4 septembre 2014

I didn't do much today. In the morning, we had a really short, to-the-point seminar titled "Very Contemporary France." We just went over some basic French political structures (like who's the big man in charge, what political parties are there, etc.), popular music, different newspapers, etc. It was... semi-interesting. Haha, but I was very thankful that it was matter-of-fact and Coraline didn't keep saying the same thing over and over again.

Afterwards, Justine, Natasha, Curran and I went over to this little street a block away from the ACCENT Center and ate at Crêpe Show. We, unfortunately, learned the hard way that most restaurants don't open until 12PM. We got out of the seminar at around 11AM so we had an hour to kill before we could eat real food. The little tiny street (almost an alleyway haha) we were on had a lot of bars and, surprisingly, even a club! We also found a super cute little story that had this in the shop window (which is what lured us in):

For those of you who don't speak French (or have a limited French vocabulary OR can't assume what the pun is by looking at the picture), "biche" = "doe"

There was a lot of really nice jewelry and bags and such but much to expensive for me. So instead, I decided to knock some things over with my big camera bag T_T Why am I so awkward?!?!

Here's the menu for the restaurant we ate in. I didn't include a picture of the galette I ate because 1) the pictures I did take of it was very rushed so it came out badly and 2) it didn't taste very great so meh no body needs to see it. The crêpe, on the other hand, was DEE-LEEEEEE-SHUSSSSSS. Sosososo good. Hence, the picture.

I ordered the chocolate chantilly (whipped cream) and I was not-so-secretly hoping that it'd be chocolate whipped cream (like, the whipped cream itself is made of chocolate). But alas, it was not. Luckily, my disappointment did not last long ^_^

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Today was the first day of class for la Sorbonne (my 8 unit intensive language course). I somehow got placed into Intermediate 2 and I'm pretty sure I am the worst (perhaps the second worst) speaker in the class. I mean, my accent is surely better than many of the people in the class. But in terms of my ability to express myself and novel ideas, I truly am awful at French. I don't know why. Sometimes, in the shower or in my room or when I'm just walking by myself, I try to imagine a conversation with someone (i.e. my host dad, a waitress, a shopowner, etc) and I can carry on a conversation! But when I am in class and I have to speak, I just freeze up. I forget all my French. I just can't seem to be able to do it in real life. Some people have an irrational fear of placing an order over the phone/at a restaurant or even just picking up the phone and speaking with a stranger; if you're one of those people, take that fear and multiply it by like 9000. That's where I am now. Ugh, please, God, help me get over this fear.

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So obviously, I am writing in hindsight because I'm super lazy and I'm really bad with keeping up with any sort of journal-y, diary-like things. But I think this was when I started to get close with my peeps and finally feel like I was part of a group! I know a couple posts earlier I said that I was disappointed that everyone else seemed to be making friends with each other so quickly, but I've determined who I get along well with out of our small USC group. Donc, je suis contente.