Day 21: Shrinking Fridges

21 septembre 2009 (Day 21)
Today was the three week mark- wow! We had quite the exciting phonetics class today. A lady in our class (students here vary from around 18-50) started slamming all her books shut and proceeded to tell the teacher that she was upset that there were so many people in the phonetics class and that there should be less, even though it isn’t the teacher’s fault. It was quite the scene, but our professor handled it quite well. Today we went over lots of poems and our teacher taught us some nursery rhymes
Today at fencing there were four girls and our teacher, David. Short and shaven David has us warm up and do some drills. I learned the proper way to advance today, as well as appropriate body positioning and how to hold “le fleuret” or foil in English (aka the lightest sword) in the French style. We have a girl from Italy who has fenced a little bit and apparently they have a different fighting style, as do the Americans. The other girl who wasn’t there last week was this snooty girl who took fencing last semester and who I didn’t like very much.
Art History was again disappointing. I guess I really shouldn’t have expected amazing Mr. Oram style lectures. It is really frustrating studying art history in French because even the artists’ names are pronounced (and sometimes even spelled) differently.
For those of you who wonder, my class schedule looks like this:
Monday
2h phonetics
1h30 fencing
2h art history
Tuesday
2h30 writing
2h theatre
1h30 oral
Wednesday
2h French culture
2h writing
1h30 gym douce (which I heard was really weird)
Thursday
2h writing
1h30 ultimate Frisbee
Friday
1h30 oral
2h theatre
2h history of France
I think I may or may not have had duck today for dinner at Rubis. I do know that I had some amazing cucumbers and dessert. My fridge broke so I got a new one today. It is nice to have a fridge that works (no more moldy jam!) but it is significantly smaller than my last fridge (not that it was overwhelmingly large anyway). Looking on the bright side I have a freezer compartment now, so I can wallow away the sadness of losing a good fridge in ice cream (if it will even fit in the freezer compartment- I have my doubts). Thank goodness I just eat yogurt and museli, because my fridge has very little in it and is practically full! Another tragedy happened today. I went to turn in my form for surfing this weekend and the secretary said that it was all full. I am quite disappointed, but am now contemplating a weekend surf trip to Olonne sur Mer in October. I just need to find the courage to sign myself up and go on the weekend adventure.