First thing before I get started on this post: I was writing the title and I started laughing to myself because it includes an element very Anglosaxon, or, at least, not French. And rather than tell you right now and ruin the surprise (because I know how quickly we read in our native languages and by now you would know what it was without any time to actually think about it) I am going to wait until the end of this post so that you can really think about it and put for a guess as to what in the post title is not Frenchish.
Now I continue. Today Tam and I had our enormous presentation in Geographie de la France, and we did really really well. I am really proud of us. It was a solid presentation and the only critique that the teacher had was concerning the color of our pie-chart segments. I just used the default excel ones, next time I'll try to coordinate better. haha.
I am excited to take advantage of this weekend to catch up on some well-needed sleep and hopefully talk to David who has had a very hectic week going through the student visa process in Chicago. It is even more difficult when you leave for a second semester placement because everything has to happen much quicker. But on the the bright side we are officially two weeks away from being reunited again!!
I made carbonara yesterday for dinner and it was extremely good. I would make it for dinner again today but I over-garliced myself yesterday so I am not sure if I can convince myself to eat it again. Of course I could just make it without garlic. ... hmm the night is still young, I'll consider it a possibility. For the most part I would say that I am quite well adapted to cooking out here and eating, though I might say that having my grocery store, a real kitchen, and all my cooking utensils is one of the things I am most looking forward to about returning to the US. As of 2 days ago I still have 7 months left though, so that American food is still a ways in the future.
Linguistically speaking I would say that my life is very well adjusted to speaking French. I no longer think at all about it, it is extremely natural, and I would say that it is much improved. The biggest improvement is still going to be my vocabulary, in terms of both words and phrases, but I figure I still have a while to ameliorate my pronunciation. Actually, other than having a slight accent, most people would say that I speak almost perfectly. It is fairly rare that I have to come to a stop to conjugate a particularly difficult piece of grammar, but at least I can do it with a pause, I suppose.
Also, I am having a bit of difficulty typing on the American keyboard because I am getting quite used to the French one. Plus I have quite a few French friends and I instant message them - as a side note I recommend instant messaging when abroad in a foreign country because you can see how they type/abbreviate/say things quickly. It is quite interesting with French - and that has increased my French typing even more, so I am totally stinking with the American keyboard, lol, am I even sure I'm American anymore? YES - I can't stand bureaucracy, I work very very hard, and I like toilet seats on my toilets. Yup, I'm American all right.
Emotionally I am quite happy because I just finished giving a huge presentation which has been looming over my days, but there is always the knowledge that I will be losing the friendships that I have made here in just a few weeks, and that is a little hard for me to deal with. But hopefully all will go smoothly and we'll be able to maintain a connection through all the forms of communication that are available today.
General scholastic update: I start taking my final exams next week, and will be finished with my courses of Analyse de Données, Recherche Marketing, and Management International. That leaves three finals for my last week of school at Le Havre: Geo, Chinese, and Macro-Econ. We'll see how all of this goes, but I should be able to pass my courses. The only one that is iffy... hmm... make that two, are Geo France (even though the presentation today was great, we have a massively weignted final which just seems really difficult) and Management International because the course was just so.... easy and yet specific (not a lot of info learned, but a lot of specificity for that info) and plus the teacher is not very accepting of foreign students so my grammatical mistakes won't make me a 'mignonne étudiante étrangère"...
Ok, I think I have said enough for today, but always feel free to send along any questions or comments as you have them. PS I just gave up and I typed the last half of this message on the French keyboard. lol
ans PPS (thanks to an email from Ohio Mom, the thing that is not French about my title is.... it has capital letters. The French; at least for their powerpoint presentations, do not use capital letters for their titles. It weirded Tam and I out but we removed all of the capital letters from our page titles for our presentation. The French...
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