D'entrée Trois: A Brave New World

After waking up for an early breakfast and a hot shower, I had to catch the 165 on a 20 minute bus ride back to reality. School started on the 6th at 6PM and for some reason all of my classes are 4 hours long (the water here tastes like it has tonnes of chlorine in it, I don't know if that has anything to do with it). I manged to get through my first class just fine, but by the time university was up to it's second day, I was falling asleep in lectures and dozing off in the classrooms. Thankfully all my teachers are good though. My puppet animation teacher, Eric, is a live wire and has more enthusiasm than a Frenchman in a farmhouse. The times when I wasn't napping in class, I was late for class. I forgot where one of the buildings was, then when I found it I got lost again looking for a classroom that didn't exist. I've come to terms with the fact that my GPA is going to take a beating, so now I'm just trying to limit the damage.

The president's welcome for international students was on Thursday night, which was okay. It was like a speed networking event, with bad food and even worse speeches, where they just threw us in a room and told us to talk to each other. At that stage of the day I was carrying a bible that someone gave me in the morning, so I find it hard to know whether people weren't talking to me because they thought I looked like a bible salesman or if it was just because of the toilet paper stuck to the bottom of my shoe and the mustard stain on my crotch.

At least three quarters of the students there were French, but I managed to find a few Australians. Oh boy, it was nice to hear the accent again and have the chance to talk to someone about kangaroos and shearing sheds. Later on I was also talking to a guy from Iran, who was still convinced I would see him in the business building even after I told him around 5 times that I did Fine Arts, not Finance.

CISA, the Concordia International Student Association, had an orientation event on Saturday. We sat in a lecture hall for a while, then got to play such fun games as 'Hold a Tennis Ball With Your Chin, Then Pass it to a Complete Stranger so You're Almost Kissing', 'Three Legged Race Using a Thin Piece of String Tied Against Your Bare Skin While You Wear Shorts, and Get a Rope Burn on Your Ankle', and 'Stand Around for 15 Minutes While we Tell You the Rules to Scissors, Paper, Rock, but we Change it to Wizards, Giants and Mice, Then You Get to Play One Game as a Team and Everyone Chooses Wizard Because it's the Least Embarrassing One to Act Out'. 

Then by Sunday, it was time to visit the city's big drawcard, The Tam Tams. Every Sunday in Summer there is a big picnic in the park, and the great thing about it is you don't need a map to get there, you just follow the smell of drugs. These guys were doing their best to make L.A. seem like a smog free paradise, and I actually read the next day in a Montreal City Council environmental report that 90% of the city's emissions come from this event alone.

There also happened to be a bike race that day, which passed by the park. The UCI drug testing commission found all 357 riders tested positive for illicit substances.

So after finishing the first week well rested and with a phone bursting with new contacts, I was on my way. But as assignments start to come in thick and fast and we encounter our first problem with the apartment, the next installment promises to be an exciting one. Check back soon for: “Act 3 - A Squirrel in the Drainpipe”.