Happy Wine Wednesday!

So my initial obsession with the children at "Beatrice's Day Care" has definitely died down. They're cute, I'll put up with them running around the hallways every.single.afternoon, but I'm getting sick of hearing a screaming baby in the background. I guess my inner-babysitter feels slightly bad and makes me feel like I should go help Beatrice out, but hey, I'm not working here, I'm paying her to live here. So I feel slightly less guilty closing the door to my room and taking a much needed afternoon nap.

Monday afternoon was unusually sunny, and relatively warm, so I decided to use my rare free afternoon to explore the other side of Passy, towards the Bois de Boulogne. I think the Bois de Boulogne is a huge park (like complete with country club, etc) but I'm still not sure. I found a really nice stretch of a pedestrian road that was lined with trees and it reminded me of the Hudson and the West Village, and I only got to go into the beginning parts of the Bois de Boulogne because the sun was about to set. It was nice to get a little lost, and I took a few pictures. The area (outside the park, when I was meandering home) oddly reminded me of a mix of Columbus (IN), South Carolina, and Barcelona. Don't ask me why. The combination didn't exactly make it seem beautiful, compared to other parts of Paris, but it was very home-y (if that makes any sense...probably not unless I showed a picture).

Yesterday we had some mandatory "cultural activities workshop" where they told us about the free events they're planning throughout the semester, and then a chef came in and taught us about bread. What was the most interesting part though was that at the end they served us a feast-sized smorgasbord of every type of bread imaginable, along with anything that was possible to put on it. From honey to smoked salmon to pate to brie, it was all there. Delicious. And then we were led on a free boat-ride tour of the Seine, which was nice because it was freezing out and there were indoor seats. It was nice to see Paris from that view.

I haven't really talked about this Preliminary Course, have I? It's by far the most annoying thing about Paris so far. It's two weeks, Monday through Friday, from 9:30 to 1pm, of written, oral, and phonetics. The written and oral parts are complete review, and meant to be, and aren't that annoying because at least it's getting us to speak French every day. But then phonetics. Where to start? It's probably one of the most annoying/impossible classes I've taken, certainly as a language class. It's like we're learning French all over again, and I swear I don't hear people speak like that on the streets, much less Beatrice. We're learning the Parisian accent, which is literally to mash everything together. Like, if I were to say, in English, "I'm going to the store today," the English-equivalent to Parisian French is "I mgoi ngtoth est or eto day," spoken really fast. Obviously, showing you the English-equivalent to it makes it seem really really ridiculous and incomprehensible, but that's exactly what it is. Our teacher will say something and none of us will understand a word she says, even though we know the vocabulary she's using, and we would understand what's she's trying to say if she spoke it normally. And it's really hard to add on the fact that all our questions to her are in French, and so if you don't understand something, it's really hard to ask in French about vocabulary (phonetics vocabulary) that you don't even know in English. Basically everyone is really frustrated and as soon as she told us what the final test on Friday is going to be like, I swear everyone just shut down and couldn't do it anymore. And I know we all have American accents and we can hear what a French accent sounds like, but to throw at us all these things that Parisians do...it just makes it impossible. We learned about liasons in New York, but this Parisian accent thing is a completely different matter. Hopefully by the end of the semester we'll be pros, but that's debatable.

Anyways, a few friends and I have officially dubbed Wednesdays as "Wine Wednesdays" (as in, today we went around to each other saying "Happy Wine Wednesday"), where we all get together at someone's apartment and have wine and cheese, and just hang out. What with everyone living in different areas of the city, and classes starting (where we'll all be on different schedules) it'll be nice to meet at least once a week.