Les Cours

(This picture is dinner that my roommate and I cooked) Monday - I went to get the results of my placement test. The bureaucracy of it all was soo French. You go to different rooms by last name. I was in the "M - S" room. You wait in a really long line...but it goes around a corner so nobody knows where it ends. When you finally get to the front, you get to enter a room. You THINK you've finally gotten to the end but no, inside the room is another line. But this time, everyone has a chair. Each student is called up one by one to get their class schedule and have it explained to them. As the first person in the line goes up, everyone scoots down one chair. This repeats 25 times until you get your placement. In the meantime, you listen to people try and argue their placement with the stone-faced Sorbonne lady. I got placed into Intermediate Level at the time I wanted, 10 - 12. I was fine with that.

That night, a bunch of the other kids on my program and I went to Chinatown for a cheap dinner. We wandered around, looking at all the "menus" (menu in french doesn't mean the same thing as menu in english) and finally picked a restaurant. The Chinese food was pretty good...but definitely not the same as American Chinese food. I had some chicken dish with a weird sauce...and hearing the Chinese owners speak French with a crazy Chinese accent was very funny.

Tuesday - Classes started. I went to my classroom, which is only a 20 minute walk from my house. The class was 3/4 people from Japan, Korea and China. There were 4 South American girls and 2 other Americans. The teacher was an old woman with glasses and her hair in a bun...very French. A lot of the people are older - married, with kids, or working as au pairs for French families. It was not what I was expecting at all! Class was fine...we started learning some stuff that I definitely already knew. I think I'm right on the border of Intermediate and Advanced French. I wasn't thrilled with the first day just because it was all stuff that I had learned a while ago, in high school French. The school is also pretty interesting because it's not a community at all. I'm in the Sorbonne CCFS program (Course de Civilisation Francaise de la Sorbonne) which is all international students. The campus is spread out over the 5th, 6th and 14th districts and you pretty much go to class and leave. The buildings are strictly for class. I bought my books for the class at Gibert Joseph, a major textbook store in Paris. 17 euro total, VERY different from buying American textbooks.

After buying my books, I went out to lunch with my friend Emily. As we were sitting in a sandwich shop, eating our food, the couple sitting next to us just starting making out. The tables are very close together too, mind you. In France, people just make out everywhere! Waiting in line for a movie, on the metro, at a restaurant for lunch! It's a little uncomfortable.

Wednesday - Busy day! I had class in the morning. I was a little frustrated because we read a comic strip and talked about what happened in it...and did some really easy grammer stuff. I asked my teacher if I could switch to Advanced at the end of class. She said that nobody was allowed to switch until Friday, but I had some other friends in different classes who were allowed to switch. Of course, all the Americans that wanted to switch were freaking out and harassing their teachers and calling the secretary's office. I called the people at CEA who set up everything with the Sorbonne. I spent the day speaking to them all in French. Because I think I did a good job of speaking in French and talking to them about how to switch, they put in a good word for me at the Sorbonne and around 5 pm, I got an e-mail telling me to go to a new class the next day, niveau avancée (advanced). Between 12 - 5, I had to take my phonetics test and sign up for classes. They put you into classes by the country you come from, so I'm in a phonetics class with all anglophones. The time I wanted was full but none of the other times were going to work so I convinced the woman to put me in 8:30 - 9:30 a.m., the time I wanted. It's early but I'll be able to leave after 12:00 on Fridays to travel. Then we walked through the Luxembourg Gardens to another Sorbonne building to register for our lecture classes (we being 4 other people from my program), but when we got there, they told us we were at the wrong place and it was closed now.

I met my roommate after that to look into train tickets to Nice. It would have been $270 euro because we wanted to go this weekend. We went to an SNCF boutique. SNCF is the French train company and they have travel agencies all around Paris. Then we went to Gare de Lyon, a major train station to see if we could get a Eurail Pass and use that to go to Nice, and then use the rest of it later. Nice was sold out for Eurail tickets so we decided not to go.

That night, there was a DJ named Justice playing at a club in Paris. We went to the club but they were not letting anybody in who wasn't on a list - there are a lot of very exclusive clubs in Paris and I usually don't go to them but we wanted to see this DJ. We went to another bar in the Bastille instead. The Bastille is a really fun area to go out in.

Thursday - I started class in Advanced Thursday. It started out pretty quickly with a quiz on verbs they had learned yesterday! I didn't know everything but didn't do horribly. The class moves at a brisk pace, and the teacher speaks quickly. It will definitely be hard but I think I will be able to handle it. It's a lot of complex verb tenses and literary works. The people in the class seem pretty smart. I bought new books after class and returned my old ones. I took it easy Thursday night, watching some episodes of the TV show "The Office" with Emily and going to bed on the earlier side.

Friday - Class again in the morning - it went pretty well. After class I went to a cafe to do some homework and had some hot chocolate. Then I went to the CEA office for a walking tour. Every Friday, CEA offers tours of different parts of Paris. We went to St. Eustache church, where they have the biggest organ in France that is played every Sunday at 5:30 pm for a free concert. It was gorgeous. We also went to Place Vendome (the ritziest street in Paris), and a bunch of other places on the right bank. The tour ended at Angelina's, the most famous hot chocolate place in France. There were about 10 of us and we all got hot chocolate, paid for by CEA. The hot chocolate comes with whipped cream on the side and is the richest, thickest, most delicious hot chocolate you could ever imagine. I could barely finish one cup, although one of my friends, Johnny, gulped down 3.

Friday night, Justin (my roommate) and I went out to dinner with 2 other girls, Emily and Caitlin, on Rue Moufftard. Went to a place called Le Pot de Terre. It was very, very good. We ordered le menu (16 e) which includes an appetizer, main course, and dessert. The food was unbelievable. We didn't end up getting back from dinner until around 11:45. Then a bunch of our other friends came over and we went out to a bar. We left around 2 a.m. and I got home around 6:30 a.m. It was very fun!! Of course, I slept in the next morning!

Saturday - I woke up late and got a move on around 1:00 pm (13 h en francais). I decided to go explore some more of my neighborhood, going over to the banks of the Seine and the National Library (Francois Mitterand) in the 13th. It was stunning. There are some amazing bridges and it was a very clean, modern area. I got some great pictures of the Seine and the library campus.
There, I met a friend of mine who was visiting from Seville, Allie. We went to an exhibit at the National Library about children's books in France but it was all in French and we weren't really in the mood for an exhibit. So we left and went to a bar in the student area for happy hour. We were both the Presidents of our respective fraternities/sororities and we had said that once we were done with our terms, we would go out for a drink. That didn't happen until Paris! But we just talked about the good, the bad, and the ugly from our experiences. She left to meet her friends and I went back to my apartment. I had a small dinner and then went to meet some people from University of Illinois. One kid is studying in Paris and 2 others were visiting from Barcelona. We hung out at his apartment for a while and then went to a bar in the Bastille. It was very fun to see them.

Sunday - I got up and met my friend Johnny at the Jardin de Tuileries. It was a beautiful, sunny day and tons of people were out. It was great to walk around. We walked to the Musée Rodin (the sculptor) and walked around the garden there. "The Thinker" is there, very cool statue. Rodin was pretty amazing and was inspired by some really interesting stuff. There was a lot about Freud and psychological principles, and a lot of references to Dante. After walking around for a while, we went to lunch at an Italian restaurant near Montparnasse (the 14th). It was great! I just told the waiter to bring me his favorite pasta dish, which ended up being linguine with mussels. I'm not a huge fan of mussels but the pasta was great. We then met two other girls at the Père Lachaise (it's the biggest cemetary in Paris). We went to Jim Morrison's grave, Oscar Wilde's grave, and a few other random ones along the way. The cemetary was very cool. I'm writing this now, having finalized some spring break plans and feeling very tired!


I hope everyone is well and if you haven't already, GET SKYPE SO WE CAN VIDEO CHAT!