All Right, She Wants A Young American

For the past couple weeks I haven't been travelling, but that's because I've had school and I realized I spent a lot of money travelling to London and Barcelona so I've just felt like I should cut back a little bit. The cliché among American students is: "You're in France to spend money." We're on vacation with homework.

But in any case, I've been trying to keep it a little bit on the homework side and a little less on the vacation side of late so as to save money for the actual vacation-time. This is the third week of class and things are starting to fall into a rythmn, which is comforting yet unexciting. Thankfully, I only have each class once per week ... wait ... that makes it seem like I don't like my classes. That's not one hundred percent true. I don't like certain of my classes (Phonetics, Grammar, the three hour class where we go over one sentence of text per hour ... these are the ones I don't like). But there are a couple of good ones. I'll tell you about my favorite.

It's the discussion section for Culture Littéraire/Rhétorique and though it's arduously technical (okay not that bad) I just really love this teacher for his incredible French pretentiousness. I really don't know how to start describing it but it's pretty much this fantastic greater-than-thou attitude where he makes it so clear that he's the smart one and you, the students, are infinitely inferior. Complete with trailing-off thoughts and once a random improvised excursus on Renaissance-era shift from metaphorical, pseudo-magical figures to "true-to-life" representational comparisons with a few Foucault references thrown in here and there for spice.

On the home front, this week my host family's nephew is staying with us and he loves everything that little boys like so I brought back my childhood last night by watching Jurassic Park in French. I assure you, Ian Malcolm is just as awesome in French as in English.

As for the Bowie-lyric title of this entry, that's there for two reasons: first of all, I keep ending up listening to music with any kind of vague reference to America or American because I dunno ... the fact that I'm constantly defined as "The American" makes me a little more in touch with my nationality even if I could care less about it while at home. The other reason is because I went to a really sweet costume party last weekend in which I disguised myself as David Bowie. Very successful. I'll post a picture of it at some point and you'll all agree how very awesome it was.

In the meantime, I've spent way too much time on this without actually saying much, meaning that I don't really have much to say. I'll finish it off with this:
France is great and I don't know how I'll transition to being back in America, but that doesn't mean that I don't miss all of you. Keep me updated on how America's been doing so I can keep the French up on what's happenin' in my country.