Friday, January 18, 2008

this is getting harder

Because I guess I'm getting busier? I guess since the last post I went to the Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon with a couple girls from Georgia, and it was an amazing, amazing, museum. First of all, it's huge. We were there for 3 hours and didn't even look at everything...Second of all, it was extremely interesting. Many, many artifacts in the permanent collection, including money that is over 2,000 years old...YEAH 2,000 years old. It also had paintings and much pottery, furniture, even jewelry, and I enjoyed that they had many things specifically from Lyon (evidently including paintings of Perrine's grandfather, Tony Tollet, who was mentioned in my previous entry). My favorite part though was their new exposition on Ancient Egypt, and I got to see a mummified head and hand just sitting in a glass case in front of me! Plus lots of scarabs, sarcophaguses, statues, canopic jars, etc...all that stuff that I learned about in 4th grade and have been fascinated with ever since. I used to be so smart... :)
anyways, the next day (Thursday) I had my orientation, and man, was that a tiring day. First, everything was in French since I'm in the DEUF program and not the SELF program, which just means I'm not taking all of my classes in English. Second, I'm pretty sure the word organized does not exist in French. I apologize, that was dramatic. But the way they do things at least at my university (or at most universities here from what I've heard) is extremely different and not as concrete or clear. The only thing that comforted me was that it seemed like every single other student was feeling the exact same way. What we have to do is search for classes we want to take at random bulletin boards around campus and try them out for 2 weeks and then decide whether we want to keep them. Nothing's online and most of the credits don't match up with the number of hours my university requires. So after finding out that that was how the next couple weeks were going to look like, we had to take a French test for 40 minutes. I was ridiculously exhausted by the end of the day. I'm having to learn to take things with a more "French attitude" and relax and know that everything will work out in the end. Today was beautiful, and I just went to school with my roommate Pilar to try to find some more classes and then met Janine and her friends at Bellecour to take advantage of the soldes some more. They just keep marking off more and more each day! Anyways, tomorrow Janine's Uncle Acco has invited us to lunch with his wife and daughter, and then we're going to go shopping for shoes because I'm wearing mine out! Until then, I will be sleeping oh-so-unsoundly on my flat French pillows. Tomorrow---Carrefour, here I come for some new squishly pillows.

Oh, will try to start taking more pictures.

1 comment:

Dhananjay said...

Hang in there! I'm sure you'll attain French Zen/become resigned to the imperfections of man/realize the evils of English efficiency before long.