First Week: Difficile

So, I’ve basically learned my way around most of the city by way of maps, tours and common sense. Getting lost and wondering around helped, too. It’s pretty incredible how quickly you have to adapt to a place you don’t know, especially a city with fast little cars, lots of bikes, and trams that run right on the ground between roads (not underground or on separate platforms) that could hit you if you walk out in front of one, which is very easy to do. I know my way around, and a few different places to eat and drink a little bit of Alsatian beer (sweet and usually blonde).
There are a lot of great churches around that I want to visit; the Cathedral, of course, St. Guillaume and a couple others. The great thing about Strasbourg is that not all the buildings are from the same period, so you get gothic architecture mixed with baroque, plus a lot of 19th and 20th century French residential style, and a good amount of traditional German gingerbread houses. Here are a couple of the beautiful places I’ve been seeing (thanks for the camera, bebe).
My host mother gets props for making me vegetarian dinners, which are pretty good, always some kind of salad to start (but last night we had fresh radishes, which I thought I didn’t like, but in fact I do, sorry Mom), then a main course, sometimes of vegetables and some kind of meat product that I don’t have to eat, or of something with eggs so that I get my protein. Then sometimes we have bread and cheese, sometimes just bread, then yogurt or fruit which is usually dessert. For the past two nights we’ve had these wonderful plumbs that my host parents picked on their vacation last week, mixed with a heavy yogurt. So delicious. Lunch is sometimes the student cafeteria which is cheap and not bad, sometimes buying a big baguette and cheese and fruit and splitting between people, and sometimes out to get a falafel sandwich.
Classes are rough. We are in school from 9am to 12:30, when we have lunch, then 2pm to 5pm. I have to be home around 7pm to have dinner, and after that I’m so exhausted I can only do the little amount of homework I have, maybe talk to some one on the phone and then go to sleep. Luckily this is not the schedule I will have all semester. For the first two weeks we have an intensive French course called the “stage” and it’s basically to teach you to take notes in French, write papers in French and think in French. We have language class everyday in the morning, then lectures in the afternoon on French literature, French history and the European Union. But after the stage we go to Paris (!) then have a week off, and then real school starts.
Enough for now. I wish there were seriously exciting things to tell, but those will come. Tomorrow is the weekend, and who knows what that will bring.
a bien tot