First Week of School

Week 3 (I'm a week behind on my posts due to my lack of internet until now!)

Hello everyone! So I had my first week at the actual French University! On Monday, I had my final for my Boston College Intensive Language Course. I am so glad that is finally over! Here is what the week looked like :-)

Tuesday: First Day of University! In Paris, all students must know by the time they graduate from high school what they would like to major in because the universities here are divided by specializations. For example, I go to the University of Paris VII- Diderot, which specializes in languages, literature, and cinema. Unfortunately, there is no equivalent of communications in France so this is the closest that I can get. On Tuesday, I had my first class- The History of Cinema. When I arrived at the school, I was a little surprised. We had seen the grandeur of the Sorbonne in passing but each university is different. Diderot is pretty small since schools here are solely for classroom use (no dining halls, dorms, school activities, libraries etc.) much different from BC! It was very difficult to understand the professor- I catch about 20% of what is going on and this is the class that I am choosing to take Pass/Fail which is good!

Wednesday: I had my second class Wednesday which was Images of Modern Art (basically art history). This professor was a little scarier than the first one- she does not like whispering in class! Another difference is that each class is three straight hours of lecture! I try not to daydream but sometimes I find my mind slipping...! This class may be a little easier for me to understand however, because we look at pictures of art pieces and I write down the artist and name of the painting to look up later!

Thursday: This was not one of our better days here... we began the day in search for the office to get our "permit to stay." My coordinator told us the wrong metro stop and we walked about 4 miles around the wrong part of the city! Finally, we found it and I headed off to class. I figured this one would be easiest- Introduction to Sociology but boy was I wrong! We sat down in class and she called two students up to give a 30 minute debate with each other on the sociology of whether or not suicide was egotistical or not (I think!!) I realized that this class was far beyond my comprehension and left after an hour and half explaining that I needed to find a new class. Luckily, my coordinator said that's normal and I can switch into a sociology class that is 3 hours of lecture instead of divided into lecture and discussion.

Friday: Today I only had one class, Hollywood Cinema! I actually enjoyed this class- the professor seemed nice. I found another girl from America in the class and the professor told us that he would give us an alternate assignment instead of making us take a midterm which would be extremely difficult! Again, understanding 1/5 of what is going on is disconcerting but at least the film clips that we watch for about 20 minutes of each class are in English-- thus the Hollywood Cinema choice on my part!

As for some fun stuff, on Wednesday night, I got dinner with my friends Courtney and Renee from high school and it wa a blast! It's so nice to have them here and laugh with them! We grabbed some sandwiches and just talked for a good while. On Friday night, I had my friend Annie over for dinner and we hung out that night, watched Grey's Anatomy. Saturday, I got up and met up with Courtney at the Centres Pompidou, which is a building that was build inside out (with all the piping exposed) that is a) A modern art museum and B) Has this tube that you can walk through for excellent views of the city. The best part is that all the museums in France are free to European students so it was GRATUIT :-) The museum was very...modern and to tell you the truth, I don't really understand modern art but it was fun to just walk around with Court. After the museum, we took some pictures from the top and went shopping! I got a new purse and Courtney got some shoes! Overall, it was a great day then I went back and hung out at her apartment because her host family was gone for the weekend.

Sunday: Sundays are always really calm here since everything is closed. The highlight of the day was that I found a tiny store open and got a baguette haha. Overall, I slept in, organized my room, and did some catching up on emails and skype with the family :-)

Pictures are refusing to load so I will post them later!