First Day of Classes!! Whew....

Today was the first day of classes. I have a headache!! Of course, I always have a headache after the first day, whether it's in France or in the States, so I should complain.

I had "Littérature Française" this morning. It's just your basic lit class. It covers mainly the 1800s and 1900s. And funny enough, the first thing we are reading is Chateaubriand!! We have 3 works we need to read of his-René (which I read at Buff State..), Atala, et Les Natchez. That will be easy because I've already learned all about Chateaubriand and the time period he lived in and what influenced his writing :) The other main thing we are reading is André Gide's "Faux-Monnayeurs." I haven't studied that particular work, but I have studied Gide, so yeah...

The other things listed on our book list are actually not things we NEED to read, but more like complementary things that sort of correlate to the other texts. But I'll probably buy those books and read them as well just because I want to really understand everything we talk about in class. Those other works are: Armance by Stendhal (already studied Stendhal et "Le Rouge et le Noir" so yeah), Au Bonheur des Dames by Emile Zola (already studied Zola a bit too!), Le Journal des Faux-Monnayeurs (yes, it's different from the other Gide work....), La Condition Humaine by Malraux (which I had to read an excerpt of last semester..), and La Jalousie by Robbe-Grillet (which sounds really familiar so I think we at least talked about it a little last semester). So at least I'm sort of familiar with all the authors! Should hopefully make the class a bit easier.
The teacher is very nice. He came into the classroom where jeans and sandals which caught me off guard. But he spoke WAY too fast!! The whole first part of class I had no idea what he was saying. Then my brain actually started functioning faster and I could pick up tidbits of what he said. After class all the exchange students went to tell him that we are foreign, and he said that he knows he has to talk slower because the native French students even have issues understanding him! He also said that his wife works with the foreign students here and she is always yelling at him to slow down when he speaks. Cute :)

Well that class was from 10:30 this morning until 12:30. My next class was the CUFLE class (the French for Foreigners class), and it was from 5:00 to 7:30. Longgg!!!! But at least the teachers give 10 minutes breaks in the middle of class :) My teacher is very nice, so that's cool. But class was so boring!! We were just talking about facial features and hair color and stuff. Puh-lease! I had to learn that in middle school and it is boring!!!!! I have that class again tomorrow. And then I have another CUFLE class on Thursday. The Thursday class is cool. We had a list of 4 classes we could choose from. I was orginally going to do the Littérature Française one, because I saw that it studies a lot of poetry, and I love French poetry! But then I saw that it also studies LOTS of theatre.......and I really have never ever ever been a fan of reading plays. And I was also quite scared that we'd have to read La Cantatrice Chauve, which I absolutely hated last semester!! So, I decided to do the History of French Art class. It deals with art from the 1700s to the present day, and we study the different movements in art. Which is cool because we sort of touched on those when my French class went to the art gallery last semester :) The art movements pretty much follow the literary movements. So I'm hoping this class is a really good match to my classes back home. I'll have an even BETTER understanding of all the movements :) Plus maybe different points of view. So yay! I hope it's an interesting class.
Only class I have tomorrow is the CUFLE.
The other girl from Buffalo emailed me today saying that I was on the attendance sheet for a grammar class she took today, but that class overlaps with my CUFLE class! I think what is going on is that the regular French kids have to take all the classes in their "group" (as in, all the classes on the schedule for whatever group they were placed in..) But since we are exchange students, we only have to take 12 credits of regular uni classes, so we only take the ones we need back home and the ones that don't conflict with the CUFLE classes. Um so yeah. We're supposed to meet with an administrator sometime soon to actually register for only SPECIFIC classes, so I'm sure I'll be taken off the attendance list of that grammar class soon. I bet all of us are on all the attendance sheets, lol!!

Shopping for the books I need tomorrow. And also doing some grocery shopping. I'm all out of bagette bread, no!!

Love,
Kelly