education time

the past three days have been very busy. to begin, we had to show up to la fac (our campus) to take a placement test to determine what level we would be in the for the next week at 9 in the morning.

because i live far enough away, this meant waking up at about 7:30.. not entirely my idea of fun. we got to the test and found we were going to be taking it at the same time as study abroad students from other countries. i really did not enjoy taking this test, and not surprisingly, didn't end up doing very well. for one, obviously it was in french. for another, i swear it was like a mini SAT test, and it's not like i was all that good at taking the SAT's in english.. hence another reason i didn't do all that well. but hey, at least i have a friend in my class. let me tell you though, so far, not so excited about it. the first day the professor spent half the class explaining punctuation and how to use it. i hated it. i may not be all that good at french, but other than " actually being << in french, they use it the exact same way, so i kinda felt like she was wasting our time. plus i figure if we screw up punctuation at this point, correct us on our papers, but don't spend an hour teaching it to us. today's class wasn't quite so useless, but i'm still not a big fan. plus the fact that for the past two days my class has had to start at 8am. which for me means leaving the house at about 7:15 (and waking up to the sunrise).

this isn't all that much fun when i stayed up until midnight one night for reasons unknown, and didn't go to bed until 2am the following night because i was out bonding with my host brothers, their friends, and one of my friends. i've officially reminded myself why i don't stay out late when i have an early morning the next day (although i did have a lot of fun). if you think it's hard to pay attention to a class in your own language when you're tired.. you miss a lot more when it's in a language you are trying to learn. but i'll know better for next week. so this boring class we have for about 4 hours a day (with a 15 minute break). and then we have another class, which we actually got to have some say in and i find more interesting, for another 2 hours. i am taking les sciences humains. and we are learning about rituals. though, because i've been tired, i think i should reread all my notes and the articles to actually figure out what's going on. whoops.

other than classes which have taken up most of my time for the past couple days, i have continued to explore lyon with my friends getting to know this city i am growing to love.