First Day of Classes!

11 September 2012

Today is the day to wake up bright and early and head over to the CUEF to find out our posted French levels, have a CUEF orientation, and choose our classes for the semester. Once I arrived and saw the class postings, all of my dreams came true: I placed into the B2.4 level, the best level I could have placed in! I was so happy, all of my years of studying French really are paying off! 

Before heading off to the orientation, we met up with a new girl in our program who arrived late named Julie. She's from Illinois too, and she's really nice. We have so much in common, we're going to be café buddies for sure!

Sitting through the orientation was kind of a buzzkill at first, filling out forms and paperwork and feeling like just a number on an ID card instead of an actual student, until one of the professors told us this beautiful story (in French, of course) about a man who was looking for happiness. Someone told this man to keep walking to the East, and once he found a village with three stores, he would find happiness. So the man walked for days and days, looking for happiness in this village, when he finally stumbled upon the three stores. This was it! He finally found happiness! However, he was disappointed to find that in each of the stores, he didn't find happiness. All he found were strings of flax in one store, lumber in another store, and in the third store, nothing but small metal bolts and screws. He was so disappointed to realize that this was happiness. In his misery, he stumbled out into the woods to take a nap, just to escape from his disappointment, when he heard music...beautiful music, enchanting music, coming from a small grove just a little further away. He got up and walked in the direction of the music where he found a man playing the guitar. The man was smiling, and he was radiating happiness, and happiness was woven into the sounds that played from his guitar. The man playing the guitar told the man "I have already found happiness...and so have you." The man then realized, he did find happiness in that village. The happiness was not the strings, nor the lumber, nor the metal bolts...but instead, happiness was the guitar made from all three of this small, otherwise insignificant things. And during this story is when I realized...Grenoble is one of my three keys of happiness. =)

Feel free to take a moment to find a kleenex and dab away those tears.

Are you better now? Good. On to classes! After the orientation they split up all the students into their respective levels, and from there we went to separate auditoriums to learn about our class choices. The classes I am taking this semester are: Intense study of French Language, Written and Oral French Expression, Intense French Vocabulary, History and Analysis of French Cinema, Contemporary French History, and French Literature of the 20th Century. I'm going to be a busy little bee, but I am more than excited to expand my knowledge of French culture, and watch as my French gets a little better with each passing day in these classes!

After picking classes, me and Julie stayed behind to start our first class of the semester: French Literature of the 20th Century. Despite it being the first day of class, AKA syllabus day, it was still so much more fun to have a syllabus day when that syllabus was written in French!

After returning home from classes, enjoying a nice goulash dinner with Fadila, and resting up a little bit, I went out to a local Mexican restaurant called El Tex Mex with Lori, Jimmy, and a guy named Matthieu. The main reason we went was for the salsa dancing lessons they have every Tuesday night, but they must have cancelled those. We couldn't have possibly missed it or not have seen it. It's salsa dancing, if it's happening, you know. But we decided to settle for margaritas in the rain, and who could possibly say no to that!

Crazy eyes