Yesterday (Friday 14 September) was an interesting day. I went to class nice and early in the morning, and I got Paris 3's Guide de l'Etudiant, and I read through it, and I found their department for Linguistics and modern languages...and guess what...they have Finnish!!!!!! They have a whole 'Finno-urgic' languages section in this program, as well as some really interesting linguistics courses. I'm quite annoyed with MICEFA that they didn't have a clue about it, but at least I did my research. I went over there yesterday too, but there wasn't really much there, so I think I will wait until Monday when the rest of the MICEFA kids are working on registration stuff. I'll definitely post about that on Monday evening...
Anyway after class Cecile and I went to the train station and got our 12-25 year old card for train discounts, and I'm really excited about it. Everyone has told us that we had to get them, so it was definitely a good idea. Now we can have all kinds of cheaper train tickets, yay! Then we got lunch, but by the time we were finished (we had to wait in a huge line at the train station) it was time to meet at the Louvre. There was a huge group of MICEFA students, and we had a guide...it was very interesting. She was really nice but we only went to about 6 different works of art, she just talked about each one for a long time. At first it was cool but then I got kind of tired so it dragged a little bit. I want to go back pretty often on Friday nights (when it's free for students) and just take the museum piece by piece and really see what I want to see. There really weren't that many people there, which surprised me, but it was cool because I want to see all the French art I studied in my class. We did see the Coronation of Napoleon, The Raft of the Medusa, and Liberty Guiding the People, or whatever that famous Delacroix one is, and those were all pretty amazing. Of course I was totally disappointed by the Mona Lisa - it's tiny, really far away, and there are a million people. There are some other really interesting paintings in the same room, though, so I looked at those instead. Anyway I just want to go back and do the museum at my own pace and see the things I'm most interested in.
Afterward, a bunch of us went out to a hookah bar around Pere Lachaise, it was me, Elly, her roommate Hannah, Sebastian from my French class, to begin with, and then Anne joined us and then four other MICEFA kids and then Molly and 4 of her friends...so there were a ton of us by the end, but it was so fun. I really just talked with Anne the whole time, which was totally okay with me, but it was cool to hang out with those kids. Apparently they thought I was really quiet but they were shocked when I told them I have tattoos and knew how to light a shisha coal (I was the only one there who could, it was weird). Hopefully I'll get to hang out with some of them this weekend, too, it was cool to have a different atmosphere than class. Then Anne and I walked all the way back home, it was awesome, because she told me all kinds of interesting stuff about the 11th arrondissement, apparently her grandmother was born there and her mom lived there while she was living in Paris. Also, she told me that it's a really safe part of town, and she used to walk home from work at 2 or 3 in the morning and there were still people around. I'm going to go have dinner at her house on Monday when Sasha comes, with her and Greg and Jean Francois, her friend who was in the Czech Republic with her. It's so cool to hang out with Anne but it's always so strange to leave and just say, okay, I'll see you soon!
This weekend is the Journees de Patrimoine, which means that pretty much everything is open for free! I'm super excited! Today we're going to the aquarium, and then there's this Yiddish culture place that I want to see, and tomorrow I'm going to go to the Musee de Cluny in the morning, and then the Galerie des Gobelins, which is the old tapestry 'factory' which hasn't been open to the public for years! And then I might see another museum or something. I'm trying to avoid the really popular places, because I have cards that will either get me a reduced rate or maybe get me in for free, and I know there will be WAY too many people at something like the Invalides or something. I'm trying to go to some places that aren't generally open for the public, which I think should be cool. I'll definitely post again after this weekend!
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