Falling flat and catching up.

Well, I've had quite a time since I last posted. Besides classes really getting started (and how -- but more on that later), I've walked around half the city, joined a knitters' group, been to the top of the Eiffel Tower, gone to an opera and a dance performance, seen a screening of Hitchcock's Notorious, found my favorite crêpe place so far, and maybe most importantly of all, tried fondue. Life here is very busy, and my days are very full. I usually get up early and cross the city by noon, either to go to class or to get downtown, and I don't make it back to my room until late in the evening, around seven-thirty or eight if I'm eating dinner with my host family and much later than that if I'm foraging on my own. This is both exhilarating and frustrating. It's great to be on the go, getting as much as I can out of the time I have here. But, on the other hand, a lot of that time is spent on the tram, the metro, the RER, the bus, walking at a brisk clip, planning, meeting people, getting directions, and (crucially) figuring out if the place I'm trying to go is open. My goal for the next few weeks is to spend more time wandering in the city, rather than always trying to be going somewhere in particular; there's lots of neighborhoods I have yet to explore, lots of museums I haven't gone to yet, and lots of adventures waiting to be had before it gets too cold.

I was happy to be able to check "go to the top of the Eiffel Tower" off my Paris to-do list. I met my friends Melanie and Allison early on Friday morning, before the ravening bus-loads of tourists arrived, and we got to see Paris as the day brightened. It was really beautiful. I have a lot of pictures to post, but I can't seem to post them right now, so I'll edit this entry as soon as I can get the picture-post function to work. [Edit: Seems to be okay now, here we go!]


That's the Tuileries and the Louvre (and a bunch of mist).


The Arc de Triomphe!


The Seine and the Trocadero.


Me! And Paris!

Last Saturday, I was also really pleased to make it to a French knitters' group that meets here in Paris. I found out about it through an online knitters' community that I belong to, and I was a little bit nervous as I made my way to the meeting-place, a bookstore on the Right Bank, because this was one of the first really French things I was doing here: being with French people without any other Americans around. (All of my classes but one here have another CUPA student in them, so at scary, oh-no-French! moments there's usually someone else to look baffled with.) I brought a pair of socks I've started working on and sat down near the back of the group, and after a few minutes other people started to say hello, and talk about what we're working on and whether violet is the color of the season, and then I was offered tea and homemade cake. And then I tried to just listen, to enjoy the conversation and the company. I had a great time, and while I won't be able to make it every week -- the meetings are at 10:30 on Saturday mornings, which isn't generally the most convenient time for college students -- I certainly hope to go again soon.

Other exciting things... CUPA provides us the opportunity to go to four big shows per semester, and this past week I went to two. The first, on Monday night, was fantastic: Rigoletto at the Opéra Bastille. To begin with, the Opéra Bastille is an amazing building. It was built by Mitterrand in the 1980s, along with the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Pompidou Center, and the Grande Arche, and the style is very imposingly modernist from the outside. The inside, however, is comfortable and the sound is amazingly lush. I don't know much about opera, but I loved the show. (At one point there was fire onstage!) The next spectacle on Tuesday night was less enjoyable. I managed to be about ten minutes late due to some unforseen subway difficulties, and rather than luxuriating in our top-notch CUPA seats, I got stuck on a half-seat on the end of a row in the nosebleed section. I fear that my appreciation of the dance was affected negatively. The seat was unbelievably awful; it constantly wanted to turn inwards, so I had to brace myself with my feet to prevent sitting in the lap of the person next to me, and the chair was less than half the size of a normal one, so the lumbar support was nonexistent. It was almost a stool, actually. There was no intermission, which meant I couldn't go take my real seat for the second half, and I will admit I spent the entire hour and a half frowning mightily and wishing I was at home, or at least in a real chair. The dance was okay, I guess. It was the story of Snow White in modern-dance form, and involved the seven dwarves swinging in complicated formations from bungee cords as they emerged from the mines. Also, they had spelunking hats and clicked the little lights on and off rhythmically sometimes.

Perhaps I just don't understand modern dance.

Unfortunately, the week wasn't all fun and games. I spent a lot of time in various libraries, working on an presentation for my French feminism class that was due on Thursday. I had volunteered to go first, on the theory that it was a subject that interested me (Hubertine Auclert) and that it's always better to get that kind of thing out of the way early, rather than waiting until the end of the semester when all the work just piles up. But I hadn't counted on one thing: I am in France, and I have no idea what I'm doing. This became abundantly clear when I gave the presentation. I had prepared, essentially, what is called an exposé: a sort of report on a figure or topic. What I was supposed to have prepared was an explication de texte: a line-by-line close analysis of a historical or literary document that seeks to clarify a historical issue. So, my twenty-minute summary of a four-paragraph document and the life of Hubertine Auclert was, um, wrong. I figured this out right before I went up to speak in front of the class.

It was one of the worst hours of my life. After I finished, the professor critiqued me (as is the custom here), and although she was extraordinarily generous, I still had a very hard time not crying. (However, I provided a valuable service to the other foreign students in the class, because after my clearly very-confused disaster, she explained exactly what the assignment was supposed to have been and how to do it for everyone else.) Once class finished, I spoke to the professor for a minute, trying to explain that I was really sorry, that I hadn't known what to do, and, miraculously, she told me not to worry about it. I am still worried about it, and thinking about what I can do to make it up. But I know that I certainly won't be caught so confused again.

Today I'm taking some time to relax and get organized. And I'm thrilled because Mom will be here in a few days! I can't wait to see a familiar face.