first day of Sorbonne classes...

and i'm wiped. Seriously. Wiped. Like a bug on a windshield.

Monday, for those of you who haven't heard me crying about it yet, is my hell day:
09h00-10h30: grammaire
11h00-12h00: église et société XIe-XIIe CM
13h00-15h00: église et société XIe-XIIe TD
16h00-18h00: france dans la belle epoque TD

(French universities do things really differently than American ones. Besides the language thing, I mean. All of my classes have a Cours Magistral and Travaux Dirigés. The CM is an hour long lecture that meets once a week. The TD is kind of like a discussion section, except not at all. It's a smaller subgroup of the lecture students, but taught by professors (not teaching assistants), and it doesn't have to cover the same material as the lecture. Also, all of the graded work is handled by the TD professor; I don't think we do any work for the CMs at all.)

Technically, all my Paris IV classes are at the Sorbonne, right down the street from my apartment, but because there are so many students and so many courses there are two other campuses. My église TD is at one of the other campuses - not the offical other campus, but the satelite campus. The satelite satelite campus, if you will. ("Which makes me the Deputy Deputy Chief of Staff!" Bonus points if you know what this is from and who said it.) Anyway, I got totally lost trying to find the place; the point on the map I needed was between two pages in my guidebook, so I was pretty much on my own. I finally found the building and staggered into the classroom... only to find the TD for a XXe century history class. Awesome. Even awesomer: the reception desk's chart showed my TD as having occured from 10h30-12h00 this morning, which is impossible because that's when the CM was held. Being a tenacious young woman who loves learning, I tried to argue with the reception guy for about 20 minutes, but had to give up cause it's difficult to argue in another language when your opponent mumbles and talks really fast. No time to mourn, though; I had to hoof it back to the real Sorbonne for my Belle Epoque TD.

(The Belle Epoque TD prof is notoriously hard; out of 20, the average grade is a 7.5. The class covers from 1895 to 1914, and deals with culture, society, and history. I'm not sure what the workload is like, but everyone has to either do an exposé (an oral presentation) or a textual commentary. Exhibiting the same love of learning and desire to excel academically as I had only two hours earlier, I volunteered to do an exposé. Yikes.)

Tonight we have some kids coming over to watch Le Pen's debate. Yay for quasi-faschist politicians!

p.s. My French vocabulary is growing by leaps and bounds because of Ethan. For instance, I learned that "mon choux" means "my sweet" as well as "my cabbage." Who knew?