PPI Perancis 2007

Hope you had a great weekend, cuz I did! Tiring but great!

As i said on previous post, I spent my weekend in Paris to attend the assembly of PPI Perancis 2007.

So the five of us (Dika, Stephan, Bang Kadar, Pak Trides and I) left on Friday night, almost saturday morning (12am) from Toulouse train station: Matabiau.

On board we were so impatient to check out our compartment (we get to sleep on small beds) only finding that our compartment door was locked! Mister train only opened it up even after the train left. It was not all, our beds were not equiped with blankets, no pillows, no extra small boxes whereby we could find a pair of useful ear plugs, two candies to regulate morning breath :( , adn what else I couldn't remember.

After taking about 20 minutes to actually settle down complete with our blankets and yada yada, we fell asleep so save and sound.....zzzz....

We reached Paris at 7.30 am saturday morning. There was Rida who picked us up from Paris Montparnasse to bring us straight to KBRI (Indonesian Embassy) to have breakfast and start the meeting.

waiting for our compartment to be unlocked. Ya foto foto doooonk!!!

I was dead tired but excited at the same time, knowing that soon I was gonna meet a lot of people and was sure enough to eat good food until tomorrow!! Haha!

On the way to the Embassy. 7 Hours of bad sleep made no effects on our smile!

Nothing much on the meeting. We discussed many details on the rules and regulations, on voting rights, on president candidature, etc. It was a very long and tiring process to elaborate one by one. But at least now I know how it all goes and I learnt a lot about organisation.

Break time and lunch time were my favourites throughout the whole program. Besides getting to eat good Indo food, I got the chance to widen my networking. Never have I imagined meeting these people in France, and I kinda regret the fact that it was only now that I met them. It would have been lovely to bond earlier, rite!
These Indonesian scholars are spread out in the whole France, lotsa them study in La Rochelle, Lyon and Marseille and most of them are BGF receivers (Bourse du Gouvernement Francais = French Government Scholarship)

We left Paris reluctantly. Personally, I wasn't ready at all to leave, I wanted to spend more time with these people. Don't I sound clingy and desperate..... ?? I wasn't, really. It's just that I had the feeling being at home surrounded by these people, being on Indonesian "land", chatting away, laughing away in a language that I was born and very comfortable with... There was this sense of belonging that I have lost for quite some time which I was starting to get cosy with. It felt so different being a foreigner in a land so far away from home than being one in Malaysia.

p.s: Our embassy is huuugeee!!!! and guess who's our neighbour? Mr. Eiffel!!!

Posing with puppets with traditional costumes from Sumatra