It's All Greek To Me

The sushi we had on Sunday night was absolutely fantastic! The Dhommées also had their friend Daniel over, and he had brought homemade tiramisu for dessert, which was amazing. I was so incredibly happy with that dinner.

Yesterday I had my first class, which was "Reinforced initiation to Greek" at 1pm. I got up, got ready, and had breakfast, and then walked the 20 minutes or so to the building at Rue des Tanneurs. I found the class without a problem. There was another girl waiting, so I started talking to her a little and found out that her name was Corinne. She's a French student from Mauritania or something; it was some DOM-TOM (one of the French-run overseas territories). She was really nice, and was telling me about the class. They had apparently started last fall, and were already on Chapter 10, which kind of worried me, but she offered to give me photocopies of everything I'd missed for Wednesday and kind of help me with the class, so I was hopeful. The teacher came in several minutes late, and told us that there had been a mix-up in the administration and that we had been told the wrong classroom. There were only six of us, so we followed her to the other classroom and sat down. The first sign I had that this would be hard was when she started talking and I wasn't sure what she wanted us to do. Apparently we were to write our names, emails, and level on a piece of paper, in addition to how much Greek we had taken so far and what our expectations were for the class. Then she had us open our books (I didn't have one, obviously, but Corinne let me glance at hers) and start on that lesson. I became increasingly worried when she started writing on the board in Greek, doing various conjugations of something into various declensions, and I had no idea what she was talking about. After about 10 minutes of increasing terror and feeling absolutely lost, I raised my hand and said that I was probably in the wrong class, since I'd never taken Greek at all before and didn't even know the alphabet. She agreed with me, seeming surprised, and I said I would have to talk to Carine Berberi, the person who had signed me up for classes.

That was when I fled, and went back home. I felt awful, of course, since my first class had basically turned out to be an abject failure. Fortunately the others had planned on going out anyway, and I came with since I had a couple more postcards that I haven't quite gotten mailed out yet. I was also worried, since there seemed to be a very real possibility that my Italian class that evening would also be in the middle of the semester, in which case I would have to relive the morning's experience. We were all hungry after doing some errands, so we went to the Delhi café again, since we'd liked it and it was so cheap. This time we got to sit in the front, which was much nicer. I got a burger and a giant plateful of fries and a pile of lettuce. The burger was delicious (cooked pretty rare, which you can't usually get in restaurants, but which I actually prefer), although they put a little hashbrown round in it, which was kind of weird. The other thing that was funny was that in the US you would never think to eat a pile of just lettuce as a salad, but that's basically what it was.

After eating we came back to the house and bought more postcards on the way (I have a whole second round of people to send them to; I've just been slow since they're expensive when you add postage). Grant and I had to leave almost immediately once we'd gotten back, since our Italian class started at 6pm. We're taking it together and usually we're planning on going to the sessions on Thursday, since they're at the building on Rue des Tanneurs, which is closer. But this week we have the CUEFEE test on Thursday, so we would have missed the class. The Monday session is at Rue des Fromeurs (or something like that, I don't really remember the name). That's where the CUEFEE classes are all held, and is a half-hour walk from Le Nonante.

When we got there, a couple groups of people were standing around, and some of them seemed to speak English. We didn't really know where our class was, since the way Carine had written it on our sheet looked like FR ss (FR standing for Fromeurs, the site of the building). I ended up asking one of the people there, who turned out to also be an American, and she realised better than we did that it said FR 11; it was just that the handwriting made it look like a lowercase cursive s. So Grant and I found the classroom just fine after that, and went in and waited. We were worried, and so had decided to talk to the teacher before class started, to make sure that it was absolutely a class for beginners and not halfway through a longer class. She asked the students, and we were reassured that the class was for Débutants Débutants, absolute Beginning Beginners.

When the class actually started, it turned out to be a ridiculous amount of fun. The teacher kind of jumped around a lot; she ended up teaching us five different verbs with their present indicative conjugations, how to say "My name is," your nationality, and where you're from, and then towards the end she taught us the alphabet and the numbers from 0 to 10. Of course, it wasn't nearly in that order; like I say, she jumped around a lot. Grant and I were really excited after we left, and we spent the whole long walk back to Le Nonante repeating the letters and numbers and spelling out our names in Italian. I'm really looking forward to having that class again next week.

Grant and I had gotten back late for dinner, but Jacqueline had saved some for us. We had salad and hard-boiled eggs, then strips of roasted duck with a big pile of cooked vegetables, and applesauce for dessert. It was all really delicious, especially since we were so hungry after our long walk home. We hung out for a while, and a few people went to the café for ice cream. I didn't really want to keep spending money, so I stayed home and ended up playing some Dungeons & Dragons through AIM with a friend from back in the States. I have to keep in practice, after all, if I'm going to start up again when I come back!

This morning we all got up early-ish and headed to Rue des Tanneurs since we had a meeting with Carine to go over classes again. I had set up the meeting through email, since we still haven't figured out exactly how things are going to transfer back to Concordia when we go back. Dr. Rawson told us that we need 200 hours of classes this semester to equal four Concordia class' worth. But Martine and the people at the Université told us that we need 20 class credits, and whenever we say anything about class hours they just repeat that the French system doesn't work that way and tell us that class hours mean nothing. It's basically all a big mess, and nobody seems to know what we should do with it.

Since Mamie and Valeria still didn't have any classes set up and haven't heard anything about the art classes they wanted, they were going to come with me. And when Grant emailed Carine about meeting with her to pick some other classes himself, she told him to come with us too. So I was assuming the four of us were going to go. I was a little surprised when it turned out that all seven of us were going to go all together; apparently everyone had something they needed to talk to her about. We got there a little early and met with her. I managed to find a Greek class that is (like my Italian class) for absolute beginners, to replace the class that didn't work out so well. Half the group had missed breakfast, so they went to that same restaurant to eat lunch while I stayed with Valeria and Mamie while they discussed their issues. After they finished talking to her, the three of us girls went to talk to Caroline and got some paperwork we needed to figure out our Université email addresses. Since they were gone for lunch, we wandered around Old Tours for a while and went into Saint Martin's Basilica. We sat in the little crypt for a while, and it was nice and peaceful. We were able to get the paperwork we needed upon our return to Tanneurs, and that was cool.

For lunch, we three bought ham and a baguette at Monoprix, and made sandwiches at home. It was really good, and we had chips and pop with it. Now we're basically hanging out and napping before dinner, which will be another surprise!