A Little Bit of Everything

In keeping with the theme of starting these blog posts talking about food – my host mother just came by my room with a freshly baked pain au chocolat. I should come home earlier more often! It is about 6:00 here – the time that most American families are sitting down to dinner, but here we don’t eat until at least 8:30. I don’t mind really – it means that I don’t have to worry about rushing home from class and can do things like snack on pain au chocolat at 6:00! Good thing I walk everywhere!

I made another discovery this week. It turns out that it does not, in fact, rain every morning in Paris before I manage to peel myself out of my bed. The wet sidewalks I remark each morning are actually due to the French trash and sanitation departments that hose down the sidewalks to get rid of dirt, trash and the ever-present dog excrement. Not that it does much good – I still find myself looking down more than I look ahead when I am walking so as to avoid an unpleasant surprise – guess that makes me all the more Parisian! Watching where I step on the sidewalks was the second thing I was warned about by my host father when I arrived – right after looking out for pickpockets on the metro. Ah, Paris – je t’aime!

This week my family is also hosting a Spanish exchange student, Anna, who is 15 years old – the same age as my youngest host sister. It is interesting to hear French from a very different accent, but she speaks quite well. She speaks English even better, and will often say the word she is searching for in English so I can translate it into French for her if I know it. Quite the multi-cultural life my host family is living right now! Hearing her speak French with a Spanish accent makes me think how funny my own accent must be – my family does remarkably well at understanding what I am saying though!

I ended up giving a (rather terrible) description of political parties in the U.S. today to my host family and Anna. It started with a discussion of elephants and donkeys and ended with me trying to translate the Wikipedia page: The Tea Party Movement. Clearly, they walked away well informed and impressed with my knowledge of the American political system.

Well, maybe not. But, I do hope I gave them a general idea of how things work.

Last Friday my art history class met in the Louvre, and tomorrow we will have class in the Musée d’Orsay (I know – life’s hard). I’m doing much better at staying awake in this art history class than the last time I tried (think 2^nd class Freshman year, lights off, big auditorium… nap time!) – needless to say I did not stay in that class. However, I love both my art history classes here. One covers the history of French art in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, and the other is a course at a French university called the history of modern art. I was hoping to get some insight on what all those blocks of color and vertical lines mean in modern art, but it turns out that modern actually means 17^th and 18^th century art – who knew?

Art history class in the Louvre is not always as glamorous as it might seem, though. Trying to balance a notebook and take notes (in French) while standing around a painting is not as easy as you would think! It actually must be quite comical to see a group of 16 American students attempting to scribble down notes in French, only stopping to look quizzically at one another when our Professor mentions the date of the painting, and we have no idea what numbers to write down.

You would think I should know my numbers by now, given that I have been studying French for 8 years, but I still have problems with the French way of saying years. In English 1894 is broken into two separate numbers – eighteen and ninety-four – nice and simple right? Okay, well in French you would say that date: Mille huit cent quatre vingt quatorze. Basically that translates to: one-thousand, eight hundred, four (times) twenty, fourteen.

Got it? Yeah, me neither. Now try having your professor give you birth and death dates of all the artists as well as start and end dates for the paintings. I guess by the end of this semester I’ll be a pro!

Since this post was a (rather badly organized) conglomeration of my reflections on home/class life (and me whining about my inability to add 80 and 14) I don’t have any fabulous pictures to share, but one of the Louvre seems appropriate! Thank you for all of your lovely emails and comments – I love hearing from everyone so keep them coming!