Well I'll strart off to say that even though it is the weekend I was up at 7:30 (this is an hour later than usual, so I guess that is good) so that Tam and I could talk to our Geographie de la France professor to give him our presentation topic ideas and let him know that we wouldn't be there next Friday, and so we could go to the market, and then still arrive at the bar where we were meeting our French friends to watch the semi-final match of the rugby world cup. It was France versus Pays de Gaulle and France won, but barely, meaning they will play in the finals next week (which I so will not see because I will be with my mother!)
Secondly, I am sure that among you there are those who are curious how my presentation went in Techniques de Commerce. Well, I cannot tell you because the day before the presentation the teacher contacted everyone to tell them that everyone's presentation had been moved back one week, so I will not know until this Friday. Actually I was kind of upset that it was moved back because I was looking forward to having it out of the way, but I think that my partner and I are ultimately grateful that we will have a little more time to prepare. I think our presentation will be better this Friday than it would have been if we had given it yesterday. On the other side of things, however, my test in Geographie de France was ridiculously hard and Tam and I completely failed. Especially given how much time and effort we (or really more particularly, I) had put in to memorizing all the regions and departments and rivers etc of France. Yes, there were a few questions for placing them, and I got all of them correct, but the cities that we had to place in France must have been minuscule because I had not seen but one of them before, and I had studied a variety of different maps to learn cities around France. Also, the landmarks that we had to place were equally difficult. I only knew where one of the 7 were and I could make a logical guess about one of the others, but still, it is not like I hadn't studied! I had seriously studied and I just have no clue where he found his list of geographical landmarks because none of them were ever listed on the maps I studied. And finally he also put 4 of the ancient regions of France... only one of which I knew where to place, but rest assured, I put down guesses for each and every item that I didn't know (= On the bright side, Tam and I could not stop laughing thinking about our teacher's reaction when he gets to our tests, because Tam also put guesses for everything he didn't know, and there is just something more humiliation about putting a city completely in the wrong part of France, or marking an ancient province completely in the wrong territory, but I figured why not at least guess? I am sure that the professor is officially going to pity us as the two "special" students in his class now that we did so poorly on the exam. On the other hand though, I am not sure how the other French students in the class did, so I guess we will see, but none of them seemed as phased as Tam or I afterward. But only time can really tell what grade we will get since I have no idea how the French grading system works.
Finally, my blog posts have been less frequent because I have literally been spending hours every evening working out details and price quotes for all ten days of my mom and I's vacation, and doing homework, and trying to get some sleep, so I just haven't taken the time to blog. Sorry about that. However, before I close out this one I want to remind everyone who has not yet responded to my question in the previous post about my possible change of English to please respond because I would like to include the results in my blog!
Overall today is a 100 because I get to talk to David, I booked a hotel over the phone in France (and actually had to cancel right at the end because it was 20E more expensive than online so I just booked it online), did all my laundry, walked for over an hour, spoke French (that doesn't always happen on the weekends), and cleaned every square centimeter of my box.
And finally finally, I just wanted to leave a linguistic note that at this point my comprehension is basically flawless except occasional vocabulary words or idiomatic phrases, but that my production has become a little worse (in particular my accent) and here is my evaluation: I am quite sure that my mental processing of French has gone up exponentially, so I am now mentally capable of producing French at a very fast pace, but my mouth cannot keep up with the rate at which my brain wants to speak because the sounds are different from English, and are therefore harder for me to form in my mouth. Anyway, I think it is a good step forward in a sense, because soon my mouth will catch up I think.
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