week four, monday-wednesday

Here is my attempt to catch up before I start traveling the world during fall break. Where am I going for fall break you ask?! Guess you’ll have to read the whole blog to find out or suck and cheat by scrolling down to the bottom.

So Monday of last week, obviously not this monday because I’m so far behind in the blogging world, I slept in because I don’t have class on mondays and being in paris you really need all the sleep you can get. I waited for dorene to get home from class so that we could go to the isa (my study abroad program) office for our “how are you doing so far in paris” meeting.  It was a huge almost two hour waste of time but I finally picked up the converses my mom had sent me as well as my debit card (dorene was my sugar momma for a good three weeks while I was waiting for my working debit card to arrive). We’re not allowed to receive mail straight to our apartment, we have to have everything sent to the office which would be a little annoying if I was awaiting more packages, but with my new shoes and card I’m pretty much all set.

After our meeting I decided I wanted to try this gyro my other friends had gotten the week before, dorene agreed as always, so we set off to st michel to find this magical gyro place. A semi long not worth mentioning story later me and dorene were sitting in this tiny room that passed for a restaurant with gyros. I had never had a gyro before so I didn’t really know what to expect. I want to say it was both better and worse than I expected. I think I was just happy to have fries with ketchup, the french don’t understand my need for a lot of ketchup when eating fries.  I don’t know if I’ll have another gyro here, I think there might be better things to waste calories on but it was definitely worth trying once.

On tuesdays I have back to back classes, meaning I’m at school from 9am to 6pm. It is worse than high school ever was. French college students must think that we’re such slackers in america with one hour lectures. The only thing I remember specifically about this day was that for my fashion in france class we went on a walking field trip to the sonia rykiel store. I have no idea why we went there and how that related to any of the beyond boring things the teacher goes on and on about in class but we got out early so I was a happy camper. On our walk over some guy from the class started to talk to me and I found out he was from the virgin islands. One thing led to another and we started talking about how back home he used to kill his own chickens and how you have to hold them down because after you cut their head off their body still moves around a lot. It was quite the conversation.  

 Wednesday was a longgg day for roxanne, so long that it requires me to refer to myself in the third person. On wednesdays I also have back to back classes which are almost as bad as tuesdays except that I have brittany, dorene and melinda in art class to keep me going in the afternoon.  This wednesday me and dorene were supposed to present our impressionism presentation that we had thrown together the night before, and by thrown together I mean dorene used her three years of art history knowledge to make up enough for both of us to say. I had wikipedia-ed impressionism and learned all about where the word impressionists originated (monet’s painting called impression sunrise) and made myself a page of notes so that I would be all ready for the presentation, but sadly our teacher was not.  Our main teacher, the one that usually talks wasn’t there, so silent bob as we like to call him had to run the class for the day. Turns out they didn’t have the right cables to hook up a mac and they also couldn’t access the wifi in the room to use the computer that did hook up, so we weren’t able to do our presentation. At least we’re done with our little powerpoint and notecard part, I’m just going to have to rememorize the impressionism story again sometime this week.

After our major computer hooking up fail our class walked to the musee d’orsay to see half the paintings that were in me and dorene’s presentation in person. If only the class knew how cool it was that we were going to present certain paintings and then be able to go see them right after.  Silent bob spent ten minutes trying to convince the people at the museum that we had a reservation and were students studying art in paris so that we could all get in for free, and we did! We also got this tour guide lady who took us around for a bit almost ruining the presentation me and dorene had prepared! Luckily she skipped one or two paintings me and dorene still have to talk about so hopefully some people will listen to us this week. After our tour was over we walked around the museum with silent bob. At one point I decided I wanted to try to take the same picture I took with the degas ballerinas a year ago when I visited that museum, apparently silent bob also decided to jump in the picture to be funny. Dorene almost cried laughing because she was taking the picture while I had no idea what was going on. As dorene said, silent bob strikes back!

Wednesday night me and dorene went to a french football game, football being what we call soccer in america. We went to some qualifying match for the world cup between france and austria. We made it out to the stadium in paris, stade de france, after a packed metro car full of drunken fans singing the national anthem as well as a couple getting married.

I don’t think the couple was actually going to the game but I had to mention the fact that we saw a couple dressed in a wedding gown and tux on a metro. Could they not afford private transportation? As we were getting off the metro we passed by a lady selling france soccer team scarfs and started speed walking towards the stadium. Halfway towards the stadium we decided we really wanted the scarfs and started walking back to the lady against traffic, even though the soccer game had already started. We’re true fans, we know.

The game went buy relatively quickly since we were sitting next to the always entertaining gabriel. I was wearing thick tights, jeans, socks, boots, a tank top, a long sleeve shirt, a cardigan, a peacoat, gloves and this ridiculously ugly hat I had bought earlier that day just so that I wouldn't die of frostbite and I was still FREEZING. Even weather proof dorene was willing to admit that it was cold but it was definitely worth watching france beat austria.  Allez france! (go france!)

I know I said I would tell you all about my fall break plans at the end of this blog but dorene has a french test tomorrow and needs to go to bed so yet again blame her for my lack of blogging, her and our stupid french school system.