Today, I had my first French class. C'était ennuyeux. I live about a 25 minute walk from the Institut Catholique, so I walked there, since it was a nice, sunny morning. I could take the Metro there, but the ride is just about 20 minutes long because I'd have to switch lines. Why spend 20 minutes on a dirty metro when you could spend 25 minutes walking in the streets of Paris? My entire class is all international students and I sat next to Yoko, a mother, wife, and all-around upstanding citizen of Japan. I was really surprised to find that there's another girl from Michigan in my class. She is originally from the Midland area, but goes to a small school in Indiana. The one good thing about Tuesdays and Thursdays is that I'm done with class by noon.

After class, I decided to stop in a few stores and look for notebooks with regular lined paper. For some reason, all of the notebooks in France have graphing paper and people just write on that. Personally, I don't like the look of vertical lines cutting up my words, so my journey began. After a couple of stores, I finally found a notebook with "normal" paper- I was so excited! I realized on my walk home that I haven't had a crêpe yet, and I thought that it was time I did. I stopped by a crêpe stand and got une crêpe avec beurre et sucre. C'était delicieuse! I then realized that I needed stamps for a couple of post cards, so I went to the post office. There must be some universal agreement between every post office in the world to make all customers' experiences unpleasant. The man "helping" me could clearly tell that I was a confused foreigner, and did absolutely nothing to ease the situation. Usually, people will speak slowly or break out into English when they realize I'm not from the area, but this guy spoke faster, if anything. Anyway, I got my stamps and made sure to get enough for a while so I won't have to re-live that experience anytime soon.

Galerie Lafayette

It was about 2pm and I was just sitting around my homestay with nothing to do. I am trying my very hardest to not be lazy while I'm here. No saying "I'll go there tomorrow" or "I'm tired", so I got off my butt and walked around Galerie Lafayette. Galerie Lafayette is pretty much like an enormous Saks Fifth Avenue where most of the clothes are grouped together in little boutiques by designer. It has an absolutely beautiful ceiling and an awesome terrace on the roof that gives you a wonderful view of the city. I didn't buy anything, but I'm glad I got up and went.

For dinner, Ines, Audoin, and I had some "traditional Spanish dish", that was comprised of potatoes, eggs, onion, and cheese in a skillet. I am much more comfortable conversing with them, since they are around my age. I actually enjoy it when they laugh at my grammatical errors and mispronunciations, because it makes me laugh, too. There's a sense of humility about being a foreigner that demands thick skin and a good sense of humor. For example, when they asked me about Barack Obama, I said that he thinks about students a lot. I accidentally used the feminine tense of students, so in French I technically said that Barack Obama thinks about female students a lot. That puts a WHOLE different twist on what I meant to say. It's important to laugh at the mistakes like that. I make so many of them, that I'd be pretty miserable if I didn't smile about them.

My first assignment for my photography class is to take pictures at the same location for six days. I chose to do the street across from mine and this was one of my favorites: 

Affecteusement,

Katie