End of the year rush, à la française

I should be using this time to work on my corpus documentaire, but my brain will no longer function in French -- something about reading 250+ newspaper articles about the French Socialist Party in the past 24 hours does that to you. So instead, I decided to update my much neglected blog. Hopefully I can be more coherent in English than in French, though at this point I'm not making any promises!

Let's see, has anything exciting happened in the past week or so?

Sunday 5/17: I was invited to dinner at a friend's house, so I made a peach cobbler...sort of. I have yet to master the art of converting American measurements (cups, teaspoons, etc) to French (grams, "coffee" spoons). I think I ended up with too much butter, and my baking dish was too big. But the peaches were fresh from the Sunday morning market, so it still tasted good!

Wednesday 5/20: I had to do math for the first time since high school in my urban planning class. Yuck. Not only that, but the French write their numbers differently: they use decimal points where we use commas, and vice versa. So 20.000 m^2 is really 20,000 m^2. That tends to make quite a difference. Still, I felt a strange sort of satisfaction once I finally managed to conquer the story problem!

Thursday 5/21: I took a day trip to Amboise with a few friends. We toured the local chateau, poked our heads inside Leonardo da Vinci's retirement home, and stopped by the local winery and glass blowing studio. It rained pretty much all day, but in some ways that added to the charm (or at least that's what I tell myself). Plus, it was definitely a nice break to see green space and trees and very few cars and traffic.

Friday 5/22: Hmm, anything interesting about this day? Oh, yeah, it was my 21st birthday! This was my first birthday away from home, and as much as I wish I could have celebrated it with my friends and family back in the States, I must say that Paris is a pretty decent substitute. One of my friends here hosted a little party at her apartment, and then we all went out dancing. Slightly different from the standard U.S. college student 21st festivities, but I liked my version better!

Sunday 5/24: number 37 on the list of "random things I never thought I'd experience in Paris": I went to a steeplechase. When I think of horse races, I think of the Kentucky derby, but apparently the steeplechase is big in France. My favorite moment was when one of the horses fell going over a jump, looked down at his jockey on the ground, said "see you later, buddy", and took off to finish the race. I was so worried that one of them had been hurt, so it was pretty funny to watch the horse run off while the jockey basically shrugged and walked off the course.

Tuesday 5/26: Last night, I had my first final exam -- yikes. It was for my Arabic class, and of course, as with most things with this class, the entire process makes me sigh and shake my head a little. First of all, the other students in the class negotiated both the date and the content of the exam. I'm certainly not complaining, but I have never before sat a final exam that only covered 3 of the 8 units of the semester!

Second of all, it took me a little while to figure out why the exam felt strange, but I realized this morning: I was not required to produce any original Arabic, anywhere in the test. I had to translate one sentence from French to Arabic and another from Arabic to French -- with the help of a dictionary! Funnily enough, the Arabic -> French section was the hardest part because I only have an Arabic-English dictionary, so I essentially had to do 2 translations for the words I didn't already know.

After the translation section, I had the conjugate 6 or 7 verbs into various tenses...and that was it. No essay section, no speaking, no dictation. My Georgetown classmates' heads would explode from the shock of it all. But, in the infinite wisdom I have gained over the past several months, I just smile and mentally shake my head. Is that condescending? I hope not. Like I said, I'm not complaining, it's just very different from what I'm used to.

And that brings us up-to-date. My current project is a giant group research paper on the "leadership crisis" in the French socialist party. My job, as the only exchange student in the group, is to comb through newspaper archives and compile articles on the party convention last November. It's pretty interesting to compare French vs. American party politics...maybe I'll include a more detailed post on the subject once I finish the assignment.

It's a little crazy to realize that the end of the semester is in sight. Other than this big project, I have one more exposé due on the last day of class (June 12). I have final exams in my urban planning and French classes next week, and my other two finals are during the exam period at the end of June. I sort of like having the work spread out like this -- it's very different from the Georgetown system of cramming everything into the last 2 weeks.

Aside from school work, I'm getting ready for my next round of visitors. K and M arrive from Salamanca, Spain on Sunday, and L will be joining them from Madrid sometime next week. I'm so excited to see them, in addition to looking forward to the excuse to gallivant around the city doing touristy things. I've been realizing that there is still so much I want to see and do here...I just hope I can fit it all in.