School Things and Touring...

Hey! So I was thinking that it's been over a week since I last posted anything. And then I checked the date and it's been much longer than that. So sorry for the delay!

School is now in full swing, and I certainly was there a lot this past week. Four days a week I have my grammar class from 8-10:30. This week all the other classes started though. And by "all the other classes" I mean my phonetics lab and the conference (lecture) courses. The phonetics lab is one hour every day, but only every other week, so this week I started my first ever phonetics course! Basically the prof says a few words, we repeat them, then she says the same words and adds a few more on to make it a longer phrase. It builds up to full sentence that we just say from memory and then she gets each person in the class to repeat it aloud individually. The class is designed to work on fluidity and linking together words better when we speak. We're also working on putting the emphasis on the right syllables in order to help lose some of our English accent. So it's all pretty interesting to me and sometimes it's quite the mouth work out.

But the biggest part of my week was taken up with the conference courses. I only have to take 3 this semester (each one runs for 2 hours once a week) but at the beginning we're encouraged to go to a lot of them to see which ones we like the most. So I ended up going to 7, all at the beginning of the week. By Wednesday evening I had already done 21 class hours If you're thinking to yourself "holy, that's a lot of class time!" then you and I are thinking the same thing. All of our classes are taught in French (quelle surprise!) so I have to pay close attention in order to be able to follow what's going on.

What were the highlights of the courses? Well, there's an entire class that talks about the Palace of Versailles which was actually super interesting and the prof was fantastic! I thought the topic was too narrow to be interesting, but turns out I was wrong. There's also a literature and cinema course that looks at film adaptations of novels which I really enjoyed. And the third course to make my favorites list is called "Gastronomie, terroir, et culture." Confession time. I didn't look up those first two words before going to the class so I was expecting something about some sort of warfare (gastronomie sounded violent to me), terror (terroir) and how it's impacted French culture... Turns out it's a course about food, so that was a happy surprise. I must say I felt a little silly when I realized that "gastronomy" is an English word which I should have recognized.

So that's school in a nutshell. I'm learning lots and am working at finding more opportunities to speak French. You'd think it would be easy, but most people in the residence speak English (including my room mate) so it's actually a bit of a challenge. But don't worry, school hasn't been taking up all of my time...

I've been to see Notre Dame de Paris...

Such a beautiful day!

The windows were incredible!

I think the sign said this one is 10 meters across.

And we got to walk along the top to see these guys :)

This was right before my camera died. I will definitely go back to get more pictures from on top of the bell tower!

And we went to La Congiergerie, which was a palace/fortress at one point and then was used as a prison during the French Revolution. Marie Antoinette had her own special cell there. The rest of the cells were super small and there were so many people in there that a lot of them ended up dying from sickness before making it to the guillotine. 

The Hall of the Soldiers is the oldest surviving Medieval part of the building and was one if the biggest ever built. The 2000 staff had to eat somewhere I guess.

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One of the Guard's rooms.

Sainte-Chapelle

The Women's Courtyard

Of course with spikes so nobody could get out.

This is where they could wash their clothes.

Clock outside the building

And the view of la Conciergerie from the bridge. It's a pretty impressive building!

So that's what I've been up to lately! This weekend coming up I'm headed to Normandy and Mont Saint-Michel, so I'll have more to share soon! If you think I've left anything out just leave a comment and let me know. Take care everyone!