Salut à toutes et à tous,
I've been meaning to write for a while, but this semester has started off in a blur. My spring break is two weeks from now; I can hardly believe it!
Academic Report
This is definitely not a coasting semester even though we'd all like it to be - it is, after all, my last semester of school for at least the foreseeable future. (I mentioned something on Facebook about "my last first day of school EVER," and one of my college professors commented "says the girl who'll be enrolling in a Ph.D. program in four years," which got a lot of likes. Who knows, but I do love school!) Anyway, we appear to be failing with regard to Mark Twain's advice, "don't let school get in the way of your education." I personally would much rather continue learning about wine and how to vive la vie parisienne, but alas academics must come first. I am taking the same number of classes as last semester, but somehow I seem to have more work and to spend a lot more time in class. (Also contrary to my wishes for my last semester, I have two 8:00 a.m. classes! I haven't had one of those since maybe junior year of college.) Fortunately, my classes are, on the whole, better and more interesting than those I took last semester. I am taking: Investment Arbitration (in English but taught by France's undisputed king of arbitration), Banking Regulation (in English), "Economic Analysis of Law" (in French), International Private Law of the Circulation of People (in French), Contracts & Arbitration in Latin America (in Spanish!!!), Secured Transactions (in English), Corporate Social Responsibility (in French), Written Skills in Arbitration (in English), and a French language class. Quite a list, eh? I also took a short course in January called Legal Aspects of International Finance.
A few other comments about this semester thus far:
- I've discovered that I cannot type fast enough in French. I change my keyboard settings so that I can do three of the five accents (accent aigu, the dash that points up; accent grave, the dash that points down, and ç), and typing those doesn't take up significantly more time, but when I am struggling to process what I am hearing from the professor AND translate that from my head to my fingers, I almost always lose the end of the sentence. It makes for a very frustrating time in class, made worse on Tuesdays by the fact that I have six hours STRAIGHT of class in French. I am absolutely exhausted by the end!
- On the other hand, it is a joy to go to a class taught in Spanish. For me, listening in Spanish requires only the tiniest bit of effort more than listening in English (as opposed to in French, where I am still often translating inside my head as I listen). It helps my constantly bruised ego to feel like I can function in at least ONE foreign language. (I am never going to stop feeling inferior to my European classmates who can speak at least three if not four languages fluently. I know it is not my fault - our education systems are just too different - but still, I feel so uneducated relative to them.)
- There has been an infusion of American exchange students from two other big law schools at home, and this is weird for the small group of us who've been here all year. These other students don't speak French, so they are only in a couple of our English classes, but there are about 20 of them. In one of my classes, this has the result that almost everyone in the class is American... which kind of misses the point of studying abroad. Our original group feels a bit superior and snobby towards these new folks, and we have decided we are okay with feeling that way... we've earned it, plus let's be honest, Parisians are snobby, and we've been here long enough to have picked up on that character trait.
- I LOVE my French language class. I can't tell you how upset I am that I didn't take one last semester (ie, that the school did not inform us that we could take one and give us the information necessary to do that). It is 100% worth getting up at 7:00 a.m. to attend!
French Language Progress...
As I've been here for over five months now, my French has clearly improved - though it still has QUITE a long ways to go before it is anything I will feel proud of, and I am definitely not going to leave being fluent - far from it. This is disappointing, but I will be okay if I leave at the end of April being functionally fluent... that is to say, being about equal to where I am with Spanish. I don't know every word, but I can react to pretty much any situation and can at least talk my way around any missing vocabulary. (Interestingly, French has - temporarily - surpassed Spanish in at least one way: last week I had the option to read an arbitration judgment in either French or Spanish; I chose Spanish first, but I realized that my legal vocabulary is more robust in French, so it is actually easier for me to read legal texts in French at the moment. This will not last much longer though; thanks to my class in Spanish, I'm starting to be exposed to the same types of texts in Spanish, so it won't be long before I catch up.) I am making an effort to read more frequently in French and to read actively - to look up each word I don't know, to consciously observe the sentence structure and grammar, etc. I bought a small notebook to record new words (and I go a step further by using each new word in a sentence so that I can remember them). Reading the free newspapers and magazines on the Metro is really helpful in this regard. I read a hilarious piece last week about why the French are still obsessed with Dominique Strauss-Kahn's scandals, and let me tell you, I got all SORTS of colorful vocabulary out of that article! We Americans are also trying to talk to each other more frequently in French. I am proud to report that I had to give an oral presentation in my French language class last week and that I managed to do so without notes - this is a HUGE improvement on last semester, where for each oral presentation I essentially read straight from a script (something I would never EVER do at home/in English but which everyone, including French people, does here). I am also getting better at tuning into the conversations of random people I pass on the street or stand next to on the metro; I think this is a good measure of listening comprehension.
Paris
The majority of the holiday lights are gone now, but they were up well past Christmas, which I appreciated. Their loss has not bee too horrible thanks to the gradual lengthening of the daylight - we are finally getting sunrises before 8:45, and we've got solid daylight now until about 6 p.m. We also have sunlight returning - January was almost entirely cloudy, but we've had a lot of sun so far in February, which I hope will continue! My watch battery runs on solar power, and as happened at the end of my summer in The Hague, it has recently stopped working because of the lack of direct sunlight.
I have ramped up my running in preparation for the Paris Semi-Marathon, which is on March 2. I have run 9 or more miles each of the past four Sundays, including my personal longest run ever of 11 miles yesterday! I do a different route each time, but essentially I am just doing one big loop around the Seine, starting from somewhere in the vicinity of the Eiffel Tower, heading all the way east past Ile St-Louis, and coming back. I am really proud of my progress, but I am looking forward to getting the race over with so I can go back to running 5-6 miles at a time... it's a lot more sustainable!
The other notable event of the past month has been the Soldes. This is one of two big periods of sales all over France each year... imagine Black Friday that lasts for a period of WEEKS. I had been waiting literally months to buy some things during the soldes; I picked up black leather (real leather) boots for 100 euros instead of 160, for instance. 97% of the stores in Paris have soldes, and it's been a really fun experience shopping in the various stores. One of the big department stores was even playing pump up music like you'd hear at a sporting event, where there would be music and then the shout of "soooooooooldes supreeeeeeeeeeemes!" This is my favorite thing I saw during the soldes, at the Printemps department store. What a tagline: Reduce n' Seduce!
(Note, though, I am not sure how far the seduction would get with this particular ensemble. How the heck do you take all of those off at the crucial moment?!)
My Favorite Spot in Nighttime Paris
I mentioned in my December post about loving Paris that I shared Owen Wilson's consternation over whether Paris was better during the day or at night. I am ready to give an answer: it's definitely better at night. I can even give you my favorite place in Paris at night: it's the Pont au Change, one of the bridges that connects the right bank with Ile de la Cité. From that bridge (and only that bridge), you can see Notre Dame on your left and the Eiffel Tower on your right. It's a gorgeous view and the one that always makes me start singing Sinatra's "I Love Paris" in my head whenever I am there at night:
Speaking of Paris at night, back in January I finally found the place where Owen Wilson gets on the time-traveling taxi each night in "Midnight in Paris"! It's right next to the Pantheon in the 5th arrondisement. I was not there at midnight, so I can't confirm the magic...
Here's the view of the street the taxi always drives down:
and here's me on the steps, waiting for my own taxi to the 20's:
French Wine
I have found/made time to drink wine in the last few weeks. Two weeks ago I went back to a great place called Le Quincave which is about midway between school and home; Anthony Bourdain went there on No Reservations, and I had a quasi-celebrity encounter with its owner at L'Avant Comptoir back in the fall. It's a wine store, but you can consommer sur place. So we did:
(Note, "hop là" is a phrase you hear in French all the time. It's kind of like saying "there we go" in English. We bought this bottle because of the name and because it's made by the same producer as the bottle of wine my cousin and I had at my favorite restaurant back in December.) Speaking of that restaurant, I went back a third time with some people from my school who were here in January. Check out this amazing desert: pears soaked in red wine and topped with freshly whipped cream. It was DIVINE.
Last week we also had our second atelier du vin (wine workshop) led by my friend who is a former competitive wine taster. This time around we tried six different wines from the Cote du Rhone. On the whole, we were underwhelmed and decided that Bordeaux deserves its reputation as being the best. The event yielded another great picture that summarizes Parisian life, though:
And finally, I just have to share this picture of an empty metro car - this happened to me two weeks ago when I got on the last train of the night coming home from my friend's place in the 5th. This will probably be the only time I am ever alone in a Paris metro car!
Sorry for the random, haphazard nature of this post - I will try to write more regularly and coherently in the coming weeks!
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