Merci de m'avoir prévenue que vous aviez changé de conférence de russe

bonsoir a tous!

translation: good evening to all. im not sure who that "all" is referring to... the weird thing about blogs is that you never know who is reading them. i could be talking to 2 people or a hundred right now... im betting on the former. i know my sister reads this as does beth anne but umm i think thats it. theyre the only people who love me in this cold, unmerciful world. god this world is so hard, especially living in paris in the 8ieme arrondissement... for those who dont know this is a pretty classy neighborhood. you can always tell the classiness by the way the children are dressed. my apertment (or rather, host-mama france's appartment... didnt mean to get so presumptious as to call her place my place even though im paying mad dough to have a small piece of her placE) is in a really residential area and on my 10 minute walk to the metro i pass literarlly about 8 schools - high schools, pre-schools, blah blah - but the point is there are mad babies running around like they own this joint. sometimes i have to put my foot down and give 'em a poke and say: "hey, baby! u dont own this joint". thats only when they get really out of hand.. like today when annoying 5 year old jerk ran into me with his razor scooter. i wanted to tell him that razor scooters are sooooo 5 years ago and that if he tried to pull that razor scooter shit in the states he would probably be pummeled lynched and killed for his un-coolness. but i decided ide just shove him into the road instead where he preceded to be run over by a velib. then i ran away. but nayways... the point of this story is that the babies here are so classy... theyre the kind of babies who wear those christopher robin shoes and little pea-coats and stolkings (the boys) and have british nannies that walk them to nursary school and speak to them in english so that they grow up bi-lingual knowing french and english (pretty much covering all the oppressive imperialist language bases) so that one day they can grow up to simultaniously own microsft and be president of the eu while sending their small children named pierre and camille to french nurssary school in the 8th arrondisement where they will grow up to run anna over with their uncool wheels. moral of the story... the kids here are better dressed and better poised than i will ever be and they are a fraction of my age. clearly i fit in pretty well at my hood.

anyways, this week has been pretty low-key because it seems like my streak of no work at sciences-po is coming to an end... this past month or so since classes started i have done litereally no work. well thats a lie. i had an expose a couple weeks ago but that was easy breezy (beautiful covergirl). since then ive been chillin. but thats because one of my classes hadn't met once until today because the teacher mysteriously came down with some communicable disease so we had to wait for them to get a replacement or else we would have all breathed in the airbourne cooties and died. The class is mad intersting though, its the discussion section for my "le monde arabe contemporaine" class (translation: arabes!! hellz yee) and both my professor for the lecture and the discusson section man are arab and know arabic, and the whole nine yards. i love learning from people who have some innate authoirty on a subject besides the fact they they have some weird fascination with it and got a ph d in it but dont really live it. my african history class at georgetown was taught by a 30 year old blond woman who went to penn state and drank diet coke from a can every class. i actually love her though and she lived in namibia for mad long and knows the language and is a genius but still.. its nice being taught by the arabs.

also, update on russian class: more sass from the language department. actually, no tis was worse... i was sassed via email by my professor of the incredibly hard class IN FRENCH. like i litterally got a one liner SARCASTIC email from her. zing! i was definiately zing-ed. here is the email, fecetiously entitled "courtesy"

Merci de m'avoir prévenue que vous aviez changé de conférence de russe. J'espère que vous avez au moins prévenu vos camarades-tandems d'exposé!

translation: thank you stupid bitch for telling me u changed classes. i hope u at least told your partner for the expose.

HA. thats it, no greeting, no salutation, no farewell, no good luck, no bon fucking voyage.. nada. i dont know why shes so offended. i guess shes losing a real asset to the class... the other kids wont look so steller without the bumbling bafoon in the corner to be comapred to. but i like her sarcasm, this lady got spunk.

also, i am officially a french pimp. i signed up for a langauge exchange partner to practice speaking with a french perosn who simultaneously wants to practice his or her english with me. i did the same thing at georgetown... my partner was from khazakstan and we had many a' conversation about Borat and globalization at Hoya court next to Subway... anyways, back to my pimpness.. i put my name up ont he list less than 24 hours ago and already i have received responses from literally SIX different french ladieeeees! ooo la laaaa. i havent responded yet.. i like to keep them on their toes for a while. if i was an american guy looking for a frenchie to smooch i would so hop on that language exchange thing cuz it seems like only french girls sign up. go figure.

this weekend i am going to bourgoune to do some serious wine tasting and see some medieval towns and then see dijon (mustard!). i used to hate mustard but ever since ive been here its really grown on me. go figure.

ok i have to go i have class at 10,, booo. its my global warming class (actually its called "le grandes risques de la planete" but tomAYtoe, tomAHtoe) and im pretty sure my teacher is having an affair with one of the french girls in the class. actually im positive of it. well not 100% but like 98%. ive got my suspicions.. ill keep my eye on the situation and report back to you later. french people are so scandalous.

o i forgot to talk about the greves... ok ill give you a quick little blurb about it. "greve" is french for strikes... "manifestation" is french for protest. basically the metro drivers were "greve-ing" and "manifest-ing" against sarko's plan to raise the retirement age. right now, for this sector of the work force you have to work 50 years before you can retire, but sarkozy is all about the american protestant work ethic and so he wants to raise the age. the frenchie metro drivers said "no way jose" (they speak spanish) and cut service to a lot of the buses, metros, and bigger trains all over france. from waht i udnerstand though, the retire after 50 year thing is kind of antiquated becayse it was decided on back when metro drivers had to work in pretty shitty conditions - i dont know the extent of the shittiness but im imaging men in overalls underground digging coal with shovels and shackles around their ankles - and so they needed to retire earlier cuz i guess they died earlier or something. but now the metro drivers are coasting (pun intended).. they just sit in climate control little booth in the front of the car and press a button that says "go" or "stop" so their job is a bit less taxing than it was in the olden days. so sarko thinks they can work a couple more years. personally... i dont think it would kill the french to work a little more. its probably the most frustrating thing when offices are randomly closed on weekdays during normal business hours... or when "lunch breaks" last 2 and a half hours in the middle of the day, or when txis drive around 3am at night ocmpletely empty and dont pick people up just because they dont "feel" like it... but the whole greve thing has me torn because i really like the tradition of revolution! solidarity of the lower classes! rising up against the man!, espeically when the man is a neo-liberal conservative with his nose up president bush's arse... butttt like, cmon. a little good ol' work ethic on the french side would make my life much easier. alhtough to be honest i was hardly affected by the strike because even though buses were running less frequently i just walked or velibed to school and the weather was pleasant so no biggie. but i talked to people who live on the outskirts of paris and had to walk like 2 and a hlaf hours... up hill both ways.. through 6 feet of snow... i wouldnt have been so happy if i was them. suckers

ok i will leave u all with one thing i like about france and one thing i dont like sos much

like about france: people actually CARE about the environment (gasp!) it keeps amazing me how involved french people are with this whole global warming business. like its literally all ANYONE talks about... i watch the french news pretty much every night and i havent even heard ANY updates on what Paris is doing or if britney is out of jail or if mary kate is still on coke/anorexic/married/single/blah blah... where are french peoples' priorities??? goddddd. no but fo realz its so refreshing because in the us i rarely heard about it but here EVERY commercial, every news story - everything is about 'le rechauffement climatique". its wonderful. like for example.. the escalatoers (actually this was in brusselles but lets pretend it was in france cuz it fits my story better) the escalators didnt run constantly - they were motion-activated so as to not waste energy between transporting people. but actually, now that i think about it... i think bursselles is the only city in the world that could do that because the city is freakin abandoned all the time [see previous entry] and has no one to go on the escalators so it needs to shut off. new york has so many people it wouldnt need the motion-activator ish to sasve energy cuz people are always on it. ok that was a bad story.) no but for real, global warming is something they think about and maybe its because im taking a developemnt class here that deals wtih global warming so ive been particularly inundated with it.. but here.. i feel like people take it into consideration when they make daily decisions. my host mom will go out of her way to take really short showers or not use her car even if its an inconvenience or buy green-friendly appliances which are mad expensive, bring cloth bags to the supermarket, all for the sake of the environemnt. in the US people are never so deliberately environmentally concious. i mean sure, there is the occassional prius-owner or the liberal who gives an "amen!" to thomas friedman when he rants about how green the rest of the world is compared to america, but people dont really take it to heart. for every prius there is probably 1,000 soccer moms driving unecessarily large SUVs to bring their 7 year old daughters to ballet class. i guess generalizations are dangerous and usualyl innaccurate but i just made one so get over it. but, anyways, global warming aside, would it kill the french people to shorten just ONE of the global warming news stories by like 10 seconds to give a brief update on how briteny is doing.. nothng huge, no Entertainment tonight type coverage..just a little taste... so i know she's okay. i mean, i worry..

don;t like so much: this may be nerdy of me but ive noticed that in class french people always have full length dicussions while the teacher is talking. not like a small whispered "hey,, lettme borrow a pencil" but like full-fledged chatter-fests. even in really small classes. and these gab sessions occur at a volume that doesnt even pretend to be a whisper. and its really distracting. there, i said it. its distracting, and in an environment where i already dont know what the professor is saying in french, the last thing i need is this background noise of more french that i dont understand. can't it wait til after classss?? mon dieu!

ok, au revoir