Formation Civique Experience

Last month I was at the L'OFII Convocation and they booked my "Formation Civique" or the French Civics Training. After getting my date and location, I made a little note in my Outlook calendar to remind me of my appointment with the location being "20eme arr." and then forgot about it. So at 7pm, the night before my training, i'm on the RER on the way home and i see the reminder on my phone. The first thing that came to my mind was, "crap, i have so much work to do tomorrow!" and then continued my merry way home. By the time i got home, opened the outlook appointment and saw that i didn't write down the address, I realized all my paperwork from l'offi was at work....i had no idea what i needed to bring with me nor where the place is. I tried googling for the information, but nowhere on the websites gave me anything. No address, no what you need to bring, nothing. This meant that I had to travel an hour into the office at 7am past the west end of paris, grab the stuff, and travel to the very very eastern tip of paris. I was miserable. Later, after some investigating, I found out that these types of training are ran in various community centres that are available for booking and not in any set locations so nothing is online.

After I got the stack of paperwork I was running behind on time. I didn't get on the train until almost 8:30am and I saw on the appointment papers that I just needed to bring  a piece of ID and that was it and that I was supposed to arrive at 8:45am. There was no way I would have made it on time and I was a bit concerned that they were not going to let me in on the training and reschedule it for another day despite my efforts of waking at 6am to do this. Nevertheless, when I got there at this community centre at 9:15, the class was nowhere near to getting started, she hasn't taken the attendance nor could she even get the projector started (no power or something). It was a rather informal classroom where you have a trainer at the front with a projector and a laptop running Windows XP. Every time the slide changed, you'd be watching it in slow motion. We got started at around 9:30am: she passed out three pieces of paper for us to sign our name next to the attendance sheet while she came around to collect our appointment form and our ID.

The lessons began with the history of french, starting from the roman period that goes all the way to present and then there was french values and french laws, etc. Although the slides were in bullet points, the woman loved to talk. She did not skimp on any point at all and went deep into every bullet point. It didn't help that the smart alec next to me who thought he didnt need to be there kept interrupting the class with stupid comments or show-offy questions. The training was supposed to have ended at 5pm but because she loved talking, there were stupid interruptions, and we had really really really long breaks, the training went 30 minutes past the mark. We had a break at around 10:30am, and coffee, tea, and water were brought into the room. The break was almost 30 minutes. Lunch was even worse. She gave us 1h30m but she didn't start the class again until 1:45pm and then the same thing happened at 3:30pm when she gave us a break that lasted until almost 4pm (at this point she still had more than 20 slides left). The lady was so slow that i felt like having to sit through her class is the real training, not her content. By 4:45pm, when she realized how late she was, she would click on her computer really fast, so all the bullet points for each slide would appear all at once, which made it seem like she was trying to hurry, but then she would still go through each bullet point for 10 minutes, so her fast clicking really saved us 1 second for each slide.

Since everything was in French, I had a bit of trouble keeping my focus and i literally realized what being bored to tears was. By 3pm, both my phones completely died and i kept yawning and tearing and the girl next to me thought i was crying. Lunch made me realize that if anyone ever had to depend on the government for providing meals, this would be the type of food one would be eating. A tiny portion of food that is ethnic and meant for you to be healthy, but they'll stuff you with starch. It was some sort of tiny portion of curry chicken with a bit of carrot on the side. We were filed into a cafeteria and these boxes were waiting for us. The food didnt taste bad, but there were so much rice and very little chicken. I ate the little chicken that was in there in 2 minutes, grabbed the apple, and went wandering around the area looking for more food to eat. On my tray I still had a heap load of rice left, carrots I ended up having another meal at an Asian Traiteur (fast food). By the time I came back at 1:15, the class room was still locked and the trainer was still having her lunch (she didnt stay in the caf to eat the crappy food).

At the end of the day, while she was handing out the certificates, I found out that they had this course translated in six different languages and I don't know why I had the French version - although i don't remember them asking me what language i wanted, i wouldn't be surprised that it was probably me being stupid and picked the french version because i thought that it would be good to immerse myself with the language.

At any rate, the course was done and I got my last of the four certificate. Hopefully I'll remind myself in time to renew my Visa for next year.