Oh. My. Goodness.
I wouldn't usually call myself a techie, or really even that reliant on technology in my everyday life, but I have had to live two days without internet, and it has been awful.
I wrote these entries on Word the last two days because I felt like I needed to keep everyone updated somehow.
So!
Wednesday September 1, 2010
Well! Life has been busy! We started our cours intensif on Monday after taking a two-hour placement test. Really, I’m not even sure how much the test had to do with anything. I know I got placed in my class because I asked to be. The test was split in two parts: written and oral, which is the same way the classes are split. The oral exam consisted of them asking us simple questions about French (why we are interested in it, how we plan to use it in the future, etc.), and the written exam was pretty run-of-the-mill. I feel pretty confident in my written French, so I requested to be put in the conversation class.
In other news, we finally got moved into our apartment! I got my key on Tuesday night, and my roommate got her stuff moved in that night. I decided to wait until Wednesday morning to move because I wanted to clean everything before I got stuff moved in. The apartment was pretty dirty before we moved in. None of the dishes were put away; everything was lying out so that we could see it for inventory purposes, but none of the cupboards were clean either. So I spent three hours wiping down our kitchen’s cupboards, shelves, and dishes. I even had to clean our dish drying rack because it had a bunch of dust coating it. It was a little gross.
I went out today and got sheets for my bed and some candles for the apartment. While I was doing that, Andrea was going grocery shopping for us, and when she got back I made dinner for us. She wiped down our shower while I cooked, and we had our first home-cooked meal here: spaghetti. Simple, cheap, and so worth it.
We did have a little incident last night when I went to hang my sopping wet towel (from the washing machine) on our clothesline. There is a restaurant that’s only open at night in our courtyard right below our clothesline, so I checked to make sure it wouldn’t be dripping on anybody before I hung the towel up. There was only a tin roof below the clothesline, so I thought I would be fine. About ten minutes later, two guys ring our doorbell, so I stick my head out the window to see who it is, and I don’t recognize them. They’re yelling indistinguishable French up at me, and I keep telling them they have the wrong apartment until finally one of them says, “Do you speeek Eeengleeesh?” I yell “Yes!” back to them from my fourth-story window, and he yells back, “Your napkeen! Weeeth thee waterrr! Iss dripping on my customerss!”
So I can’t do laundry at night anymore. Bummer.
We still don’t have internet in our apartment because everything in France takes forever, so I have to type up these entries in Word and then upload them while I’m at the program’s office. It’s definitely weird not being able to check email whenever I want. I think we’re going to get internet from my dad’s favorite (and maybe his only) French word: Orange.
Tomorrow we go to open our bank accounts here, and then Friday we get to see what the former students of the program left us all in terms of furnishings for our apartments!
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