Mes premiers cours de francais

So... I had my first classes in French today at the lovely little institution known as l'ILCF, and I have to say I'm impressed. When I registered last Thursday I met a few of the professors who teach the various courses and they are all exigent to the extreme. So much in fact it was a bit intimidating, but after 6 hours of french instruction (that's right, not a word of English.. after all we had about 12 different nationalities in the class) I'm perfectly at home.

Mme Guyot teaches Synthesis and Argumentation for my level (Advanced 1) but she's a linguist and grammarian by day. The best way to describe her is to say that she sort of dances through her lesson, greeting each student with a high-octave "booooonjour!" and then diving back into the lesson with hands flying in various gestures and all manners of quick witticisms and commentaries. I think she must consider herself an amateur artist because she adores drawing little cows and bowls to be used as metaphors and analogies. That's not a very good description of what I learned today, but needless to say she actually succeeded in making Argumentation interesting, and further in connecting with her foreign students who probably pick up about 70% of what she says.

My second class was History of France... but what I realized was not very French-minded at all. I think my high school skipped over World War I completely. (You know, that pesky little WORLD war that involved basically everyone on the planet and set forth the infrastructure for World War II and subsequently the global alliances, and political and social movements that still exist today.. Yeah, that war.) I was learning things in French that I never learned in English, and while that's generally par for the course over the next 15 weeks, I never realized I would be learning things that I SHOULD have already learned. Strange. And from a European perspective to boot.

On another note, I knew that France, England, and Spain were colonial powerhouses back in the year 1XXX (whatever) but I had never really thought about the fact that the ENTIRE world at one point was colonized, except for 2 countries: Japan and Ethiopia. What's also fun to learn is that while other colonizing powers were quite pleased to up and move to their respective colonies, the French generally didn't have the same motivation. They liked their country, and they liked their colonies, but when other people lived there. The French. Heh.

So, again, 6 hours of courses, and afterwards I took an "abonnement" (subscription) for the Velibs (the public bike system in Paris) and rode a bike on the way home across the Seine through the center of Paris. Amazing. I can't believe I can actually write that sentence and not be lying. In any case, it was fantastic and only took 15 minutes to ride home from school. And since most of my days run from 9-12 and then 2-5 I can really go home for lunch - I haven't done that since the 6th grade! Thanks France!

More to come. And pictures. I promise.