Last Week Part II

...Wednesday was pure hell. We had one class for 6 hours: Marketing. This is the only class we have with all of the other French first year students. The lecture portion was not bad because I had a PowerPoint to stare at, but the small group sessions were terrible. The lecture is about 200 students or so, and then we have smaller groups of about 40. Within the groups of 40 we had to get in even smaller groups of about 5 students and give presentations before the other 35 people in our class. Talk about stress. I don’t know the French vocabulary that goes along with Marketing. I guess I’ll be learning it quickly. I went home that night and gorged myself with chocolate and took a two and a half hour nap. I was not a happy camper.

I can’t complain about Thursday. I turned in a paper for my European civ class. Sarah and I went to lunch beforehand with our French friend Arnaud, who was so kind as to offer to proofread our papers. After much laughter at our creative French, he helped us make our corrections. I think he’s only our friend because we’re absolutely ridiculous/pathetic and he keeps us around for laughs.

Friday was rather non-eventful. We had our language class in the morning with our program director M. Faure and then I had a Pépinière meeting. My group handed me a thick packet of information completely in English and told me that they couldn’t understand it and that I needed to read it and explain it to them. I spent my whole Sunday afternoon reading that packet and let me just say, it is extremely technical. We’re talking like photodetectors, light emitting devices, circuits, and external vs. internal power sources. We’re working on marketing a small roadside safety device that both reflects the light from car headlights back onto the car for oncoming traffic to see and also emits light in the opposite direction so that the driver of the first car can better see oncoming traffic. Sounds like a great way to blind both drivers to me.

Our friend Arnaud had a buddy visiting from Lyon for the weekend, so he invited Sarah and me to go out with them on Friday night. Thibault is the name of Arnaud’s friend, and he is gorgeous. After hanging out with the two of them for a bit, we met up with the rest of the guys (the same ones as before). Sarah and I are starting to feel less awkward with them and think they might actually be starting to consider us friends. It’s still really strange to us to be just two girls hanging out with a group of 4-5 guys, but something Arnaud said that night lead us to believe that they don’t like hanging out with French girls as much because they are either too shy or too reserved. I can’t afford to be shy or reserved here, and besides, I like to laugh too much. It’s working out in my favor anyway – I get to spend my weekends hanging out with four gorgeous French guys!

Saturday was spent shopping for school supplies (among other things) and running around town. It was a gorgeous fall day not to be wasted. Sunday was spent doing homework all day long, with little breaks for painting my nails and looking at pictures from the last two autumns on my computer. I miss fall in Michigan so much! Okay, that's enough for now! Sorry to bore you all!!