This week was the first full week of classes. We're not in class very often - only 9 hours a week of class for 13 units - but doing homework takes up a lot more time than at Stanford because everything is in French. Reading textbooks in French takes a lot of time, and I'm not as comfortable skimming the readings because I'm never very confident in what I skim. The academic highlight of my week was buying books for my African Literature class. I had to go to two tiny bookstores in the Latin Quarter to get them that were completely packed with books. I couldn't locate anything on my own so I had to ask the bookkeepers for help, but they could track down those books in lightning speed. It was awesome.
The Stanford center is on the French 6th floor of a Parisian school. That means 6 (not 5) flights of stairs that I climb up and down at least once a day to get up to the Stanford mini-library up there.
Between those stairs and walking all over this city, I am going to be in great shape when I get home in January!On Wednesday, I ate lunch at what turned out to be a Vietnamese restaurant near the school with my language partner and three of his friends there. It was a lot of fun - 2 of them were from Guadalupe and the other 2 were from Martinique. I'm highly amused that my designated guide to Paris isn't actually Parisian at all. My language partner (Nicolas) is on the far right.
My favorite part of lunch was learning the French term for chopsticks: des baguettes chinois.My birthday was Friday, and Angelica also came into town for the weekend. We said farewell about two hours ago. We managed to pack in a solid day and a half of Parisian sight-seeing. The weather this weekend was gorgeous - a nice change from the grey and rain we've had all the rest of the time I've been here. I don't have time to describe all the places we went in great detail, but here are some highlights:
We hung out for a while Saturday afternoon in the Champs de Mars drinking wine and looking at the Eiffel Tower, which had been claimed for the weekend by the New Zealand rugby team...
See that giant oval thing under the Tower? That is a giant inflatable rugby ball that says "New Zealand". Why it is there is beyond me.Last night we also accidentally stumbled upon the Tuileries. We were really just trying to find a convenient metro stop when we saw all this fire and thought we should investigate. It turns out last night was La Nuit Blanche in Paris where a ton of monuments and museums stay open until 5am. One of those monuments was the Jardins des Tuileries. The gardens aren't lit because they usually close at dusk, so instead this carnival troupe brought in thousands of candles, flame torches, fire throwers, strange devices powered by fire... It was amazing. The gardens are pretty by day, but filled with these beautiful flaming displays they were surreal.
They had probably 20 fireballs like that, among other displays. They also had security guards everywhere making sure people weren't going to burn down Paris...Whenever I go to brush my teeth in my apartment I see the Eiffel Tower. It's a real treat. At night it lights up and sparkles. This morning I was up very early. (The Musee d'Orsay was free today so Angelica and I got there well before it opened to try to beat the crowds. We were no where near the front of the line anyway but it was definitely better than showing up as the doors opened.) As a result, I got to see the Eiffel Tower at sunrise, and thanks to my handy dandy camera, you can too!
Want to know more? I'm trying to send out e-mails with different stories from France, also about once a week. Shoot me an e-mail if you want to be added to that list.
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