First Week

Ugh. What a mess with my schedule and my visa and my teaching thing.

Well my schedule was all set, but then 2 of my classes were pretty much out of my level of ability to pass in a foreign language, so I've been trying to change my schedule around. Then, that sort of stemmed me to change a lot of my classes, so now I'm a little worried that I will be going into 3 or 4 classes late. Then, to make matters worse, I won't even be able to go to 2 of my classes this week, and one next week because of my medical appointments for my visa.

AND my visa. Stupid stupid visa. Well my visa is meant to expire the 1st of February, as I was originally only going to stay for a semester abroad. Well I had an appointment with the Prefecture in France to extend my visa for friday the 21st of January, yesterday. I went. Waited and did the whole thing, then when I got to the desk, with my folder and all my super organized paperwork, he told me I'd have to come back to do it. Apparently they prefer to wait til the visa has expired to do it. But no one told me that before. NO ONE! jerks. So now I have another appointment in 2 weeks. This time, though, Guillaume can't come. So if there is another strange circumstance, I'll have no one to help me understand it.

Then, along with the visa paperwork is the OFII paperwork. Who knows what that stands for. But anyways, for the OFII stuff, you have to get a medical visit if you are staying in France more than 3 months. Well I came back to a letter in my mailbox that I have my medical appointments next week and the week after. There are 3 in all. There is a notice on the bottom of the letter that says the times and dates of the appointments cannot be changed. Well they all have to land right during classes. So there is actually at least one class that I will miss the first 2 weeks of. Grrrr.

Also, I was hired at the end of last semester to teach some english classes. Well actually, last semester it was just to be a conversation partner, but this semester it is to teach them. So, we had our meeting for that last week, and it was decided that I would teach the wednesday morning classes and the other American doing this would teach the afternoon classes. Easy enough. But then, the reason I had so much trouble changing my schedule was that classes kept landing on wednesday morning. Oh it was a mess. Well thats all worked out, but everything was still resting on me getting my visa. Which was supposed to happen yesterday, but didn't. And I'm even more confused, because the other American had all the same stuff with his visa, but had no trouble getting it extended before it had expired. Harumph. :(