American in Paris

Salzburg, Austria was the plan for this weekend, but when Rachel and I went to buy our tickets on Thursday, they were all sold out! Fortunately, we have a sunny weekend in Paris to take advantage of. It's been a few weeks since I've had the chance to be a tourist in Paris. But, in order to maintain my status as an American in Paris, I really need to get it together see the sights that have yet to be seen.

Instead of touring Paris for these last few weeks, I have finally begun living the "study" part of study abroad. All of my classes started this week and I have no complaints. The professors all seem great and the classes seem interesting. I am taking two classes through my exchange program and two classes at a university in Paris called Nanterre.

With other exchange students in my program, I am taking an 19th century art history class (we get have more than half of our classes at museums like the Louvre and Musee d'Orsay!) and a French cinema class.

My classes at Nanterre have the potential to be boring because actual French classes. One class is for speaking and the other is for writing. Luckily, they're kept exciting by the fact that the students in both classes come from all over the world. In my speaking class, each person introduced their neighbor. There were people from Italy, Spain, Brazil, Turkistan, Thailand, Japan, Germany, Russia, Austria, and, of course, there were a few of us from the United States. It's an interesting bunch of accents all trying to speak the same language. I'm really excited to get to know some of the people in the class!

So far the workload does not seem too terrible. I have a few writing assignments, but nothing that isn't manageable. However, I do have a 10 page art history paper (all in FRENCH) on the horizon. I'm hoping that if I start now, I'll be able to figure out how aspects of Dante's work have manifested themselves in 19th century romantic paintings by November. Wish me luck.