Student life

So the other day I decided to do something different, just for a change.  I have three ways of getting to Sorbonne: I can take a bus from my apartment to the metro at La Courneuve and ride line 7 to Censier-Daubenton near Sorbonne; I can walk to the station in Le Bourget, take the RER to Chatelet-Les Halles and change to line 7 for the trip to Censier; or I can take the RER all the way to Port-Royal and walk to Sorbonne from there.  Until now I've been taking the metro all the way, since walking is minimal and it's very convenient, though a little time-consuming - travelling two-thirds of the line takes around 40 minutes.

I made a fortuitous discovery last weekend, though.  When visiting my friends at Martin's house I discovered that it's only 20 minutes from Le Bourget to Denfert-Rochereau, making it less than that to Port-Royal or Luxembourg, the stations nearest Sorbonne.  Accordingly, on Wednesday afternoon I walked the 10 minutes from my apartment to the station, bought a ticket and hopped on the next train into Paris.

Less than half an hour after I'd left my apartment, I was standing outside Port-Royal RER station in the south of Paris.  All that left was to find my way to Sorbonne.  It turned out to be a longer walk than expected - around half an hour, though that may decrease as my mobility increases.  I found Sorbonne easily enough, but my next task will be to look out the shortest and easiest route there - I think next week I'll try walking south from Luxembourg rather than north from Port-Royal.  I also tried option two yesterday, changing at Chatelet-Les Halles, but it's the biggest metro-type station in France and just walking between the two platforms took a good 10 minutes.

Classes are getting better - my brain is now more used to hearing three hours of chatter about the Bible and raising Lazarus from the dead in French, so I'm understanding more of my classes and the structure of the courses and as such feeling a little more comfortable all in all.  I will say, though, that I will be eternally grateful that I did (most of) my degree in Australia and that I'm still officially an Australian student.  Not a lot seems to happen in classes around here and how much learning gets done I still haven't figured out.  At least during my insane number of contact hours at Monash a large amount of information was imparted into my brain.  I'm beginning to see that organisation, efficiency and burearucracy are three things for which you should never hire a Frenchman.  Anas is totally on my side, too.  He's already wondering why he left Switzerland for this, which made him laugh when he remembered I spent a day and a half on planes and moved halfway round the world for this.  Sigh.

History of French orthography is still my favourite class.  Once I finally arrived today (bottleneck at Gare du Nord, my RER was held up for 45 minutes or so) we were discussing writing systems - Sumerian compared to Greek, Latin, Ancient Egyptian, Arabic, Hebrew - and how they each expressed language, i.e. pictures versus representations of sound, and how well each system worked.  This culminated in an explanation of why French is such a hard language to learn, specifically because every grapheme (written thing) has multiple pronunciations and every phoneme (spoken thing) has multiple transcriptions.  It sounds very similar to history of English classes - "Our language is just generally screwed up!"

I had an argument with Paul today.  It turns out that we both finish class at 11 on a Friday, and since I don't see any of my friends regularly anymore we took the opportunity to hang out.  This ended in us agreeing to reserve judgement on which is the best Disney movie until we've each had time to view the other's nominees (I have to watch Robin Hood, he has to watch Tarzan and Beauty and the Beast).  We also came to the conclusion that Paul's antipathy towards The Lion King may be due to the poorer quality of the German version, a theory we'll have to test.  There may also have been some extensive quoting of Finding Nemo around this time.  We ended up in the middle of a Park League soccer match, too - the bench we were sitting on at the park near Sorbonne was frequently looped as the kids chased the ball out from behind or underneath us - that is, when Horace doesn't take matters into his own hands and just bounce the ball back (yes, it did bounce off me once or twice).  It was hilarious watching how intense these six-year-olds were and trying to figure out which tiny soccer star was playing for which team.

It's now definitely bedtime.  Tomorrow I'm going into Gibert Jeune again for another textbook and hopefully meeting some friends for hot chocolate, not to mention starting to plan and book some of my trips over the next few months...I love having a four-and-two-half-days weekend!