Cathedral

17 March 2010

Shopping, eating, visiting and little else.

Room check

Early morning, got up to finish the enrolling, but before that I had to  go over the room check. Noting the state of everything in the room would have been easy if I knew what more than half the things on the list were. The lady who was supposed to pick the list up came over, talked very fast - so I understood very little - and helped, and by helped I obviously mean did it all.

Shopping and eating

One thing I didn't like is the one-to-one conversion which seems to have taken place between the euro and my native coin. My native coin is only a fraction of the euro so ever since I got here I've been mentally converting to estimate the price of things. Most things so far seem to have been converted into a similar fashion as the dollar to euro conversion many American companies use when dealing with Europe (1 euro=1 dollar). Feeling like you're throwing money out the window is not a good feeling at all.

The good news is I found a supermarket with decent prices, some items even cheaper than I thought. At this point I'm not sure if I'll buy my own food and cook or prepare it, or if I'll eat at the cafeteria, so I only got some basic things: dairy, meat, bread, tomatoes, pickles - you must have pickles.

Visiting

Since registering as students failed today due to faulty schedule synchronisation. We visited St Etienne, a lovely cathedral whose history I won't go into at the moment. Large, silent and peaceful, with 6500 square meters of stained glass - or so a piece of paper would have me believe - it comes with a crypt and treasury which you can visit for 2 euros. Unfortunately they were closing soon and I couldn't stay and look at everything as much as I wanted. But I did learn of a nice legend about it which I'll most likely talk about at a later date.

An organ on the right side

Stained glass on the left side

I loved the ceiling

The largest expanses of stained glass windows
 in the world at 6500 square meters

It's a lot larger than it looks

Internet

There's no internet in my room, but there is some in the kitchen, very unstable, very slow, today was the first time I got my hands on it, sent some emails, wrote the first 2 posts, and helped a fellow with an article he was writing. Almost forgot to sleep, but then again I'm used to that.