it's as weird as the books say it is

Today was a bad day.

For our second class excursion we went to Biblothèque Centre Pompidou for a guided tour. I woke up a few minutes before my 8:30 alarm and decided to get up and get my waffle and coffee while checking facebook. I still hadn't heard from Tamara and was hoping that she hadn't stood me up. At a few minutes before 9:30 I decided to go to her room and ring her bell. There was no answer. I was sure, at that point, that I had been stood up and was trying to garner some courage to make the trek alone. To my surprise Tamara was already downstairs waiting for me.

We took the metro from Gare de Lyon and ended up what was supposed to be a five minute walk from Centre Georges Pompidou. We followed the signs, which always lead in a bizarre direction to nowhere, and ended up lost. Eventually we found a building that could be it, but couldn't find the entrance. I had thought that I had seen the building somewhere before; I was right. The building is used in architectural books as an example of bad/weird/confusing architecture and why one shouldn't build that way.

We found the entrance, but no one from our class was there. It was only 10:05, and we were meeting at 10:30, so Tamara got coffee and we hung around for a few minutes waiting for someone to show up. She was very huffy that our professor had failed to give us directions even though she knows that we've never been there before and would get lost. Very huffy.

Finally we found some people from our class, but not our professor. We eventually found her, but most of our class was missing. Turns out that despite our professor telling us that we should meet there, some students thought that we were meeting at ACCENT. Those troublemakers were escorted by the graduate assistant and arrived late for our 11 am tour.

We cut the huge line that had already formed outside and toured the library. The entrance looks like a food court, and I was not impressed with the library's architecture or overall feel at all. However, the library has a lot of resources that would be very useful including self-teaching stations to learn French, tons of books, and even a music section and area to watch TV in several languages. It's a free library so many students go there during examens. I enjoyed our tour. Though the tour was in French, the guide spoke slowly and spoke some English when we looked confused.

After the tour a group of us headed home on the metro.

I have made kinda friends with two other girls in our class, and Kristina and I decided to go to the grocery store instead of going home with Sierra and Tamara. This was my first trip to Franprix. It's much smaller than Monoprix, but Kristina said that the baguettes were delicious so I went alone for my daily fix. A baguette the same size as the ones at Monoprix was only 76 cents and it was delicious! It was soft and perfectly flaky and buttery and I will totally be getting my bread from there from now on. The store is closer to our dorm than Monoprix, but the service is bad and the one cashier looks like she'll stab you. There's construction going on outside so the jackhammering did not help improve my shopping experience.

I went home to eat my baguette before class at two, and had plans to meet Kristina to walk over together at 1:40. I went to her room to get her, and we walked over. This is the end of the happy story.

My professor kept yelling at me during class; you need to learn to say "l'art", read only this page, are you listening michaela? She speaks five million words a minute and I can't seem to learn anything, and all the other kids speak better French than me. During our break I went to see the advisor about changing the class to pass/no pass. Then I cried. In her office. Yep. Cried. I'm going back tomorrow to talk about changing my grading option, and probably do some more crying.

I was definitely not in a good mood after this. I went home and ate the rest of my speculoos cookies and started my homework. I took a break most of the way through to eat ice cream and watch some Judge Judy. Then I ate some potato chips and went back to studying. We already have one of our two quizzes on Wednesday, and I'm so melted down that I can't even panic about it right now.

I'm going to bed.