Ok, So honestly I did pretty much nothing noteworthy during these three weeks except school. The first week consisted of picking out our classes- we had to take another placement test and despite my actual trying to do mediocre they placed me in the higest level of French. Basically this means that I have to write a 3000 word memoir on a topic in daily French life- two thumbs down. I can tell you now that I've chosen French retirement/nursing homes so I've been visiting really old people and collecting stories for my paper- it's due in 2.5 weeks and I have about 400 words, great.
Ok- after week one we had to choose definitively our schedule and start attending classes. I am taking 6 hours a week of required language class- we basically talk about our memoire, take written and oral exams, and are right now in the middle of reading a novel.
I am also taking history of France- with a rather adorable professor who smiles at the most nerdy things and knows more about French history than any one person should. I've been busy cramming my head full of about a thousand people named Clovis/Charles/Louis and lots of germanic tribes and kings.
History of Art is with an amazing firery read-headed woman who must weigh 80 pounds wet but is typically artsy and knows how to make a class interesting. We are covering pretty much every time period of art ever starting with Prehistory- with megaliths (which I saw and wrote a post about) and cave paintings- and continuing on through roman, romanesqe and gothic art/architecture. We talked about some beautiful illuminated manuscripts and the architecture involved with a typical roman city. Right now we are working on churches and I am wishing I had time to visit all these great sights.
English to French Translation is probably my hardest class- we take english texts and painstakingly translate them to french, considering multiple options for every single word and discussing which would be the best choice. Our teacher is incredible though, he is french and probably knows english better than I do.
My last class is Grammar where we cover random topics that most foreigners find difficult about french- we spent the first few weeks just talking about prepositions- probably one of the most frustrating aspects of the french language, and have now moved on to the three main past tenses- making prepositions seem easy.
So I had two weeks of just going to classes and not a lot of work at the beginning. We didn't have any orgainised excursions but there were a few rather disappointing ND football watches thrown in (don't laugh Jamie) I had some great dinners with my host family, including one where we invited the neighbors and it lasted 5 hours! I'm not kidding. I honestly can't remember anything else to write home about during that time and I'd rather tell you what's going on now so I'm going to leave it at that. Sorry for getting so far behind. Hoping to be all caught up by Thursday :) Love, R.
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History of Art would be my favorite subject...if I were there.
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