France Could Use a Few Tips On Organization

I've said it before, and I'm saying it again, France is not an organized country. There are seven different offices, all located at different corners of any given city who are managed by thirteen and a half civil servants who may or may not have shared information and their sole purpose is hand out a pamphlet that is not at any of the offices.
This is what the French bureaucracy is like.
I spent forty minutes standing in line to get into the information office so that I could learn that the schedule for Les Arts Plastiques was posted in the next building, not on the board in hall with the rest of the department information.
Ce comme ca, ma vie francais.
Mais c'est pas mal.
C'est l'inverse, c'est incroyable!
While in Caen, I made my peace with the french way, I decided it was afair trade: organization for relaxation, automatic smiles for genuine politeness. I like it here, despite the differences.

What to tell?

Since the last post, so many things have happened.
Last weekend, I went to Le Mont St. Michel, which was incredible. It is this old monastery on an almost-island about an hour north of Rennes. When the tide is in, the entire thing is surrounded by water, with a sort of dike buit up to alow car access, but when I was there, it was surrounded by what looked like a quarter mile of sand. The "mountain"(it is quite small for a mountain) rises up out of miles of flat farmland, circled from top to bottom with a labrynth of old buildings and cottages and shops, and on the top, rests the abbey. It's enourmous! And it loks just like a castle should, with a golden sculpture of The Archangel Micheal looking down from the point of an emerald spier. The abbey itself is quite wonderful and also very labrynth-like. The original building was built during the roman empire, small in comparison and rectangular and "roman." In the centuries that followed, the monastery continued to expand and the building was added on to, creating a sort of outward spiral of architectural history. The outermost walls are kind of "typical castle" (if there really is such a thing as a typical castle) but as one continues in, there is a shift, to the same sort of clean-lined architecture that I saw at the abbies in Caen, further on there is a shift towards the gothic stye, all grandure and gargoyles, which is amazing. And at the very center (I think, i started getting turned around) there is a gieant room with something like eight or ten roman collumns supporting the ceiling, I also feel like this might have led to some sort of crypt, but I don't know.
The town around the abbey was also quite lovely, though definitely a tourist trap. I would love to return in the off-season to be able to do a bit more exploring.

Since then, classes have started, and since I am an exchange student, I don't really register for anything for the first couple of weeks, which is a good idea, in theory, because it means that I'd have the opportunity to see if a class would or wouldn't work for me. The downside is that if I took two weeks to choose a course, I'd have missed the first two classes and started out behind. It's also a bit rough, because nobody seems to have told the professors that this is how the exchange students do things, because we are constantly being told that classes are full or that we need to be registered in the department. As it were, I'm a stress monkey, and pretty much built a set schedule a week ago. It's kind of frustrating, but I made it through.
I think that a couple of my classes will be truly enjoyable, and two are going to be incredibly difficult, simply because the professor (the same for both classes) speaks very quickly and doesn't write anything on the board. My notes are abismal. Lots of question marks lots of half-sentances. Countless errors in spelling and grammer.
Ah well, none of that matters really, becasue I think I've made friends!
Friends who aren't american!
A german girl and a spanish girl, both doing the same sort of mixing of Les Arts Plastiques and Les Arts de Spectacles that I am, both very nice, very creative, and very fun to talk to, despite the fact that none of our french is great (I feel at times, like mine is the least great, but I blame geographic distance. They each share a border, it's like cheating.)
Tonight we went to a free concert of a groupe Bretagne, which was quite wonderful. It was an accordion player, a bass guitar, the contra-bass and a drummer playing swing music and jazz. Amazing.
Music always makes me feel better about things anyway, but the fact that it was music, combined with friends made it even better.
Keep your fingers crossed, for me. Good friends are hard to come by.
Really, it was just so good to be speaking french without the option of english. At one point I accidentally spoke english and got laughed at when I'm sure my jaw dropped, and I started apologizing, but I am so happy to finally feel like I am using the language, albeit badly.
Woo, and Hurrah.
C'est tout. Je suis fatigue.
Au revoir, mes cheres.