Phone got fixed! And now I love it. Fixing it wasn't too bad, either. Pay phones in Paris don't take coins; you need a little card, which I didn't have, but fortunately McKenzie had one left over, which she lent to me, so I went to a pay phone and called the support line, asked for someone who spoke English, and the woman I got was so nice and helpful!! It was awesome. So now it's unlocked and I can use it again, plus I spent so much time combing the manual that I found out how to do more things with it. Like locking the keypad, finding the place where you can hang phone straps (so YESSSS all my Japanese phone straps went back on this phone. The hook was behind the back battery panel, how strange), setting up my voicemail, etc. I also discovered the GAMES!! I don't usually play cell phone games but there is this REALLY FUN SNAKE GAME that is so great... hee, hee. :> Plus, now that I like it again, I think my phone is so cute and little. YAY PHONE ♥ :D

This afternoon I had my housing meeting with the housing director, which made me realize I was being too shy with my host family, and I should talk more to them (which I hadn't been doing due to lack of confidence in my French). So, although that was kind of upsetting to me at the time, tonight at dinner I think I made a sizable improvement. :) yay! Plus, I confirmed that Isis (the cat's name) comes from the name of the Egyptian goddess... as I thought, my host mom loves Egyptian stuff (it's all over the house). I hope she liked that I knew it. They asked about my religion, turns out it's hard to express the concept of a "non-denominational" Protestan Christian, but it also turns out they just wanted to make sure I wasn't the same kind of Christian as Bush. Ha ha! I was just like "Err, also not the hugest Bush fan myself" and they were just sorta like "uh, yeah, us too." Obviously; he (and the other conservatives) have not been the best friends to the French! Freedom fries, don't even get me started... (they're from Belgium! French people laughed their butts off at that, you know!)

I've kind of slipped into this group that's been hanging out together all the time, basically everyone from Saturday night, we just bonded and now we're like this group. I wonder if it will last, but I'm having fun, although I do want to meet more cool people. It's probably going to be impossible to have the same sort of tight-knit awesome group as last year (I'm talking about just about everyone in IES Tokyo as a whole here, not just my group of friends), but I hope we can get pretty close.

Brush-up classes have been this week. But they're not only in the morning, but in the afternoon too!! I take it back, I don't want this anymore! But I need to do really well on the real placement test (this Friday) because I want to get into the highest-level French class, a translation class!! But I do feel better about my French every day... especially scoping out the ability (or lack thereof) of some of the other people here... (COUGH!)

Oooh, but I'm going to get to take Japanese classes! At IES Paris you can take one class at an outside university, there are several you can choose from, and they looked into it for me and I'm going to take Japanese at the Institut Japonais. Placement test on Saturday! yayyy excitingggg

I'm also going to finally get on the ball about that French comic book company whose editorial director gave me his card last August at TOKYOPOP... I hope he meant it when he told me to contact him when I got to Paris, cause I'm following up now. It would be another glittering jewel in my beautiful intern crown... seriously, looking at my resume, it's "intern intern intern intern." It'll be so great to get paid for once someday..!! ha ha

We've got a Sogo 2 (my old Japanese class) email group going. THIS IS FANTASTIC. Matt Kaminski wrote us a hilarious email that was so typically Matt: he typed in all caps, with no spaces or punctuation. He said he wanted to give us a difficult email to read. CLASSIC! Oh, man, so great. I'm so sad I'll have to miss the NYC reunion. I even looked into flights from Paris to NYC (I mean why not, I've always wanted to go and it's right on the eastern coast, wouldn't be that terrible)... $500. :/ wah!

OKAY BEDTIME YAY