H O W D Y from Nice!
I’ve been here for about 2 weeks now and I am still continually awestruck at how beautiful this town is. When I first got to the airport on Jan 9, there was a driver from EDHEC Business School waiting for me and my landlord met me at my apartment. The first day while I was here, I was too scared to go out and explore as it was dark and I wasn’t exactly sure how safe it would be for a non-French speaking girl to go out past dark. Now that I’ve gotten a feel for the city, I am much more comfortable and continually come back home at late hours. Nice is much more safe than I ever assumed it would be!!
These past two weeks have honestly been? a dream. EDHEC held an orientation for exchange students the day after I landed, and we learned how to set up bank accounts, get passes for public transportation and the school even took us on a tour around Nice. After spending the whole day together, the students all got very close very quickly. A few of us have already planned and spent weekends in Vienna and Italy/Monaco! Vienna was beautiful, snowy and EXTREMELY cold. The wind made the cold feel so much worse than it actually was, but the city looked so beautiful coated in a light sheet of snow. It was freezing and so so worth the weekend getaway.?
Italy and Monaco were both just as beautiful, in different ways. My roommate and I took the train the furthest it could go, to a small town in northern Italy called Ventimiglia (Vintimille in French). We spent a few hours there walking along the coast and wandering the streets before we decided that we wanted to stop at Monaco / Monte Carlo, which was a few stops away on our way back home. Monaco was…. A bit pretentious for my taste. Everything was grand and ridiculously flashy, almost to the point of being tasteless. I was more impressed with the sea and the beautiful sunset than I was with the country itself.
I am in the midst of my third week of classes. Classes are crazy different here, in that we don’t have a set schedule. Our schedule is given to us on what is basically a weekly basis, and we almost never have classes at the same time. For example, I am currently taking a strategic management class. It is once a week- the first week we met on Tuesday, last week we met on Monday and this week it’s also on a Tuesday. Also, classes are 3 hours long. Each. It kind of sucks but it’s also nice to usually only have one class a day. Another cool thing about this type of block schedule is that you have loads of days off. For last week, I had Tuesday and Thursday off, and this week I have Thursday, Friday, and next Monday! This is especially awesome for when you’re trying to plan trips!
During the past Thursday that I had off, my roommate and I trekked to?Parc du Chateau, more commonly known?Colline du Chateau, or Castle Hill. The views from the top were absolutely breathtaking and it was an amazing day. We’d had the sense to pack our lunches before, so we had a picnic in the sun at the top of the hill. The temperature was around ~13 C, which is around 55 F, but the sun and breeze made it feel absolutely amazing. After the “hike” (which wasn’t as much a hike than a walk around a park with a few flights of stairs), we decided to stroll along the port and the rocky beach on the way home. We sat on the rocks for a few minutes and enjoyed the breeze and the sound of the waves gently rolling along the coast. It’s my new happy place and I plan to visit the same spot whenever I happen to have a high workload and need to de-stress.
In terms of school, the business school is kind of disorganized. For example, during the first week of classes, all the exchange students were given the wrong schedule. We all had classes on our schedules that we didn’t sign up for, or were missing classes that we had signed up for. It was a mess. Also, attendance us mandatory. For each class we are required to scan our EDHEC ID for attendance. It’s been 2 weeks of school already but the scanners are still having problems working. Also, Blackboard (EDHEC’s eCampus) is ridiculously unorganized and some of us don’t have classes that show up- which means we don’t know our groupmates for projects that have already started, etc. For someone who is trying to focus more on school, this is kind of a pain!!
Regardless of the disorganization surrounding school, Nice is a dream come true. I will never get tired of walking around and admiring the scenery, and I can’t wait to see what the rest of the semester holds! 
