I Wrote This In 6 Minutes and Then I Added a Few Pictures

Saturday night the group gathered together and made a delicious dinner. It was at the house of our friend's host family. Everything was put in place at the last hour before we headed to the house. Myself and a few others ran to buy chicken, pasta, garlic, etc. With the help of each other, we made Chicken Marsala with a white wine and mushroom sauce. We made pasta and sauteed veggies. We made a unique sauce from pasta sauce, heavy cream, flour, white wine, and oil. We drank a ton of wine. This was a really fun weekend. Here's a picture of some of the finished product that doesn't really do it justice.

If you're in the States, or if you've been at university for the past few weeks, you'll probably scoff at the following couple sentences. School has finally started here, and it's rough. It's quite comparable to a semester at the University of Illinois, except every single class is in French. French classes are structured a little differently than American ones. There are SIGNIFICANTLY less things to do for tangible grades. There are maybe 4 different grades that go into your final grade. However, there is a lot more reading. And it's not the bullshit general education reading that plenty of freshmen go through. Participating and understanding lectures is a major part of classes here. In that vein, you kind of have to do the readings. It's a trade-off. Less papers and no online postings, but more reading.

We've started to look at some cool weekend trips, as well as spring break trips. As of today (Sunday) we are hoping to go to Normandy this coming weekend. Planning trips with more than like 4-5 people gets very tricky, but I think we're going to pull this one together tomorrow after class. Monday is my worst day for classes - six straight hours. Then on Tuesday I have 4.5 hours. Then 3 on Wednesday, and finally  just a couple hours of museum visiting on Thursday's. If I can get through Monday, all will be well in the cosmos. Everything else is excellent here, my French is starting to sound a tiny bit better and the food is, as always, perfection. More updates to follow later in the week.

Noah

PS: Oh yeah on Thursday we went to a club. Every Thursday there is an "International Party" at this club. This week's theme was American, and they had beer pong. We finally got the French people to stop messing around at something they didn't understand, and proceeded to enjoy ourselves at their makeshift BP table. The club atmosphere was kind of weird, but overall it was a unique experience.

PPS: We were lucky enough to see our friends from Leuven, Belgium while they visited Paris. We went to our favorite Irish bar on Friday night and serendipity caused all of the Belgium students to successfully make it our way. Shouts out to Lauren Pliskin and Jaclyn Schwartz, it was very good to catch up with that crew. 

Recent music:

I Shall Be Free No. 10 - Bob Dylan

My Key - Atmosphere