Establishing my usual haunts

I should be doing my homework right now, but that's not really on the top of my list of things I want to be doing at the moment. So I blog instead.

It has been a little strange, getting back into the routine of going to class every day. Classes aren't really my favorite thing. I am learning some interesting stuff in some of them, but not most of them. I can say that I am absorbing a lot of French in all of them, but that's about it. Yesterday in my press class, we were talking about weekly publications, and I learned that the most read weekly publication in France is a satirical newspaper called Le Canard Enchaîné. It's extraordinarily difficult to read, even for the French, because it employs quite a lot of plays on words, literary references, cultural references, etc. But people from all walks of life read it. And the best part is, it's basically an anarchist newspaper. There are no ads, it is completely self-supported, fairly anti-capitalism/anti-authority, it is constantly exposing government scandals, it never buys information from anyone, and it sells the most copies of any weekly publication in France. I find that very amusing. As my professor told us, there is a little anarchy in every Frenchman/woman.

I feel like my daily routine is starting to become French. The past few days have gone something like this: I get up and go to class, eat lunch, maybe have another class, and for the rest of the afternoon I sit in cafés and talk with friends for hours. The best is when my French friends come along because I am forced to speak only French. Yesterday I spent the afternoon trying to explain southern culture to one of my friends who is going to be living in the south of the U.S. next year. That was pretty amusing. There is not a word for grits in French. Tragedy.

Today I went to the yarn store with a couple of my friends who are curious about the art of knitting (I am spreading the knitting love all over France), and the woman who was helping me asked me where I was from, and when I said the United States, she said, "well, you speak French very well." and for the rest of the time I was there she referred to me as "mademoiselle qui parle très bien le français," or, "young lady who speaks very good French." It was very cute. It's so funny that the French say things like that. In the U.S. we would never say to someone who sounded foreign "you speak very good English." Which reminds me, I forgot to say that when I was in Paris, I was told by three Indian guys with British accents that I spoke "quite good English." Thanks. It's just my native language, that's all.