The Bibliotheque

I have a paper to write in my 20th century lit class...due a week from Thursday. It needs to be about 5 pages long...written in French (which is hard enough). BUT I'm writing it on a book that I've never read. It's a very very hard read...even for the 3rd year French students in my class. So needless to say, I'm freaking out about it a little bit. So Lauren and I went to the university's library yesterday to look for books. We got there, and they had those little bar things that you have to walk through. Well we had NO idea how to get through it...so we watched a couple people and you obviously had to have a card to get the bars to unlock. We tried out student I.D. but that didn't work. So we went to the desk and asked for a card. After standing there for about 10 minutes, we got it worked out with the people that worked there to give us cards. We did the sign up and all that, but they wouldn't let us in. They said we had to come back the next morning and then we could get our cards and enter. I was mad and frustrated but whatever.

So this morning, Lauren and I got up early to go get our cards and check out some books. The lady gave us our new library cards and we went in. After we passed through the bars...we were lost. I had no idea where to go or how to look up books. So we each sat down at a computer on the first floor - but neither of us had any idea how to get on the computers. We sat there confused for about 5 minutes...turns out they were both broken. So we walked around the small first floor just checking out the books and trying to get a feel for the system they use. Then we walked upstairs to try to find a computer to look up books on. We found an open one on the second floor but couldn't figure out how to login. So we asked a girl next to us and she looked at my library card and said that we needed to enter the bar code on the back. She flipped over my card...no bar code. So back down stairs we went to ask what our bar code was. Why our cards were different from all the Frenchies' cards - I don't know. But the lady at the desk gave us both codes and we sat down at a computer again and logged in successfully. We started looking up the books we needed and found like two in the whole library that fit our book we are writing about. So we both get out a piece of paper to write down the numbers on the books to track them down...BUT there were no numbers. It did though, tell us how big the book was in centimeters. What the heck am I supposed to do with that?! We clicked every button on that stupid page and finally found a few numbers that might be helpful. We wrote them down and headed back up to the second floor. We looked around at the shelves...but couldn't find any numbers on those books like the ones we found online. So up to the third floor we go. BUT THERE IS NO THIRD FLOOR. First and second floor. That's it. No more books. How do you have an entire university and only have like a dozen shelves of books?!?! I swear there were probably just as many computers there as books. Therefore, I feel "library" isn't the correct name for the building. It should be called "computer lab" or something. I'm am astounded at this stupid system they have. It's the most difficult country I've ever been in. Confusing, not helpful, and so so frustrating. I have no idea how I'm going to write this paper.

I did find a couple books at a "library" across town...but you can't check books out which makes no sense. You can go there and look at them but that's it.

So basically it looks like I'm gonna have to pay a French student to write my paper for me. Haha, I'm just kidding. I would never do that. But as of now, with a little over a week left, and atleast 5 pages to write, about a book I know nothing about...it's looking like th only option.

P.S. JSTOR and other online scholarly journals are not helpful either. Ugh.