Chapter 24, in which not all goes according to plan.

{Wednesday, September 24}

Okay, time for the official judgement of the courses in which I'm stuck for the next 12 weeks!

Monday/Wednesday, 10:45 AM - 12:15 PM: Comic Books & Society

Exceptionally cool. The basic concept of this course is reading and analyzing comic books, but we also put them into a historical and political context, and we're reading everything from Astérix and Tintin to comics translated into French from English and Japanese to Les Schtroumpfs {the French word for Smurfs! Awesome!} to Barbarella to Persepolis. The professor is a legitimate art critic who is both brilliant and hilarious...not to mention that the other day he wore a yellow polo shirt, a black sports jacket, jeans, and black-and-yellow sneakers. Oh yes, and part of our homework is keeping a blog {if you hadn't noticed, it's connected to this account, but I promise you don't have to read it, as it's in French}.

Monday/Wednesday, 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM/occasionally till 3:45 PM: Phonetics

Phonetics? You say. What happened to the theatre class? Well, for one, the class was not what I expected it to be {it would be like re-taking Playscript Analysis, but in French}. Also, the professor is incredibly closed-minded - if your answer is not the same as hers, it's wrong. Finally, for practical reasons: I would have missed at least one performance {if not the following class as well} on the weekend I'm going to Prague {and more than two absences lowers your grade}, and I was not keen on getting up at 7 four days a week and waiting about four hours between classes at the IES Center.

So, phonetics. It was offered as a language course, so I thought I wasn't really allowed to take it, that it was for more basic students, and that the mandatory lab took place after every class; not so. The first session didn't meet, and I missed it today because I was changing my schedule, but I met with the professor, who seems very nice, and the booklet I received has some cool exercises in it. So, once again, friends, I have chosen linguistics over theatre in a sudden but brilliant turn of events.

Monday/Wednesday, 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM: The Word and the Image

This is just as amazing as I thought it would be, mixing my favorite "art forms" - theatre, film, literature, and basically any image you can think of that can be connected to them. The professor is a real-life director who has worked on sixty-something films, mostly documentaries. He's the quintessential kindly old Frenchman, but he's still completely with it and, so far, has had some really insightful points to make. We'll be studying a little bit of everything: Cyrano de Bergerac, Jacques Prévert, "La Regle du Jeu", and much more - above all, adaptations of written works for film. Needless to say, I'm wicked excited for this course.

Tuesday/Thursday, 9 AM - 10:30 AM: Translation

I wasn't a huge fan of my professor at the beginning {i.e. during the Propédeutique}, but I think we've all found an equilibrium with her; she's a little bit crazy and scatterbrained. I guess you just have to know how to take her - and I'm glad we had two weeks to figure it out before actually being graded on anything. Anyway, it's gonna be cool to learn about when to translate directly, how to change from English metaphors/idiomatic expressions to French ones, and generally get some practice in, because this is theoretically what I'm going to do with my life {one of the potential choices, anyway}.

And finally...
Tuesday/Thursday, 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM: Drawing

This is literally a class for people with no drawing experience whatsoever, which is nice because we started from scratch, and the professor is very forgiving. However, it also meant sketching still lifes for an hour and a half, which did get slightly tedious. I think it'll be fun, and {hopefully} there won't be any homework {although I really wouldn't mind sketching alongside the Seine - how Parisian}.

Lawrentians, taking five classes is officially really weird. I almost feel like I'm in high school again. Not to mention that these classes only run for slightly longer than ours do {hour-wise and week-wise}, and we have no Friday classes, so the workload is kind of concentrated like at LU. Very strange.

Other than classes, this week hasn't been very eventful {unless you count epic searches for books at the FNAC}, with the exception of this evening. It started out normal enough: since Monica, Cody, and I didn't have family dinner, we decided to all go out together. We found another three-course restaurant off of the Boulevard St-Michel, and sat down around quarter to eight, Monica and I reminding ourselves that we needed to be back on the metro around 9, because half of our line was closing at 9:15 {ten stations in the middle of the line; how convenient}. Eventually, we realized that this was not a realistic goal, as we hit the dinner rush and dinner in France is never rushed. So at 9:15, when our desserts had not yet been served, we sighed and planned out a new route involving a bus that we could get to by taking the 4 from St-Michel to Strasbourg St-Denis, then taking the 8 to Opéra {technically on our line, but thereby inaccessible}, where there was a bus that goes to Levallois. A little complicated, but then again we got ourselves into this mess. Due to a street performance involving Prince and breakdancing {at which the white guys were much better then the others; Oh, inverted world}, we didn't get on the metro till quarter to 10, and thus began our epic journey. At Opéra, we walked up to the street to find the bus stop; it was actually very close by. We stood there a moment, scrutinizing the map of the bus' route to find our stop.

We noticed suddenly that the sign said "Dernier départ à 21h" {"Last bus leaves at 9 PM"}. I checked my watch, knowing full well that we'd missed the bus...by an hour and fifteen minutes, as it turned out. Disappointed but tenacious, we walked back to Opéra to plan our new route home.

On the line 3 {our regular metro line}, Opéra is 9 stops away. A direct trip like that takes between 15 and 20 minutes {at most}. But we didn't go that way. How did we get home?

We got on the 7 at Opéra and went 2 stops to Palais Royal Musée du Louvre. From there, we took the 1 to Charles de Gaulle Étoile [6 stops], where we hopped on the 2 to Villiers [4 stops], where we jumped on the 3 back home [5 stops]. There is probably a 'skip' missing in there, and honestly I don't doubt that we skipped, as we spent most of the trip laughing maniacally at our collective idiocy and bad luck...and at the fact that we had officially taken half of the available metro lines within 6 hours. We arrived home around 11:15. Thank you, Parisian metro system.