La Technologie

I am currently at one of the faculty computers at the high school where I'll be teaching, typing as fast as I can on a French keyboard. The great thing is the accents are very easy to find; the bad thing is that the letters are rearranged differently so if there are spelling mistakes, I apologize beforehand for them.

I am loving everything so far and I'm sorry I can't post photos yet. I don't have internet on my laptop yet, so I will try to write like an English major so that you can imagine what it's like here.

It must be difficult to be poor in France, as if being poor anywhere is easy, but in France, you often have to pay to use the restroom in public places like shopping malls. I had forgotten this characteristic about Europe, but I do remember this in Spain, Greece, and Italy.

This is going to be a bit of an everything-goes post. I don't hqve much of a theme besides the fact that my access to the internet is quite limited at the moment, so I want to write whatever I can now!

Even the paper is different here; I do remember that European paper is a different size from that of the US, but French binder paper has many more lines on it than ours does; it looks more like graph paper.

I must say that I'm disappointed on the technological front here. We really have no concept of how lucky we are in the US, or more accurately, in the places where I have lived and studied. We assume high speed wifi; we assume printers; we assume that people will respond very quickly to email; we assume cheap phone calls and cell phones. It is not the case here. I spent a small fortune yesterday to get a phone plan - for 5 months, it translates into only 4 hours of conversation! Texts are about 10 cents each and phone calls (domestic) are 50+ cents per minute.