First week of classes

This week has been really busy but wonderful. I had my placement test, which consisted of a listening part, written part, and oral part. The listening started out really slowly, slowly sped up, and, finally, at the end it was so fast that it sounded like jibberish. After they figured out the scores, we were placed in language classes according to our ability. We also get to pick three elective classes, so I'm going to take Econ, Culture, and Art History. I'm finding that I understand everything really well, but when it comes to speaking I just can't formulate what I want to say--it's extremely frustrating, but I expect that it will come with time.

The program consists of all foreigners. About 40% are American and 40% are Chinese. The rest are random, like Swedish and English. The age range varies from 28 to 17, too. There's one Chinese girl in my class who has only been speaking French for 8 months and she's wonderful. It's incredible, but she has been living in France for four months so I guess that gives her an advantage.

This week I've also been exploring Grenoble; it's an interesting city-who knew?! On Friday, I don't have class so I went to 5 museums. They had one floor of a museum dedicated to skiing. If there's one thing I have to say about Grenoblians it's that they take their skiing VERY seriously. I've also learned that it is not appropriate to smile at strangers. They think it's weird that Americans strike up conversation with someone in line at the grocery store and smile at people that they don't know. If you smile at someone you're either flirting with them or you're making fun of them. This was really hard to stop doing, because it's so ingrained in our cultural customs to smile a lot, but I'm getting better.

Last night I learned how to play boules, which is the French acquivalent of bachi ball. This is another thing that the French take very seriously. I must have had beginner's luck because I kept winning every game; this wounded some egos but everyone was still gracious.

And today we are going further up the mountain for a picnic. I'm kind of nervous to see what they mean by up, because the tops of the mountain are above the cloud level, but we shall see.