First Day Of French Class
Tuesday June 5, 2007

         Last night after I wrote the log for the day I fell asleep and was asleep basically for 12 hours. I don't know why my sleep schedule is so messed up. I probably shouldn't have stayed awake the entire night before leaving on my trip. That really threw off my schedule. Today we all woke up again very early and went down to INSA. We got our pictures taken to put on an INSA student ID we got. My picture looks horrible. I didn't even know she was taking the picture and all the suddent she pointed to the monitor and said, "D'accord?" And I said sure. After that we had an orientation session where we learned some very basic information about INSA and its subsidary universities around Europe. After that we had a break where I took an hour nap.
         When I got up we all went back to INSA and had our first day of french class. For those of you who don't know, I have taken three years of french. My first year of french was in middle school where I learned a decent amount from a woman who was English but spoke fairly good French. The next year and a half I learned from a woman who had spent two years in Africa so not only did she not know French very well but she had no French accent or pronounciation at all. She left for about four months because she had a child and we seriously did nothing in the class for that time. We literally sat there until the bell rang. It was really disappointing looking back on it but at the time I loved it. After that we got a new French teacher who was actually French. But she was so flabergasted the entire time at how little French we knew she didn't teach us much either. This is all important to tell you how different it is to go from that background to having a French class where the teacher's first language is French and she hardly speaks any English. It's great. I love the class. I feel like I'm actually going to learn French in it. While in class I can actually hear French student talking outside the windows. It's great.
         After the class I went with another guy in the program, Zach, to a grocery store to get food so I don't have to eat out all the time. The food here is much more expensive than in America even without the exchange rate. All food except of course wine. It's really amusing that here Corona is about 12 dollars for a six pack and Guiness is only 6 dollars a six pack. Very differnt. This evening I went to Corey and Evan's room and played beer pong for a while. It was fun. Tomorrow I should have some cool pictures because we're taking a tour of the Airbus factory here in Toulouse. It should be at least semi-fun.