life goes on..

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hmm ok...another blog entry. i hope i'm not sucking too much at updating this. i try to do one every few days, but oh well. i'm on my second weekend in lille, i went out last night with a bunch of the international students to celebrate the end of intensive french classes and that was really fun...and then today i went to le musee de beaux arts with my friend ivi. this weekend is le weekend de patrimoine, and admission into museums, churches, historic sites, etc. is free. all over france. it's so cool. things that are normally closed off to the public are opened and whatnot, so tomorrow i'm going to see la maison de charles de gaulle (because he was born in lille) and then to the zoo, and then to the opéra. i'm very excited. also, tomorrow is the wazemmes market. every tuesday, thursday, and sunday there is a great market in wazemmes. it's a great place to buy cheap things, and they have everything from fresh produce and baked goods to clothing and posters. i've never been, but i've heard it's amazing and i can't wait to check it out. so yeah, then off to first week of real classes on monday. i'm taking a whole lot of french litterature classes including very basic intro. stuff like medieval lit, then i'm taking francophone lit. and sex in litterature. other than that i'm taking the extensive french language classes, japanese, a translation class from french--->english and english------->french, and this cool course called tandem which is basically just like one on one conversation partner time with a french student who is studying english. you meet once a week with them for an hour and a half and half of the meeting is in english and the other half in french. i'm really looking forward to that one, should be fun. so i'll have all of that next week, but it only comes to 15 credits for the semester, even though it seems like a lot. hm, i finally get my stipend next week as well....now i can stop spending so much of my own money on things that i've already paid for, like rent and food. i'm starting to settle in more now, my room is slowly becoming more personalized, i bought a few tiny rugs for it, and my shelves actually have food on them so i can make most of my meals at home instead of spending money out and about on sandwiches that are 80% bread. i've gotten a lot of the official business things out of the way, just have le carte de sejour bull shit left i think. i got my student discount cards for riding le métro and for taking trains throughout france. so far so good. just a little homesick, mostly for people and mountains. i miss vermont. especially fall in vermont. i want to go apple picking and watch the trees change color on the mountains, i want to go down to the waterfront and look out across the lake and watch the sun go down. they should move lille to the coast. anyways, i'm so exhausted from last night that i'm going to stop this right here. miss you all!

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Photos

fountain
this is fountain right outside the musee de beaux arts

musee
this is the musee de beaux arts in lille. it has some monet in it, some renoit, and a piece by camille claudel and rodin.

friends!
this is mostly the group of ladies i hang out it, we're just missing a few.

porte de paris
this is the porte de paris that symbolizes lille's entry into the french nation. before that lille was a flemish city.

park
this is a park that used to be a parking lot, but then the environmentalists in lille made it a nice park. too bad it's so far from my residence.