Welcome to the Champlain at
I’ve decided to break this blog down into Chapters, each one on a specific topic concerning the city and my experiences with the Champlain Abroad program. Each Chapter will be proceeded by an entry of undoubtedly varying length that is more or less a Mini Journal on interesting things that have happened to me recently. So, without further ado, I give you Mini Journal 1 and Chapter One, the Residence.
We, the Study Abroad students from Champlain, are 25 in number. We happy few live at one of the UQAM (University du Quebec a Montreal) residences. It's an eight floor building, but we only occupy a total of eight rooms. I myself live on the first floor, though I was originally destined for the 5th, but there was some mix up in the kind of
roommates I was looking for. Here on the first floor, I live with two very nice girls, my age, who are majoring in International Business at UQAM. They are from Southern France and between the two of them they speak only basic English. My room is bilingual now, since I want to learn French from them and they want to learn English from me. Every day is a continued effort to communicate effectively, but we seem to get better at it all the time. I should note, of course, that I've been living here for less than a week.
We have a dry erase board on the fridge on which all messages are written either in my broken French or their not-half-bad English. We have sheets of printer paper taped to the wall above the dining table that display a somewhat random collection of French phrases and their corresponding English translation. I've heard more than a few Disney songs performed in French, and I've had the honor of learning how to use the keyboard on a French laptop. (The 'M' is moved up next to the 'L', the exclamation point is where the comma is, and you have to press shift to type a period. Don't ask, I don't know.) Every once in a while, my roommates friends from France will come to the apartment to chill and drink a beer, but since I neither drink, smoke, nor speak fluent French, I like to sit back and listen to the sing-song banter. From what I can understand of their conversations and based on basic body language, they're really not any different from any other college students I've met. Significantly less rowdy, perhaps, but otherwise they talk about the same things and make the same jokes as American students. Many of them smoke cigarettes (smoking is not looked down upon in France the way it is in the US), but they all unfailingly sit in the window to do it, so the room doesn't smell like cigs, which is nice.
I could go on all day and night about my roommates, because they're so nice and extremely courteous, as are all their friends, but I'll try to curtail my enthusiasm about my person living situation. The rest of the UQAM dorm is quite nice, too, the ground floor with a help desk, a couple of student lounge areas, snack machines, washers and dryers, the mail room, recycling and trash behind little refrigerated hatches, and don't forget the bank of weirdly retro green-glass windows that make the UQAM dorms visible from quite a distance. The suites we live in are for 3 or 4 people, and are all uniformly white but with plenty of room and a nice view of the little green courtyard. And, as several of my fellow Champlain Abroad buddies have pointed out, it's incredibly quiet. "There are college kids here??"
In summary, life in UQAM has been pretty benign thus far. I look forward to the remainder of my stay and I'm enjoying the city immensely. (And I am not the sort of person who normally enjoys cities.)
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