A long update

Well! I have been busy! Because this update is going to be so long, I'm going to have little headers with the different sections in case you don't care too much about one subject.

School

We started real university classes on Monday, and (shockingly) I think they're going pretty well so far! My first class is a second-year lexicology class, which is basically an application of linguistics skills, and I'm well-versed in that department. I feel like I'm where I would usually be in a class in the States, which sort of makes me feel like I'm not challenging myself enough because everyone only ever talked about how horribly difficult our classes would be for us.

I'm also taking a comparative literature class that discusses the way translation has affected the meanings of works and how characters have evolved over time in their different representations. We're focusing on Faust and Macbeth, but we're reading everything in French, which should be interesting! Those are the two school classes I'm most excited about, but I'm also taking a Languages of the World class with a million first-year university students. The class size is too big for me to like it, and I feel like I've already learned all the material in another class I took in the States, except it was in English before. The funny thing is that most of the terms are so technical that they end up being the same thing in French but with an accent. For example, Indo-European languages are "les langues Indo-Européennes". So I'm hoping that class will be an easy A.

My other classes consist of a Modern and Contemporary African History class, a theatre course offered by the program, and a University Methodolody class offered by the program. I think I might end up dropping the African History course because it is a four-hour class for third-year French History majors. I've never taken a history class before in college, so I don't feel like I'm sufficiently prepared to take an advanced history course, especially in French. But we'll see!

I really like the theater course. It's a course designed to help us with our oral French, but it's really fun because we end up doing a lot of improvisation involving acting and being ridiculous--two things I rather enjoy doing anyway!

Meeting Real French People!

On Thursday of this week, some of my friends in the program hosted a dinner party/potluck at their apartment. All in all, there were at least twelve people who ate and several more who came later in the evening. The girls in the apartment have a French roommate (named Violette), and she invited several of her friends to come to the party too, so I got to meet real French people who are my age for the first time! At one point in the evening, we learned that one of the French girls (Sonia) had studied in England for a year. I was coaxed into speaking in my English accent to see if she could understand me better without the American accent. It turned out that Sonia could understand me fine either way, but another girl could only understand me when I spoke in the accent. So for the rest of the night if I spoke in English at all, I had to speak with an English accent so that everyone could understand the conversation.

On Friday night, I had my first dinner with my French exchange family. The way the dinner was to go was explained to me as, "You will speak to the children in English for an hour and a half before dinner, and then during dinner, they will correct your French." Which made me feel really confident in my French abilities. The organization for it happened really quickly; Thursday night I was told I might meet the family on Friday night if they called me back on Friday, and then early Friday afternoon, I heard back from the mom in the family and we got everything set up for that night. I really like the family. The kids are ages 16 (girl), 15 (boy), and 13 (boy). It was nice to be in the middle of a family setting again. I mean, the program kids all joke around about how we're a huge family at this point--and it's true, it's what it feels like--but I miss the real thing. It was nice to be among bickering siblings again--and I really do mean that wholeheartedly.

Marseille

Yesterday, I went with a few of the program kids to Marseille to see a professional football game here--or as we Americans are prone to say, soccer. We were able to find tickets to the game for only 30€, and train tickets are also pretty cheap to Marseille. The game was fantastic! Marseille won 2-1 versus Sochaux, so everyone was happy. The Mistral was playing games with the temperature here again, so we were all sort of freezing, but it was like we were at home again watching an American football game. We were all pretty happy with the results of the night. After the game, we went out to eat and I got Marseille's specialty: bouillabaisse! It was okay, not amazing but not terrible either. I'm happy I got it at least once, anyway. The bouillabaisse was followed by profiteroles and coffee, and it seemed like a pretty great French night overall.