La Rentrée

Last week, our summer vacation ended and it was back to school. We celebrated with a group of my classmates by gathering to watch the sun set and the lights of Paris come up. Turns out, the Eiffel Tower sparkles for the first few minutes it's illuminated. (The Tower is bathed in blue lights and decorated with gold stars to celebrate the French presidency of the EU -- it's currently their turn in the six-month rotation.)


The next day, we headed down to check out the pet market. We'd first discovered it two weekends ago, when we happened to wander past just before they finished packing everything away. This time, we enjoyed checking out all the small pets being offered for sale -- many, many beautiful birds (everything from finches to fully-communicative parrots); hamsters; guinea pigs; chinchillas; and even chipmunks. Our informal assessment is that chipmunks don't take well to caged life -- they were incredibly edgy, and (apparently) trying to work off the nervous energy by sprinting loop-the-loops around their cages.

We also picked up a few new toys for the cats, who have made themselves completely at home in the new apartment by losing every one of their toys. Since we've been slower than they at discovering all the best hiding places, the easiest thing to do (read: "thing that prevented yowls of boredom at 3:00 AM") was to replace a few of them.



After the weekend's fun, we put our noses back to the grindstone:

Matt is in class every day from 9:00 until 12:00, and Tuesday and Thursday afternoons from 2:00 until 5. He's in a beginning French class, but it's moving at a much faster pace than any class I ever had: they had their first unit test this morning! (The goal, of course, is to head home ready for the translation exam required for his PhD -- at this pace, I have no doubt he'll be good to go.)

I have seven classes (six law classes, plus a French class), with my week beginning at 7:15 PM on Mondays and ending at 12:15 on Thursdays (plus, of course, however long homework takes). One of my less-favorite elements of studying at Sciences-Po -- but something the university is famous for -- is something called the "exposé." This is a ten-minute presentation on a specific aspect of the course topic: it sounds simple enough, except that 2/3 of your grade for the course will depend on how the professor scores your presentation! My first exposé will be on Thursday morning, and my second will be next Wednesday night. (Fortunately, both of these classes are conducted in English -- public speaking in a second language is a fear I can put off for a few more weeks yet.)