C'est l'amour: our first day with the MICEFA

I've had a great past couple of days, spending most of my time with Elly, Cecile, and Sarah (from Richmond). On Saturday the first we spent the day together, going from Notre Dame to the Eiffel Tower, all on foot (which is quite far, we discovered, considering all the walking we did in between!). On Sunday we attempted to be a bit more social by going to the Musee Rodin in the morning to meet MICEFA students, but since they were meeting at their temporary housing and we didn't know where that was, we didn't actually meet anyone else! So we continued walking around and ended up on the other side of the Eiffel Tower (near the Ecole Militaire). There's also a great Peace Monument there, I hadn't heard of it before so I'm not sure what it's called, but it's a bunch of silver pillars and a glass building thing with 'peace' written all over in different languages...I'm putting up a picture so there's some idea what I'm getting at... So far we haven't gone into anything other than the Musee Rodin, but I suppose we'll get there, especially after we get student cards saying we are art history students, in which case we should be able to get in free at most museums.

I planned on going back to eat some dinner after all that walking yesterday, but then it turned out that Monica, Anne's friend (who I think I didn't mention, she's from Mexico and was studying in Barcelona and is now touring around Europe until she has to go back home) was leaving this morning, and I wanted to go see her again before she left. So I got back on the metro and met her around Sacre-Coeur, and we walked around Montmartre for a few hours. It was so touristy, but it was evening when I got there, so the sun was setting and we just had amazing views of Paris in the dusky twilight time of night. The cathedral is so daunting - it looks so far and small from the metro station at the bottom of the hill, but once you climb to the top it dwarfs everything, it's truly incredible. Montmartre was extremely touristy, I really didn't hear any French in the area right around the cathedral, but we walked further on to Rue Lepic, which is apparently where the Amelie cafe is - though we didn't find it - and there were much more French people there, and it's a really lovely neighborhood until you get to Pigalle, which is where all the sex shops and sleazy bars are. By the time I got home, I was exhausted from so much walking, and I didn't stay up much later...

This morning, we met at MICEFA at 9, where they told us to wait for a half hour before going over to Censier, at the Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris 3) for our orientation. It was much of the same information as ACCENT gave, though some things we hadn't heard before, and Topher Simon (who works there) seems like a nice guy and is knowledgeable about Paris. Luckily, we got to leave early because we already have housing, so we got crepe lunches and went back to the ACCENT office and on some errands before actually sitting down to study some French - our exam is tomorrow! There's not that much more I can do than review it and hope for the best! We have oral exams on Wednesday, too, and by Thursday we will know what classes we're in. So au revoir for now, onto studying, I guess!