Day 11: Au Cafe

11 septembre 2009 (Day 11)
Today I met my oral professor (as in the teacher who teaches conversation/communication). She is younger, with amusingly done dark hair and crooked teeth. She is from Paris and doesn’t like Nantes because it is more of a family city, so you can’t go get a café on Sunday morning or eat dinner late Saturday night. She seems pretty nice and funny. In her class I found out that many of my classmates want to be lawyers, veterinarians, and journalists. Some followed their lovers to Nantes and are trying to learn the language, another was a journalist in Ukraine who now wants to find a job in France, and several are working on Masters. I have classmates from: Thailand, China, Ukraine, Russia, Brazil, Spain, and the United States.
I ate riz pilaf with nantais peas for lunch today. Nantais peas have more than just peas in them, but I’m not quite sure what else. Yesterday I had my first ratatouille at the resto-u.
I really like my history professor. He is a history professor at the university that has been doing classes for IRFFLE for a long time. He is really funny and relatively easier to understand. He was trying to explain “prehistoric” to someone and ended up articulating that we came from animals and the Russian girl started arguing with him so then he went on a tangent about how Darwinism is wrong, but we are descendants or related to the monkey. She continued to argue so then he was like or Adam and Eve and so on. He was really funny articulating about AD/BC. He said that Christ was a man who did exist, he existed and lots of people listened to him, but whether he is the son of God or not- “that’s your problem”. It was really amusing, especially since the theory of existence had nothing to do with what we’ll be studying.
I was really tired after my class, so I took a nap, did some cleaning and then I went to a cafe by my house this evening and sat outside with Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and a large cup of hot chocolate (not to be confused with hot cocoa). I took great pleasure in sipping my 2,30E “chocolat chaud” reading my book. I think I stayed at the café for around an hour. It is kind of nice to just be.