this is a bronx bound 6 train. and other metro differences.

unlike that lovely city of new york, the metros here are not air conditioned. the cards for the metro are made of paper. you have to pull a lever to open the doors. there's no automatic voice on my "4" train. but the stop is closer to me than the one in ny. so beat that. other differences: the subway maps are way easier to read. i also take the metro a lot less here because i've been walking like it's my one and only job (which it isn't).

yesterday we walked around the latin quarter for a while, so i got to see the area. apparently rue mouffetard (which i remember danny used to like) has now become touristized, so i asked our master-degree american tour guide of the day where we should go. she told me of an area called oberkampf which has a lot of "bobo"s. wanna know what that word means? it's everything miriam wants to be (read: the bourgeois bohemians). so i must go make friends with them.

i also learned about the extra curricular activities that are open to me. one is writing for this paper here, where you'd get to do cool things like interview parisians and write about it (in english). i may do that. i'm also looking into tutoring french kids.

last night, after some trying to fix my bed adventures, meeting our very nice 30 year old neighbor dorothy, and discovering that our dryer is actually only a washer, and to dry our clothes a clothes stand comes down from the toilet's ceiling, erica and i popped open some wine, chilled, then went back to the latin quarter to hang out with some folks. most of whom decided to go dancing, so we (erica, carrie, whitney) stayed around and went to some bar called the latin corner. it looked kinda clubby from the outside bc of loud music/smoke machines, and when we went in we discovered all the waiters/bartenders were in jeans with thongs sticking out, and there were thongs and bras (supposedly gotten off customers) hung all over the ceilings and lights. you could also pay a waiter to give another person a lap dance. it was rather hilarious.

so i'm starting to look into classes, bc next week is our "shopping period" and we have to preregister tomorrow. i took a placement exam on tuesday to see if i should take classes at a french university--it was a literature passage with questions. i placed relatively high so they said i can take a class. i would take it at paris VII, aka jussieu to everyone over here, which apparently is better with lit stuff than the sorbonne. im going to find out if i can take whatever class i decide pass/fail so that i wont have to worry as much about it messing with my grades.
besides that, the reid hall classes i'm looking into are a french cinema class, a contemporary french thought class (derrida and all that crap), a french history class or state+political life in france class, a grammar class, and then if i dont take a class in jussieu, i'll take a parisian walks class.

also, there's the possibility that i'll do a directed research/independent study which probably would be great. there was another class at jussieu i wanted to take but it won't fit into my schedule, so i'm thinking of proposing something like it and doing it one on one. the class was a shakespeare class where they read king lear and macbeth (translated into french! how intteresting!) and then compare it to ionesco's macbett and edward bond's lear. i think that sounds really interesting and if i like it enough, i could probably do my senior thesis on something like that. i'd have to write a 20-25 page final paper, and depending on whether i want the french credit for it, i have the option of writing it in english or french.

tonight we go to dinner in small groups with french people, which should be fun.