A Post Long Overdue

Bonjour tout le monde!

I have been really busy recently, and it's not letting up anytime soon. I last left off on Wednesday, so here's what's been up from then on:

On Thursday we had a pretty intensive class in the morning. We had our first real graded test and we weren't sure what to expect. There were different sections- listening, reading, writing, and speaking. For the listening, we listened to a dialog and had to write down what instructions a certain character got; for reading we were given an invitation to an art gallery and and article about the same gallery, but there was conflicting information between the two, so we had to point out the 10 discrepancies; writing involved writing an invitation letter, and in the speaking we had a partner- one of us was an art gallery owner introducing a painter, and one parter was the painter introducing himself to the crowd. There were also a couple grammar and vocabulary sections, all using the words and structures we had studied that chapter, which had been about art. Overall the test went well, except for one mistake of my own. We had been given three sheets of paper face down- 2 regular sized and 1 half sheet. Foolishly, I assumed that the half sheet was the speaking portion, to be done later. With 2 minutes to go, I looked at the sheet and realized that it was another grammar page. I did what I could, but I couldn't really give it my best attention.

For Interaktive Praxis we went to the Marktplatz, an open area downtown where there is a food market every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. We had different activities such as finding the cheapest fruits and vegetables, finding out the names of new flowers, and discovering what all kinds of items of items are also sold. It was a fairly useful activity, although our group was already familiar with the market, even enough to have our own fruit man whom we always visit.

After that, we took part in the German custom of Kaffee and Kuchen- coffee and cake. With all of the MEMS kids, interaction leaders, and teachers, we recognized the half-way point of the program, as well as the switch-over between Dr. Hasty and Dr. Futterknecht. It was nice to have the whole group together, and we were able to get to know Dr. Futterknect a bit better, which was nice since pretty much all of the intermediate German kids will have him for Advanced German next semester. He is very nice, and very interested in his students, so I'm sure it will be a good class. After Kaffee and Kuchen we hung out a bit with Wolf and another interaction leader, and then we headed on home.

On Friday began our adventure to Paris. We had class in the morning, and then made our way over to the Hauptbahnhof for our train at around 1:30. We got into Paris at around 4:45, to the familiar Gare de l'Est. We navigated around and bought our metro passes- Cait and I still had some left over from the week before, so we just bought a 2-day unlimited pass for Saturday and Sunday (although we found out later there was a cheaper way to do it that would have cost us 9 Euros less, argh). We also bought our 30-Euro Museum Pass, good for two days from first use, which would let us into many museums and also avoid lines. Then we made our way to our hostel- it was in a cute little area. I did the administrative things since I was the only French speaker, and we went up to our room. It wasn't bad, and we had a private room with a bathroom. However, there were only 3 beds and we had booked a quadruple, so that had to be sorted out, but that was done easily enough. It was also blazing hot and there wasn't A/C, but that was to be expected. Our shower was the smallest one I've ever been in. It wasn't a tub, just a shower, but even standing fulling on one side I could not put an elbow all the way out. I also couldn't bend over to pick anything up, all of my movements had to be simply up and down. But it was fine and clean, and then we set off to explore. The first thing we did was see the Cathédrale Notre Dame. During the course of this blog entry it will get very boring reading about how beautiful everything we saw was, so I will not go into it for every place- but Notre Dame was just amazing. We were not able to go inside because it was too late (we went inside the next day, though), but it was stunning- the architecture, stained glass, and just the size.

After Notre Dame, we went for dinner at a place that Erica and her family had eaten at the week prior. It was little Italian restaurant not too far away- I had lasagne, and everyone else had some kind of pasta or pizza. It was good and refreshing, and not too expensive. From there, we walke d a little bit on our own, seeing the pyramid of the Louvre. There were tons of people hanging out and eating on one of the bridges to get there, and there were also several musicians playing. The whole city is just beautiful, and there are so many things to see. Afterwards, we did our final activity of the day- a sightseeing boat cruise on the river. We were in a little tour boat, and we went around in the twilight and saw some recognizable sights, listening to 4 different languages- French, English, Spanish, and Italian. The most magnificent thing we saw was the Eiffel Tower- at this particular time it was lit up completely in blue, with a circle of gold stars on the front, a symbol of the EU. It looked spectacular, and it was my first glimpse of the entire tower. The tour was interesting and a little informative, although it was hard to go into much detail when everything had to be repeated 3 times. We saw a lot of people hanging out by the river, dancing and eating, and there was also a little "beach" area set up. After the hour-long boat tour, we were all tired, so we went back to our hostel for some rest, since we planned to get up early the next morning.

It is getting late, so I am going to split this trip into more than one blog entry. Tomorrow I will hopefully get caught up to the present!
Bisous!