Paris in the spring...: Le week-end

Hi guys,

All of a sudden, things have gotten much busier here, so sorry for the delays here on the blog.

Today I start my phonetics lab, which is a class where you practice your French pronunciation with other students who speak your first language. I imagine this will be a class with mostly Americans, but there are also Brits and Ghanaians at the school, so we'll see.

Over the weekend, I got a letter with my appointment for the immigration department. I already had to go through a big long process to get a visa at the French consulate in Atlanta, but once you arrive in France, you have to meet with immigration officials and have a medical appointment. My appointment is in two weeks, so that should be a blast.

On a more exciting note, this weekend was actually really fun. Friday night a few of us made tacos. It was kind of difficult to find tortillas and taco sauce, but we found it all, and it was delicious. Saturday night we went to see The King's Speech (Le Discours d'un Roi, in French). It was a reaaaaallly good movie, for any of you who haven't seen it. The ticket was only 5euro80 with a student idea, which is cheaper even that American movie tickets. Luckily we stopped by the grocery store for snacks on the way in because this theater did not have any sort of food for sale. I'm not sure if bigger French movie theaters sell food, but there was certainly no popcorn in this small suburban theater. The theater was so small that everyone had to wait in line for the previous screening to get out before we could take our seats. Unlike American theaters, French theaters play a lot of international films, so The King's Speech had English audio but French subtitles.

Sunday we got up really early to go to Versailles. Unlike all of you lucky folks back in the States, it is freezing here and has been raining for several days. The weather was horrible, but there were still a large number of tourists there. Versailles is about a hour and a half train ride from my house. Unfortunately, they did not have any student prices, but we went anyways. The chateau is as unbelievable as you might think. Some sections were closed off for renovations because it's the off season, but we still saw quite a lot. The gardens are amazing also, but we didn't stay there too long because of the awful weather.

One of the best parts of this program is having class assignments to do fun things all around Paris that introduce you to the city. I mentioned to one of my professors that I was interested in volunteering, so one of my assignments this week was to go sign up as a volunteer at this agency. I'm not sure I understand their entire mission, but they are a secular agency that has an in-house soup kitchen. They may have other services too, but I think they primarily work on distributing food and clothing to needy Parisians. Paris is a huge city, and I see tons of homeless people on the Metro everyday asking for money, so this will be a nice way to give back without actually giving money myself. I'm going to be handing out food there every Friday morning. I took a tour when I signed up, and it's not really like soup kitchens that you guys may be familiar with. This agency hands on common ingredients that can make healthy meals for families. These include a chicken, packs of vegetables, cheese, milk, baby food, etc. More updates on that once I start.

This upcoming weekend I'm going to Strasbourg, which is a medium-sized town almost on the border of France and Germany. It's the seat of the Council of the European Parliament, but since I'm going on the weekend, I won't be able to observe any sessions. This is my first big train trip, so I'm very excited. The train ride is only about 2 hours, so not bad at all.

Tomorrow night the entire program is going to see a ballet at the Paris Opera. It's called Caligula. I'm not familiar with the plot (I think this version was created just for Paris), but I'm obviously very excited. It's so nice to be busy again after my long winter break.

Here's a little photo update for you guys in the states: