Marianne Sanderson, Foreign Correspondent
This weekend was the “week-end d’intégration” where the school take you and about a hundred of your classmates on holiday for a weekend so you can get to know people – with varying levels of intimacy… We booked our places and were told to rendezvous at 8am at the University.
So, at five to eight we walked up to the school to see all of our classmates standing around in lab coats chatting away, all well and good but no-one had told us that we were meant to wear them- we stuck out like sore thumbs, but luckily with some grovelling in our best French we managed to blag some.
The morning was a series of challenges set around the centre of town, with the added challenge of collecting as much money as possible for the school societies by selling sweets and condoms to strangers as well as collecting ink pad stamps on ourselves, the more bizarre the body part the better.
The first two challenges were easy enough; a series of sports based games followed by charades, then it became more…interesting. It turns out the French’s reputation for being slightly lustful is well founded. In one game, a member of each team had a carrot tied around their waist so it dangled between their legs, then without using their hands, had to run up the stairs to the church and manoeuvre it into a bottle. The winner then got to decide which side they wanted to be in the next game, sperm or spermicide. This turned out to be British bulldog across the square but if a sperm got to the other side, he had to down a pint of a grey lumpy drink with raw egg in it, which (there’s no other way to say it) was meant to look like spunk, apparently it didn’t taste very nice either.
Then we were on to the body painting challenge, in the middle of the town square, firstly a guy from each team had to paint on a girl’s stomach, he was given the theme of ‘a butterfly’ and two minutes to complete his masterpiece. Easy enough. Then it was my turn, I had to paint on a guy’s back- simple enough right? Then they announced the theme, ‘chaleur du coeur’… everybody laughs or groans, then they notice my confused expression and explain, chaleur du coeur is …. hornyness…didn’t think I was going to get off lightly I suppose, so I painted some flames and a devil and amazingly… I won! I was so proud.
The final challenge was to make the longest line out of our clothes as possible in 30 seconds, as they blew the whistle, everybody started stripping off, then I realised why they were so keen- they all had their swimming stuff on underneath… no-one had told me this! Suddenly, with all of them stripped down to their bikinis and trunks they realised that I was stood there fully clothed and like vultures they descended… I ended up stood in the middle of the town square in a borrowed, hole-filled lab coat and my underwear… and we didn’t even win.
Add Your Thoughts