Blog Revived

Well here it is, my first post on this blog since arriving in Belgium almost three months ago. It doesn't surprise me much really that I've not kept up with it, I'm much more a fan of reading than writing, and as much as I've wanted to write long posts about all the amazing stuff I'm doing here it's just always seemed so daunting as there's so much to say.

I don't want to abandon this project though, not at all, but rather I'm just going to start following others' examples and just keep it simple with pictures and captions, and then when I write an update home I'll just post the e-mail or if something really important happens and I want to talk about it then I'll do that too. I've already got one such e-mail to post, and having just recently returned from Paris I've got another one to write this weekend, and I've got no shortage of photos to post either.

As far as my desire to make this something of a resource for future exchange students I don't know, I can offer some general stuff but there's really no hard and fast set of guidelines for being an exchange student as I learned very quickly after arriving here. Having seen what it was like for a very linguistically and culturally mixed group of students spread out over a large area as the exchange students in my district in Canada were, I can say that the life here, though in essence the same life, has quite a lot of differences. It's easy to imagine what happens: a large group of anglophones, Spanish speakers, Portugese speakers, and a few others, concentrated in a small area where drinking to excess or buying marijuana is as easy as catching a bus or train into the city, in an archaic school system that engenders nothing but contempt (for North American's anyways, I'm sure some kids are finding it to be a nice break), with a lot of trips and activities organized in between, it's no wonder that the exchange students here quickly form their own microcosmic society, complete with a class system and the universally spoken language (English of course) within the country they're living in and it becomes virtually unneccessary for them to learn the language or culture beyond the extent of knowing which beers are the best and how to order them.

I may sound a bit embittered, but if I am it's only because of the love-hate relationship I have with the exchange program here, I mean, we do so much and it's so well organized, but it has those fundamental flaws which annoy someone like me who tends to see a year in a Europe for the great oppotunity for learning and growth that it is as opposed to the opportunity for partying it is (that is not to say that I don't have fun from time to time, but not every week and certainly never doing anything as stupid as using drugs which could easily get me sent home).

The language thing gets to me especially I think, I mean I studied French for years and as such came with a strong base (91% on the provincial, I still have to post the rest of the marks, it just gets better!!!) with which I've been able to make what I consider to be good progress, but I still can't help wondering what it would be like or how much I could have progressed if everything I did here promoted the immersion process. In theory, I could live the whole year here on no more French than can be found in a little phrase book, being that the majority of people here understand or speak English, and that annoys me, I don't want to be seen as some fat ignorant American tourist here, I want to have to adapt myself 100% to the language and culture as the students in my district last year did, hell you could even say I'm jealous of them.

The school system I would have to say, at least for now, is number two. Now let me first get it out of the way that I'm not someone who routinely goes about criticizing something so intricate and difficult to manage as a school system, and I don't like to say one idea is better than another (it usually results in me getting my head bitten off), but for the sake of progress isn't it sometimes better to do that? Otherwise wouldn't we still be living with medieval living standards mixed with current living standards because we would be too afraid to stand up to people who defend the medieval standards as simply being "different, not better or worse, different."? Okay, so it's a weird example but what I'm really getting at here are the things the students are forced to endure (10 hour school days for example), it must be awful enough being a student here, having practically no choices except how many hours of everything they want to take, and there is a minimum for EVERY subject, yes, the kids take EVERY subject, and the only way for a student to get out of a subject is to take more hours of a harder subject. For the exchange students though I think it really isn't a place where they're ever excited to go because unlike in North America where they are on a semester system (which I can't tell you how much I prefer, it's simply second to none I'm sorry) and are able to take courses like art, drama, music, cooking, or if they want, harder courses (the good thing being here they have the choice), exchange students are simply thrust into the full on schedule of their peers.

Now you my look back at this point and say something along the lines of, "Andrew, you're so dumb, first you say you want real immersion then you say you want a watered down school system, what kind of a whimp are you?" and while you may be right to say it, I'm simply looking at it as an issue where instead of being able to take a light schedule where one can concentrate on learning language and making friends, we are instead forced to worry about math and science and unbearable hours of French (French being of course as we study English)and school becomes just an annoying thing we are forced to do during the day so we can see our exchange student friends at night.

Really I could go on for quite some time about the things that annoy me at school, there's a lot, but I chose to tell you about those things because I think it's an important issue for exchange students, like the language, it's just very unbalanced all over the world (I hope I didn't just sound like Jack Layton, I hate that man so much and I've got a great analogy for him to consider, which I'll write out later), and while I know that we the students are the one's who must adapt ourselves I can't help but think that this is one area where I've truely been fortunate to come from a great system which I could share with the people here (that is afterall my job, not just to take but also to give and share).

Enough about that though, that's my bitching out of the way, now back to the future of this blog. I intend to get caught right up today, which is going to mean posting a tonne of pictures, the e-mail I wrote home, plus another e-mail I still have to write about my trip to Paris. When it's all done though I'll have a good base to start inmplementing my new plan for keeping this blog current, as I outlined in the second paragraph. As far as this post goes I've said just about all I want to say, except for a couple things I'm going to write about quickly at the ned here but they're unrelated, if you've gotten this far then read on if you want to, otherwise hopefully the rest of the stuff, or at least part of it is up by now for your viewing and reading pleasure. So thank you very much for bearing with me.

So, I just wanted to quickly tell you about my provincial marks, you already know I got 91% on the French provincial, next is my highest mark, 99% on the English provincial (don't ask me how, I seriously thought those were some of the crappiest essays I ever wrote), and finally my most important mark, 98% on the chemistry 12 provincial, which, while not being as hard as math, was still extremely difficult but having learned my lesson from January I really took the time to make sure I was better prepared for the chem exam and it payed off. So for next year comes the problem, I can't start university right away, I simply don't have the courses and having taken a year off from the courses I do have they're liable to not be very fresh in my mind, so basically what I have to do is decide whether to do one semester of upgrading then work to save for university while still missing one course, or, upgrade for a full school year and then work in the summer before starting university with all the courses I could need. Beyond that there's the decision of whether to do my upgrading at the high school for free (a little embarrassing to be taking classes with kids two years younger than you as you approach 20 years of age) or at the college for a minor cost (which I'm still not entirely sure I can do). One thing is for certain though, come September, 2008, I will be starting my bachelor's program, and contrary to my original plans to study science, I have decided that it is in my best interest as well as better suited to the kind of career I want to pursue engineering instead of simply chemistry. The reasons became quite obvious to me after having a crisis due to the fact that I still hadn't picked a career that I wanted my studies to lead to, then after some research I realized that the thing I had in mind, a career where I would use math and science to solve problems and complete projects, is exactly what being a professional engineer entails, and so I think I've finally made a decision that's going to lead me to the kind of career I've always dreamed of but never been able quite put my finger on.

Well I hope you enjoy the blog in it's new spleador, it's taken a lot of energy and frustration over difficulties with the Enlgish language to revive it. I look forward to seeing everyone soon. -Andrew