Sometimes I feel like going to Sylvana and Amanda’s is like running the gauntlet. First, the metro line that I connect to is usually jam packed. So I have to shove myself into a full car. Then, I walk up a little bit of a hill, and then I have to pass through the guys trying to get me to buy a friendship bracelet. Once I have successfully broken through that bunch, I have my option. I can either cram into the funicular with 34 sweaty and smelly tourists, or climb 222 stairs (yes, I have counted). The next stretch is another little bit of walking up a hill, and then breaking through the line of people who want to draw my caricature. When I get to the door, there is a small set of stairs to climb, and finally I have made it. My reward is French TV and wine.

This has been an odd week. The kids started their Toussaint vacation on Wednesday, so I only had to teach Monday and Tuesday morning. I only had each class once this week. I went over Halloween with them. Halloween isn’t that big of a deal here is France, but the kids were really excited to learn about it.

Toussaint is All Saint’s Day, November 1st. It is where Halloween came from (All Hallow’s Eve). It is a national holiday in France, and the schools take a week and a half off to celebrate. Unfortunately, not the Universities. They only take the one day off. One day is better than nothing though.

And I found out, cursive is mandated in the elementary schools. All of the children have to write in cursive. So of course, the directrice (directrice is the word the French use for Principal) wants me to use cursive whenever I write anything. First of all, I barely write in cursive. It’s easier for me to write in printing, plus I think it is easier for other people to read. I happen to like my writing. Secondly, do you think French cursive is the same as American cursive? Of course not. So after spending my last class on Tuesday being constantly corrected by the directrice (she is my last class on Tuesdays, she is a teacher on top of being in charge of the school), she gave me a book that has all of the French cursive in it. I get to practice it during my “vacation”. Great, I feel like I am in elementary school now too.

Last week, in my oral class, the girl from Mexico presented her country. Keep in mind that my French speaking class is composed of only non-French people. There are 6 Californians in my class, and the rest are Europeans. The 6 of us were just drooling when she was talking about Mexican food. I am not sure anyone else understood. They were looking at us like we were crazy. We were looking at them like they didn’t know what they were missing out on. We were asking if she found any good Mexican restaurants here, and she said she found one, but she forgot what it was called. We made her promise to tell us next week.

And this week, I made the best discovery yet. I discovered the Monoprix by my apartment. Think of Target mixed with Vons. And that big too. I felt like I discovered Christmas. It’s funny how excited I got as I was walking through the store. So much variety of food. (I guess it is important to explain that the markets I have been shopping mostly in two markets. One is smaller than an average 7-11, and one is about the size of a produce section in a typical Californian grocery store. ) I have choices. I don’t know if I can explain my euphoria without sounding like a complete nutcase.

I’m supposed to get my first paycheck this coming week. It’s an interesting situation, because normally people don’t get paid at the end of October, but they give us the choice of getting most of our money advanced to us. I got all of the proper paperwork taken care of. But the way things have gone up to this point, I am kind of expecting it to not be there. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

So here is my week in review (complete with tons of pictures):

Teaching is going well. I’m surprised at how far back the students are from where they are supposed to be. So I am only doing lesson plans from week to week, so I can gauge how much they know in comparison to what they should. I don’t think there is any sort of test that I can devise. I’m getting more settled into the job though. Trying to learn French names is a bit difficult, and I am butchering these poor kids’ names. They are really nice about it though, and are helping me along.

The neighborhood around the school is super nice, the houses are really cute.


When I got to the bridge for the train, I saw a truck who didn’t pay attention to the details of clearance. I was laughing out loud.


School is school, there isn’t much I can say about my writing and speaking classes. They are nowhere near as awesome as the History of Literary Paris class.

Nanterre is right outside of the city of Paris, and the campus is supposed to be modeled after American campuses.


So I guess you could say that my weekdays tend to be on the boring, real life-ish side. School, work and babysitting.

This weekend, Sylvana and I decided to go to the Père Lachaise cemetery. It was quite interesting. There are four cemeteries in Paris, and this by far is the most famous. The cemetery was opened in the early 1800’s. In order to attract people to want to be buried there, they moved the remains of Molière and Jean de la Fontaine to the cemetery.


It then became “the place to be (buried)”. 19th century families all wanted to be buried there, and they all tried to outdo each other when it came to their final resting places. One thing that I have noted, everywhere, is the extravagance with which the French do things. Whether it is their palaces or their final resting places, it seems the bigger the better.

We walked around, and saw the gravesites of such famous French people as: Abélard and Héloïse, ,
Jacques-Louis David (he was Napoleon’s painter), who was exiled, and not allowed to return to France, even in death. So only his heart is interred at the cemetery, in his family’s plot. ,
Honoré de Balzac ,
Eugène Delacroix ,
Théodore Géricault ,
Amedeo Modigliani ,
Edith Piaf ,
Marcel Proust ,
Gertrude Stein (who’s residence I had just visited earlier in the week) and Alice B. Tolkas (her partner). They were buried in the same plot, but their names were engraved on different sides of the headstone.
Mademoiselle Rachel ,
Allan Kardec (the founder of the philosophy movement “Spiritism”) ,
Oscar Wilde (who’s grave and monument were gifts from a devoted fan, and where it is tradition for women to wear lipstick and kiss his grave)
and the Rothschild family crypt.

And of course, what trip to the Père Lachaise would be complete without a stop by the grave of Jim Morrison? The grave is barricaded, and there is always a guard by the grave. (It’s funny, not to diminish the goodness of the Doors, but there these other artistic “giants” in the cemetery, yet Jim Morrison’s is the most popular, and cause of problems.)


There were also several monuments built for the soldiers from different countries that lost their lives in the two world wars, and also monuments built for the French citizens that died in the Nazi Concentration camps.

One of the more interesting, but not publicized landmarks was the Mur de Fèdèrès, where fighters of the Commune (who were also responsible for the fire that destroyed the Hôtel de Ville) were captured by the French government, lines up against the wall, and shot.

And then this one just kinda creeped me out. It reminded me of Return of the Living Dead.

Walking around the cemetery was interesting, and also kind of sad. There were a lot of graves that were in ruins, it looked like some had been smashed. And a lot were become ruin status, overrun with grasses and moss. Some crypts were filled with trash. People probably spent a ton of money to secure their eternal spot amongst French giants, and it is in ruins.

More and more I am becoming convinced of my ability to control the weather. It never rains whenever I want to go out. It started sprinkling just a little when we were at the cemetery. I told Sylvana to give it just a minute, it will pass. Lo and behold, it stopped, and five minutes later, the sun was out. Coincidence, or cosmic powers? Time will tell.

And I feel accomplished, I finished Les Misérables. It was a great book, and of course it made me cry at the end. Now I need something new to read. Anybody want to send me something?

Wednesday begins the Toussaint holiday for the little kids. Oh yeah, a week and a half (paid!) vacation from teaching. Unfortunately, the University isn’t so kind. But I am so excited.

Apparently I’m retarded. People have left comments on my blogs, and I have said nothing about them. I wasn’t ignoring you, I didn’t know they were there. Ooops. I will try to check on that more and answer. Sorry.

Teaching gets better a little each day. I have no clue how to tell what the kids really know and what they don’t. It’s kind of like trail and error for me. I don’t want to be over their heads. My 10/11 year old class today didn’t know the alphabet. Which they are supposed to know, according the “official French standard”, by the end of their first year. But it’s coming along.

Next week is Halloween, and I only have each class once (instead of the usual two seesions), because they get a week and a half vacation for Toussaint. I am so excited to do Halloween activities with the kids.

Today for my History of Literary Paris class, we walked around Montparnasse. It was really cool, we saw cafes and theatres and buildings where writers, painters, and other artists lived in and frequented.


It was an area frequented by John-Paul Sartre, and we went to the Cemetery of Montparnasse and saw his grave, where he is buried with Simone de Beauvoir.


We also saw cafes that were frequented by Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and saw from a distance the café where the two writers first met. (It’s the café with the red sign).


We also snuck into an apartment building and saw (from the outside) where Gauguin and Modigliani had their studios.


Along the same courtyard, the artist Pascin lived. After his death, his wife killed herself by jumping out of the window into the courtyard.


We also saw the Carrefour Vavin. This area has four incredibly famous cafes where artists gathered: Le Dome, La Rotonde, La Coupole, and Le Select. If they were an artist, famous, and in France in the first half of the 1900s, then they probably hung out there.



I am in awe of the historical places I visited, just in three hours.

Our professor is so sweet. He is giving us a ton of information. I asked him if we were going to be doing much with the Existentialists, and he said no. I explained to him that my little brother was studying philosophy, and was interested in Camus, for example. He said that although he wasn’t going to cover it in class, he would bring me a paper with information about different important places. He knows a lot, this class is turning out to be awesome.

And the weather was awesome for our field trip. Pleasant and sunny. I think someone talked to the one responsible for the French weather. Thanks for arranging that.

Well, this has been quite a week.

The job is going well. It is hard trying to feel out the kids, and where they really are at in their level of English comprehension. Some of them know the words, but they have no idea how to use them. Like numbers. The little ones know the English words, and can count, but when it comes to quantifying things, there is trouble. So I am working on it. It’s like that with a lot of different words. The older ones know colors, but when I ask them to apply it, it is hard for them. It will probably take me a little while to feel them out, and really make progress.

School is good. The classes are going to be interesting. I am so excited about my Literary History of Paris class. And I thing I am going to learn a lot from my Written French class. Like practicing my verbs. I am not sure yet how my oral class is going to be. For the time it seems like I am above the level in my speaking abilities, but I could just be fooled. We’ll see.

This weekend was awesome. On Friday night, I went to Amanda and Sylvana’s. We decided to get Pizza, and rent a movie. Alex (Amanda’s boyfriend) bought a DVD player, so we can watch movies. We watched a movie called Caché , by a French filmmaker named Haneke. It was the kind of film that would make David Lynch’s brain say “ouch”. There was a lot of political symbolism in it, so if you decide to watch it (which I do recommend if you like unconventional things), I would definitely try to understand the French-Algerian conflict.

On Saturday, it felt like we were all over. We started to night near my place. Nell, who is another girl in the MICEFA program, was having a little get together at a bar for her birthday. So we started there at about 6, to take advantage of the happy hour specials.


Then we met up with Alex, and went to one of his friends house for some wine before we went out. And then we went to this Chinese food restaurant. It was pretty awesome, because there was a wedding reception that was happening there, and it felt like we were the only white people in the room. The best part was the had a Chinese singer, and she sang La Bamba. It was a truly international experience.

The food was awesome too. Me and Sylvana had spring rolls, which were incredible, and I had sweet and sour pork.

But Sylvana started to not feel well, and wanted to leave. I didn’t think it would be a good idea for her to go home by herself, so I went home with her. I ended up crashing there for the evening.

Sunday was just a boring day. I went home, and worked on my lesson plans for the coming week. It is hard to plan lessons while I am still feeling the kids out, but I am working on it.

The mornings are a bit strange to me. I have to leave my apartment at 7 in the morning on the days I teach in order to get there a little early so I can prepare for the day. The sun doesn’t start to come up until 7:45. It’s still dark. And all of the restaurants along my street are receiving their deliveries, so it’s almost like I feel like I am seeing the backstage going ons to the city.

It’s also just odd to me for it to still be dark that late in the morning. Winter should prove to be interesting.

And to help with my train rides, I would like to take this time to restate my love for my iPod, and the awesomeness that is iTunes. I got sucked into Grey’s Anatomy back home. And now, it is on iTunes, so I don’t have to miss out. And Desperate Housewives. So I download them on Monday nights, watch Grey’s Anatomy on Tuesday’s train ride, and Desperate Housewives on Friday’s. It’s like I have tricked myself into looking forward to the train ride.

And I feel like I have control over the weather. I have figured out the key to stopping rain, and that is keeping my umbrella with me. The only times it has rained since I got stuck in that downpour coming out of McDonald’s have been when I am inside, or I forgot my umbrella. It has not rained at all when I have had my umbrella with me. Winter will be an interesting time for me to prove my theory.

The seats in the Metro stations aren’t made for short people. They only serve to make me feel shorter. Sitting in the seats, my feet dangle. I thought of my tall little brother, and how much he would love to see it, so here are some pictures of my dangling feet.



I still get giddy about going to the bakery every day or ever other day and getting fresh bread, and sometimes desserts. This week I got a brownie. It was awesome. Not the most French dessert, but it was a dessert in France, so it counts.

La rentrée

Well today was the rentrée for me.

The rentrée is the time in France where everybody comes back from vacations and goes back to life. It is also used to signify the first day of school.

I started working today. Anybody who knows me could have guessed that as soon as I got with the kids, my anger at the situation disappeared. The kids melted me I guess.

My first class was the 8 year olds. They were so excited to begin the English classes (they actually cheered when the teacher told them that I was there to teach them English). And one of the girls was saying things like “She’s pretty”, and even called me elegant. That’s where the little ones are so awesome. I began with doing introductions, and they sang a song for me (their teacher had taught them a simple hello song, just for me, it was so sweet).

The 9 and 10 year olds were great too. They were all well behaved. I started the first class with them as a chance for them to ask me any questions they had about the United States, California and myself. Part of what I have to teach is culture, and I felt that this was a good way to break the ice, and kind of get their questions out of the way. I have learned that being from California has made me somewhat of a goddess here, and I wanted to get past that in the first session. It also made me feel really good that they asked me questions in French, and I was able to understand them, and answer them, and they understood me. It was a nice affirmation.

The teachers were all really nice, and I have a feeling that I am actually going to like it. They have been really welcoming and supportive.

I left the school smiling.

The school reminded me of a French version of Alta Loma. The kids were almost all white, with only a few exceptions. But they were all well behaved, and excited about learning English.

And from teaching I took the train straight to school. My schooling is going to be spread out over two schools. My MICEFA class will be at Paris III, which is the same school where I did my orientation. But I am actually considered a student of Paris X, which is Nanterre, where I will be taking my language classes.

Today was my MICEFA class, the History of Literary Paris. The teacher was really nice, and it seems like that class is going to be fun. We won’t be going into Victor Hugo, which kind of bummed me out. (The professor said if I wanted, I could do my final project on Les Misérables. I think I want to actually read another book, I am not quite sure that I am ready to conquer Les Misérables in French.) But we will be going into the surrealists, which I am excited about.

Next week our class will be in Montparnasse, where we will be going to cafes and areas frequented by Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre, not to mention countless other great authors, painters and artists.

Even though it isn’t the architecture class, I am excited about it.

Things are looking up.

I finally had a crepe today, and it was a bit heavenly. A crepe with Nutella. Mmmmmmm. And the other day, I bought a Frasier from the bakery. It’s some sort of crème cake with strawberries and I don’t know what else except for a lot of sugar. But it was quite awesome. I love the food here.

The last week seems so far away. I had another half day of training, and met a really nice lady, Sandrine. She has been super, and I guess you could say she has taken me under her wing. She is the one who is responsible for coordinating the adult programs, but she has gone far above and beyond helping me with that, and I am so grateful for her.

She went with me on Friday morning to the school I will be teaching at, and helped me with getting my schedule set. There are some problems with the schedule that has been give to me, and she has helped me through my frustrations.

On Saturday morning, she offered to meet with me to get my first lesson plans started, and help me with ideas for activities and other lessons.

This whole teaching thing seems a little overwhelming to me right now, it is a bit more than I bargained for. But once things get going, that’s when I will really know. All I know right now is how things seem. And it seems like a lot.

It is a nice change of pace to go to work in the suburbs. The commute is a pain in my ass, and something that I am still a little upset about, I mean I will be traveling one hour each way, but there isn’t anything I can do about it, so I have to look to the bright side. (Thank goodness for iPods.)

The lifestyle is so different, and the cityscape is so different. It’s very quiet. But apparently the area I will be teaching in is an affluent suburb, and the parents are quite picky, and a little too over-involved in things. Sounds like my experience working at the Y in Alta Loma. And the parents there loved me, so hopefully things will be familiar.

I start teaching Monday morning, and as it stands, I will have 2 classes of 8 year olds who have never had any English classes, 2 classes of 9 year olds (who have had one year), and 2 classes of 10 year olds (two years of English). And then I will have one hour of an American culture driven conversation class for teachers on Fridays. I will be teaching Monday and Tuesday mornings, and all day Fridays. That is if they decide not to give me to more classes on Thursday mornings in an attempt to drive me insane.

Speaking of things that are crazy, Saturday was the Nuit Blanche (White Night, which cracked me up to no end). The premise of it was that Museums and churches were going to be open all night from 7pm to 7am, with different art displays, and it was going to be coordinated by quarter. So the plan was going to be to meet up at Sylvana and Amanda’s, drink a little, then head out to the Marais, because it appeared they had the most going on.

Hahaha.
We started out at Sylvana and Amanda’s. It was really cool, there was a little fair type thing that was going on around the Sacre Coeur, where they had different booths set up where they were selling wines and breads and cheeses and things from different regions in France. We checked that out a bit, bought some bread, and then went back to their apartment, and had some wine.

Amanda’s boyfriend and his cousin came over, and we hung out. And time kept passing. Supposedly we were going to meet some of Alex’s friends in the Marais at about 10:30. 10 came around, and nobody had an inclination of going anywhere. So Sylvana and I decided to go.

We started in the Marais, near the Centre Pompidou. The line was sooo long to get in, so we decided that we would pass. We went to a church that was nearby. It was interesting to say the least.


After we left the church, a guy Sylvana knew said he was in the 5th, and wanted to meet up. So we said that we would meet with them at the Fountain at Saint Michel. Silly us thought they meant they would be there. We waited about an hour for them. I think Sylvana felt bad about just leaving without them, and after miscommunications, they finally showed up. Drunk, and with beer in hand. And the mission to find more alcohol.

I got bitchy. We waited an hour for them. And they were being rude. So I said we were going to go. And they could call us. We never heard from them.

And the art displays we saw just weren’t that interesting. It was three in the morning, and my Nuit Blanche had been a letdown, so we headed back to my apartment.


We made the decision that events like this were small groups, with like minded people. The more people involved, the more complicated, and ultimately, disappointing.

Sunday morning I slept, and then met up with Rachael (the assistant that graduated from CSUF and who knows my friend). We met near the Eiffel Tower, which was actually the first time this trip that I have gone near there.


We went over our lesson plans, and shared ideas that had been given to us by different people. She is having a hard time because she doesn’t speak French very well, and so she is being overwhelmed in that sense. I told her that any time she needed help to call me. We are going to work together probably every week on our lesson plans. It has always seemed to me that creativity inspires creativity, and if two of us are working together, we could probably come up with some good stuff.

And Rachael is really cool, so yay, I have another friend in Paris.

The weather here is now cold. I don’t know temperatures, but it is cold. I bought a scarf. I have never before worn a scarf. I made fun of emo kids in California for wearing scarves, because come on now, is it ever that cold?

But here it is. And the winds are chilly. So scarf it is. It has rained a bit. Where I live the wind doesn’t blow too hard, but up on the hill where Sylvana and Amanda live, it blows hard. At least it didn’t rain on the Nuit Blanche.

I’ve been reading Les Misérables (but in English). I bought the book back in January I think, and had started reading it, and the first 75 pages were incredibly difficult to get through, and the story just didn’t seem to move. So I had given up on it. When I went back home with the whole visa fiasco, I decided to bring the book back with me. I mean, I did go to the Victor Hugo house, I might as well start reading more of the Parisian hero.

And I have really gotten into the book now. It is awesome. It is long, but good. The stories are intricate and well fleshed out. I really have grown to appreciate Victor Hugo’s way of storytelling, interjecting his opinions of life, spirituality and politics. And his humor. Indeed, in his book, Victor Hugo says “To err is human. To loaf is Parisian.” I spent 5 minutes laughing.

I think that I have decided not to buy food at McDonald’s ever again. There have only been two times that I have bought food there while in Paris, and both times, the internet didn’t work. All of the other times that I have gone to use the internet and not bought anything, it has been fine. Go figure.

Call it laziness, but I had a really long day, and needed to use the internet, so I just stopped by there on the way home, and decided that I could eat while surfing. McDonald’s didn’t think so.

Fortunately, the Haagen Daaz store next door offered a low speed connection, so not all was lost.

I am hoping to my own connection very soon. No more crashing icky fast food restaurants. Although I do have to admit, the McDonald’s here are way nicer than the ones that I have been to in the US.

September was a month of beautiful weather. It was pleasant most days, mostly sunny, and nice temperatures, I only ever felt hot in the Metro stations, after climbing 48975892375984352 stairs and cramming into cars with as many people. But it has definitely turned. It went from being 20 degrees during the day to being 14 degrees overnight. The rain started, and it is cold (for my wussy California self anyways). I can’t wait for Winter, yippee.

The nice thing is, sometimes in the afternoon, the clouds break up some, and there are some really pretty sunsets.


I finally started my training for my teaching. I am so lucky that the French love me. The rectorat that I work for decided that not only am I going to teach little ones English, but I am going to spend one hour of my two hour lunch (yes, they take two hour lunches) on Fridays teaching teachers English. And I get to help plan at least two seminars, one in January and one in February.

The first day of the training/orientation was quite a doozy. Because I got placed in a city way the hell outside of Paris, and the “central school” is even further, I had to travel over an hour by train to get there. And then we spent 4 hours in the morning filling out paperwork. Yes, just paperwork. And that is not counting the time I will be spending later this week actually filing it at the appropriate offices.

And then we spent the afternoon going over lesson ideas, and did an actual lesson (but we were taught to count to ten in Latin). It was cool, and it gave me some ideas to use later on.

8 hours of keeping up with someone in French, and then a lesson in Latin makes for a tired Jenn. And then I had to go babysit. At least that is pretty easy.

It’s strange to be a continent and an ocean away from home, and then end up working with people who know people that you know at home. I know a guy who does Electronic music, and there was a girl that works for the same rectorat as me that was wearing one of his pins on her bag. Turns out she knows him, and she actually had gone to Cal State Fullerton a couple of years ago. Wow.

I think it has been said that the French are a little more sexually liberal than the Americans. That is true.

You want evidence? Well, there is the condom dispenser in the University cafeteria

(you think I could make one up like that?), and then there is this ad plastered all over the Metro.

It’s kinda just icky to me.

Well, I learned the hard way to always have an umbrella with me. Even if it is sunny and clear when I leave my apartment, and I plan on returning within the hour.

On Saturday, I had walked to McDonald’s, to check my email, and check on my Dodgers (mark my words, they will win the World Series, mostly because I am not home, that’s my luck…) It was sunny, and nice. I even decided to just put on flip flops, stick my computer in my bag, and go. Hahahaha. I spent about half an hour there, and I go to leave, and it is raining. Not too bad, I figured I could probably make it home fast enough to not worry about my bag getting too wet to soak through to my computer. And then all of the sudden, WHOOSH, it just started pouring. I took cover under the overhang of a building, but that didn’t help the splash up from the ground. It poured super hard for about 15 minutes, and once it started letting up, I decided to head for my apartment. The rain got really hard again once I made it to a little side courtyard near my apartment. I was able to take a shortcut through there, and was pretty sheltered. The rain had stopped by the time I got back to my apartment. But my jeans were soaked. Luckily, the rain never got past the first layer of my bag and my computer was safe.

But lesson learned. My umbrella is always with me now.

Saturday night, Sylvana and I went to a party that was thrown by a girl who used to be a teaching assistant, and was supposed to be a mixer for this years assistants. It was kind of lame. But I did meet a few people who seemed cool, including a girl who SCUBA dives. She was talking about some of the great diving around here, so I gave her my number and email address. Hopefully something will come of it, that would be cool.

This Sunday was the first Sunday of the month, so that meant free museum day. We decided that we were going to go to the Musee D’Orsay. Wow. The Museum was a converted train station, and housed mostly French art from the 1800’s. You know what that means, Impressionism! I was in heaven. I cannot even describe how incredible these paintings are in person. I was standing in front of a Van Gogh, not looking at it in a textbook. It gave me a completely deeper appreciation for the paintings, and I am in love even more. And there were, of course, Monet’s. And paintings from Degas, Renoir, Pissario, Boudin, Manet, Cezanne, and that is just the more famous. The painting “Whistler’s Mother” is normally housed in the Musee D’Orsay, but it was on loan to an exhibition in Tokyo.

And I discovered a new artist (well, new to me) who just absolutely astounded me. Eugène Carrière. His style is amazing. His portraits look ghostly, I just fell in love with his style. They featured his work with Rodin sculptures, apparently the two artists were friends and worked together.

One of the more amazing things about being a year long tourist here, is I can spend all day in a museum, and not worry about the other things I am missing out on. I spent all day at the Musee D’Orsay, and could easily spend another. I got to see most of the works on display there, but I would not mind seeing them again.

Monday, I went and actually enrolled for my classes. Which was quite an interesting experience. I showed up to the office listed on my paper, told them which classes I wanted, and they wrote my name on a piece of paper. I guess that means I am enrolled. I am a little leery, because it was easy.

So my classes all start next week, and I start my set of meetings for my teaching job tomorrow. It will be all new experiences, but I am really looking forward to them. With my umbrella in my hand, of course.

P.S. I think Flickr hates me. There are way more pictures from the Musee D’Orsay. Just wait. I have to get a chance to sit and let them all upload. I thought they did, but apparently I was wrong.