Academic Year officially started

It’s Saturday, late afternoon but we just finished classes (17.00)… I think that’s what it means that life in Natolin goes at its own pace, you don’t even notice it’s weekend!

This week was very busy, and I have a strange suspicion that it will continue to be like that…

October 1st, we had an official inauguration of the academic year. It was a bizarre feeling, since we’ve been here for over a month now… it reminded us a little of the first day, when we had the “unofficial” inauguration and the director of our studies made us publicly present ourselves! (in the traditional CoE fashion, that is by switching from English to French in mid-sentence).

So, the inauguration on Wednesday was supposed to start at 19.00 and the main problem we had throughout the day was the question of what to wear. We all have a rather limited choice of clothing here, especially those that came from afar, but we the dress code was very formal.
There was supposed to be a dinner after the official part of the inauguration and therefore we did not have our usual dinner in the canteen at 17.45… which meant, that when we got to the ceremony most of us were already hungry…
Our honorary guest was Hans-Gert Pottering. He arrived late, and the delay was about 40 minutes. Our college choir sang Gaudaemus and the European anthem (it was really impressive, the choir had started only last month!). After a brief speech by J. Saryusz-Wolski, the Rector gave a long speech about Marcus Aurelius, how generally speaking, we should be inspired by him. I think everyone assumed a stoic attitude at this point, suffering from a growing hunger. But then came the main guest and his speech… it was about an hour long and covered all challenges that the EU now faces… It was almost 10 pm by now and I was afraid I would faint because of hunger…

When it eventually ended we headed to the Stables building for the buffet dinner. The Campus was very nicely lit, and there was an tent extention behind the Stables, so it all looked very nice! The buffet consisted of traditional Polish food, which was not a very good news for me, because I don’t like heavy food… there was lots of mushrooms, wild boar, pierogi, cabbage, various cheeses and meat, but the line around the table somehow wasn’t moving…. it was quite frustruting, and I ended up eating lots and lots of cheese before eventually grabbing some pierogi … the dessert section was nice, though, with lots of fruits.

We then also had a speech by another honorary guest, Aleksandar Milinkiewicz, main opposition leader in Belarus, who made a moving speech. We have two students from Belarus this year and a Belarus Working Group at the Campus, and they had a separate meeting the following day. 

On Thursday we had an interesting presentation. In view of our upcoming trip to Turkey and our preparations, we invited two Turkish women, who spoke about the problem of the headscarf ban in Turkey. The story was interesting as we would not be able to hear this viewpoint at the Turkish university to which we are going.

This week were also had a course on Central Europe in the EU with G. Mink, which was actually a history of Poland since 1945. I guess certain concepts must be hard to understand for the rest of the people here, because even though I have studied it before I still don’t understand everything. We also watched a film about the situation of Poland in 2005, and we Poles almost had a heart attack seeing farmers with a horse plow! Today on the other hand, we had a 5-hour economics marathon! European Economic Integration is suprisingly interesting, although after 5 hours I could hardly understand what we were talking about! That’s Natolin life…

 

Uff…

It’s been a while since my last post, but also quite a lot has been happening in the forest lately! We suddenly found ourselves with quite an amount of reading to do, as we are now also confronted with three courses: still the gigantic Systeme Institutionnel…, L’Europe Centrale dans l’UE (avec prof. Georges Mink et prof. Wnuk-Lipinski) and we are about to start European Economic Integration with Prof. Guerreri. I try to keep up to date with all the readings, but it’s not easy, because there is always something going on at the campus, some subcommittee meeting, some other meeting, some workshop or a party in the evening, so it’s difficult to focus on studying and the weather suddenly got beautiful again!

I’m trying to read Vie et Mort du Bloc Sovietique, but the book is quite difficult to read. First of all, it’s in French (:D) and second of all, it assumes quite a knowledge on the part of the reader… I know this history quite well but I’m struggling nonetheless.

We also started foreign language courses… apart from my French, which I need to attend I also ended up in C1 German. It took me about half a hour to switch from the French mode back to German. There are only 3 of us in this class, but I’m not sure yet how long I’ll be able to go on for

We are also preparing our presentations for the study trip to Turkey (or at least we have meetings about preparing our presentations on Turkey). We’re going in about one week! I’m in the first group, that goes on Oct 12th. The second group leaves the following days. We stay 8 days in two hotels near the city center. It sounds exciting!
We are now also supposed to start thinking about our choice of majors and possible thesis topics. Times goes very quickly!

But there is a good news from a different courtyard – last Friday I officially became a Master in American Culture Studies! It’s such a relief! I’m officially Master Squared I thus won all the bets made in elementary school, that I would in fact write a thesis on Gone With the Wind. Its title was “Social Context of David O. Selznick’s Gone with the Wind: Morality, Race Relations and Regionalism in American Society of the 1930s”. It was generally quite fun to write (chapter number one largely about my favorites, Vivien and Olivier) but the process really dragged… now it’s finished

I should now be in my salsa class, which is taking place floor below in our bar, but I didn’t feel like going. The enthusiasm seems to be dropping slowly :/ But overall, the first month was great!  

 PS. Peut-etre un jour je vais ecrire en francais, mais pas encore

 

Sweet days of boredom

Finally, some action today!
We had our Systeme Institutionnel… tutorial in the morning and placement tests for languages. I made it somehow to Oberstufe in German, even though I had to cope with a sudden urge to speak in my broken French! I think my brain is already overheating.

We are also in the middle of an electoral campaign for student reps, it’s interesting and we have some pressing issues (quality of toilet paper ) Elections take place on Friday. 

I also filled out my application for a Turkish visa, as we are going to Istambul for our study trip at the beginning of October. We are split into 4 thematic groups (I’m in “Perceptions of the EU in Turkey”; others are: “Turkish identity”, “Turkish civil society” and “Turkish foreign policy”). I can’t wait and I hope it’s going to be warmer in Turkey than it is here now.

Finally I managed to take some photos of my room. It’s nice and big, bigger than average rooms on the first two floors (rooms in the loft are much, much bigger though). It’s quite colorful and I have a fridge, a TV, radio and a DVD player

Entrance to my room; GWTW poster hangs on the bathroom door :) (we can’t put anything on the walls…)

View from my window

 

Natolin campus

So it has been three weeks… because of the fact that we are located in a big park, it still feels like vacation, although yesterday temperature dropped drastically and fall has arrived. The campus is very different from the one in Bruges, until now we’ve had squirrels, deers and millions of mosquitoes! At the same time my window opens into a busy Warsaw street that leads to 24h Tesco, which implies that there is civilization behind the College walls!

This week is suprisingly free, we don’t have many classes (I will finally have some time to take pictures). So far, we finished two courses and are following a third and took one non compulsory exam. Academically and socially the last weeks have been quite intensive though. 

There are about 80 of us at the campus, with big groups of Poles, Italians, French and Spanish. We live in two residences, Wlodkowic and Retinger. We were assigned rooms by drawing lots. I very much wanted to be in the newer one (Retinger) and I got it, the honorable room number 1  My room is bigger than other rooms on my floor, but as I’ve already discovered, it has some disadvantages. The older residence looks I think even a bit nicer, because the dominant color in the halls and in the rooms is my favorite green. My residence is very modern, houses not only students but also lecture rooms (which means I often don’t even have to go out to go classes) and our student-run bar (already operational and proudly named European Central Bar.)  I can’t complain only perhaps that room number 1 is a bit noisy   

We have a restaurant, with three meals a day: breakfast (which is served very early, considering our current schedule…) from 8.15 to 9.00, lunch (12.30-14.00) and dinner (again– too early) 17.45-19.00. After that you’re either hungry or you go to Tesco. But I must say, the food at the restaurant is suprisingly good! I’m an experienced canteen user and I’m not easily satisfied, but so far it has been good. It’s million times better than the European Commission canteen, and (based on the one time I had lunch there), better than the Bruges canteen  

Our courses for this semester are the following:

Systeme Institutionnel et politiques de l”UE
L’histoire de l’integration europeenne
European Economic Integration
EU legal order
L’Europe Centrale dans l’Union europeenne

The first course has been underway since the first week, first with lectures and now with tutorials led by academic assistants. The second course (l’histoire…) took place two weeks ago and was very interesting. Although the topic was not new to me, because I’d studied EU history many times before, it was a course in French so for me the most valuable thing from this course was the French vocabulary Generally, considering my level of French, I was surprised by how well I understood everything.

This past week we had an introductory course on economics and today we took a final test, which was ok. In general, despite some panic showing through at the campus, I’m still very relaxed about the workload (although it’s true that there is little spare time when we have normal classes). Apart from regular courses, I take French classes and I’m about to start German classes (my language classes end at 21.40!!) We also have a Cinema committee, a sports committee, a journalism committee etc.

Next week I start my intensive seminar (that is if I have been accepted, so far I signed up) on cultural representations of the Balkans. Today I read a very interesting book on the subject “Cafe Europa” by Slavenka Drakulic. I should be reading other more urgent stuff, but it’s nice to read about something other than the EU. After all, I’m also a graduate of culture studies, so I’m especially torn  

That’s a rather long introduction, but I had to do a recap I’ll try not to ramble on so much in the future!

 

Hello world!

Following in the footsteps of my friend from Bruges, I decided to start my own blog to describe my College of Europe experience in the second campus, in Natolin (Warsaw).

We started our academic year on 25th August, so it has been already 3 weeks! As we have already noticed here at the College, days drag but time flies! I’ll soon add pictures and my impressions from the life “in the woods”

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