Day 10: Le devoirs commence/The homework begins

Last night after dinner, we watched "Une famille formidable," which is a French series Claudie and I had watched one of the first days I arrived. It was quite amusing, and I could understand it better than the first episode that we watched together. Apparently, my host dad worked with one of the main actresses on the show at a theater for quite a while.

Part way through the tv show, Claudie had to go downstairs for the Flamenco class. I told her that my mom had tried a flamenco class. She asked if my mom had continued, and I told her no, but that my mom and my grandmother do tap classes. She explained that tap and flamenco are very similar, but that flamenco is a different type of tapping than tap dance.

I am interested to see if we'll eat the smelly/strong cheese tonight at dinner, and how they go about rearranging the meal to make the cheese fit in.

My host dad is quite the character, and even though I'm not always part of the conversation, listening to Claudie and Michel speak French at a fairly normal/native speed is fun - seeing if/how much I can understand.

Today I only had one class - Literature. This class is sure to be amusing. At the start of class, the professor showed us a painting by Renée Magritte, which I have inserted into the blog. The words under each image aren't the word for the image that is shown. For example, the hammer tool at the bottom right of the painting is "labeled" le désert. Clearly a hammer is not the same thing as a desert. So then we talked about why the artist would do that and what the relationship was between the word and the image. Needless to say, we had quite the laugh (though I don't think the professor always understood what we were laughing about).

After class and lunch, Alaska and I conquered going to the post office and buying stamps. It was very overwhelming to go there - it's big and there are multiple registers you can go to as well as automated machines, and some people were taking a number (like waiting at a deli to order), and waiting in line, etc. First we tried the automated machines, but since we wanted to buy stamps in excess of the pieces of mail that we actually wanted to send, we had to ask what to do. I went and asked at the "Welcome" stand where to buy international stamps. The guy and girl at the desk understood me and responded in French. (Very exciting!) Then after, we went to the little desk to buy the international stamps and asked in French, the woman understood what I asked, and I understood her response! The whole process was very exciting, complicated, and overwhelming, and that is why I say we "conquered" the post office.

The homework load is already starting to increase. I had quite a bit of reading for my Political Science class (a packet of 17 pages in French). I decided that I need to be doing my homework in my free time during the day so that when I go home, I can hang out with my host family and not worry about getting my homework done.

À bientôt!