french is hard. english easy! i will do this in english. hello all! i finally made a blog, but the website is in french (side note: one of the most annoying things in france is that google.com automatically goes to google.fr so all the searches are in french and well, i mean cmon, wheres the america speak when u want it?? along these same lines... celcius needs to get out of my grill. same goes for the metric system) so all the questions/instructions for setting it up were in french so i hope to goodness gracious i didnt fuck this up. if u r reading this, i dont think i did. if i did fuck itup well then, i guess you wouldnt be reading this and no one would ever know. kind of like if a tree falls in a forest and no is there to hear it does it make a sound?? if anna makes a blog and no1 reads it, was the blog ever made?? umm.. yes. it was. clearly anna is just lacking in the friend department.
anyhoooo i am in the france. its a good itme so far. tonight i had diner with my host mama and her middle son (not the oldest, not the youngest, the middlest) and his new girlfriend (oo lala!). whenever i have dinner here with just me and mama france she throws some noodles in a pot and calls it day. butt with the new girlfriend in town... we pulled out all the stops. we had "aperitifs" (which is just a fancy word for pre-gaming dinner) with white wine from the loire valley. she also served Bugles during the "aperitif"which was surprisingly less than classy. maybe in france bugles are a sophisticated international delicacy but where I'M from, we put dem bugles on our finger tips and claw at our neighbors. perhaps thats just a new jersey thing... needless to say i had to execute some serious restraint while eating the Bugles. but anyways, back to the feast made for kings: there was chicken! and salad! and potatoes! and fancy bakery cakes from, according to my host mother, "le meuillere pattisserie a paris". pshh i never got treatment like that on my first meeting of dominique. my first night here she made me a fig tart. FIG. yeah, when u serve fig u are clearly not trying to impress. (lisa, u dont make friends with salad!) dont get me wrong, i ate that fig tarte like a champ and i liked it. but in comparison to the the best bakery in all of paris, well, the figs def dont take the cake (pun intended). nevertheless, the dinner was nice. and by nice, i mean it reaffirmed just how pathetic my french is. i could follow the conversation for the most part but then they start making the "blagues" (jokes) and mumbling and speaking at a rate that rivals the speed of sound... when french people start doing that i find it pretty easy to zone out. i guess i should stop doing that but it hurts my brain trying to decode their cryptic language all the time.
after dinner everyone stayed in the living room and drank some more wine and kept being french but i had to go work on my very first EXPOSE of the semester. for those less learned in the sciences po jargin, "expose" is a ten minute orale presentation which must be organized in the most dry, formulaic manner and if you diverge even slightly from this format french professors will poke you with sticks. my topic is "la construction de l'Europe"... for my asia and the EUclass. i dont know y i signed up for that class... o yeah. cuz my password didnt work during registration and i could only start registering like 30 minutes after registration started, when EVERY other class was filled.. o yeah now i remember. i mean i was actually interested in the class and i still am but the teacher has a pretty intense korean accent (and dont get me wrong, i love kim jong-il as much as the next girl) but i really cant understand a damn thing shes EVER saying. in english i appreciate and genuinely prefer a foreign accent to an american one but it was only once i reached france that i realized that foreign language fetishes are a luxury reserved for native speakers.
anyways, back to expose: luckily we get to work with partners and signed up with this guy who had, what i thought, a french name. I wanted to work with a real french person instead of one of the millions of americans/australians/canadians/british peeps in my class.. turns out the guy was german. which is ok becuase his french is impeccable and i soon learned that he freaking worked at the EU this summer and is next in line to be the preseident of the European commission, so basically he is very knowledgable about the topic. i guess any european would be more knowlwedgable in the topic than me. europeans are obsessed with the EU. i mean, i guess its kind of a cool/successful endeavor but like, get over it already. collective security is soo overrated. hegomany is where its at! woo hooo USA! USA! anyways, while i was ecstatic with my partner, i think he was experiencing a little bit of the "o fuck y did i get stuck with this girl" blues. I kept asking him all these stupid questions in horrible french. BUT i think i made up for it by making my powerpoint slides very astheticallly pleasing. word art anyoneee??? helllzzz yeee
aside from being the weekend of expose, this weekend was also "la nuit blanche" which is a pretty new tradition here in paris that i very much approve of. one day in the year the whole city stays open into the wee hours of the night. the metro runs all night, there are all these lights/art exhibits around paris, people stay out frollicking and everyone is generally in jovial spirits. my spirits were in a pretty jovial state, but since i was not inebriated i think they were less jovial than the other spirits i watched stumble around during la nuit blanche. but, alas, my sobriety helped me enjoy it more... or something.
anyways, i took some pictures and i will post them as soon as i figure out how to do so. problem is my flash memory card thing from my new camera doesnt fit in the hole its supposed to in my computer. i have a feeling my pictures will never make it out of my camera... im keeping them prisoner forever!! mwwahahaha.
ew im eating prune yogurt. its gross but for some reason i cant stop. eating it that is. it was part of an 8 multi-flavor yogurt pack thing at my local "episserie" and well, i cant turn down a bargain when i see one! so i bought it... even though 2 out of the 4 flavors i knew i wouldnt love: the peach and the prune. peach turned out good... strawberyy, cherry... cant go wrong. prune? yeah.. mistake. BIG mistake. HUGE GIANT ENOURMOUS mistake. i might as well just kill myself now. o well. thats what i get for being a concientious shopper.
ok i will end this post with one thing i like about france and one thing i dont really like about France:
Like: PARKS. i love PARKS. theyre so nice. french people know how to make themselves a good park. theyre always so well manicureed and awesome. theres a nice one by my house that i like to run in when im not being too fat and lazy. america needs more parks
dont like: parks in france: the grass is always so green and beautiful and cut and lush and healthy so my natural inclination is to run and lie and roll in it. but no, french people dont sit in grass... theyre too civilized. they sit on benches on the sidewalks NEXT to the grass but the grassy knowls (spelling?) are usually fenced off by a fence no more than a foot high. technically u could walk over the fence but i dont wanna be the uncivilized baboon marching all over the the french people's grass. so for now, i sit on the bench and appreciate the grass from afar.. such a waste.
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