Today I participated in a language exchange. It was interesting to say the least.
We were supposed to meet for the language exchange at 8:45 at Accent so I woke up at 7:30. I already had my outfit picked out so I had a fairly relaxing morning eating madeleines and drinking my coffee while responding to Facebook messages. I had picked out my gray knit sweaterdress with my blue longsleeved shirt over it. I finished my outfit with my gray scarf, brown tights, and brown boots. I even wore my glasses so that I'd look extra smart for the language exchange boys. I left the house at 8:30 and walked to Accent.
I was, of course, the first person there. We were supposed to be right on time to leave, but most of the other students were at least 3 minutes late and some didn't show up at all. We then walked to the school which is near the Bastille. It's a university for video game designers and other digital artists, and has mostly male students. We were a group of all girls. Carole introduced us to the English teacher and she got us settled in for the exchange. I sat with Kelly at a table with four French students. The first half of the exchange was English conversation. We were supposed to ask the students questions about mundane topics such as what they find bizarre about America and why they want to speak English. I was partnered with a guy who barely spoke English and was sweating profusely despite the room not being that hot.
The instructor had a bag of fun questions so we snagged a handful of them and started a group discussion at our table. Only one of the guys really spoke English and two of the boys were mostly interested in chatting with each other. Kelly was weird as usual. I was glad when we went on a break for breakfast. The school provided orange juice, a bottle of coke, cookies, cake, and brownies as our breakfast. I mostly chatted with Kelly and some of the other girls. It was weird to have so much French boys milling around us. I felt like I was on a bad dating website.
Kelly and I sat at a different table after breakfast. I really liked the boys there, and Kelly found herself a love interest. I chatted with one boy while two other boys interjected occassionally in French. They had just come back from Japan and told me all about their Japanese girlfriends. We were supposed to be speaking in French for the second conversational session, but we mostly got along in English with me lamely attempting some elementary French. The guy I was chatting with added me on Facebook and told me that if I ever wanted to go to Disneyland that I could stay at his home because he lives nearby.
I have taken a few weird lessons away from the exchange. 1) The French readily admit that their culture is copied from America. All of their music and movies are American, and they find nothing weird about American culture. Sweaty boy did ask me if it's true that Americans eat bacon and eggs for breakfast. I told him it was true. 2) They aren't really that interested in speaking fantastic English. It's just not a life goal 3) The French admit that it's really difficult for even a French person to speak perfect French, and they say that the language is really difficult. It's weird to me that a whole culture accepts a language that barely anyone can speak properly. 4) French people really do live with their parents until they're older. The boys were all about my age and still lived at home with their parents. They say it's because it's so expensive to live in Paris. One boy told me that he wanted to move out when he had finished university. 5) They go to a private school and consider the tuition of about 700 euros (a year I think) expensive. They were astonished when I told them my school is public and costs about $5,000 a quarter.
After the exchange Kelly and I started walking back to the center. She had to run home before her lecture, but I went to the center to talk to Nic. You know all about my history paper being due tomorrow and that I am in desperate need of his help. I printed my paper and he started intently reading and marking up my essay. I sat and drew boxes and flowers on a sheet of notebook paper as he read. He finally finished reading and we started chatting about my essay. He's so funny and we spent most of our time talking instead of focusing on my paper. We actually had a really great discussion about Napoleon, Republican values, and the religious monarchy. Who knew that was possible. He was really helpful in reorganizing and improving my paper. He will be reading more papers in the future.
I came home to work on my paper while I waited for my histories group to come over. My histories class has been assigned a scavenger hunt at Les Invalides. We were given a series of prompts about the decorative scheme of the building, and we have to answer them by interpreting the decoration. I didn't have a group so I approached Morgan about partnering with me. It's a project for three people so she recruited Annie to be our third member. We were supposed to meet today at one to have a group meeting and see what our next step should be.
I started working on my paper while I waited for the girls. I tried to fit in all of Nic's corrections while still making the paper coherent. The paper is now about 3 and a half pages. It's supposed to be 2-3. Oh well. It needed development. I finished my paper and moved onto studying for French. Morgan said that she would be over at one, but when I messaged her at one she said she was at Monoprix. I started studying and awhile later my doorbell rang. Annie wasn't worth her. Morgan told me that Annie was busy all day and wouldn't be able to make it. I had read the prompt before Morgan came over and figured out that we needed to go to the site today.
I got dressed while Morgan grabbed her camera, and I met her downstairs. We went to Gare de Lyon and took the same path as I took to go to Musée Rodin the other day. When I was on the 13 last time I realized that there was a stop called Invalides. I wondered why our professor's directions told us to get off at Saint-François Xavier instead of Invalides. We decided to get off at Invalides and see why. It turns out that the metro stop is near the Invalides ancillary centers and not near Les Invalides itself. We ended up lost and walking near the National Assembly. We found a metro map and navigated ourselves to Les Invalides.
We spent lots of time taking pictures of the outside before we turned our attention to the interior of the building. We must have looked like crazy tourists walking around with sheets pressed to our noses and taking detailed pictures of everything. Morgan handled the camera while I pointed out decoration that would be important to our paper. This was my first time inside the building and it really cemented for me what an asshole Napoleon was. There are 10 bas-reliefs with the sole purpose of showing off how cool Napoleon thought he was. In every image he is dressed like a Roman emperor and is doing something supposedly fantastic for the empire. He is even buried inside five coffins. Laurel wreaths and the names of his military victories are pictured on the marble floor around the coffin. For such a short man he really thought highly of himself. In a few images he even makes references between himself and god. Insane.
We finally finished up our project and came home. I got right to work finishing studying for French. After French I took a small break and found a Facebook message from the guy from the exchange today. His name is Quentin, and he sent me a link to a website that links up language learners so they can practice their conversational skills. Of course I got on the website and started chatting with boys instead of reediting my histories paper. After awhile I started working on my paper. I found out that my editions had made it a semi wreck. I edited it two more times before finally calling it a day. Our professor has a rewrite policy so I think it's good enough for now.
I then turned my attention to working on the scavenger hunt. Morgan is already working on her section because she's traveling this weekend. Her proactivity made me feel slightly bad about wanting to put it off until tomorrow. I wrote my two paragraphs for the first two sections, wrote my topic sentence for the second section, and then wrote a few disjointed sentences for the third section before I finally couldn't take studying anymore and called it quits. I'm sleepy and it's only 9:30.
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