are VERY structured in everything. So, when it comes to organising the oral they do it in a very structured way. You get four passages in French a month or so before the big day and on the day itself they give you one of those to present. The selection is supposed to be random but, as noted, the OU are very structured. Sooo, what they do is give the examiner a pack of the four articles and instruct them to hand them out in a clockwise manner so everyone knows (if they think about it) that the first article goes to the person sitting on the left of the examiner, second to the person to the left of the first etc. Anyway, that means that you can basically select the article that you’re doing when you walk into the room. You can even select the group you’re in if you sign in for the exam together and we managed to do that the first year: it worked brilliantly too. Failed miserably to organise that last year so we’d big plans for this but, of course, we all ended up in different groups as we didn’t walk into the building together. Oh well: Jackie can learn from our mistakes. Incidently, don’t forget to tell me your new e-mail Jackie!

Walking out of the signing up room, I joked to one of our group that we may as well get up and walk out if the exam was on the last book (which nobody could understand seeing as it was all in weird French accents). Naturally, the question was on the last book :(( Net effect was that a considerable number of people didn’t even know where to begin. One very, very good student (nope, not me) only wrote 150 words, another didn’t write anything for 90 minutes (and the exam is only two and a half hours). Who knows what the results will be like?

Anyway, Friday and Saturday were shopping days which resulted in an enormous heap of stuff to bring over. So much in fact that a slight bit of underhand repacking was required after checking in. So if any of you are going by Jet2, it’s possible to get away with 20kg checked luggage, 10kg legit handluggage and another 10kg slightly illegit handluggage. I’d recommend a wheeled carryon bag: 20kg is a LOT to carryon!

In said handluggage is the breezeblock Spanish dictionary (yes, Jackie, you should get one of those) for the level 1 course and the German dictionary & grammar for the beginners German. No, I’m not daft enough to do both in the one year but I’m not currently totally decided which of the two courses I should go for. From a practical point of view, I think Spanish is the way to go as I reckon I could get to fluency with that reasonably quickly and also we get quite a reasonable number of Spaniards staying. On the other hand, since we don’t get many Germans staying at the moment you could argue that I should do German so that I could increase our marketing in German (one of our booking sites has the page in German but we’ve not had any bookings from Germans via that site).

What’s missing from the luggage is the four boxes of soap that I bought in Makro (the Perpignan Makro doesn’t have great soap and doesn’t have it very often either). If any of you are coming over, we’d be grateful if you could bring one or two boxes with you.

Bookings-wise, we are getting quite a lot of bookings for the second half of October (usually we only get bookings a few days to a week ahead). We’ve also received our second enquiry re December. This one is a biggie: it would completely fill the building for three days. That’s actually slightly overfull as we’d need to move out of a couple of rooms that we’re currently using to store some things. It’s including all meals too so we’d have some serious cash to start off the new year if we can pull it off.

We’ve also had our fourth South African booking. It looks like he’ll not be able to get here either but he’s really determined and has paid the full balance up front as supposedly that’s required to get the visa. Can’t see him getting it in time though as he’s due here on Saturday and only got to the French embassy on Monday morning.

Got our first “rates” bill this morning: EUR 1250 which ain’t bad considering the scale of this place. Have to fork out EUR 800 for our new sheets and towels too so it’s not a good week expenses-wise. Still, I should be getting the £1.80 for the travelling expenses to the exam from the Civil Service soon to put towards it. Yeah, dopey amount to claim I know and it’s the first time I’ve ever claimed for the exam trip, but I need it to indicate to the Inland Revenue that you guys are still paying me which will affect their decision re my Crown Servant status which in turn affects John’s nationality amonst other things.

Weather: it’s almost the same as Belfast again. I’m still in t-shirt, shorts and sandals but I had to put socks on this morning.

Arnold