Been quite a week

So, last week we were in the South of France with work. Such a hard life....
Basically we went to Toulouse to visit Meteo France, the French Met service (that's meteorology, not Metropolitan), as part of an exchange system of students. We had seen the French students at Exeter, but they didn't really seem to have much laid on for them as we had in France.
This is another one of those occasions where I wish I knew more of a foreign language, I have a small amount of French, just enough not to starve and be able to navigate a bus route, that sort of thing, but one of our group, E, is fluent. She was a god send in this case. Having said that the French all spoke English that was damn near perfect anyway. Really put us to shame.
Main points that came across to me were that the French generally put much more value on scientists and engineers, whereas in this country (UK) we seem to be embarrassed by anyone that is good at something mentally challenging. Footballers and the like are loved but engineers and scientists are seen as that most terrible of things, "too clever by half." The other thing, and more important really, was that the French train to be able to fit in anywhere in their establishment, be it research, forecasting, IT or HR, and the choice of the job they get is dependent on their grades in the academic work they produce while training. If there are 15 in the class, the are rated on results and a list of 15 positions is prepared. The best student gets to choose their preference, then the next down and so on. If you didn't do very well, you get what is left. As a result the students all seemed VERY focused on their work.
Now I'm not saying that this is a bad thing, indeed it's good for the grades, but we have a belief in the values of "work hard, play hard". In this way the work MUST be done to an acceptable standard, but once that is done it's time to relax and have fun. One of the nights coincided with the Arsenal game so some of the guys watched the game with some of the French while the rest of us had a really good meal (and bloody expensive) in Toulouse. They mentioned to us afterwards that the locals were quite quiet and restrained. The next day was the soiree held for us, which as might be imagined, turned into a fairly drunken affair. Nothing TOO embarrassing (except my dancing) but hey, play hard is important.

Did feel like a youth club in places though. Darts, table football, spontaneous line dancing (I'm not kidding here) and later more of a dancy feel. Loved it! Except the line dancing, but they enjoyed it and the number of students there was so small that I guess they know what they like and can enjoy it, so good for them.
Still think they focus too much on broadscale and vorticity though, but that's just my personal view.
Jim