Learning French is Easy when the City is Beautiful!

Well it's safe to say that I'm over whatever jet lag may have affected me. It only took 10 hours of sleep last night and a little nap this afternoon to cure it!

My classes at Alliance Francais began today.  After a professeur initially placed me in the wrong classroom, I finally found the correct classroom avec mademoiselle Delphine.  Tres francois!  There are mostly Americans in my classroom, a group of 7 or 8 from the Georgia Southern University, a girl from Seoul, and a girl from Italy.  The girl from Italy is the only one who doesn't speak english, but our professeur keeps everything in French anyway.   So far the class is a refresher course, but at an accelerated speed.  I'm sure in a week or two I'll be learning things I never fully learned before, which is nice.

After class I walked to a beautiful bookstore, Mollat, in downtown Bordeaux to buy the textbooks for the class.  And from there I wandered for 2 hours, just taking in the atmosphere.  Bordeaux truly is a beautiful, old city.  The architecture is incredible; there's nothing quite like it in America.  As you walk along the streets, there may be modern stores on the first floor, but there is a strong sense of antiquity from the city and its old, weathered stone buildings, its monumentous churches you can see from immense distances, or even the cobblestone roads all around the city.   I sat in front of the Saint-André Cathedral (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bordeaux_Cathedral) this afternoon as I ate my lunch.  Tres jolie!  Tomorrow I have a class in the afternoon, so will not have much time for dejeuner (lunch).  But perhaps that is where I will go for church this Sunday!

After all that walking, I needed a nap.  So I came back to the house of my host family.  The house is four stories tall and has a small front yard with a wall about 12' tall protecting it.  My room is on the top floor, and I can see so much of Bordeaux from my windows!  So far, we have eaten all of our dinners outside.  And dinner consists of 5 courses, regularly.  Soup, salad, main course, bread and cheese, and dessert.  Je serai tres gros (I'm going to get fat)!! 

Nothing else new to report today.  My host family does not have internet, so I piggyback on some other internet which causes my skype to be quite poor.  But it does work, so if anyone is ever on, feel free to skype me @kjfortier.

I hope all is well stateside.