University Life

After a lovely dinner with my host mom (savory and sweet homemade crêpes, featuring different kinds of cheeses, vegetables, hummus, cashew butter, jams, and the maple syrup I brought from the States!), I am supposed to be sitting here being studious. I have three entire French novels to finish by Monday, as well as half of Diderot's Salons, or How to Philosophize About Art in 500 Pages. Ehhh, I think I'll just update my blog instead.

So. Monday and Tuesday were my first days at la fac (Paris III), and the rest of the week is spent with Midd. I'm lucky enough to have a schedule that, purely by chance, doesn't require me to go racing between the university and the Middlebury Center. My first impressions of Paris III, were, well, not that great. Just walking up to the entrance feels like I'm literally taking my life into my hands, as surviving the giant cloud of carcinogens is proving to be a difficult feat. Everyone smokes. Everyone! Some of the students look no older than 17, but they're still out in the freezing cold at 9 in the morning, lighting up. Guess the French haven't yet gotten the memo about cigarettes...  From what I've heard, the ban on smoking inside the classrooms is a recent development, so I suppose I should be thankful that I only have to deal with the smoke outside. Anyway, so, first class on Monday was my Literature and Painting course. It was a good thing that I got there early! The classroom was set up for about 40 students...and about 80 showed up, all registered. What. This occurred in all my other classes as well, so that students were crammed in sitting on the floor, disrupting the professor when they'd had enough and leaving to drag in more tables from other classrooms and attempting to squish them in the back of the room, and basically packing the place so tight with people that the windows would fog up from top to bottom and the room would become grossly humid. You're doing it wrong, registrar. So, after all that rearranging occurs, my professor handed out a syllabus and promptly told us we were by no means required to go to class, that as long as we turn in our essays and take the final we can do whatever we want. She then went straight into her lecture, about which I can't really remember much right now, so it must not have been that interesting. What did stick in my mind was the fact that even if I wanted to pay full attention to the professor, I couldn't, because the French students were too busy talking to each other and blatantly texting or checking Facebook on their laptops. And when I say blatantly, I mean blatantly. There was nothing "sneaky" about it - they would take out their cell phone, hold it in their hands in front of their faces, and text away. And when they weren't texting, they were chatting and giggling with their friends, so that the classroom was perpetually humming with bored students. This wasn't just in my first class, however, and continued to be the norm in every other class I'm taking at Paris III. In my Writing World War II course, for example, the professor (who did not hand out a syllabus but instead started his first lecture by verbally giving us a giant list of possible essay topics and asking us to pick right then and there. Due? Ehh, "sometime after one of the breaks"...which one is still unknown) would ask the odd student who was actually paying attention to "Speak up since, you know, the room is noisy." So apparently, it's completely normal for French students to be really disrespectful, and the professors have this it's-out-of-my-hands attitude that almost encourages the students to not pay attention! Alright, that's my little rant about French university life... The good news is that the professors are incredibly knowledgeable about their subjects, and since lecture classes don't bother me (good thing since apparently that's all we're going to get!) I'm quite content with what I'm learning - as long as I sit in the first or second row, that is, so I can hear what's going on.

In other Paris III news, I went to use the bathroom, and as I entered the stall I had a momentary panic attack that I had just walked into the boys' bathroom and that leaving the stall was going to get very awkward, very fast. Turns out the bathrooms are unisex (even though there's an open wall of urinals, cool). I think also one of the greatest differences for me, no matter what country the university was in, is that there are so many people, everywhere - it's always a crowd. Bowdoin has 1800 students, so the big-university life was a definite change for me; it's kind of stressful to be surrounded by so many people all the time. (Although, for some reason, city life doesn't bother me in the least. In fact, I quite like it! Being able to get-up-and-go, just take the métro and no matter where I get off, there will be food and shopping and museums and the like.)

There are probably other things about Paris III that I'm forgetting to put here, but I'm sure next week more will come to mind. On Monday in between classes, I walked for awhile away from the university just to clear my head, and came upon a small brasserie that I stopped in for lunch. It was a definite local joint, where the hostess knew every customer by name, and what they would want to eat, and a lot of the customers knew each other, too. So I was definitely a newbie, but the hostess was just as friendly to me, chatting with me about the book I was reading and asking me about America and how I liked Paris. Also, for lunch, everybody gets a free kir. Just saying. Anyway, the food wasn't spectacular but it was decent and cheap and the ambiance was so nice that as I was leaving and the hostess asked if she'd see me again soon, I just had to let her know that I'd be back in next Monday.

Okay, that's enough about school. Let's look at some pictures of the Louvre, shall we? (Remember, click to enlarge!)

Here I am!

The original party cats.

Yo, sup Mona.

So...overwhelming...

Napoleon's apartments.

I guess this is where Napoleon hung out?

I also went to the Marais and did some window shopping (or, inside the store browsing, since it was 11 degrees today. Fahrenheit) in some of the fancy food boutiques (typical). I also went here:

Jew food.

It's the oldest Jewish boulangerie in Paris, and I stopped in for lunch (perogis! - but since I requested the Polish kind, the woman assumed this meant I spoke Polish, and started babbling away and it was really awkward trying to figure out how to stop her since she just kept talking and talking, oh well). I also saw a "NY-style Jewish deli" but didn't have time to test out that claim.

Le marais.

Okay. Time for bed! My first phonetics class tomorrow, not really sure what to expect but all I can think of is this. Le jokes! Goodnight dear readers!

x R.