This bookstore (Librairie Mollat) is literally the biggest bookstore I have ever been in in my entire life. It is enormous.
So I ask the first helper-bee that I see if she could tell me if they have any of these four books. And she was like "you'll have to ask my colleague in Social Science". Yes, the bookstore is that big that they have a person assigned (with a desk) to each area of study, along with floating people who shelve books. This next social science woman knew right where two of them were, but told me that the other two she would have to order and they were like twice as expensive. So I did not buy them.
Then I asked if they had any anthropology books in English, because if you remember, I don't actually know anything about anthropology. They don't, but she gave me directions to the English bookstore which might have some.
After I bought my books, I set out to the English bookstore which was quite tricky to find. You first had to go down (like actually down, it was a sloped street) this kind of alleyway, and she said the bookstore would be on the left. I went quite a ways and it didn't look like there was any kind of store there at all. I dropped into a coffeeshop and asked where the bookstore was. I apparently did not look convincing in my French, because the man first informed me that his store was not a bookstore. Yes, I know that. Thank you. But then he told me that it was just a little ways down the street and that it was on the left.
The bookstore was pretty cute, but it mostly had books for children and teens. I asked the woman about anthropology books and she said they could order some in. However, the books would cost like $1200000000 because they would have to come from the US. So I didn't buy any books.
I walked outside of the store and tried to find my way to a bigger street so I would know where I was. Where I actually ended up was the garden right by the mall. As I was feeling like some lunch, I was like, let's go to the mallllll!!!!!!
I bought a sandwich (you're welcome Kammie) from Paul and I got on the mall wifi to chill and eat my sandwich right inside the doorway on a ledge kind of a thing.
After I had eaten my sandwich, I got a message from Julie about our next class at 13h30. This is her only class in Victoire so she wanted to meet up beforehand so she wouldn't get lost. We agreed to me about 10 minutes before class, and so I voted I wanted to go home and eat some cookies before I met up with her.
I went to get on bus 5 which goes right by my street and is the speediest way to get home from the mall, but there was some kind of demonstration that made all the traffic really slow and so bus 5 was not coming along.
I even took a picture for you guys because that's how cool I am. Not a quality picture, but that's what's up. There was some chanting and people with signs, but I don't know anything else about it.
Anyways, I needed to get home and bus 5 was not coming when it was supposed to, so I took bus 15 to Victoire and walked home from there. At this point, it would have been speedier to take the tram because the bus got stuck behind traffic and it took way longer than it should have.
I got home and picked up some cookies and put on different shoes and then I went back to the campus to meet up with Julie.
Our Biological Anthropology class is in Arnozan (or Arzonan, I don't know which one) which is a lecture hall, but basically just a regular classroom. This was where Parenting was, but that was really loud and awful so I wasn't looking forward to this.
HOWEVER, Biological Anthropology is God's gift to Americans. It's the best class ever. The professor is a doctor, and he starts class on time, and he gives snotty looks to all the people who come in late. He has a powerpoint, and everything he says is on the powerpoint so you can just write it down. ANNNND the final exam is content-based, so you can just memorize the text that he's giving you. He also has a textbook he wants us to get, but he wrote it, so I'm probably not going to go try to find it unless it's in the library.
That's my new favorite class.
Directly following Biological Anthropology, I wanted to try out Visual Anthropology which everyone was raving about. It is, in fact, something to rave about. The professor spoke for a smidge at the beginning, and then we watched a movie. I'd like to ask him for French subtitles just so I'm certain about what's going on, but I probably won't. After the movie, he told us all to take our stuff and follow him, so we blindly followed him down some streets to a coffeeshop kind of a place. We all assumed we were going to discuss the movie here, but he really just wanted to show us the shop so that we could go to an event later that night if we felt like it.
The guy who ran the shop gave us all mint tea and that was fun. Then I got my What'sApp set to my French number so I could be included when all the Germans are making plans. (This did backfire later that night when they all text each other in german...)
One guy further down in the table invited us all to his house that night so me and this Ana girl decided we wanted to go and we got each other's numbers.
Then I went home and ate some dinner.
I got a text from Ana a while later asking about when I was going to the party. I was still eating dinner so I informed her of that fact. She said she was going to eat some dinner then too, and we would meet up afterwards.
We had some snafoos getting to the meeting place, but eventually we both ended up at the same place at the same time. From there we went to Idil's apartment in the CROUS village over by Capucins.
I thought a couple other people would be there, but it was just her and an Italian girl, but that was okay because they're fun to talk to.
A couple hours later, we walked to cross the river to go to the Anthropology party. The house/apartment/bohemian flat was pretty easy to find, and there were probably 15 people from the class, but no other international students. The people were really fun, but they were all smoking and that did not make my cough feel any better.
At one point, the host of the party decided we needed to try French vegetables. This comes after he told us about "Chicken Joe" which is some chicken from some movie about a penguin...? And then he brought us a tomato that was shaped like a chili pepper and had no seeds and informed us that is what a natural tomato looks like. As that of course makes no sense for a natural plant to have no seeds, Idil tried to dispute him, but I had mostly lost my voice so I just gave up. It was a very tasty tomato (though not natural). Then he brought us a "cucumber". It was not a cucumber. It was a zucchini. We tried to tell him, but he didn't believe us. We ate it anyways. I'd never eaten a raw zucchini before, but he wasn't giving us a whole lot of choice. At one point, he took it and put it in some kind of dressing with mayo and olive oil and vinegar and pepper and it was pretty okay. Really weird though. Then one girl decided that is was ridiculous to be eating all these vegetables so she cut up a peach so we could have that for "dessert". It was all rather odd.
I left then to walk home and I got in my bed immediately because I had to go to the second lecture for Biological Anthropology at 8h30.
No comments:
Post a Comment