Il fait SUNNY?

Yes that's right readers, spring has come to Paris! At least it did for a few days. Or at least, on Thursday walking around cobblestoney Saint Michel in the sun under an impossibly blue sky, gelato (however disgusting it might have been) in hand, I thought it had. We had a gorgeous few days of clear skies and (gasp!) temperatures of around 50, everything permeated by the smell of spring--which coincidentally is the same as the smell of my apartment, in that it is the smell of cigarettes. My theory is that spring in Paris smells more distinctively of cigarettes because it's finally stopped raining so much, so they stay lit long enough to actually produce a smell at all.

But alas, today it's back to rain/snow/sleeting, so really the short-lived warm spell was nothing but a tease. Sad, because I'm dying to wear something other than boots. Which really means I'm dying to go by obnoxiously colored flats from the cheapo stores around here.

After much hassle and frustration (mostly contre the direction), I have a class schedule. It proves, yet again, that I am as Valerie says, "tres intelligent de debrouiller pour n'avoir jamais des cours" ("smart enough to figure out how to never have class).

Tuesday
9h00-11h00 Litterature et Cinema at Reid Hall
11h15-12:30 Grammaire
17h00-18h15 Art et Societe Medieval
and starting in March 19h00-21h00 - Writing workshop at Shakespeare & Co.

Wednesday
10h00-12h00 - Le Fantastique et Policier dans le Roman Victorien at Paris III Monde Anglophone (taught in English!)
2h00-3h15 - excursions for Art et Societe Medieval

Thursday
11h15-12h00 - Grammaire

So basically I really can't deny what Valerie said.

I'm a little disappointed because the professor of the American Modernism class I wanted to take at Monde Anglophone is now apparently no longer sick, which means I didn't have to switch into the Victorian novel one. However, our professor is AMAZING. He's an adorable little French man who speaks English with a perfect British accent and is super friendly. Our class is made up entirely of girls, all of whom speak English incredibly well. Kind of disappointing since I was hoping to feel justified in how good my French isn't after hearing them bumble around in English. But like I said, they speak amazingly well, one of them with an Irish accent. Not sure where that came from, but it's adorable and I'm jealous.

I dropped my literature class at Paris III, L'Enfant au pays des adultes, because it a) was not as cool as I thought, b) had WAY too many people in it for me to ever open my mouth c) was smack in the middle of Friday afternoon which is just ridiculous and d) I couldn't understand what hte prof was saying half the time because she talked way too quietly. I have enough issues understanding what French people are saying, I don't need to throw not-being-able-to-actually-hear-them issues into the mix. But my schedule is fine now, and I'm in France, which is the point. I'll take real classes when I get back to Hamilton.

Thursday Leah and I went to the Musee de Cluny, the museum of the middle ages, and got in for free with our art history student cards. I love things that are free. We saw the unicorn tapestries, plus a bunch of other tapistries (including one featuring the knight with the hugest butt ever) and then we learned how priests make spaghetti and brush their hair. Not really--there were all these artifacts that kept being referred to as lithurgical, including a collander and a comb, and since there weren't descriptions we had to decide for ourselves what they were used for. And that's what we came up with, regardless of how much sense it doesn't make.

Leah, Ellen and I also went on another adventure to the ghetto (which is not really very ghetto at all) to buy duffle bags for our trip to Florence. We found a store selling them for 7euros, and we took the woman completely and utterly by surprise by walking in and announcing that we wanted not one, but THREE of her crappy bags that will probably (read as: most certainly) fall apart after one use, of not before then.

People are coming over soonly to hopefully make sweet potatoe fries and valentines, and tomorrow may or may not involve going to see an exhibition of crinolines. Yes, that's what I said. Crinolines.

I love France.