Nov. 4-5... Election Day!

Okay, I have been slacking a lot on my blogging because first I was busy getting ready for vacation, then I was on vacation, then I was recovering from my vacation/getting back into the swing of things. So I'm going to divide up my posts so that it's not one 10 page post.

So in France, everyone loves Obama. His picture is everywhere, and he is constantly in the newspapers... They have had tons of coverage of the American elections, and because French newspapers aren't unbiased like American ones are (or should be), they're probably 99% for Obama. My politics professor Marc stayed up all night to watch the results, and he actually sent an email out at like 5am saying "OBAMA A GAGNE!" ("OBAMA WON!").

So I was sitting in the student lounge with another girl, Shaina (who actually goes to IU), and we were just chatting when Bertrand, the guy in charge of student affairs at IES (my program), walks in. He said, "Hey, so there are some people here from a French news station who want to interview American students on the election. Are you two willing to be interviewed? Everyone else is in class..." And what were we supposed to say? So of course we agreed and then were terribly nervous when this man and woman walked in carrying a video camera and microphone. Fortunately, it wasn't like CNN France or anything; it was fairly casual, and they said it would be airing online and not real TV, thank goodness. I think Shaina and I did pretty well, but who really knows? We were pretty nervous.

I had my literature midterm on Wednesday, and I honestly thought I did pretty well... it was stuff that we had covered in class that I thought I really knew. We had to answer two questions about themes in these two books we had read, then we had to pick an "explication" question where she gave us a page or two in a book and we had to explain what was going on and how it related to the overall theme/story. Well, since this post is written like two weeks later, I now know my grade... and yeah, I was sort of surprised to get a 9.5/20. Yeah, that's like less than 50%. I would have freaked out, but because this is the French grading system, they don't divide the points up like we do in the States. My lit prof told us she doesn't give higher than a 12 (again, a failing grade in the States), so my 9.5 was actually a B+. No, I don't really get it, so sorry, but I can't really explain it either. But I was happy that rather than failing, I did okay.