Exams

After a lovely Christmas at home, Annie picked me up from my house to drive to the ferry. After making the most of UK music all the way and being searched by some butch woman we met Claire to sail back over to France.

It was so nice to be back, but the prospect of exams was not very appealing I must say. The first one was a three hour, year three translation (English > French). We got there half an hour early like we were told to, but we weren't let in until they started calling people in five minutes after the exam was meant to start, ONE BY ONE. I swear sometimes the french are so backwards. We then had to explain we were Erasmus, and guess what? Being once again true to their un-organised form, there were no seats for us! So we had to squish in where there was space. It would be me that was stuck next to the girl with BO wouldn't it? Typical. The exam wasn't too bad but I was finished after an hour and couldn't believe that we had been given three hours for ONE translation. The boy in front of me had a casual sandwich mid-exam, a girl in the first row decided to make the most noise ever trying to get her coat off and I was sat there not having a clue what the word for "broody" "betrayal" and some other obscure words were. Let's just say it wasn't long before I made the first move to leave, swiftly followed by Lou.

The second exam was year one translation which would be easier. However it was at 7.30 AM the other side of Nantes! And to get there for 7 i would have had to leave mine at 5.30. Ergh absolutely disgusting. What on earth were the university thinking when they arranged that? As usual, my sleeping pattern failed me so I got to the exam buzzing on caffeine. This exam hall looked more like what I was used to. It was about twice the size of the Exeter sports hall at exam time, just without the stupid women screaming at us all to shut up. Everyone was just so chilled and just went to their seats. We started the exam and all finished within twenty minutes as we only had to do a small translation from french into english, however we couldn't leave for an hour. I felt so bad for the woman invigilating our exam, all of us just sat there glaring at her for forty minutes because none of us had a clue what time it was as there were no clocks anywhere. I always thought I wasn't very creative, but it's amazing what I can come up with when given a few pieces of scrap paper and time to kill.

The third exam was year two translating both ways and my god it was so hard! Nothing else to say really other than I don't think I did very well!

Fourth exam- phonetics. WHAT. A. JOKE. We had to do an oral exam because we had a clash and I know as little about phonetics as I do about football (next to nothing). The guy gave me the question sheet as I sat there with Doug looking so confused. I wrote down anything and everything I could think of about how we make vowel sounds but turns out when it came to it, that only took up about 4 minutes of the fifteen minute exam. He then asked me some questions to which I just responded with the GCSE knowledge I had before staring blankly at him. He started explaining this graph thing to me but I got so distracted by trying to get out of his line of breath (gag) that i completely switched off, only snapping out of it when I was met by a cold silence. Panicking and not knowing whether he had asked me a question or not, I looked all confused and asked him to repeat what he had said. FML he repeated all ten minutes of it and then hadn't even asked me a sodding question. ahhh it was awful. How well did I do? Well put it this way- before leaving, he looked at me confused and asked "Don't you do Maths?" to which I replied "Yes but I hate physics." Not a good move there Jess eh? I was just so mind-numbingly bored by the end of it and needed to escape his smelly breath ERGGH. Yes I bloody do maths, but maths makes sense (occasionally) and it's in English! Maybe I should have revised a bit... Ah well.