Paris!

Salut tout le monde,

I know it's been a little while since I've updated this baby, but my life has calmed down a bit since I got back from London. We're smack in the middle of the semester (midterm time/just before spring break), so I've mainly just been in class. My French Politics class is going really well. It's so interesting, but it's weird to have a class that only meets once a week. I always avoided that kind of schedule at Elon, but it's really not that bad. We just had a midterm, and I think it went pretty well.

What is not going so well is my Phonetics class. The whole set up is quite strange because it's a hybrid grade with my grammar class, and as far as I can tell, the mixing of those two grades is pretty much arbitrary. I've never taken a Phonetics class before. It sounded pretty interesting and useful, but it's really more like an upper-level linguistics class. Every day, for one hour, we rush through a crazy discussion of differences in vowel sounds, different word combinations, etc. etc. One hour really isn't long enough to get anything done, but I still show up everyday, just in case I happen to learn something. Yuck...

In more exciting news, Paris is finally starting to get warm. It could definitely get cold again, but I'm hoping to be able to mail my winter clothes home soon. It will be so nice to revisit all the gardens around Paris, but spring and warm weather also brings more tourists. Yuck... France has a population of around 65 million, and they get about 80 million tourists each year. I have class by Notre Dame, and there are already so many EF Tour groups everywhere. Americans just don't realize how loud they are. Not fun at all. I get out of class at 4 today and I don't have anything else to do until 8 when I go to the Israeli Film Festival, so I think I'm going to go check out some more gardens. They are all over the place, and it's looking like a beautiful day already.