first wednesday

Our oral placement exams were on wednesday morning. I went in totally confident, thinking that I will be lowered from intermediate (I literally laughed during the test I took online because I had no idea what was going on) to elementary level one (they have elementary level one, two and three.) Long oral exam story short, the lady wouldn’t switch me! She was this sweet old lady who I swear thought of me as the little train that could. I didn’t understand a quarter of the things she said and I swear I didn’t even say one complete sentence in French but for some reason now I’m stuck in elementary three. As my boss once said “challenges are the spices in one’s life” or something like that, well here’s to one super spicy semester.

For lunch our program took us to this college student only cafeteria in paris. Apparently there are a few places in the city where students can come eat a pretty cheap hot lunch, cheap in euro standards. For 2.90 euro you can get a main course, a piece of fruit and a dessert. In case you’re wondering I got a pizza, watermelon chunk and this like tomato salad instead of my dessert. I was going through a healthy phase at that moment.

At night me and dorene decided to put our metro pass to good use again and went to check out gallerie lafayette. I pretty much wanted every bag and shoe that I saw there. Not to mention  the super cute umbrellas they had.  I had never seen so many umbrellas being sold in one place before.

So in this department store (one of the biggest in france, I think, I’m totally making this up) they have this new shoe basement. It said it’s 3000 square meters of space. It basically was a museum for shoes. Every brand had it’s own little perfect section.  They had the cutest mannequin set up where it looked like she was walking all these different shoes as if they were dogs. I had to be a tourist and take a picture.

I controlled myself and didn’t buy anything, mostly because I couldn’t afford anything but that’s besides the point. I really want to get another longchamps while I’m here, even though my mom will yell at me. I wonder how many longchamps it takes to become a true parisian woman. So far I'm at two.