Posts Tagged Switzerland
Punctuating the wake-eat-sleep
Welcome back. Apparently there have been a fair few visitors, despite my relative absence whilst I’ve been falling into much Swissness. Apologies. I’ve been baking biscuits.
Chocolate to buy, clothes to degrime, biscuits to bake, apartment to clean, and case to pack. I left suburbia for another bit of suburbia it seems. South Manchester goodbye, hello Suisse-Romande. That’s just today. The last day before I leave. Fingers crossed Geneva airport won’t fuck up again (snow? Let’s not work. Snow in other Swiss airports? Do we need to ask?)
Books about crazy people punctuate suburban routine: Plath’s The Bell Jar (finally, swallowed in two days whole, after rejecting it when I gave it a go in the college library), Doris Lessing, Sartre, plus grammaire grammaire und grammatik.
Let’s see how it’s going…
Swiss German: hopeless, utterly hopeless, I can just about stammer ‘Gruessi’
German: ignore my French accent (why I speak German with a French accent I’m not sure) and it’s fine. Ignore the lack of grammar subjunctive and all that. But I can understand, read and write, which ought to get some cheer.
French: fluent for listening, responding and reading. Written work needs some help for expression and tricky grammar, otherwise fine. (And I thought French grammar was easy. Deluded I was. It’s easy to-start-with.)
English: reasonable, minus the accent which seems to appear when I speak to foreign-speakers in English. With English people, it’s cent pourcent there, am happy to say.
As in the bag, where to now?
A levels over, my As are in the bag plus a jazzy distinction for an AEA in English - but what happens now?
I did the university applications last year, had the places, and rejected them. Surely there’s got to be more than this ‘education’ of UK university which would have my arse sunk in £30,000 debt by the time three years are over? (So I asked myself zillion times over, and still applied. Still did drawn-out entrance exams and pretended to my parents I was studying more than perhaps I was in reality…)
But then there’s the leaguetables harping on about the value of our university and the ease that the majority of my friends, whilst not still in Manchester, are at least still in the UK. Of course, there’s also the comfort that university delays work - full-time, ‘proper’ work, at least, even if scrounging around for badly-paid evening shifts isn’t far out of the question.
Now I get time out. Proper, not just a week at Easter shoved in (whilst away on an exchange doing double the work or doing revision anyway.) I get proper time out. To digest, relax, read and learn for myself, write essays and gander around for opportunities of what I might want to do.
I’m also in Switzerland, the French-speaking bit. Mountains, blue skies and clean it may be, Manchester it certainly isn’t. One thing in particular gets a gold star though - you can fall asleep without feeling like you’re going to be burgled in the night, heck, you could even go all out and not lock the doors if you really wanted to push Swiss trust and see where it takes you.
Tomorrow is wall-painting and French lessons (private, one to one, Katy to Katy plus exercise book), or writing: poems, novel, essay for comp or some good new pitches. Go get me for saying good.