Headacheeee.

Yesterday was the first day of classes. I only have one class Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, and then two classes on Wednesday. Classes are all three hours long, though, which is rough. Yesterday, my class started at 9. I woke up at 7 because I have to get ready, walk to the Métro, then take the Métro, and then walk a little more. That was the earliest I've had to get up since I've been here. It. Was. Strugs. But I did it haha. I got there a little bit early since I didn't know where my class was, and it's a good thing I did because I got lost. Turns out there are a few entrances depending on which building you're in, so a nice nun helped me find my building lol. My class is only about 18 people or so. It's so weird. I was seriously expecting to walk into a lecture hall like UCLA, but it's more like a discussion. So strange. It's mostly Americans in my class, but there are a few random people from Korea and Germany and Mexico I think. Some people have been here for about a month already and have been taking classes, so I already felt behind. Then the teacher came in and started talking. In French. And never spoke English the entire three hours. I'm really glad I got here a couple weeks early so I could start tuning my ear, and I was proud of myself for understanding most of what happened. We had to introduce ourselves to our neighbors, then go around and ask everyone else questions, and then present what we had learned about them. I've found that I can understand pretty well, but when it comes to speaking I'm still at a loss. After meeting everyone (it took about 2 hours out of the three), we got a sheet of verbs and had to conjugate them according to the subject provided. This is where I failed immensely. A lot of them were irregular verbs, and I missed about half. I was also mad at myself because I let my neighbor convince me I was wrong on how to conjugate "faire" (a super common verb), and I was right originally. Then we went over a bunch of the rules that applied to all these tricky verbs (like it's different if it ends in "dre" vs. "indre" etc.). No homework but we're supposed to study those and may or may not have a quiz on Wednesday, at that point I was exhausted and didn't catch everything that was said. We'll see how today goes with "Les médias en France," my French elective.

Last night, Michal and Mado hosted everyone at their apartment for dinner. We had Shepherd's Pie and salad and the apple pie we all won from the scavenger hunt. It was really good and fun to hang out with everyone (none of them are in my classes!). Dinner was really fast, and after we were supposed to go to Montmartre, but Sergei didn't come and he was kind of the leader of that excursion, plus I don't really want to go without a guy in our group because I've heard it's not super safe at night. So half the people left, and some of us stayed and we just hung out for awhile and then watched French Kiss with Meg Ryan and Kevin Kline, which I had never seen before. I loved it. It was soooo funny, there were so many hilarious scenes, and I can't believe I've never seen it before! I got home around 12 and went to sleep, getting ready for my second day of school!

So that class was rough. After about 5 minutes I entered panic mode because it was legitimately all in French (I guess I knew it was going to be like that) and everyone else in the class had something to contribute (in French) which I was not prepared for. And there are only about 20 people in this class, too, so it's obvious if you're not talking. I was catching about every third word or so, and the lecture was about the media which I decided I don't really care about. I sat there for three hours, the only exciting moment being when we talked about the Dreyfus affair, because I knew what that was. After three hours of that, I have quite the headache. There's a guy in my class from UCLA, though! That was exciting. He's really nice, too. But he is fluent in French and was actually following what was happening. Hopefully even if I switch out of this class, I'll still have a fellow Bruin to go find somewhere to watch the UCLA football games with haha. So now I just have to wait for my resident director to email me back about the elementary electives...I'm really curious as to what the difference is. Maybe less class participation? Hopefully slower speaking? I wish there was one that had an integration of material with French, but not everyone else speaks English as a first language. I'll keep you guys posted!

Bisou bisou!