my life with depression.com

today was my second day. it took me forever to do my homework yesterday! i had to write a short biography about myself for a pretend online dating thing called: www.reconter.com. anyway, that took me awhile. it was to practice writing adjectives and forming them into the feminine form and blah blah blah. then, i did extra conjugations on the verbs that we brushed by, but which i thought that i should probably know - extra work? yes. ass-kisser? no. paid for the class with my own money and damn it i’m going to learn this damn langue? oui!

so today, i arrived 5 minutes early. i didn’t get starbucks this morning. it’s just as well as it’s trés expensive. i accidently jumped on the wrong metro line and realized it after seeing that i was not stopping at the correct next stop. had to whip out my little map and find that i had to stay in the metro an exta 20minutes or something. I finally caught a crossing line closer to the school and since the alliance does have little coffee machines, i thought why not. after you taste the coffee, THAT’S WHY NOT!

i faired better in the class today. i’m having a bit of trouble with making things feminine to masculine. there are way toooo many ways to do it. there’s adding an E or changing ‘euse’ to eux or changing a ‘ve’ to an ‘f’ - etc. why even have masculine and feminine. that’s not all either! you have to match EVERYTHING to it. not like spanish - no … that’s way too easy and not like english, that way way tooooo easy - per all the non-american english speakers in the class.

we did cloths, hair and size description today. interestingly enough, that girl sophie who works in germany but is chinese, she said that in asia, asian women are very conscience of their weight. she said that she and i would be considered normal. i told her that in the states, i am considered tout petite and feel rather thin there.

we had a new guy join the class today. i guess he started a few days before me. he’s a fellow american but i didn’t talk with him and i don’t know his name. he seems nice enough and i am so glad that he’s not one of those who give americans a bad name overseas. i would’ve wanted to punch him.

again, i had fun in class. oh! we had to write about a famous actor or politician or something, my parter Nada and i wrote about angelina jolie. i suggested her thinking that it’s kinda interesting that the last name that she picked to replace her dad’s name (voite) is jolie which in french = pretty. people had to guess who we were describing. obviously i learned the word livre for lips. well, it’s not spelled like that, but it sounds like that…

after class, i had 30 minutes to stand in line, purchase my food and eat before my next class. needless to say, i was munching away on my pannini in class. the cafeteria coffee was even more horrible.

this is the first day of my first afternoon class. this class is called ‘vive la paris’. what that means in english is break out your tennis shoes ’cause you are walking around town trying to follow instructions and answering the questions.

that’s all find and everything, but EVERYTHING was in french. ALL OF THE DIRECTIONS! i was working with a group, but decided to ditch them because they got caught up with a very very very friendly parisian woman (yes. friendly and parisian. that does exist) who wanted to give them all the answers to the questions. i wouldn’t be surprised if she marche avec ils (walked with them) throughout the whole exercise. i got lost of course, but in the 3hrs that we had, i got to finish most of the questions. i wish though that i did st. sulpice. this is the davinci code church in dan brown’s book. i will have to go back.

i had diner with a lovely 23 year old chinese girl who spoke better french than moi. we spoke in english most of the time and added french here and there. she was in the class and turns out that we were heading back the same way. we ate dinner at about 5:30 and we were the only ones on the street doing so. the french eat dinner late. like 1am in the morning. not really, but practically.

she said that she is the product of the one child per household rule in china. she was living in paris by herself with no friends or family for about a month now. she said it was hard, but i told her that when she’s in her 30’s, she will not look back and have regrets about her ‘adventure’. her personality dictates that she needed to do this. i admire her. that is a very hard independent thing to do. she wants to get a portion of her master degree here. poor thing. her feelings were hurt in her french class because people are not open minded about other people’s culture. funny because those same people are trying to learn another culture through language. maybe they don’t have interest in hers. i guess it could be understandable in that the western cultures find asian culture more of mystery and are not comfortable with it. - maybe. je ne sais pas. i don’t know.

i got french lessons today from 3 men with whom i ended having a conversation with, one man was half italian - which he first learned - and half spanish, but was born in africa! i love meeting interesting background people like that. i guess you get more of the chance to meet people when you travel since one might be more open to it rather than in everyday life.

i’m including a picture of the biblioteque mitterand- it’s new and there are four buildings all formed like an open book. this picture is taken from the new MAM bridge. very cool - over the seine.

here’s an up close picture. the black thing in the middle is a small “forest” within an enclosed area. the little twinkles are lights from the lecture rooms. in front are two of the book-like buildings: