I got my first piece of homework back from one of my literature classes today. It was the devoir sur table (in-class written assessment) from my Literature and Opera class. I've been worried since I've been doing all my assessments as commentaire composes, since that's all I know, but I'm still not sure I'm doing them right, and I warned the teacher about it. I was worrying for nothing. I got a 15/20 for it, which is supposed to be really good in a French uni, and her main criticism was that my spectrum of inquiry was too broad, so I didn't have time or room to go into detail on any points, but what I'd written was good. There was a bunch of grammatical mistakes and miswrites (typos by hand!) but there were no 'construction' problems and she marked a few areas as 'good', and when she talked about the themes of the extracts and what we should have covered (as a general idea), she even gave the title of my devoir as an example of a good one-sentence analysis and theme for the commentaire. I was amazed! Hopefully I'll get another assigment back tomorrow, but after this first mark I'm feeling pretty optomistic about this semester.
I've been freaking out my European friends with the amount of travelling I do. I spent this weekend in Belgium - went up Thursday night and returned last night, Sunday. E3-Harelbeke was on Friday and Gent-Wevelgem was on Sunday, both major cycling races, and both Harelbeke and Wevelgem are a short distance from Kortrijk in Belgium which is just over the border from Lille and Roubaix. While I was there I spent a bit of time in Gent and its suburbs, lots of transfers through Kortrijk and an afternoon in Brugge. In other words, I'm now really well acquainted with the West Flanders region of Belgium. Feel free to check out Peloton Cafe for my E3-Harelbeke and Gent-Wevelgem pieces and my profile-feature on Mitch Docker, Australian Orica-GreenEDGE cyclist.
Attached is the beginning of an unfinished post from a few weeks ago about a class trip...
I'm not quite as over-the-top with it as I am with my Disney obsession, but I'm absolutely mad for Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera (though we prefer the term 'phanatics'). I love it so much that the first time I saw an English version of the French novel it was based on (in my university bookshop, of all places) I bought and read it straight away. In fact, the first thing that caught my attention on my first trip to Paris was the Opera Garnier, or Old Paris Opera House. The Opera Garnier was the model for the Opera Populaire in the Phantom of the Opera film, so as soon as I saw it I realised I was in the Phantom city (not to mention the city of many other things that are educated and cultural and have nothing to do with tourist stuff). Anyway, you get the point.
I put my name down a few months back to go to a rehearsal of the opera Cenerentola at the Opera Bastille with my Literature and Opera class. We're studying Cenerentola this semester, since it was developed from the story Cendrillon by French writer Charles Perrault (which later became the Disney movie Cinderella - what, everything relates to Disney!), so I thought it would be good to choose that opera to see, plus the Opera Bastille, I mean, pretty cool, right? So you can imagine the kind of excited sounds I made when I realised there'd been a venue change and we were going to the Opera Garnier. Performer's entrance. Exclusive entry. The whole kit and caboodle. Whoa, dude.
I also made some friends on this trip. I finally talked to some of the French girls in my Lit and Opera class, which is handy, because two of them are in my Medieval Language class directly after Lit and Opera on Mondays. Up til now I've been too shy and unsure of my French to talk to the native French students, so I was pretty proud of myself. I've also made a couple of friends in my Morphosyntaxe class - we've been teamed up for an oral presentation next week, but I like them alright. My linguistics classes this semester are great - Medieval to Classical Language and Morphosyntaxe are really engaging and interesting. Even Lit and Opera and Divine Love Lit classes are pretty good, since I've mostly enjoyed the texts we've studied. It's Thursdays that are a bit trying, but there's only five more weeks of class left, so I'll survive (five weeks! Holy moly! Where did the semester go?) And then after that I apply to graduate and I enter the big wide adult world! Scary thought.
In my quest for the best hot chocolate in Paris, last weekend I went to a teahouse called Angelina's that a friend recommended to me to test his assertion that they have the best hot chocolates. I've never been to a cafe that has a queue before, that was an interesting experience. Unsurprisingly the hot chocolate was rather disappointing - it was Spanish-style, not French-style, and the Spaniards don't know how to do hot chocolate. The place was worth it for the experience though, I'd recommend it.
I think that's all for now. I might post some photos at some point if I get around to it. In the meantime I need to eat dinner and then finish ghost-writing Tiffany Cromwell's blog. Ah, the glamorous life of the professional journalist...not.
