I've made it through an actual full week of all classes. This means that the history department is in gear, I've dropped the class on Palestine fully, and I signed a paper with Julie, our academic dean/registrar.
I dropped the class on Les Miserables mostly because I don't want to read a book that heavy and I also don't want to start it in the middle (the class starts in the fourth "book" of the first "part"). Also, Danielle doesn't want me to be sad for the whole semester, and if there's a class that's going to make me sad, it's going to be the one where I'll be studying wholly the Fantine bits of Les Miserables. I'm sticking with the ballet classes at the university because it's a ballet class where the teacher gives me good corrections and I ultimately paid 15€ for the whole semester--for a weekly ballet class, that's not half bad. This past Monday I also managed to find the class on Arabic Civilization, which promises to delve into colonization, fights over oil, and a little bit on Israel's presence in the area; so, business as usual. I'm happy that I'll get to have my Palestine class after all, essentially, and the syllabus sounds incredibly interesting.
Tuesday, I spent a while searching for a class on the Ostrogoths before giving up and having a café créme. As far as I can tell, that's a café au lait but with steamed milk? I just googled that and apparently it's different based on where you are in France (and completely different if you're in Switzerland). After sipping that, I did manage to find the course on medieval art history, which is also interesting because it's not just art; it's also the influence of the Church on culture and life at the time, which is always fascinating to me. Later in the afternoon, I had the second session of theatre class, which started with a massage (always good), required me to be poked in the ribs (not good), and also provided me with a chance to use some Russian vocabulary (unexpected). Tuesday finished with the conversation club, a meeting of IES students and local university students. In my group, I met a geography masters student who was at La Pérverie at the same time as I was during high school. We spoke French for 45 minutes and then switched to English, which was definitely a case of linguistic whiplash and was also a little surreal because I hadn't really heard the other IES students speak English.
Wednesday morning I got to the 8:30am politics class early and then spent three hours learning the exact dates of when countries submitted their proposals of candidacy to be part of the EU to the EU and the exact dates of when the EU acknowledged the proposals of candidacy and the exact dates of when negotiations were opened and then when treaties were signed and when the treaties were ratified, and then of course when the countries became part of the EU. It was a long class. In the afternoon, I accompanied Danielle to her daughter's house and talked with Victoire, a friend of Danielle's granddaughter who was at the conservatory and, to the best of my knowledge, seems to have professional aspirations for ballet (and the skill level to get there, definitely). Victoire then took me to La Péverie to talk with the ballet teacher there, where he told me that my form and placement were not great, but that he could fix that. I find this terribly exciting: I am not sure exactly what attitude French ballet teachers have; I think it must be somewhere between Russians and Americans, but I need someone who's going to whip me into shape here.
On Thursday I made it to two history classes, one on Sub-Saharan Africa and one on Latin America. I'm mostly especially excited for Latin America because I have literally never studied that area and I didn't have any intention to, and so that should be good. I'm also a little apprehensive about the course because the professor was ten minutes late and then dismissed us an hour early. We'll see how that goes.
And today I had no classes. Sydney texted me, asking if I wanted to grab lunch, and so I did. Lunch then turned into checking the FNAC for USB chargers, which turned into browsing CDs at the FNAC, which turned into searching Monoprix for a thermos and cooing over tiny espresso mugs, which then became wandering all over the general area of Place Graslin. We finally stopped at Aux Merveilleux de Fred, a chic-looking bakery selling merveilleux. As we had no idea what those were, we obviously had to buy some. They turned out to be meringues slathered in whipped cream, rolled in chocolate flakes--we had made a good decision (as I type this, the rest of mine is sitting in the freezer; too much sugar to eat in one sitting). We also stopped in La Librarie Franklin, a very small bookstore crammed with very old books, among which was a 1958 edition of the French equivalent of "American Daily Life for Dummies" and a book on Nantais slang/vocab/names, which I really want, but is a little too pricey.
When it comes to the ballet class on Friday evenings, I've come to the conclusion that a seven o'clock class in a tiny wood floor studio with a busted up CD player for music is not worth paying the equivalent of a dollar and a half more than a class on mylar with a live pianist at Pacific Northwest Ballet. Also last time I went to that class, I got followed halfway home by a sketchy dude, so I'm just not doing that again.
It was a fantastic week, especially since the factor of where are my classes in this disorganized and unlabeled campus is solved.
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