Dance

Here I am taking several dance classes.  I have contemporary for 2 hours in school on Mondays, 1 hour ballet followed by 1 hour and a half of modern on Tuesdays, and an hour-ish of jazz on Thursday, which makes for 5 and a half hours of dance a week.  It's great being able to dance here, especially since I won't be able to in SSS- It won't fit into my timetable.  I still get to choreograph though, which is exciting.

Over all the arts here seem more liberal than Canada.  In art and dance class in school there is no real structure and I'm not really sure how marking works.  It is very contemporary   In the studio that I go to outside of school it's basically exactly the same as Canada, so I think it's just the school.

The dance studios at school are beautiful.  Here are some pictures:

They are brand new and slightly bigger than our new studios at SSS.  They also have a completely enclosed porch on one side of the studio shown at the top.  Yoga on the porch would be awesome in the summertime.  

The school rents out their studios to the conservatory dance course, which is 8 hours a week in the evenings and weekends.  Why don't we rent out our studios?  They aren't used at all on weekends.  We could use the funds for the dance program.

I'm sure there is a reason we don't rent out our dance studios.  It's probably a fire hazard.

Last weekend, I went to a discotheque with Mary-Lou and a friend of hers.  There weren't many people, which I found strange since it was Friday, but apparently Thursday is the big party day in France.  Saturday is pretty big too, but not as much as Thursday.  It was fun, the music was really loud.  Even Mary-Lou said afterwards that it was too loud.  The DJ wasn't wearing his earphones, they were just hanging around his neck.  I think he'll probably be deaf at 30.  It was good music though!  I had lots of fun, and I think I want to go to clubs in Canada when I'm old enough (and when my friends are old enough) I got sprayed with champagne at some point, so one of my dresses smells a little alcoholic, and we were knocked into by some really drunk people on more than one occasion.  It was a fun night, we got home at about 4 am.  The next day we had waffles after lunch, which were awesome.  I will own a waffle maker at some point in my life.  On Saturday night we went to a hip hop battle, which was also pretty amazing.  There were these little kids that were maybe 6 or 7 that could do all of these flips and tricks that I could never hope to do.  It was another fun (if very late) night.  On Sunday we went to a museum, which was educational.  I didn't get sprayed with champagne, but I did learn about the war of Vendee, which many people died in, including women and children which were massacred in their homes.  All in all a very good end to the week.  I'll do 2 more posts this weekend to make up for not posting last week.  I'm only really writing that there to guilt my future self into writing more.  Just so you know.

School Food

The last post on the subjects of both school and food:  The Self at school.

At lunch, students do not have the option of bringing a lunch.  They can go home, or eat at the Self which is what they call the cafeteria at my school.  You get a card that you pay for at the end of each trimester based on how many days you are at school.  They deduct field trips and days you are sick, an unpardoned absence is not deducted.

As you enter the self, you scan your card for a tray and collect utensils from bins.  You can then go get one side dish, one entree and a dessert.  You can also get two side dishes instead of an entree if it's something you don't like, say, for instance, potato puree and sausage that tastes like DEATH.  The side dish place is a salad bar, and is self serve.  The entree section is a counter where cooks serve you whatever is on the menu for that day.   There is usually more than one choice, although on Wednesdays not a lot of students eat at the self because school is over at 11 or 12, so there is usually not a lot of options.  At the dessert section there is also fresh fruit and sometimes cheese.  On the way out you can get napkins, a glass and bread.  You can also get condiments, more bread, and lettuce on the other side of the rotary door which separates the eating area from the food gathering area.  (Side note: the rotary door is not backpack friendly)  When you are done eating, you put your tray with your plates and utensils on a conveyor belt that goes back to the kitchen.  All of the dishes are ceramic, there is very little that goes in the garbage.

I'll post a picture on Monday or Tuesday.  The self is usually crowded and with all of the things you have to hold on to it's hard to take pictures.  Not that I ever remember to, I'm usually pretty hungry, they don't eat until noon or 1pm, which is normal I guess but not what I'm used to.

That's it for today.  Picture on Monday (I wrote this yesterday, I just forgot to send it)

School. Yeah!!

In this post I'm going to talk about one of the things that bothers me about Ontario.  That is Liability And Insurance Rawr.  See! it's a cool acronym that spells something  :) .  I'm mostly just saying that whenever some student decides to do something of questionable wisdom and hurts themselves doing it, it means that there is automatically one more rule put in place to prevent whatever they did.  This phenomenon is not present here.  These are some pictures of what French kids get to do in labs.

 





I think it's also because schools are underfunded, but honestly, I'm beginning to question that.  Do you know how many smartboards I've seen here?  Zero.  How many cool lab experiments have I done?  Five.  At least.  How is it that a school can be too poor to afford <insert complaint here> if it can afford to replace perfectly functional projectors with 4500$ touchscreen smartboards?  (the price is random, I don't know what model is in our school)

The labs I've done here remind me more of the labs I did on a field trip to Laurentian than the ones I've done in SSS.  These pictures are from biology class, and we did a very similar gizmo in SSS that actually came out with different results.  In this experiment we subjected chlorophyll to white light, which was then filtered by red, green and blue coloured filters.  We measured the O2 and CO2 in the air surrounding the chlorophyll as we changed filters.  We didn't control for temperature which I think may have been the reason for the difference in result between the two experiments.  It was really cool and very enjoyable.  The kids who take science here usually get 2 or 3 labs a week.  3 is if you take a SPE course, which is over and above normal courses.  I wish we could have one lab like this a month, that would be really cool.
-That's it for now, I'll post on the weekend :)