Morgan Lancaster: The Public Transportation Joke of the Day

Wednesday, September 14th, 2011

As I have already mentioned, every Wednesday is a half day meaning that we have only 5 classes instead of 9! After having such an easy schedule Tuesday, and then a half day Wednesday, I never thought I would be able to say that I love the middle of the week so much!

1st Class: I have etude... Or rather, for you non-French speaking folk (that I really am almost a part of...), STUDY HALL! They seem to have lot of those here, with their crazy like schedules. Previously, I was very much excited by the fact that I would not only get let out early on Wednesdays, but I would also get to come in late. Seriously, as far a a weekday goes, Wednesdays were becoming like a little heaven! But then, when I actually looked into riding the bus to school, I realized i would have to leave at about the same time as I would if Pascale drove me, and I would have to walk a whole bunch in the early morning. Where it would probably be could. Darn public transportation! So instead, I just went to school, unfortunately, at normal time and read for the study period.

2nd Class: Luckily I had etude to wake me up, because my next class was chemistry. And this time, I was actually scheduled to be in the class!!! But if I thought chemistry was complicated in English, well than it is absolutely mind blowing in French, because even though techinically the names of the atoms are the same, they are in the French spelling and the teacher was doing these weird things that I didn't really understand and so ya... Maybe not a class that I will exactly be passing until I can brush up a bit more on my French!

3rd Class: Yet another study period for me... I seriously don't know why I would even bother coming to school, considering my next two classes are English classes! Might as well just take the whole Wednesday off, because at least for a while I won't exactly be learning anything... But oh well, it was still fun to hang out wiht my friends during study hall and just talk and chill. Seriously, I would rather just have school end an hour of two earlier though than waste time in the middle of the day. I know it is supposed to be used as a work time, especially for 6th Year students who have the toughest and most time consuming schedule, but at least so far all the other kids have done is sit around and talk. Maybe soon though, that will change as the teachers assign more work and classes become even tougher. And if in that time you see a weird looking girl going crazy in the corner, half crying out of misunderstanding and due to the failure of all of her classes is very stressed out, well don't mind her, she's just the exchange student.

4th Class: First of two English classes. Well, at least I was able to understand everything! Even the parts when the teacher stopped and explained everything in French to the not-as-hard working kids who can't speak hardly any English (not that I'm judging, just saying that they have been taking english for quite some time and their teachers are all really good...) So yes, this class was half of a relization for me that I COULD understand some French and that I WAS actually learning it and HAVE improved since I have been here, even if sometimes it really doesn't feel like that. During this class period, which was thankfully with 6th Year which means it was a bit more advanced, the topic was family. Especially for me who is halfway around the world from hers, it was a bit of a rough subject but at least I didn't have to think twice about what it was that I was actually saying. The teacher had us break off into little groups about halfway through and discuss a specific topic about families. For my group, the topic was the advantages and disadvantages to a big family. Now I, coming from a big family and completely loving it, had a lot of really positive things to say about it. But it was crazy, the rest of the students were easily coming up with reasons why having a big family wasn't so good. Now, I think they are absolutely crazy, but it is a bit harder to explain the good parts in English, so maybe they just went the safe route and chose to speak about the disadvantages.

5th Class: Yay, the final class of the day! And it was English, in the exact same room, with the exact same teacher, but this time with the 4th class. After they all got over the fact that I was a foreigner from the U.S. (and yes, all of them thought I lived in  Washington, D.C. too...), the class was just a bit boring. But the teacher that I had was really nice about everything, and she used me a lot for different examples and as another person to kind of help out in the classroom. Well, at least I can be of help in one class because in the rest of them I am the one who is lost, needing someone to help me along. So really, I like helping out, as long as I am not put on the spot and can't come up with an answer to the teacher's question, looking really stupid because I speak English and don't even know the answer.

After school, I met up with Tedde so we could go to Liege and meet up with others. Liege was ok, good because I got to eat another one of those delicious waffles and Tedde got to try her first Belgian waffle, but the real story of the day was how much public transportation hates me. So first, Tedde and I get onto the bus that I had thought went to the Verviers Gare, just like the rest of the buses centralized in Verviers. I mean, all of them end up there eventually! And so we are just chating away, having a grand old time on the bus, when I realize that we are definitely heading AWAY from the city and the train station. I decide (because Tedde had never even ridden a bus before, so she didn't knwo what we were doing....) that it would be best if we would just get off at the next stop and try to figure out where we went wrong. We walk for a bit to look at what other bus lines run wherever the heck we ended up at, and I decide that it is the best idea for us to just wait for the same bus, but going the other way because I knew that the bus at least stopped at Place Verte, which was clsoe enough to walk to the train station. So we wait for another half hour (I think we may have even gotten on the exact same bus, but I am not sure...) and then all of a sudden, as we are looking out for Place Verte, the bus pulls up to the train station! I KNOW that the bus didn't go by there last time we were on it... So I don't really know what happened at all, and I knew we went on the same line as before, so it shoudl have been the exact same route. Maybe it just made some huge circle where the train station was at the very end, but that didn't really make sense to me either because the bus route went at least 10 minutes outside of the city, and then to make its way back but in a different spot? Ugh, public transportation confuses me....

After the confusion, we were just glad that we were at the train station. But when we went in to buy our tickets, we realized we had to wait 40 minutes for the next train. And since the trains here run almost every 30-45 minutes to Liege (depending on the time and day...), we knew that thanks to our little "adventure" we had just barely missed the train. Not such a big problem, since we just went across the street and ate some pasta at a friture, but it was still upsetting because I knew that by the time we actually got to Liege we would be sooooo late. Once we actually got there, it took us forever to catch up with the rest of the group. we hung out with them for a bit, but then Tedde wanted to explore Liege (it was one of her first times going there...), so for most of the afternoon I just showed her the sights of the city and we looked around a bit in the shops (even though I still had NO money what-so-ever due to the temporary bank card...). Then, we were ready to go home and walked back to the train station. When we got there and checked the schedule, we realized that we had just barely missed ANOTHER train by like 10 minutes, and would have to wait another 40 minutes for the next one to Verviers. We debated exploring a bit more, but Tedde was sick of walking around at that point (her shoes weren't the best for walking...), so we just hung out in the train station and played stupid games on Tedde's iPod.

When we got into Verviers, I got a text message (an SMS here...) from Pascale that she would be unable to pick me up from the train station which meant that I had to catch the bus home. I waited until Tedde's host mom showed up, and then headed off to my bus stop. And of course, after the day I had already been having, I missed my bus by 5 minutes. Like, if I would have hurried off the train and not waited with Tedde, I probably could have caught it. I had to wait another 40 minutes for the next bus, because by that time it was like 7 and there were less and less buses making their rounds. When another bus came by after like 20 minutes, that I thought ran about the same line as my bus (705), I made the excutive decision to get on it. Come to find out, it did make the same route up until this one turn about a 25 minutes walk from my house... Whoops. I was just gonna stay on the bus so I didn't look like a stupid American, but then apparently that line ran out and the bus was turning into a different line. Well, at least I think that is what the bus driver and the other kid (who knew what he was doing, at least) said. I just embarassingly got off, walked for a couple of minutes to a bus stop for my line, and waited another 25 minutes (Yep, the bus was 10 minutes late!) for my actual bus. The same bus that I would have ridden on even if I hadn't got onto the wrong bus that I thought was the right one and completely embarassed myself. And to top it all of, after my real bus dropped me off, I still had my almost mile long walk up my road to look forward to. Yep, it was definitely a frustrating day as far as public transportation went. Hopefully you all were able to understand my confusingly long list of mistakes. And if you don't, well I guess you can feel the confusion that I felt as I rode the wrong bus and missed all of my trains by minutes.