Eiffel Tower

Wednesday, Sept. 17th

Today was very routine as far as school went. I'm not sure if I've already said this, but Aurelie is very jealous because she has to get up at six every day to go to class, and mine doesn't start until 11:30 all week. So it turns out Catherine and a colleague are writing a book! She told me that she'd be working from home today on the book. I asked her what it was about, but she said she couldn't talk about it. I think it was some kind of copyright issue and she didn't want to spread the word on what it was about, but it's got something to do with children's development because she's a pediatric nurse and there's all these books about babies lying around. She's been working on it for a year, and she said hopefully someday it will be in bookstores, which I thought was very cool. After she was done working, she had her ping-pong club meeting, which she was really excited for because she said she hasn't gone for about three months.

So I went downstairs to eat dinner with Mathilde and Slimen, and Slimen's friend Benjamin was there too. Benjamin is getting his doctorate in psychology, and apparently in France they will pay YOU to get a doctorate, so it's highly competitive because you don't have to pay ridiculous amounts of money in a grad school; instead, you have to win a scholarship in order to go. I think he said he's been writing his thesis (on developmental psychology, I think) for two years so far, and it will hopefully be done in another two. College in France is very different as well; universities are basically free and professors are government employees. There is no real campus, just buildings that you have class in. Professors don't have offices or office hours because they are just there to teach, not help students.

After dinner they taught me how to play a French card game called belote, which is hard. There is no "ace" in a French deck of cards, rather it's a "one" that they just call an ace, so every time I saw the one I had to think about it. I also didn't know the names for the suits, so I had to remember the name of each suit, plus the order of strongest to weakest cards, which was something like jack, ten... and then I don't know. Oh and the jack, king, and queen are all called different things in French. So it was sort of a partner game in that you combined your winning cards at the end and whichever team had the most won, and so Benjamin and I lost quite a lot because I didn't really get it. But either way I had a very good time.

Thursday, Sept. 18th

Today was the last day of my intensive grammar review class, so we had a test. I don't know how well it went, but I was as prepared as I'd ever be. Jeanne (my prof; she's actually the academic dean too, and is nice and a good teacher) handed back a journal entry she had corrected. The French grading system is based on numbers, not letters, so 15-20 is an A, 11.5-14 is a B, and so on. Jeanne told us that a 15 was a very good grade and that the 20 does not actually exist. She's got children in the French school system and she said they've never gotten a 20; no one ever does, so we shouldn't think that less than a 20 is bad.

Friday, Sept. 19th

We had lunch at the Eiffel Tower today! The restuarant was on the first floor, and it was called Altitude 95. We were supposed to meet at 11 but we didn't get up to the restaurant until 12:30, so I was starving. The food was good, but I was very disappointed because when I just looked at it, I thought it was chicken with cheesy mashed potatoes, but the potatoes turned out to be some kind of pureed carrot thing with fresh cream. It was fine, but not what I had thought. The chicken is on the left and the orangey stuff is the carrots, then there was some kind of gravy.

One of the program staff, Delphine, the administrative and housing assistant, sat at my table for lunch. At first I was not too excited, but she was actually very nice and talkative and we had some very good conversations about various things. Turns out she was born in England and moved to Los Angeles, then Paris with her family. They were following her dad's job, and when they got to LA her mom hated it, so they moved to Paris instead. I don't know if her husband is French, but I would assume so if they still live here with their kids.

I finally made it to the top floor of the Eiffel Tower! I walked up from the first to the second floor, but you have to take an elevator to the very top. My friend Shelly loves babies, and she kept pointing out all the cute babies while we were in line, and she actually asked a man if she could take a picture of his daughter, who was very cute. It really cracked me up. We spent a lot of time at the Eiffel Tower taking tons of pictures, but it got really cold at the top so eventually we left.

The program staff had gotten us cards for "les cars rouges" which were just those open-top tour buses, so I went on the tour with Shelly and another girl named Rachel. It was really nice, but again, it got really cold so we went down to the first level of the bus.

We spent a lot of time sitting around because Parisian traffic is awful! Some poor guy got knocked off of his motorcycle and the ambulance was partially blocking traffic, and our bus had to edge around the guy and the paramedics. It looked like he had really hurt his leg because the EMTs or whoever had a compress on his right thigh, but I didn't see any blood. People on their motorcycles are crazy, though... they're always dodging around cars. Here's a picture of Parisian traffic at the Place de la Concorde, which is a big square in the 8th arrondissement. The French nobility used to watch convicted criminals be put to death there, so during the French revolution they took over the Place and renamed it the Place de la Révolution and put the guillotine there. Marie Antoinette, Robespierre, and Louis XVI were all executed there. After the Reign of Terror (when the executions peaked), they removed the guillotine and renamed it the Place de la Concorde. Now there's a 3,000 year old Egyptian obelisk in the center of the Place. And no, these cars are not parked, they are moving.