Right now my other host sister Margaux is visiting from Lyon where she goes to school (she's 20). Apparently while she is here she needs to have 2 nights of "dinners" where she invites her friends over to eat and talk. The first one was last night; fortunately it was Jack's birthday so we hung out at his house and I didn't get home until midnight so I missed all of it. But this night I had no plans, and was tired and wanted to rest anyway, so I've been home for all of it, and people have just been arriving and talking and everything while I just sit in my room with the door shut because I'm not really invited nor do I want to join it. WOW THIS IS AWKWARD. I kind of wish my room wasn't off the main hallway, almost across from the living room so I can more or less hear all of it, and was in the back of the house like my host brother and sister's rooms. But, you know, whatever...

Jack's birthday was fun, though, if not a little strange. His parents have been in town for a week or so, and this was their last night, so they were there too, and Jack's host dad and his girlfriend as well. So its just all of us kids, great food (chicken breast, QUICHE, cheese, etc!), and 4 adults. hmmm. So that was interesting. But his host dad brought out some amazing chilled champagne and a brownie cake! The champagne was really good, and you know, it is so expensive, it was amazing how he'd done that for Jack!

I do hope I'm not actually getting sick. Throat's a tiny bit sore, but I'm trying to keep up a positive mental outlook, because that actually does ward off sickness. I'm very unhappy that the weather while my mom's here is projected to be rain, like, every day. No!! We want to do things! Go away, stupid weather! What's worse, I thought by April everything would be springlike and warming up, but apparently the cold weather can last until then! It might not even become really nice until when we LEAVE! What is this?! I am so, so, so sick of the cold, I can't even stand it anymore!! It is truly driving me insane. wahhhh

dinner, spring break, and japanese classes

Of all the nerve-wracking things here, I have to say that dinner with my host family is one of the big ones. Here is what normally happens during each dinner (which, by the way, happens around 8 p.m.). When it's time for dinner, my host mom calls everyone to the table. The phrase for this is "À table [ah tah-bleuh]!" Then we all gather, where on the table are plates and silverware for everyone and one or two dishes of stuff (and sometimes a salad of lettuce with this dressing I hate the taste of on top, but I eat it anyway). Oh yes, and they will usually offer me wine, which they buy in a little container with a spout at the bottom to dispense the wine (like a water cooler--hilarious). I assume this is fairly cheap, normal dinner wine--but I accept anyway, because why not? So, the food. Usually my family will tell me to serve myself first (something that I almost wish they wouldn't because then I can't observe others to see how they're doing it!) so I will take some of whatever is there. Now, normally I am a very picky person, and I tried to hide this fact from my host family in Japan but eventually they found out and were obliged to ask me all the time if I could eat this or that and I always felt bad. In France it is very rude not to eat everything that is on your plate, so here I have just decided to suck it up and EAT whatever is there. It is very brave of me, I know. So I have eaten things I would normally have avoided, such as onions, tomatoes, beets, duck, eggplant, etcetera. It actually hasn't been TOO bad (for example, beets are not terrible, eggplant tastes a lot like squash, and duck as it turns out is DELICIOUS. Onions and tomatoes still suck, though). I had to say no when I was offered a cabbage dish, though. Cabbage = terrible odor reminding me of least-favorite Japanese foods = no.

Aaaanyway. So we'll eat the stuff that's in those two dishes, usually my host mom wants us to finish them off so she'll ask everyone to take seconds if they want to, and then that is over and we will bring out the cheese and bread. YES, THE CHEESE. So far we've had about 5-7 different types, it changes every night which kind of cheese we'll have, and they have all been fairly good (one was nasty and tasted like feet, though. I believe it was Camembert). The bread has also been okay, but they like this funky brown bread whereas I'd prefer a typical baguette-type bread, which we've only had once, but whatever. Sometimes we will toast it (pain grillé) and also have butter, or you can just put the cheese on top of the toasted bread and eat it that way (which, delicious). Also, when we eat bread, it NEVER goes on your plate. It always goes on the table next to your plate. Anyone planning to go to France ever, remember that!!! So we will have the cheese course, then usually clear most of the plates and stuff and have dessert, which is usually yogurt from the fridge. Fortunately for me as a yogurt lover, the French also love yogurt, and there are many varieties. I love cherry yogurt... oh so much.

And this isn't even getting into the dinner conversation! Usually my host mom will ask me what I've been up to, classes and so forth, and I'll more or less struggle to give coherent, comprehensible responses (ahhh) but more often my 15-year-old host sister will start some sort of debate with my host parents. One memorable time it was over "Who killed Jesus, the Jews or the Romans?" ....yes. Seriously. My host mom took the position of "the poor Romans, they did nothing wrong" whereas Isabeau (host sister) was totally against the Romans. This actually went on for like 15 minutes... friendly yelling was involved, faux-forceful holding of my host mom's mouth shut so she couldn't protest was involved, the Bible was semi-thumped (and I found out my host family is Christian, though more my kind of Christian, which I fully approve of)... it was pretty damn amusing to watch. But I think the coolest part to me was that, for better or worse!, I understood all of it!

And oh, Spring Break plans... how happy I will be when you are finally all ironed out. Here is the plan at the moment:
Thurs. April 5: Fly to Nuremberg, Germany, arriving around 10 pm. Meet up with Rebecca, and get picked up together by Chris
- flight purchased
Mon. April 9: Leave for Florence, Italy to meet IES friends
- hostel stay booked (it's not the one where my IES friends are staying at, but it's the one close to Kathryn from AC who is studying abroad there, and I plan to hang out with her a lot. I'm in one of those 8-bed female rooms... should be interesting)
- train/flight there not yet figured out (but am thinking a train from Munich to Milan, then from Milan to Florence. Gonna be like 10 hours... ahhh)
Wed. April 11: Leave with IES friends for Rome
- housing reserved (we have an APARTMENT!! It's going to be so cool!!!)
- buy train tickets
Sun. April 15: Leave together for Paris from Rome, using the ghetto airports because we did the cheap-flight route
- flight purchased

OOOHHH once it all gets worked out I can start getting excited and not just worried about it! But it looks like it's gonna be good. :) Can't wait to collect some more stamps on my passport! And ROME! It's supposed to be the cure for people sick of Paris... ;) (It'll also be nice to not have to exchange any money. I have very mixed feelings about the euro--apparently when they adopted it prices spiked all over, and I'm not down with how expensive it is--but you have to admit it's convenient for travelers...)

Then a couple weeks after that I plan to visit in Scotland over a weekend. I would also like to use other weekends to go to Ireland, Nice, Barcelona, and London, but who knows if those will work out (because of time constraints--we only have so many weekends!--and friends' financial situations, etc). If they don't, I guess it won't be the end of the world, but I really want to go to Ireland, and I want to go to Nice the weekend before we leave. I know my friends do too, so it's only a matter of finding affordable ways and getting together to plan it in time. They also, of course, want to go to Amsterdam, so that's probably going to happen one of these weekends too. Marc said he'd be interested in going with me to London, but who knows... ahhh... making travel plans is such a big pain!!

Let's see, what else... on Thursday we had a history field trip to the Latin Quarter, though not the Saint-Michel part I usually frequent, so it was cool to see some new stuff. We went to the church by the Panthéon, St-Etienne-du-Mont, which is where Sainte Genevieve (the patron saint of Paris)'s tombstone is (her remains were burned and thrown into the Seine). THAT CHURCH IS THE COOLEST PLACE EVER. I can't even express how much I loved being there. We walked in, and all of a sudden this awesome music started to play. They have a huge wooden-carved organ up on the wall, and I guess it was coming from there. It was the coolest music I have ever heard and just filled me with this great sense of wonder and awe. It was amazingly cool, and inside it is so beautiful. It totally beats stupid old Notre Dame, hands DOWN. Eee, immediate favorite church in Paris. :D

And my Japanese classes have been interesting. I went to the first one on Wednesday a couple weeks ago, where there were about 4 other students, all around my age, there, and... it was too easy. Ridiculously easy. I knew it was bad when I did a self-introduction and my teacher had to write the words I was using on the board and ask if everyone knew what they meant. So after class she was all "That was too easy for you, huh?" and I was like "yeah..." so she got me moved to the next level, which meets at the same time but on Thursday nights. So I went to that class last week, and everyone there is older than me (30s) and there is a lot of DIFFICULT KANJI I DON'T KNOW. It's kind of... too hard. I'm like freaking Goldilocks here!!! As the teacher of that class said, there's no "choudo ii" (just right) class for me here. So I'm going to stay in the hard class, and just try to work hard and keep up. Not everyone there is amazingly good, of course, but there are these two guys who know ALL THE KANJI EVER. It's insane!!! I don't know how they did it! But they know all these random words I'd never even heard of! And my kanji is already bad... (cries) But I think it's going to be okay. Another difficulty is learning it with French people. Often the teacher will be all "This new word, okay, in French it means ____" and everyone else goes "ohhh" but I'm like "wait, what?" because sometimes I can't understand her Japanese accent when she speaks French and sometimes I just plain don't know the word. But when my mom comes she's going to bring me my electronic dictionary, which should make a lot of things easier, I can look up every word I don't know and find the English translation. mwa ha ha :) And also, I didn't realize it, but when we're learning new stuff, the teacher often kinda steps back and says "So this is how is it in Japan. How is it in your country?" Now that I think about it, this happened a lot in our Meikai classes, we'd be all "Oh, in America it's like this..." But of course, here, she says "Japanese people do this, but what do French people do? Is this how it is in France?" and it surprises me every time. Learning Japanese with French-speakers... it's gonna be interesting. But cool. I just hope I can do it.

I wish I'd been writing down what I do every weekend. Usually we spend the days exploring museums or flea markets (so I've been to the Musée d'Orsay by now, and of course it was amazing with all the Impressionist paintings. It was the strangest feeling turning a corner and "oh, well, there you are" to some famous painting or another. Insane!) and just generally hanging out. Sometimes we will go to Jack's house because he has a basement and his host dad lets us come over and hang out in the basement. Or we watch movies, we've seen a lot so far. The Illusionist (my host family took me to this one, which was really nice of them), Little Children, Babel, The Good German, Inland Empire... etc. I'm going to try to be better at writing about what happens every weekend, just so I can remember. But it was like this last semester too, I didn't get good about journaling until halfway through the semester. I've also been taking some pictures, not a whole lot but some, which I'll get around to posting, well, SOMETIME. hahah.

I've been kinda bad about updating, I hope to get better, wah! A lot has been going on. There was the initial adjustment period where I felt really disoriented and off and "Why did I even decide to do this?" but now that's faded mostly and this all just feels normal. I'm settling into a routine, school's getting into swing, I have fun with my friends on the weekends, this is getting to be the same as last semester was around this time. Which is good, because that means it's setting it up for things to be as awesome at the very end as they were by the end of Tokyo. I'm glad all the uncertain emotions I had are gone and I feel much better about being here now. I've accepted French as the language here, no impulse to speak Japanese as my foreign language of choice, and I'm slowwwly improving in speaking it. Thanks to lit class, I discovered I can read it more or less dictionary-free, which is great. And things with my host family have been pretty good, too. For a while it was like "ugh, why did I do host family?!" but now it's all right. The other night it was just me and my host mom for dinner, and we had a pretty good conversation, I learned that they've traveled all over for my host dad's job, like China and Egypt and stuff, which explains all the miscellaneous artifacts from all over the world adorning the apartment. Friends-wise, our core group is expanding and we've been hanging out with more new people, most of which are pretty cool, and last night we went to a party at this guy Jeremy's apartment (he's one of the lucky independent-housing people, so he has his own place) and there were some cool people there who go to IES but I'd never really talked to or knew about before. I hope this continues to improve... I think of how I didn't really get to know people like Marius and Allie until the middle of the semester, but by the end they were some of my favorite people there...

And we had the first field trip yesterday, but it was weird. Except for the Normandy trip (which is so popular you have to write an essay to get chosen for it, and I didn't try) every trip is simply a day trip. Leave by bus in the morning, return by bus at night. This is extremely strange to me--where is our 4-night sojourn where we all get to hang out in each other's hotel rooms and bond?! I wish we could have some of those, sigh... so there are 5, and you choose 2, and first I was doing Giverny and Versailles, but since I'm going to Versailles with my mom when she gets here, I switched to Provins, and that was yesterday. Provins is a small medieval town an hour and a half outside of Paris, so they have things like the original castle wall around the city, some medieval tower keeps, old churches, etc. We explored the tower keep, it was really cool. There were souterrains too, underground caves, some of which used to have Masonic rites performed in them (cool!!!). And we had lunch at this restaurant there, duck which was delicious (I love duck now). But overall the whole field trip just felt kind of weird. The town was like deserted, we saw almost no one on the streets, and it just wasn't all that fascinating or cool. It was just... strange. On the bus, though, it felt just like the buses going to Nikko and Nagano, so I looked out the window reminiscing and being nostalgic and thinking about Japan! Pathetic, maybe, but I do miss it quite a lot. Oh well.


Castle walls in Provins.


Mark and McKenzie.




Me inside a souterrain.

My mommy gets here Thursday, March 1! I can't wait!! :D

Rufus Wainwright 2/20 at l'Olympia

The Rufus Wainwright concert was Tuesday, February 20 (his concert dedicated to Judy Garland where he sings all the songs she did at her 1961 Carnegie Hall show). But... it was weird. It was the only concert I've been to that didn't leave me filled with joy and happiness. Why? Because he was sick. So his voice was messed up. So the whole concert was thrown off, he couldn't hit all the notes, he couldn't give it his all, and even though he struggled he just kept falling flat. He wanted to do well, we could all see that, but he just couldn't, and struggled through it until the end. I paid 77 euros for my ticket, and had a 5th row seat which was amazing... but I still paid $100 for a lackluster concert. (I went by myself because even though I knew some other people here who had heard of him, they definitely weren't interested in the 77-euro price tag, and I don't blame them! It was fine, a little lonely though, obviously.)

I mean, it was still a pretty good show. It was cool to see Rufus singing Judy Garland songs. In between songs he talked to us in French, which was very interesting. Because of his French songs I had thought he was fluent in French. He is not. His speaking French is about as good as mine--manageable, but lots of pauses, lots of struggling for the right word/article/grammatical bit. Not fluent at all! What a surprise. But it was cool, the audience understood him. Very different from when I saw him in Tulsa, though!

And he had a full orchestra accompanying him, which was soooo coool (though sad at times when his voice was failing and the orchestra was still playing on perfectly flawlessly in comparison), and for two songs he had his sister, Martha Wainwright, come out and sing, and she was amazing, and he also had Judy Garland's daughter Lorna Luft come out and sing two songs, which was really cool.

Overall it was just strangely offputting since he wasn't at the top of his game, but I guess I'm still glad I went, it was cool to see, the theatre (l'Olympia, pretty famous actually) was really nice, and the 5th row seat was amazing with a great view, I only wish it had actually been perfect... ohhh welll.

Setlist
1. Overture: A. The Trolley Song, B. Over The Rainbow, C. The Man That Got Away
2. When You're Smiling (The Whole World Smiles With You)
3. Medley: A. Almost Like Being In Love, B. This Can't Be Love
4. Do It Again
5. You Go To My Head
6. Alone Together
7. Who Cares? (So Long As You Care For Me)
8. Puttin' On The Ritz
9. How Long Has This Been Going On?
10. Just You, Just Me
11. The Man That Got Away
12. San Francisco
13. I Can't Give You Anything But Love
(Intermission)
14. That's Entertainment
15. I Can't Give YOu Anything But Love
16. Come Rain Or Shine
17. Your Nearer
18. A Foggy Day
19. If Love Were All
20. Zing Went The Strings Of My Heart
21. Stormy Weather
22. You Made Me Love You/ For Me And My Gal/ The Trolley Song
23. Rock-A-Bye Baby With A Dixie Melody
24. Over The Rainbow
25. Swanee
26. After You've Gone
27. Chicago

classes

Well, my classes are FINALLY sorted out. After like 2 weeks of adding and dropping and adding again (most of it against my will and forced on me due to evil conflicts), this is what I'm sticking with.

(ALL OF THESE CLASSES ARE TAUGHT IN FRENCH)
- History of Paris
Most boring class EVER. I took this because I thought it would make a nice parallel to History of Tokyo last semester, but unlike Myanna who is young and energetic, our professor for this class is an old man who walks with a cane and is so hard to learn from. He's also taking us on a bazillion trips into Paris almost every Thursday afternoon, which would be nice if they didn't suck up the entire afternoon by going past the allotted time for this class--effectively ruling out any other classes we may have wanted to take after this one. Thanks, crazy old French dude. There are also some really dumb people in here who ask dumb questions and don't know the right words. seeeeriously. But at the same time, those people turn out to be pretty entertaining a lot of the time, on the field trips and stuff. People-wise it's a pretty good class, and I'm happy about that.

- Women in Literature
Oh, it's so boring and weird. My teacher is a woman who, on the plus side, kind of looks like Monica, but is actually kind of strict and mean. We are, yes, reading literature written by women in French, IN FRENCH naturally, and though my class is small, about 7 people, many of those people complain daily about how hard it is. (It is pretty difficult but it's good practice, and even though I don't know every word I can generally just read it and understand what's going on.) Apparently they didn't take seriously the thing where you're supposed to take this class only if you've previously taken a class where you read literature in French. Fortunately, I pretty much have. I don't know about the level of literary analysis she wants us to do... that part is kinda hard in French... but I'll roll with it.

- French: Translation
The class that made it impossible for me to take the Francophone literature class I was in before due to its having 5 Wednesday meetings in addition to our normal Tues-Thu class times (ANOTHER wonderful schedule conflict), but I think it's gonna be worth it. Come on, it's TRANSLATION!! In a classroom!! And it means I don't have to be in the terrible French class I was originally put into, which was seriously going to be a grammar review. That's about the LAST thing I need at this point in my French-learning career. Since I had to move up into this class, I thought everyone there was going to be at a higher level than me, and um... based on what some people have been coming up with for translations... ahem!! Not exaaactly the case. (Though I make numerous mistakes too, translating INTO French is haaard! We have French-to-English meetings with another teacher every other Wednesday, but for the most part it's English-to-French). But for me, it's been very fun, and I hope to continue to learn more about translation theories and methods.

- Art and Architecture
...haha, which of these things is not like the other (since when am I interested in art history?). This is the one added today because I needed a fourth IES class. I was really running out of options here... I was about to do "European Cinema," but then thanks to STUPID HISTORY which goes ALL AFTERNOON on Thursdays, which would have conflicted with the cinema class taking place in the later part of the afternoon Tues-Thu... I couldn't do it. And now I am taking a random art history/architecture class. My dad who is an architect would be proud, but I don't think I'll have the same natural aptitude for it somehow! We'll see how it goes. At least we're going to visit a lot of museums and stuff...

At least I don't have any OUTSIDE CLASSES ON FRIDAYS YAYYYY... even if it would have been a class at the Sorbonne. Oh well, whatever, I'm not giving up 5 hours every Friday to struggle through Sartre in a huuuge class. Now my Fridays are safely entirely free :)

And finally, Japanese at the Institut Japonais, Wednesday nights from 7:15 to 8. Another thing it took forever to hear back from... apparently they called my cell phone and left a message, which I did not receive!!

OK Go 2/5 at Le Nouveau Casino

OK GO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Or, the story of my first concert in Paris. One of my favorite bands, OK Go, was performing there, and I was very excited about going, because I have been trying to see them live back home for quite some time now (I was going to see them in Austin with Eryn in August '05, I'd even bought my ticket, but then after getting my wisdom teeth out there were so many complications that I was too sick to be able to drive down. Such a disappointment!). But now I finally have, woohoo!

So that night, February 5th, I'd gotten McKenzie and Mark to come with me, and we went over to the 11th arrondissement where OK Go's venue (le Nouveau Casino) was (as well as many other music venues! I guess that's where they all are here). We got there around 7:15, doors opened at 8, and there was already a line of people outside, and we discovered that just about everyone had tickets and that the show was COMPLET (sold out). I hadn't bought tickets before because I didn't know who was going with me until very last minute and I figured there'd still be some left at the door, it's France, right? Actually, OK Go is popular here too, so yes, they'd sold out.

Full of despair, we went inside a place nearby to wait until 8 and see what happened then. 8 rolled around and we went outside and to the front of the line and watched people get let in--quickly losing hope, as it appeared no one had any extra tickets left. Then we noticed a group of people near us, and a woman approached us and asked if we needed a ticket. She only had one, but McKenzie encouraged me to buy it, go in, and they would try to get tickets and join me later (of course, they never did cause they couldn't get tickets! wah!). I pretty much didn't have a choice, so I bought it (normal price, 15 euros, which was fortunate) and went in alone. I headed for the bathroom, but there were two lines in front of it, and one was for coat check, and I couldn't figure out which was which. I heard 2 girls near me speaking English, so I asked them which line was which, and they told me, and we got to chatting, and they ended up asking me if I wanted to hang out with them since my friends weren't there, which I of course accepted. Kira from Australia and Deborah from Canada, both working as au pairs (foreign nannies) in Paris, but they've globe-trotted a lot before and during this as well of course. Kira has even spent considerable time in Japan!

So we checked our coats and went up to the merchandise table on the mezzanine level above, where I bought a cute lavender OK Go shirt and we talked to the band's manager, because he was just hanging out up there and started talking to us as fellow English-speakers. !!! so cool. He told us how the band isn't even staying in Paris tonight, they're flying directly to Germany. Busy schedule, woww! They've played Paris before, on like a boat on the Seine hahah, but they were supporting Motion City Soundtrack. That night they were completely solo, not even an opening band!!

The venue was really cute and small too, I liked it. We went back downstairs and went to go stand with the rest of the masses in front of the stage. Within minutes the keyboardist came out and started playing the opening chords to "The House Wins." After that was "Television, Television," and then I can't remember. I'd like a set list, I hope one turns up online somewhere. Between songs Damian bantered, which was hilarious because... it's Damian. He told us how the last time he was here his girlfriend went crazy for this "pamplemousse" stuff in some store, oh man it was hilarious.

At one point they set up a mini stage platform in the middle of the crowd, very close to where we were standing, and they came over and played on it, right in the middle of us! It was so cool! Then towards the end Damian came to the bar and walked on top of it and then made his way through the crowd back to the stage. Everyone was totally into it, all those French people LOVE OK Go apparently, and it was awesome. Then after two encore songs, he was all "Well, we just finished filming the video for our next worldwide hit single [Do What You Want], but it's some uber monster secret, so we can't show it to you, but we brought you something else... here's my backyard." And the image of his backyard from the Million Ways video shows up on the screen behind them, and they get into position and DO THE DANCE YAY YAY IT WAS SO GREAT.

Makeshift setlist (based on memory and mostly not in order)
1. The House Wins
2. Television, Television
Don't Ask Me
You're So Damn Hot
1000 Miles
A Million Ways (acoustic)
Invincible
Don't Bring Me Down (Electric Light Orchestra cover)
Here It Goes Again
A Good Idea At The Time
Oh Lately It's So Quiet
No Sign of Life
?
Violent Femmes cover
ENCORE
Return
Do What You Want
A Million Ways (lip-synching to the DANCE!!)

Here's a video of the ELO cover taken by someone else that I found on Youtube.


So after that was all over I went up with Kira and Deb to the merchandise area, where they bought shirts, and then we sat at the tables nearby talking about how cool it was while the majority of people left below. Then we looked out and were like "Oh hey, the band is down there" and sure enough, there they were signing stuff and taking pictures. So we went down and Kira got a shirt she had gotten as a present for her brother signed by the band, and I got a picture with Damian and he signed my ticket stub. yay!

Then we finally left, and it turns out Deb lives only one stop away from me so we took the 9 train back together. We also traded numbers and they've already invited me to this going-away dinner for their friend at a Japanese restaurant this Friday. I just might go!

Another English-language review of the show can be found here.

You know what's weird here, is that while everyone else is complaining about how this is different from how things would be in America, I'm always thinking to myself how different it is from Japan. I only ever compare stuff here to Japan, it seems, and I'm not really homesick to be home in the U.S.; if I get that longing feeling it's more like I kinda want to be back in Japan! People complain about taking the train and I'm like "So what?" but lament to myself how dirty it is and how there are no bathrooms, like a NORMAL train station would have. Or I'll learn a new French word/phrase and think "Oh, so that's the equivalent of [Japanese phrase]" and write that down in my notes. It really does feel sometimes like I'm a Japanese person here. It's so weird. And cool. And weird again. I mean, I did have less than a month to adjust to America again, it makes sense and all. It's just very strange...

Last night was fun. Some cousin of Jack's host dad guy had his 21st birthday party at the COOL MULTI-STORY HOUSE Jack lives in, so we fiiiinally got to meet and talk to some French people our own age. There were also crepes because it was la Chandeleur (Candlemas, or, as it has evolved in the U.S., Groundhog Day), which = awesome. According to tradition, you're only supposed to eat the crepes after 8 p.m.; I just love that there's a holiday in France centered around crepes (why not?!). So we just hung out at his house, talking to each other and sometimes to the French people, taking over DJing duty because French people have bad taste in music, etc etc. Then we all stayed over there so we didn't have to mess with taking the last Métro. Very fun! Mm, crepes holiday.

Annnnd the classes drama continues. To catch you up, I had gotten permission from AC to count one of my literature classes as an English credit (which would save me schedule room next year and just be very convenient all around) but it turns out the translation class I just transferred into (I didn't test into it because the placement test was ridiculous, I tested into a lower level grammar class, but they pretty much let me move up on my own) has five Wednesday meetings at 9 a.m., which conflict with that literature class.

So I've been fighting with the registrar over it and, yeah, they won't let me take Francophone literature AND translation, because apparently it's just impossible to miss 5 classes the whole semester. So I had to choose, and I chose translation. I went to it yesterday, and it was so cool. And really, I didn't have that much interest in Francophone literature (which is... African/other former French-colonized people writing in French about their experiences and thoughts, which almost invariably amounts to (and I am sorry but it is true): White people suck), it was just going to be one less out of 4 English classes I'll have to take in my remaining 2 semesters at AC for my English major. Which was going to be really nice. Oh, and the teacher was pretty cool. But oh well.

So, now I need another class, and Marie said I can take an outside class and still not have to pay extra, despite already doing Japanese. So, there's a literature class at the Institut Catholique, and a literature class at the Sorbonne that I am looking into. I'll go to both and pick one. Either way, my Fridays will be eaten into, which is very displeasing to me, because I wanted them totally free to travel/work?/hang out. The Sorbonne class will eat into them a LOT, which is why I kinda don't want to pick that except for the whole "SORBONNE!!" name recognition thing. But it won't even be at the actual Sorbonne building (which I have already walked past numerous times). The lower level classes, which is what we can take since we are only freshmen in the French university system, are in other buildings scattered all over Paris. So even though it'd be cool to say "I took classes at the Sorbonne," it won't be like ACTUALLY taking classes at the REAL Sorbonne building. I dunno. hmm

Wowww, this cat goes crazy when everyone is out of the house. I woke up to an empty house (since it's Friday, naturally) and she is just WAILING PITIFULLY every so often. Then she comes and bugs me, walking all over me and wanting to be petted and following me around everywhere! Cat!! I can't pay attention to you all the time!! And you make things fall off my desk with your endless wandering! Stop!!

Annnnyway. Tonight was fun :) Louvre exploring in the afternoon (Egyptian section!!! Which is huge, we only covered the ground-floor stuff, which I think is still most of it, and was still a lot of stuff. I saw the CAT MUMMIES! Poor kitties!), then seeing of Little Children in the evening (craazy movie).

My mommy is coming to visit me in March!! yay :) We're going to go to Disneyland, and Normandy, and all sorts of places. She's staying within walking distance of me too, so yay :D

Umm, other stuff later, blah blah, I just need to write in this thing more often. And maybe taking pictures, which I haven't been doing. It's not fantastic here yet, but it's good, and I have hopes that it will be eventually. Japan has been set up in my mind as the perfect experience, though, so it's going to be hard to top. When I get back home I am going to have a lot to say on doing a split-year to prospective study abroad students, that is for sure, hahah.