Settling in

I have arrived at the HEC campus here in Jouy-en-Josas about 2 hours ago. Wasn't a bad trip, Slavo drove me to the Bratislava airport at 7 in the morning, so I had plenty of time to catch the plane (which was finally 20 min late). The lady at the check-in counter fortunately didn't seem to think that 4kg of baggage-overweight was a big problem. I slept through the whole flight, landed at Orly at around 10. Getting here from the airport seemed to be quite complicated. There was a huge line to buy RER tickets, but in a moment of rare lucidity I have packed a couple of Euro-bills in my wallet so could use the lonely ticket machine and skip ther line. I had to change 3 times, but it was ok.

When I finally got here, I was a bit lost, and trying to find the accomodation office with 30kg on your back isn't exactly fun. I moved in to building E, room number 21. The rooms here are equivalent to Prague's (VSE) "A dorms", but instead of three people they house just one. No kidding, for EUR385 a month!! There is no private toilet though, and the shower is in a kind of mini-room between two rooms. Each room has a semi-transparent glass door leading to it, so you can see when someone is taking a shower (and many more details I suspect:). I had to call the acccomodation office to get a special internet cable (it is quite unlike anything I've seen before, these French have to be different in everything), and then had to find a internet-service centre to get passwords to access the net.

Needles to say, I got lost and somehow ended up in the HEC directorate building. When I was beginnig to get desperate, I overcame the fear of speaking French and asked some lady where to go. She didn't know what I wanted so she led me to Britta Delhay (nice name, Britta:-), the head/chief/boss/overlord of all things CEMS here. I felt like a stupid 5 year old who lost his mommy at the swimming pool:-/ Anyway, we got things sorted out and now I'm writing this nonsensical post...

Next on my to-do list: Find a place to eat! My walnut-cake my mom made was sooo good it just ran out right now, and I don;t want to eat Horalky and cheese the rest of the weekend:-)

P.S. Oh yeah, speaking of speaking French, I have been speaking it the whole day now and seem to be getting by just fine, although I'm clearly missing a lot of vocabulary, and sometimes slip into a different language (for some unknown reason, I said danke instead of merci to a ticket controller...I'm weird)