My Life Before Paris...

Sunrise: 7:44! (We rolled the clocks back this weekend)
Vocab: tuer les cochons - to kill the pigs

...is coming to a close. Tomorrow evening I head off for a long weekend in Paris with a few friends and as my second full month in Nantes comes to a close, it's about time for another retrospective. I've devoted a lot of this blog to reflections on the cultural differences I've found in France (and also on all the beautiful places I've seen, bien sûr), but I think all along I've failed to mention my various sources of comfort -- and there are plenty of those.

I've been keeping a little notebook on my person pretty much at all times just in case I need to jot down something I've noticed or add (ajouter) a word to my ever-growing vocabulary list. The other day, I was flipping through it and I found this little paragraph from early on (September 19): "Officially three months left until the end of the program. Sometimes, it seems culture shock has nothing to do with the differences and everything to do with the jarring similarities. When a little French baby touches my shoe, everything seems a bit brighter. There's something magic in French children." And I still mean it. It's almost impossible to explain this to French people because it relates so closely to my position as an outsider, but I cannot get enough of French children. Their high pitched lisping French never ceases to mesmerize and astound me. Yes, I know it's their native language, but I always find it astonishing when a little blond girl who hasn't even broken a meter in height opens her mouth to jabber away, while I still blunder my way through simple declarative sentences. It's comforting though; if they can do it, I can do it, right? And anyway, I've managed to read all of Diderot's Contes, what five-year-old can say that?!

And, hey, being an American in Nantes can sometimes have its perks. I will always resent cashiers who address me in English even when it's clear that I know how to speak French, but when the kebab guy gives me attitude, all I have to do is look across the street. What do I see? McDo. The Golden Arches are a beacon of light, the apex of the American conquest of Gallic lands. Hyperbole aside, there's nothing like a good hamburger (or as we say, 'amburger) every now and again to lift the spirits of a weary soul, and there's one place I can always go where I won't mind being addressed in English. No, it's not McDo. It's Burger House, this tiny burger joint on one of the side streets behind the big cathedral here.

I feel perfectly comfortable calling it a "burger joint" because the owner is an American expatriate who doesn't speak a lick of French. He fell in love with this Frenchwoman and I guess the rest is history. She works the counter to take care of all of his French guests while he mans the grill. The friendly yellow walls sport framed photos of beaches and American cars. The music is a constant stream of classic rock and the menu defiantly proclaims dishes like "Le VRAI Cheeseburger" (the REAL cheeseburger). Picking up on our accents right away, the owner addressed my friends and me while flipping burgers, "Where are you all from?" "All over!" we replied. New York, Ohio, Colorado, Kentucky, Maine. He was impressed and we all felt at home.

Angèle had come with us and I think she was the only one who felt a little out of her element. She doesn't eat burgers that often, and I'm not sure she'd ever had an honest to goodness American burger like the ones at Burger House, and it was funny to see her approach it with curiosity while we dug in with zest. I'm glad I've had her at my side through all this. I was thrilled to bring her to Burger House because, in some ways, I felt like I was bringing her home, like I could welcome her the way she had welcomed me.

She's a peculiar girl, Angèle, and I mean that in every sense. Granted, I'm by no means equipped to generalize about French girls, but it seems to me that Angèle is kind of a special case. First of all, she's a ham. Nothing seems to embarrass her and she will go out of her way to make her friends laugh. She likes to read trippy American poetry from the 1970s by authors that I've never heard of. She seeks out (and has a penchant for finding) the quirkiest corners of Nantes: Trentemoult, "La Maison" (a bar set up like an art deco house), Moustache Poétique (a comedic slam poetry show performed by a trio of mustachioed Parisians).

In fact, Moustache Poétique deserves its own paragraph. Apparently the theatre, TNT, hosts this group annually and they always offer a reduced admission fee to girls who are brave enough to draw on mustaches. Naturally, Angèle was prepared with stage makeup. She met me at the tram and brought me back to her little apartment (where she lives with her brother). After giving me the grand tour and mixing me a drink of diluted mint syrup, she sat me down, whipped out her brushes and said, "Ne souris pas" (don't smile). Of course I cracked up, but after a few minutes, she had managed to paint on the perfect mustache. Then we traded places and I looked her in the eye and intoned, "Ne souris pas." She cracked up, but quickly composed herself, as time was of the essence. As it turned out, we were the only girls who had been brave enough to paint on mustaches. We sat dead center, so when the group came out they saw us and cracked up, too.

After the show, we thanked the group, bought buttons from them, and convinced them to take a photo with us. When we left, instead of rushing home to "shave" (raser) we headed over to Bouffay to meet some of my friends at a bar. We got plenty of stares, but also plenty of compliments -- "Elle va bien, ta moustache!" Prancing down the street, a pair of mustachioed girls, Angèle and I took Friday-night Nantes by storm; I sensed a change in my relationship with the city. "I own this town," I thought.

Soon, Angèle and I will take Normandy by storm. She's invited me out to her family home to tuer les cochons (see above) later in November. It's exactly what it sounds like. We're going to make blood sausage. I'm worried I might be traumatized, but I also know that I've been invited out to "la vraie campagne" (the real countryside), as Angèle says. She will show me yet another piece of French life I never would have found on my own...and that most American tourists probably never get to see! I can assure you an essay of the greatest magnitude will probably develop from this experience.

Following Angèle's example, I've started to discover some of Nantes' quirks on my own. It's a small world in this city and coincidences abound. The night after Moustache Poétique, I started the day by going to an film exhibition called "Popism" at Lieu Unique (the converted LU cookie factory) and rounded out my night at the same place, meeting Angèle at the bar after a concert. While goofing off and generally embarrassing ourselves on the dance floor, we ran into two of the three mustachioed poets and spent a few minutes trying out some outrageous dance moves with them.

And that's just one example. Day to day, I see a lot of the same people. I like that. I'm beginning to understand the rhythm of this town and to march in time. There's this boy who always rides my bus. He can't be more than 16, but he is the absolute portrait of French teen angst. Long black hair, long black coat, horizontal striped shirts. I just want to buy him a big wheel of cheese and a pack of Gauloises to see if maybe he'll smile. I realize the preceding sentence maybe sounds a little creepy, but I promise it isn't. His extreme Frenchness intrigues me; that is all.

Yesterday, my university classes were canceled, so had a slow morning and then took myself out to the Musée Dobrée, which resides in a converted (small) palace. Afterward, I spent some time reading Madame Bovary in the park adjoined to the museum. This is my city now, I think, and I guess it's about time I saw another.

To conclude, two photos from our night with the Grandiloquent Moustache Poésie Club:



Angèle's friend Romain, Angèle, and me with said grandiloquent club.



Me and Angèle, the mustachioed filles

Ticket Stubs

Sunrise: 8:36am
Vocab: la foule - the crowd

This entry, which has a lot to do with art and music, comes in movements.

Stub 1: Opera Graslin

To begin at the beginning, I went to the opera on the sixth of October -- long, long ago. Another introductory remark: I am very grateful to IES for buying tickets and organizing outings to the opera. That being said, the tickets they reserved toyed with my heart in the worst way. I had signed up with a group of friends, but since I kept forgetting to add my name to the list, I ended up getting the last available ticket. I therefore knew we would not be sitting together, but upon arrival, we discovered that we were in completely separate boxes. Now, the idea of a box at the opera was a total thrill to me, so one can only imagine my chagrin when I entered my orchestra level box (!) only to discover half of the stage obscured by the balcony overhang. As it turned out, though, I was among the lucky few who could actually see all the action on stage. I missed a certain amount of the scenery, but I had a clear view of the bottom half of the stage, which was quite enough to see all of the (incredible) period costumes.

While some of my more cultivated friends left the opera house thoroughly nonplussed, I ended the night sleepy but entirely enraptured. We had gone to see Massenet's Manon based on Abbé Prévost's novel Manon Lescaut, which I actually read for a class last semester. And I thought taking a class on 17th and 18th century French would have no external validity! The opera had collapsed the complex plot into a relatively banal story of love lost and regained and ultimately lost again in the throes of consumptive death (do all operas end that way?!), but I got over that the moment the principal soprano opened her mouth. In spite of my poor view, I was totally taken in... and I snuck into the main orchestra seating area to get a better sense of the space, which was everything I had hope to find in our small opera house. While blue is, apparently, not the traditional opera house color and while the painting on the ceiling may not have been as impressive up close, the view from where I was standing transported me.

Feeling classier than ever, I reseated myself for the second act, whose penultimate mise en scene was terrifying and spectacular: a large tarnished mirror stood as the backdrop to a decadent scene of gambling and debauchery in which everyone dressed different shades of red, except for Manon and des Grieux (her lover), who wore black. It felt like hell, but in the best way. To commemorate the auspicious occasion, my friends and I all dressed as secretaries (accidentally) and took a photo on the steps at the end of the night.

Stub 2: Ryanair to Dublin (and AirCoach, too!)

As per the requests of my loving fans, I took a lot of pictures of myself in Dublin, so I'll preface this stub by saying: there are a lot of pictures, so I have made them small for spatial purposes (this is a long entry). Click to enlarge.

My Irish experience started before flight FR1987 even touched down in Dublin. Ryanair, the sketchiest airline in all of Europe, does not assign seats -- which was actually a good thing for me and my traveling companion Angela. Upon boarding the plane, we commenced our search for a pair of seats, and after a few refusals ("My husband is sitting there!") we finally espied pair of seats next to a small man most likely in his early to mid 40s.

"Personne n'est là?" I asked, addressing him in French. He shook his head no and we seated ourselves (nous nous sommes installées), only to discover shortly thereafter that our new companion was Irish, not French as we had originally suspected. After hearing us speak English, his initial attempt at contact constituted a mumbled joke about smoking on the plane. Coincidentally, just moments after his weak attempt at humor, an announcement came over the PA that the crew would be selling cigarettes that passengers could smoke on the plane and, indeed, to our astonishment, the flight attendants began walking up and down the aisles offering us "Smokeless Cigarettes." Our Irish companion was infinitely intrigued, and fueled by the ironic commentary taking place between me and Angela, he exclaimed, "A cigarette without smoke? Why, that's like a beer without alcohol, like a sandwich without..." and he couldn't finish his thought.

Moments later he ordered a beer. While waiting for his drink, our new friend started asking us more questions that we couldn't answer about the Smokeless Cigarettes, and finally stopped another flight attendant: "How do they work?" he asked. "They're just a burst of nicotine for nervous travelers," she replied. "But can you light them?" "I think so, I'm not sure." "How much are they?" "Would you like to buy a pack?" "No, no, I'm just curious." "They're 6 euro." "And how many to a pack?" "Ten, I think. Would you like to buy a pack." "No, no. This is just research. How much are they again?"

A few minutes later, the beer arrived. When given a choice between the two types available on the plane, our companion entered a state of absolute panic for about thirty seconds before saying, "Both! Both! I'll take them both." Our (apparently) tipsy friend finished both beers in the remaining hour of the flight. Toward the end, he invited us to see his band play on Monday, and we regretfully told him that we would be back in Nantes by then. He sighed, "I live in Nantes and I'm from Belfast. I don't know anyone in Dublin. I wish I had someone to invite." The last fifteen minutes of the flight passed in utter silence. After touching down, Angela and I got through immigration without a hitch and parted ways at the buses as she boarded her bus for Belfast and I mine to the heart of Dublin. I found I had to fight the urge to address people in French, which we later determined to be just a sign of my ascent to fluency -- I hope!

Dublin, it seems, is a city of nostalgia. Lynn (my oldest friend in the world) met me at the bus, and we passed the first night (Friday) catching up, and finding my other friends studying in Dublin: Erin (my first roommate at camp), Janna (one of my freshman year suitemates), and Thomas (an old friend from elementary school who moved to Dublin and is now a permanent student at Trinity). An ever growing and shrinking patchwork group, we formed quite the motley crew and tromped all over the entire city. Here is some of what they showed me:

Some very weird layout spacing is about to occur here. But, here are the first two stops from my whirlwind tour of Dublin on Saturday. To the left is the only picture I was allowed to take of the National Museum and to the right is Grafton Street, great for people watching, shopping, and generally pretending to be Irish. NB: The National Museum is chock full o' Irish art and history, including several petrified corpses or "Bog Men" -- relics of an ancient clan recently discovered in (surprise!) an Irish bog.

Above, please find evidence of the various theatrics that take place in Dublin. Also, Leprechauns exist!
















Dublin is the perfect place to be a literature nerd. To the left, I've taken a moment out of my day to read a little Proust at the James Joyce center and to the right I've cracked open my copy of Joyce's Dubliners (which I bought at a fantastic used book store) in front of the James Joyce statue.


























And what would a trip to Dublin be with out some culinary exploration? No? You're not with me on this one? Well, at any rate, to the left you will notice my extreme trepidation before diving into a plate of bangers and mash, but perhaps I'm just overwhelmed by the excitement in the pub mere hours before the start of the Ireland vs. Italy football match. To the right, note my pride after sampling my first "sip" of Guinness.
















Sunday morning, we took yet another turn around the city before my departure, stopping first at Dublin Castle (to the left) and then taking a load off at St. Stephen's Green, which wasn't far from the AirCoach stop. Throughout the weekend, I felt like I was walking on air, not cobblestones and pavement. I was relieved. In Dublin, everyone understood me: the language barrier was basically non-existent, and I passed my time with friends who know me so well that I never have to explain myself to them. It was hard to leave, but there were, nevertheless, things to look forward to in Nantes.

Stub 3: Phoenix à La Carrière

And now we're about back up to date. Phew! Last night, my friend Christiana and I went to see the band Phoenix perform at La Carrière this huge venue out in the suburbs (les banlieues). At this point, Phoenix is pretty well-known in the states, and even though they sing in English, they are, first and foremost, a French indie group. They were on their home turf last night and it was astonishing.

I'd already been to a few smaller concerts around Nantes, and I'd fallen victim to the growing fear that French people never dance at concerts. It was all the more terrifying when, at La Carrière the entire enormous crowd stood stock still throughout the entire opening set. It was Chairlift. While French indie has reached the states, some American indie still clearly has yet to capture French audiences. After Chairlift's lukewarm reception, imagine my surprise at the crowd's roar when Phoenix finally came on -- punctually, might I add. France has no time for rock star theatrics: Chairlift started 10 minutes early and Phoenix came on promptly at 9:30. Swept up in the tidal wave of people, I hardly had to do anything to feel like I was dancing. The tightly packed crowd nudged me into unison with its swaying and jumping.

I'd never had more people ask me if I was British.

Stub 4: Tickets de Repas

Two days a week, I eat lunch at the University Restaurant (Restau-U or RU, pronounced: roo). I've written a fair amount about my frustrations with the atmosphere: the crush of students all trying to squeeze in a meal during the 1 1/2 hours the place is open and the general distaste French students seem to have for anyone they don't know. Well, all that changed last week when I discovered one vital piece of information: not all of the students eating at the RU are French.

On Thursday, I started chatting with two girls in my history class, ERASMUS students from Hungary and Italy. Outgoing and friendly, Lilla and Georgia seemed thrilled to meet other international students, and speaking French with them came easy. It was also more necessary with them than with anyone else since French was our only common language. We walked out to the RU together and while we got separated in the lunch line, we implicitly promised to try to eat lunch together on Thursdays from now on.

On Friday, a group of us inadvertently surrounded a Chinese exchange student. He handled it well though, and seemed relieved to be among chatty Americans.

In closing, I don't disparage the French students: this is their home turf. They have nothing to seek out. Most French students at the University of Nantes came with with other friends of theirs from high school. It's different from the States, where people tend to go their separate ways for college. That said, it's a relief to find a welcoming international community, finally...and to discover that I am a part of it!


TICKET SOON TO BECOME A STUB: TGV to Paris for Toussaint!

Full to Bursting

Sunrise: 8:07am
Vocab: je m'en fiche - I don't care

So much has happened to me in the past week that I may have trouble cramming all of it in here. In true lit major fashion, though, I believe I can narrate this quite well in a stream of consciousness where time has collapsed entirely. I'm pleased to announce the return of photos!

Marie actually took this first photo; it's of me and Jules Verne, if you can't tell. As per usual, we spent this past Sunday seeing the sights around Nantes. This time we took advantage of the Balade des Ateliers. Atelier is the French word for "studio" and a balade is a little walk. So, to put that together, the Balade des Ateliers is kind of like a local artist scavenger hunt. (Okay, maybe it's not quite as rip-roarin' exciting as a scavenger hunt, but for some reason, a lot of what I do in France seems kind of like a scavenger hunt...but that's not a motif I plan to develop at this moment.) There's kind of a course of different sites around the city where local (and less local) artists have set up shop to display (and hopefully sell) some of their most recent work. We didn't have time for all of it, but we got through a couple stations, and at the last one we went to, I saw some of the best watercolors I think I have ever seen. I was actually considering buying one, in spite of the >300 Euro price tag, but in the end, it didn't seem prudent. I've also chosen to highlight this photo because it depicts a friendly interaction between me and a Nantais kid. No, really, it's not a stretch (tiré par les cheveux).

Last night, there was a party à la fac, a kind of mixer for international students and local students. Pretty much everyone there had also registered for a filleul(e)/marraine ou parrain. Here's the basic idea: the international students wore yellow wristbands and the local students wore blue, and once tagged, we were all supposed to mingle and ultimately link up in a blue-yellow pair. Whoever you ended up paring up with is your buddy for your stay in Nantes. My marraine (I'm the filleule) is named Angèle: she bought me a beer with strawberry syrup in it (kind of weird, I'd consider drinking it again, though) and introduced me to some of her friends. CONTACT! AT LAST! I don't know too much about her yet, but she's studying English (and she plays the ukulele!), so we really are a perfect match, I think. She also seems to genuinely want to pursue a friendship and we're going out for drinks tomorrow night.

Since I started this entry in medias res and have now fully exhausted the most recent events in my life, I will backtrack a bit in time to last weekend. On Thursday, a group from IES played some billiards and went to a crêperie for dinner. In the spirit of "full to bursting," I should mention that between all the gallettes and sweet crêpes I've been eating, I'm definitely getting a little squishy around the edges. I'm hoping salsa class starts to get aerobic, and today I actually considered doing some clandestine pilates in my room from time to time. Meanwhile, so many French ladies are just as skinny as can be. I. do. not. understand. In any case, when this waiter asked me what I wanted for dessert, how could I say, "nothing?" (As you can see, he's a very insistent-looking man.) Oh, and did I mention how good I am at pool?


















As you can see, I'm toying with the photo layout a bit, also, I wanted to save space for the photos that are really worth keeping big. In other words, the photos from Mont Saint Michel and Saint Malo. The French Romantic author Chateaubriand, incidentally, is from the walled city/town of Saint Malo. (Yesterday, I read René for my Literary History class. I will be reading approximately 500 novels for that class.) I won't say too much because I think these photos pretty much speak for themselves. Briefly: Mont Saint Michel is an isthmus (a word I just recently learned) off the coast of the border between Brittany and Normandy. Surrounded by clay and perilous quicksand (!?) at low tide, Mont Saint Michel is, at first, a series of narrow, sloping cobble-stone streets full of these seemingly ubiquitous touristy storefronts stuck inside ancient hovels. Eventually, the path gives way to the abbey. I present these photos in chronological order so you can get a sense of the ethos of the place, so you can come along on my journey, and so I won't have to work too hard to describe everything I saw and felt.


It was love at first sight(ing).


Mortal peril!




A view on the way up. (So many views!)


Entry! At last!


A view from the top that actually made me want to take photos in sepia.

And now, we enter the abbey...













I feel bad for Saint Malo, since the Mont is a pretty tough act to follow. Here are two Saint Malo photos anyway:


Walkin' the ramparts.





And by two, I clearly meant three.

The W: A Rambling Study of Photoless Blogging

Sunrise Today:
7:57am

French Vocabulary Lesson:
claquettes - flip flops
acariâtre - cantaknerous

You'll notice a few things about this blog post. First: the brief account of practical knowledge prefacing the body of this literary chef d'œuvre. I have my reasons. To explain the second item first (because I'm all about digressions and convolutedness), I've been keeping a running list of the new words I'm learning. I haven't recorded all of them, but I have made a point of noting words that I find particularly useful and/or amusing. (Case in point: above.) The former item, the sunrise time, relates to a brief anecdote from the week:

My courses at the University of Nantes started this week, and my very first class (The Literary History of the 19th Century) commenced at 8:00am on Tuesday morning. Factoring in the 15 minute walk to the tram, the amount of time I would spend waiting for and riding the tram, the walk to the building, and the inevitable time I would spend being lost, I decided to leave myself a generous hour to get from home to class. In other words, I planned to leave at 7:00am. Much to my chagrin, the sky was absolutely pitch black when my alarm sounded at 6:00am. Figuring the sun would start to rise as I slouched through the necessary morning ablutions, I hauled myself out of bed and into the bathroom. Half an hour passed and I was dressed. Fifteen minutes later I had eaten breakfast (I've been doing that here). That adds up to forty five minutes, and even in the time it took me to calculate that sum, the sky remained decidedly, stubbornly dark.

I checked the weather: no rain. I checked my email: nothing doing. I read the newspaper online: that was depressing. Finally, I googled "global sunrise times" and discovered that the sun did not plan to grace Nantes with its presence until nearly 8:00am. So, at 7:10, I plunged into the night of morning. While the walk to the tram doesn't take me down any sketchy alleyways or narrow streets, it's long, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little afraid. Although I generally feel quite safe here, there are times when I am rudely reminded that I am a woman traveling in a foreign country. Sometimes, the young men here think it's okay to slink up to me while I'm staring at the ground waiting for the tram in the evening and shove their faces into my line of vision, forcing me into the eye-contact I've been told to avoid. It's no real threat, but it's a display of power -- no, machismo -- that I find quite off-putting. But, I digress.

Fortunately, though the sky could have been a 2:00am sky, the streets were what anyone might expect of pre-rush-hour morning streets. Businesspeople, uniformed school children, bedraggled university students. Soon, I was reveling in the crisp air of an autumn morning in Nantes. Crammed into my tram car with all the other morning commuters, I watched the sunrise. The sky turned purple, then pink, and was still working on blue by the time I found the amphitheater for my class. Moral of the story: the sun rises very late here. I find this both disturbing and amusing. I would like to document the gradual decrease of daylight hours here in Nantes, and I'd like to take you along for the ride -- hence the sunrise report.

In the spirit of digressions and disorderliness (and postmodernism), before I continue with my linear narrative, I'll briefly point out (and explain) another thing you might notice (or have noticed) about this entry (aside from my excessive use of parentheses...but that's not too out of the ordinary, anyway, is it?). There are no photos. I have no new photos to show you right now. Last Saturday night, I had a serious case of "The Plunge," as depicted in a graphical representation of "The W" earlier in this blog. Therefore, I did not go out with my friends or make plans with them for Sunday (no Planetarium, in the end). As much as I love it here, and as happy as I am with my friends and with Marie, sometimes a girl's just gotta cry.

Things took a turn for the better on Sunday, which I spent with Marie. I hope that these Sundays we spend together continue. This past Sunday, we went to two exhibitions in Nantes: a photo exhibit at Lieu Unique -- or LU, that's right the original Lefevre-Utile, LU cookie factory that's been converted into a bar/art space. Nantes: home to the industrial chic avant garde. Among the displays, there was an incredibly disturbing display on domestic slavery and violence, but I also found the artistic activism of the whole piece to be incredibly refreshing. Each panel comprised a simple photo of the façade of a building on one side, and one woman's story of abuse on the other. It made me feel how easily a façade of normalcy can conceal abuse and how sometimes closed doors are all it takes to deter prying eyes. It was a bit much for me in my fragile, W-ridden emotional state, but I'm glad I saw it. LU also apparently hosts artists, and we stopped by the "studio" where the current artist-in-residence had been working on these enormous wall-sized sketches of a young boy. Really stunning.

After that, we went to Scopitone, a very new age exhibit in one of the hangars over on Ile de Nantes (not far from the Elephant). Most of the displays at Scopitone incorporated multimedia and had some interactive component. I won't even attempt to describe any of what I saw there, but you can check out the website if you're curious. (If you can't tell, I just figured out how to add hyperlinks to blog posts.)

Marie's nephew Arnault and his friend Sarah actually came with us, and that just added to the fun, since they're much closer to my age -- mid-20s. It was also totally refreshing to spend the day speaking French with real French people. I haven't done enough of that yet since I'm kind of scared of the university students, but I can tell I'm getting better. There's still a lot of practical vocabulary that I'm lacking, but I'm learning, and the people I speak to are patient enough to teach me -- and hey, Conversation Club started this week! It's about half IES students and half local French students; we break off into smaller groups, each with a discussion-leader (animateur) and spend half the time speaking in French and half in English. We met some really nice French people this week, and every time someone actually understands what I'm saying, I feel more confident in my speaking ability, which just makes me giddy to practice some more. For once, a productive cycle.

Now, we return to my classes -- but there's a logical segue! I still haven't gotten up the courage to strike up a conversation with any university students. On the bright side, I understood about 80% of what my professors said this week, and I'd say that's a pretty respectable portion for the first week of class. Two of my classes (Literary History and African History) are lecture (or CM) classes in huge amphitheaters. In the spirit of cultural relativism, I've tried not to let my small liberal arts school sensibilities get in the way. The professors are very smart and with each passing year I stand more in awe of educators who engage a room with their verbal essay-writing. I miss having professors who care about my opinions, but for the time being I'm just as happy to keep them to myself in a packed amphitheater. In fact, my smaller class (a TD) is by far the most intimidating. The professor allows the students to speak up and expects each of us to deliver an oral presentation at some point this semester... I don't want to talk about it. At any rate, we're reading 18th Century erotic literature and philosophy, and the salacious reading material is engaging and easy enough to understand, so I'm content. Incidentally, textbooks are so much cheaper in France!

I stand both in awe and horror at how much I have managed to write of the mundane facts of my existence (albeit, a French existence). I will conclude by informing you that I had my first Salsa class today (my ju-jitsu alternative) and I'm making progress, both dance-floor-deftness-wise and French-friend-making-wise.

Tomorrow, I will again wake up before sunrise for an IES excursion to Mont Saint Michel and Saint Malo, just north of here. Photographic evidence of history and hijinks to come.

To my devoted readers who have gotten this far, I thank you and wish you the bonne-est of bonne nuits!