j'aime les choux-fleurs

Et donc, je suis en france.

To begin with, I now live in an apartment in the 5eme arrondissement of Paris--which is to say the Latin Quarter, la rive gauche, the best part of Paris (not only because it is twenty minutes walking distance from here to my school, but because all the crazy artsy folk are here). I have my own room which isn't any smaller than my room at home (and a lot bigger than my room at Hamilton), and I have a window just like any window you'd see on a French postcard, with a curly, wrought-iron thingum where the two cats (Daphne and Bart Simpson) like to sit and salivate over the pigeons. They do this for hours, and when they're not doing this they try to sleep in my bed. Actually, Daphne is trying to push me out of my computer chair as I type because she is a fat and lazy little beast.

Anyway, I live here with my host mother Valerie, who is a chain smoking ex-director of plays who now mostly directs commercials etc.. She's incredibly kind, and she even slows down her billion-mile-a-minute French so that I can actually understand what she's talking about. Her fifteen year old son Eduarde is also here, and he has three guitars in his room (I wanted to ask if he had named them, but then he would certainly know how insane I am, so I decided against it), along with all the seasons of The Simpsons (hence the cat's name) on DVD en francais. The apartment's front three rooms (mine, Eduarde's, and the dining/living room) are pretty big, although the kitchen and toilette are really small. Our building has a lovely geen door, and is very safe--you enter the secret code outside, then use your magical little detector thing to open the next set of doors, and then you use your apartment keys. The elevator is basically the size of my suitcase, but luckily I only have to go up one flight of (spindly spiral) stairs to get to the apartment.

There is a pedestrian shopping area close by where I bought an impermeable (a raincoat) and some ridiculous postcards. The whole area is full of fruit stands, boulangeries, clothing shops, and sometimes an organ grinder man. It's pretty great as long as you stay away from the fish market, which actually smells a lot like Newport.

Last night Valerie had a dinner party thing with mom and I (mom left this morning), Mme. Stevens (the director of my program here) and her husband, and some friends of hers. I thought my brain would explode from the excessive amounts of la langue francaise, but it didn't. Valerie made really super rare meat, which was amazing. Hopefully it wasn't pleine de (full of) mad cow disease, but it was so good that I probably wouldn't be bothered anyway.

Language-wise it's been...interesting. The short version is that I can speak French well when I think about it long enough, it's just when people talk back to me that I have issues. Parisians speak like speed demons, and they don't sound a thing like Mme. Paquin, or even Mme. Krueger, really. Hopefully I won't have a nervous breakdown next time someone answers a question I ask.

In other news, Valerie is listening to music in the other room, and right now it's a Christmas song, and I'm not sure whether or not she's aware of that because she doesn't speak English. Uh, yeah.

Tomorrow we're going to do something for which Valerie had a very long explaination which I did not understand, so that should be fun...whatever it is.

I'm going to go get the cat out of my pillow case now, since I have a feeling that won't be great for my allergies later tonight.