First week-Intensive Language Courses

Just finished our first week of intensive language. It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, but it wasn't great either. The "Institutions" class stayed interesting- we had in-class discussion about opinions in Europe/the States regarding welfare (not in the welfare-mom sense), gay civil unions/adoption... We also talked about the French political system, although it wasn't as interesting as the other stuff. Grammar never really got fascinating- a lot of it is stuff that I know in theory. For example, if you give me a worksheet asking which pronouns I'm supposed to use in a list of sentences, I can do it. However, it's completely different when I'm actually talking/writing in French.

Had a frustrating group experience about which I'm still struggling to have a positive attitude about it. I chose "gastronomy" when we went around the room and mentioned topics we wanted to use. Three Chinese kids and a German girl also chose it. We somehow made it from there to alcoholic beverages among cultures, but I didn't like that and wanted to do a specific occasion at the very least (our advising teacher said it would be too much of a list to just talk about alcoholic beverages) during which people drink alcohol. I couldn't seem to get this across to most of the other people (except my friend, the German), who just wanted to do regular drinks. We finally decided on doing wedding food traditions. They also really hadn't done any research, so about 2 hours of our first obligatory meeting were spent by them doing research. We ended up changing our topic because we couldn't find much information, but it was so hard just to organize who was going to do what. This morning we went through a trial run of what we were going to say and the German girl's and my parts were about the right length, but the others talked for FOREVER and repeated things about ten times. It was interesting to hear about the way other cultures celebrate weddings, but we were supposed to talk for 20 min or less and our trial run took 47 minutes... We asked them to take things out or to cut them short, but they didn't really. However, I shouldn't really be too upset... There were some really funny parts of their presentation, and I didn't feel like I did so well myself (didn't use notecards to avoid reading, which resulted in some "uh..." moments). However, afterwards I was talking to my German boys and they thought I did okay, which was good because Germans a) don't lie and b) speak extremely good French.

To celebrate the end of our week of intense French, we're going out tonight with the Americans to a bar where the Europeans will be. Fun times! We went out on Wednesday night to the club up the street from us and danced for a long time. It was fun because we had our own little group, but all of us have made friends with a couple of other people, so lots of other nationalities were coming over to mix with us. Left at about 2:45 and went to bed around 3:15, so getting up the next morning was pretty awful. Haven't been sleeping much because we get home from school so late that by the time we cook dinner, clean up and check e-mail, it's about 12:30 and we get up around 7 or so to get ready for school. Whatever, I can sleep when I'm dead!