my classes in a nutshell

French language: This is my main french class. We met three days a week, including fridays even though no one has class on fridays, for a total of nine hours a week.  It’s basically an ESL class but I guess since we’re learning french it’s a FSL class? There are a bunch of people from my program as well as other americans from other programs. The other half of the class consists of older people, almost all asian, who are trying to learn french.  They have the thickest asian accents though, and I honestly have no idea how my the teacher understands what they’re saying.  Props to my teacher, well kinda because I don’t really like him.  So my teacher’s name is pierre. He is middle aged man who is way too tan for his own good. He has a huge gap between his front two teeth and wears the same outfit everyday.  The outfit consists of these beige button down jeans that are officially yellow because he wears them so much, this brown belt that is literally going to tear any second, again because he wears it everyday, a cream color button down and these brown leather shoes that look like they came from colonial williamsburg.

I’ve asked him to switch me down to elementary level two about three times now and he’s denied my request every time. He thinks I know enough to be in his class even though I don’t even remember present tense at the moment. I think the only reason why he doesn’t want to let me go is because everyone else in my class is afraid to participate and I’m the only one who actually says something, even though it’s always horribly wrong. At one point in the class he asked us if we had any questions for him and I had found out that he liked watching american classics so I asked him what his favorite classic was. His response, breakfast at tiffanys, he said “j’aime breakfast at tiffanys” in fact. I’ll leave it at that, but lets just hope I find a way to switch out his class.

Fashion in france: I cannot even begin to describe how fabulous my teacher for this class thinks he is. Try to imagine the most stereotypical, straight out of a movie french gay guy who studies fashion, times that by ten and then you have an idea of what my teacher is like. It is so surreal that I asked dorene if he was for real at least four times during class.  The actual class part wasn’t as fun as he was but his accent made all the historical crap he was telling us a little interesting. He can’t pronounce the sound “th” so instead he says “z.” So when he introduced himself in class he told us that he was “zee” best. All I remember from class so far is why girls are associated with the color pink and boys with the color blue (orphanages wrapped babies in red or blue blankets accordingly, and the red color would wash away overtime resulting in pink blankets), why the wedding dress is white (some royal girl was being forced to marry someone she didn’t want to marry and white was designated as the color of mourning so she decided to make a statement and wear white to her wedding instead of maroon) and prostitutes used to wore bright red (explains the song “roxanne” now, kinda.) Speaking of the song roxanne, my name wasn’t on the roll so he asked me what my name was and when I told him he paused for a moment and said, isn’t that the name of a song? I looked over at dorene and saw her trying so hard not to laugh out loud.  The french know the police repertoire well.  I’m looking forward to what else is he going to say and/or teach us.  I’ll try to sneak of picture of him and pierre soon.

Contemporary Art:  This class is taught in english, just like fashion in france, but it’s taught by two guys instead of one. My teachers are like jay and silent bob, one talks the entire time, the other one basically just sits there and mumbles something to the talker. They’re both relatively young and not bad looking. The talker has a french/british accent when he speaks english so its fun to listen to. My class is four hours long but I have dorene, melinda and brittany there to keep me company. Also, we only really stay in the classroom for about 2 hours, the last two hours we actually go visit different museums in paris. Sounds really cool I know. We have to write a paper for that class and give a presentation about a certain topic. This week we’re going to the musee d’orsay so our topic is impressionism and orsay. I told dorene that we should go first so we can set the bar high (yeah right) and get one our assignments out of the way.  We’ll see how it goes.

My name wasn’t on the roll for this class either so I had to spell my name, first and last for my teacher. When I finished spelling my last name my teacher said “wow, that would be so many points in scrabble, you have the letters W and Z.” Then I asked him if Z was really ten points in french scrabble because you can get the letter z from conjugating almost any verb in the formal second person tense in french. Apparently it still is ten points. I later asked how many points the letter k was (because dorene had mentioned something about there being no k’s in french) and he said it was ten points as well. Then I asked him what words in french have the letter k in them, he said “ski, kiwi and whiskey.”  They all sound like american words to me but okay.

Gastronomy: This class is by far my favorite class even though it’s taught in french and I don’t understand half the things my teacher says. This class is all about the history and culture of food in france. I have a feeling I’m going to learn a lot in this class, if only I understood everything she said! In my first class I learned all about french dinner parties, which are kind of a big deal here.  The big french nono’s I learned about so far are you never drink white and red wine from the same glass, you never eat meat before fish and you never go over to dinner at someone’s house without bringing something with you. I’m excited to learn about what the different parts of france are famous for in the food world and hopefully tasting a few new things. I couldn’t have asked for a better class to take in paris, well maybe an actually cooking class would be better but I’ll take what I can get.

Overall, I think all my classes will definitely contribute to future blog posts. What more could I ask for?

PS when I said my classes in a nut shell I obviously meant in more of a walnut versus pistachio shell.