Cats, Cinema Classes, and $7 Cokes

My third week was much like the Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen cinematographic masterpiece Passport to Paris, minus all the McDonalds and falling in love with twelve year old boys.

 Classes:

being able to see the Eiffel Tower from pretty much everywhere makes it impossible to have a bad night

Fair warning about French universities: the first entrance test to joining the class is finding the classroom.  For Gender Studies I traversed three buildings before going all the way to the department head who showed me a small calendar in the corner of a bulletin board with the classroom number written in pencil about the size of my pointer finger.  For Cinema I spent thirty minutes looking for an unmarked classroom wandering through dark hallways that looked like perfect murder locales and asking everyone I encountered where the room might be.  Nearly all of them responded “Uh, I don’t know, I don’t go here.”  (Oh, you’re not a policeman?  Then maybe don’t wear a policeman’s uniform and drive around in a cop car.)  I finally found the room but by that time I was sweaty and nervous because I was twenty minutes late and, in my terror, I had forgotten whether “I got lost” was a reflexive verb or not.  I stumbled into the room looking like a panicked albino (note to self: don’t wear white, without the California sun your skin is translucent) only for the professor to tell me that the class would begin the next week.  Basically I’m killin’ it in the first impressions department.

gobblin’ some snails

That being said, I have loved my university classes so far.  At a certain level the words get easier to understand, not harder.  As you can imagine, dehierarchisation and problamatiser mean exactly what they sound like they mean.  The lectures for both classes are really interesting, even if I do emerge from the classroom zombie-fied with a sort of French-hangover from concentrating so hard.  For my cinema class, since I will be missing the final my professor asked me to give a 15 minute presentation (in front of a class of 60 French students) on the representation of work in 1990s science fiction films…which is not terrifying in the least.  I only just got past the stage where I gave myself a standing ovation every time I used the subjunctive. (“Play it cool, play it cool, you conjugated that verb like nobody’s business!”)  Still, I’ve gotta hand it to her, asking me to give a presentation in French pretty much guarantees that I will be paying DANGEROUSLY close attention this entire term.

Cool Thing #1: 3^rd Arrondissement, The Cat Café

my high fashion photoshoot

One day after class a friend and I went to check out this new café that was opening that our professor had told us about in class.  Le Café des Chats (cat café) is a café/restaurant where there are about twelve tiny kitten (all rescue kittens, of course) that you can just play with to your heart’s content.  It was so popular we had to make reservations, and for good reason because it is humanly impossible to be unhappy in the cat café.  Purr therapy does a body good.  And so does $7 coke.  Since I was there on one of the first days the place opened, I ended up being in some photos that were used for Glamour’s article on the café.  Ergo, I am now famous for my style and pizazz in all of France.  If you need fashion tips, come to me.  I’ve heard that berets are really in this season.

À tout a l’heure!

Clancy T