sleeping on the bus and wandering around the mall.. welcome to France!

Bonjour,

I've been in France for about four days now, and I'm having a fun time. I spend the vast majority of my time in the ELC (Europe Learning Center). It's Schlumberger's training facility. I also spend a large quantity of time on the bus. The hotels we stay at are about an hour away from the ELC, so a designated bus comes to pick us up every morning at 7:10am and leaves to take us home at 6:00pm. Class lasts from 8:30 (most days it's really 9:00) until 5:30. I spend most of the hours on the bus sleeping. Surprise of all surprises, I know. :) It can actually be a challenge if I don't have my iPod, because everyone else sleeps too and sometimes it's quite the symphony of snoring. Depending on where the lead instruments are sitting, you can be pretty overwhelmed by the melodies... if you know what I mean. Anyway, the reason we stay so far away from the ELC is because the only hotels that are big enough to handle the number of students coming through the training center are near Disneyland Paris. We're actually staying about 5 minutes away from the magical world of Disney, European style.

This week is my COM1 (Common 1) course. Most of the people will be in my Sand Control School as well, starting next week, but some of them are in other segments. This week is a breeze.. a warm, gentle breeze. We don't really do anything. I'm sitting here in class, waiting for our teacher to come and actually teach us things. I'm not complaining, it's a really nice break. Our course starting next week will be much more rigorous.

There are two American guys based in Louisiana here. One of them actually graduated from the University of Michigan in Aerospace Engineering. What a small world! Anyway, they're pretty funny. It's almost strange to hang out with Americans at this point. They're basically obsessed with getting to a monastery in Belgium where these monks make beer that is supposed to be really good. One guy bought a french cell phone so that he could call the monastery (the Beer Phone, as they call it) and reserve a case of beer to purchase. He came in one morning telling all of us about the dream he had about I think I'll go with them when they decide to make the journey.

I'm also been hanging out with a guy from Brazil. He's the one I knew about before I got here from our mutual friend in Macaé. It's fun to speak Portuguese with him. I guess there is another guy coming from Angola for our Sand Control class, so I'll be interested to see how well I can understand Angolan Portuguese.

I'm sharing a villa with a girl named Lydia. She's dutch.. like really from Holland. Her last name starts with "van," so I knew right away where she was from. Those are my west Michigan skills of dutch identification right there. She's pretty cool. She's working in Norway, so needless to say, our Schlumberger experiences have been a bit different. Mine in tropical paradise, and hers in the beautiful glaciers and mountains of the far north. It's fun to hear other people's stories about different cultures.

There's a mall by the hotel. It's really big. It's all one corridor, and it takes about 20 minutes to walk from one end to the other. It's overwhelming. The supermarket is in the mall too. It's wonderfully huge- one of the biggest I've ever seen, actually. Two stories of endless options. It was really a reverse culture shock. It's been almost six months since I was in an American supermarket, and the Brazilian grocery stores in Macae are much tinier. There is an entire aisle for yogurt, and aisle for chocolate, two aisles of cheeses, and about four aisles of wine. I was wandering around, wide-eyed and overwhelmed. Haha.. it's fun.

We've gone out to eat a lot. I'm loving the bread, cheese, and wine. Stuff is pretty expensive. Well, the wine is the cheapest thing to drink. The pub we went to the other night actually had caipirinhas.. for 8 euros!! They're normally 8 reais in Brazil. That's like $16 vs. $5. I decided to stick with wine for the night. The waitstaff around this area speaks a lot of English. I think it's because all of the Disneyland tourists. It's rather convenient. They do seem to appreciate the fact that we try to speak some French... even if we butcher the pronunciation.

Well.. I should be doing my in-class assignment, but I will send more updates later. I'm sure whatever we do this weekend will generate interesting stories :) and we all know I love good stories. :)

Au revoir,