presque la moitie

I really can't believe that I've been here 6 weeks. That boggles my mind. I can't imagine being anywhere but here, and yet in December I'll be leaving. So weird.

Classes this week were excellent, as usual. We watched Jacques Tati's Mon Oncle for my cinema class, which was hilarious and which I could actually follow because there was hardly any dialogue. Awesome. Mon Oncle won the Oscar for best foreign film in like 1958, and the interesting thing about it is that when it was subtitled with English, they didn't even bother to put subtitles for a lot of the dialogue, because it just really didn't matter. And it still won the Oscar. I love it.

In Theatre class, we first wateched the movie version of Cyrano de Bergerac, which was so good. Gerard Depardieu is incredible. The quality of the video was pretty bad, but it in no way took away from the film itself. After, Jean-Claude gave us the script for our final performance, and it looks really cool. There are scenes from: Antigone (Anouilh), Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (Moliere), Cyrano (Rostand), La Cantatrice Chauve (Ionesco), and Fin de Partie (Beckett). I REALLY want to be Antigone. It's the scene where she's talking to a guard about how she's about to die, and I WANT IT. I'm just afraid that someone else will want it too. Jean-Claude already has ideas of who he thinks should be what, but he's a) not telling us until Tuesday, and b) going to let us have input in the casting also. Eep.

Also, in my rock dance class, I solidified my friendship with a 16-year-old French girl named MaryLou (I know, right?? What the crap kind of French name is MaryLou?? Like, come on) and also may have been hit on by multiple creepy French guys. Their creepitude was somewhat lessened by the fact that they can actually dance so that's pretty cool.

Sidenote: I'm really pleased by the fact that Firefox/Blogger/whoever it is did not mark "creepitude" as spelled wrong. That seriously makes my day.

Anyway. When I got around to the instructor in the dance circle (did I explain this already? The guys stay stationary in a big circle around the room and the girls--"cavalieres"--turn so that every girl dances with every guy), he had me do a turn that we hadn't learned yet, and after I did it, he said, "impeccable! Impeccable!" It made me feel very, very good. And yeah, I'm kind of in love with him. He's approximately my height (maybe even a little shorter...), bald, is probably late 20s, has a slightly emo fashion sense, is an incredible dancer, and is SO SWEET. I can't even handle it. This week was kind of funny because there was another girl that was helping him out, and usually Virginia lets Cyril (the instructor, AKA mon amour) talk and only interjects a little bit to say something specific about what the girls have to do, but this girl was very commanding and kept cutting him off and stealing his thunder and I was personally getting pretty annoyed. MaryLou and I were laughing about the major drama that was going on, so it was good in that we bonded more. But yes. A sucessful class.

Wednesday, I went to see the new Matt Damon movie, The Informant, with my language partner, Claire. There's one cinema here where they show movies in the original version with subtitles in French, which is super awesome for us. The movie was really cool. Matt Damon is an incredible actor, and the story was surprising and interesting but not unbelievable. One of the tristesses de ma vie right now is that the movie Fame is coming to a cinema in Aix but not to the one that shows the original versions. Like, come on. How is that even possible?? I want to live forever, dammit!

Anyway. I hung out with Dave Gorleku from Williams and his friends from the Wellesley program a bunch this week, which was a total blast. It's very different for them, because they're all living in apartments or houses with just other students, as opposed to homestays. It's just a different experience from the one that everyone in my program is having. Neither is necessarily better, it's just interesting.

Okay. Time to get going on studying for Midterms. Yeah. I have like almost-real work. Not okay.
A bientot!