A TY stint in Paris proved a real eye-opener for one Cork student 

Earlier this year, my mother was invited to work in Paris for a few months.

It was a lucky coincidence as it was my Transition Year - so I decided to tag along and live in one of the most buzzing cities in Europe. The only condition was that I had to go to the local French lycée (school).

My time spent at school in Paris was a bit of a culture shock in some ways.

I vaguely remembered hearing at school that French teachers were very strict. What I could never have foreseen was the principal bursting into the classroom on the last day of term and telling us how badly we were all doing!

One pupils was told, “you’re going to have to repeat the year again”.

During the next lunch break, the general mood among my classmates and friends seemed to be a mixture of relief that it was over and embarrassment - but I was the only one surprised by the whole thing.

All I could think about was the amount of lawsuits something like this might incur were it to have happened in Ireland, where we’re always told how lovely and special we are!

One of the first things I noticed in this new French school, to my horror, was the timetable. Every school day was a different length, but all of them were at least an hour or two longer than my school days in Ireland.

Wednesday was by far the worst, with 10 hours of school, starting at 8am and ending at 6pm with double maths.

Before you start to sympathise, though, the lunch breaks, in true French fashion, were up to two hours long.

During these lunch breaks, we would often go on the hunt for some new style of food, or some new places to eat in the amazing (and affordable, if you know where to look) food scene of Paris.

But sometimes our searches would deviate and we would end up trying to track down some supercar that was spotted at the other end of the city, or simply window-shopping. And we’d frequently return to the school in a sprint, avoiding, by mere seconds, an hour’s detention spent after school at the remedial Chinese class.

Something else I wasn’t expecting was the lack of music in my French school.

In Ireland, in my school anyway, even if you don’t actually take music class, there are frequently concerts put on by students at the end of term, attended by the whole school.

In the French school, there wasn’t even a music class.

Now, the French education system is a very precise and specialised one, and anyone musically gifted would have been sent to a conservatory, probably aged 10, but still, the lack of any type of music in the school, save one lonely, mostly unused piano in the hall, was depressing.

On the other hand, as a musician, I loved the music scene in Paris in general.

Between the amazing Palais Garnier, the fabulous Tradfest concerts the Irish Cultural Centre (CCI) organised at the start of this summer, and other things like the theatre, to which the school actually brought us because we were studying the play there, entertainment was everywhere.

French cinema is a national hobby, which during the Fête du Cinéma (annual cinema festival), I got great joy out of - the tickets were all on a big discount, and some amazing films were out.

The French government is an amazing patron of the arts, and lots of musical events are completely free to enter as a result: things like free organ concerts in churches, performances in parks, and even the national jazz orchestra (ONJ) were celebrating their 40 year anniversary with a free to enter concert, which was spectacular.

One of my favourite memories was of walking around one night, and under the warm lights of the Place Vendôme, I saw a group of tango dancers with a little speaker in the corner dancing away to themselves.

I even gave performing a go myself, and played on a bandstand in a park with some other musicians.

And during the annual 24-hour Fête de la Musique (the national music festival), I went busking on the Rue Mouffetard.

Although busking during the event is legal and encouraged, many Parisian people still see it as begging, and whilst they did watch, it was tourists who generously tipped me enough to at least buy myself an ice cream afterwards.

Of course, during the three heatwaves in May, June and July this year, everything shut down and nothing - apart from the French Tennis Open seemed to be happening entertainment-wise. One forest fire got dangerously near to Paris.

Once the temperature gets over 35C in a city like Paris, it can become impossible even to think. It was so hot that the sales season was extended because no-one was going outside to buy things.

The few months I spent in Paris this year were very memorable and enjoyable, and school was uniform-free.

I’m very glad that we in Ireland have TY, a concept which amazed lots of my friends in France.