It's snowing today!

My dinner party was last Friday and it was really fun! 13 or 14 people came so I finally got to introduce all my friends to each other, and we ate baguettes and cheese and drank wine, then had eggplant/roasted pepper/goat cheese salad, delicious French onion soup and madeleines with strawberries and whipped cream. Almost everyone brought a baguette or two, and at one point we had eaten a ton already and we still had 8 left! Cooking is so much fun here and I made a TON of food but we still almost ran out. Everyone had a good time, and one of my "host sisters" came home and joined us after a while. Once it was over, we wandered along the Seine and sat under the Eiffel tower for a while, then went home. The family I live with is fantastic. They're so friendly and accommodating and they always take the time to make sure I can understand what they're saying, teach me slang words, etc. After the dinner party, I was washing dishes and I broke 2 wine glasses. I felt terrible that she let me have one party and her things got broken, and I wrote a note apologizing profusely and saying I'd of course buy replacement glasses, but the woman I'm living with just kept saying "wine glasses break themselves" and wouldn't let me pay to replace them. She's so fantastic!

It's a really beautiful walk from the metro station to class since Sciences Po is in a really nice neighborhood. I love walking past really fancy boutiques and art galleries on the way to class and seeing them change their window displays every few days. Fun fact: Christian Dior went to Sciences Po! (So did Nicolas Sarkozy, Jacques Chirac, François Mitterand...) I'm really lucky I got the chance to come here. My classes are fascinating (all in French: 2 law, 2 history, 1 French language class) and they're mostly about things I've studied a little bit before, but French law and the French perspective on history are really different from what I've studied. I expect I'll learn more about French culture by seeing how these subjects are taught than about the subjects themselves, which is fine with me. French people have trouble with Hs and "ei"s, so on the first day of each class, I was the weird foreign girl with the funny name. French people usually say "eye-dee" if we're lucky or "ee-dee" or even "eddie". One professor asked me my name, looked on the attendance sheet for a while, then said she was having trouble finding it "because of my accent".

The headquarters of Radio France is right outside my window, and I finally started listening to their stations. They have a pop music station, a classical music station, a news station, a "culture" station that's kind of like NPR, and a couple more but I'm not sure what they are. You can listen to all of them online, probably anywhere in the world. Here's a picture of the view out of my window:



Young people like to hang out and drink wine under bridges along the Seine. It's really beautiful and when tour boats go by, you get to wave and pretend you're French. Host mom and host sister #2 taught me the word "potes" the other day, which is a French slang word that means your group of friends, and I've been using it a lot since then. On Sunday, I went to my friend's apartment to eat pancakes with some of my potes, and I have to mention that her apartment building has a really funny elevator. Most elevators here are tiny. Like really tiny. At her apartment, there's a 3 person limit and in order to fit 3 people you would need to be squished together and standing a certain way, touching all the sides of the elevator. After we had pancakes, we headed to the Centre Pompidou (the modern art museum) but we kind of got lost so naturally, we took a break and stopped in a cafe. French coffee is what Americans call espresso, which I love! If you order coffee from a cafe, they'll bring you a tiny cup with a shot of espresso and a cute little sugar packet or sugar cubes. Most of the Americans miss drinking huge cups of weak coffee, but I love espresso so it's fine with me! I'm definitely buying an espresso machine when I get home. Then we finally got to the museum. I'd been there before, but it was fun and they had an interesting exhibition on women artists and feminist art. Later, some of my potes went to a Canadian sportsbar to watch the super bowl, and I wanted to go but it started at midnight and I had class early yesterday morning.

A bientôt!