Catching Up

In a nutshell, life's been a bit hectic here in good ol' Paris. Okay, not quite hectic, but just too fun and serene to really have the time to write blog entries all day. (It's either that, or we just also really have a ton of homework for our classes.) In any case, here are some brief highlights:

WEDNESDAY
*My econ class went to the Assembly of the Western European Union, where we heard/spoke only in English. In retrospect, it was a really cool outing.
*From the AWEU, Camille walked with me to Passy, where I happily found myself lost amidst all of the stores that are ending their sales more quickly than I'd like.
*I took the wrong direction and decided to get lost in Pasteur, and then walked to Montparnasse Bienvenüe and back.
*I continued my search for an elusive pair of jeans at La Motte Picquet Grenelle. Seriously, jeans are too long (i.e., I'm just really getting tired of being short in this country) and too expensive.
*Dinner consisted of baked pasta with cheesy bread.
*Trevor and I spent the rest of the night going through our notes and outils workbook in preparation for our first French quiz. Of course, we ended with chocolat chaud.

THURSDAY
*We had our first quiz in French class, followed by an AMAZING phonetics lesson afterwards - it's equally great when everyone continues to speak in French after just having had learned how to speak it.
*My immigration and citizenship class continued to watch a movie on Algerian immigrants now living in France. We also discussed Caché which, naturally, meant that I understood the movie by the time I left.
*Trevor and I walked along the Champs-Elysée on the way home - Trevor finally found his bag.
*Antoine cooked wonderful galettes for dinner, with Christine cooking the dessert crêpes. We also had cidre from Brittany (i.e., Bretagne). Galette round: ham, egg, cheese; salted ham? (prosciutto), and cheese; salmon; Sucre round: Nutella and banana flambé; Nutella and dark chocolate
*We ended our night once again with choc chaud.
*I also bought my tickets for spring break for less than 150$ !

FRIDAY
*My immigration and citizenship class watched Salut Cousin which was hilarious and refreshingly easy to follow.
*For the most part, Renée and Odile met up with us A-J-last-name-students at the Musée du Vin. We were thoroughly taught (in French) many of the ins and outs of wine. We also tasted two reds, two whites, and a champagne.
*Trevor cooked eggs as the base for our dinner.
*We went out for some jazz following dinner. We met up with Gerald, Jill, and Sam, at Hippocampus. It was especially cool because we were pretty much the only ones there. The theme for the evening was Oldies; they played older music from France and the States, as well as a few that made me want to be back in Louisiana. Trevor and I then went to what I think is tied as my favourite jazz club, Duc du Lombard.

We Officially Have a Sixth Course

Today was, more or less, perfect. I’m kind of tired, though, and want to jump ahead to the dinner portion of the day, so I’m really going to make every effort to make this a short post.

After deciding to go to the laundry place some other day (because we were still tired after working on our homework for about 5,5 hours last night), I got ready for my day and got to school on time. I had the best class with Elisabeth (Travaux Pratique) to date, as well as a great class with Odile (the immigration and citizenship in Francophone cinéma course). Throughout Odile’s class, she was able to help us all make sense of the movie we viewed last Friday, Touki-Bouki. I’m really enjoying the classes so far. Then, we had to stay for a group conférénce, this time focusing on French politics. Olivier, the political science professor gave the talk and was quite entertaining and informative, and the fact that I could understand everything he said was surely a positive sign. During the day, I was able to find a nice boulangerie near the school, and we were also told that we would be experiencing our first grève in Paris. A grève is, generally speaking, a strike; in Paris, this means an almost complete halt of all transport systems in Paris. The situation is anticipated to be bad enough that they’ve cancelled our classes for Thursday. It should be quite interesting to see how the city operates without such means of transport as the Métro not being in service.

Straight from class, Trevor and I walked to the Dupleix Métro stop, only to find it wasn’t working. So, we headed for the La Motte Picquet Grenelle stop and, en route to the stop, did some supermarché shopping. Finally back at home, I began preparing our dinner, which was yet another five-course meal. I’ve titled this entry as us having a sixth course, but we did only have five courses, with one of those courses being a possible sixth one in the future (hope that makes sense). EntouK (texting shortcut for En tout cas, i.e., In any case), our first course (i.e., the new one) was an apératif, followed by our first plat being a rather unconventional round for us: eggs. Trevor had a bunch of them, some scrambled, a few sunny-side; while I had cooked whites with sugared ham. We then finished off the leftover baked pasta, to which I melted Leerdammer and Gouda into an additional portion of pasta sauce, for round 3. Round 4 came in two parts: our cheese plate, alongside fresh mango slices. Finally, we had our dessert round, which included a special (and may I say, favoured) form of chocolat chaud: the 86% cocoa form. :)