first week of classes

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so i started real classes this week, not just the intensive french classes i was taking last week. i still have intensive french, but now it's only once a week. as for my other classes i'm taking translation, and that's split into once class for french to english and one class for english to french. english to french is hard, i had it today. but in the end i'm only supposed to be tested on my translations from french to english, much easier.
i'm taking a whooole lot of french literature: francophone lit., sexe et litterature, medieval lit., contemporary et moderne lit, another french lit.
i had francophone lit today, it seems to be alright, there are other exchange students in it as well so we can kind of support each other and ask questions together, so it's good.
i'm also taking japanese, which i have for the first time tomorrow. i'm very excited about that. and i have no classes on fridays! also awesome.
two of my professors this week were absent already, and seeing as my classes only meet once a week, i found it pretty amusing.
i'm also taking this course called tandem and it's just like having a conversation partner. half the conversation in english and the other half in french. c'est parfait!

let's see.....what else. i'm meeting lots of awesome people. hung out with a bunch of cheques last night. my best friend here (ivi) is from prague so we went to her friends apartment and hung out. it was a lot of fun. i also met a girl from korea, and from japan. the girl from japan (miki) wants to improve her english and i want to improve my japanese so i think we're going to hang out and do our own little tandem thing.

hmmm...ivi and i have started an exercise routine. there is this tiny work-out room in our residence with the crappiest machines and everything, but they have a decent exercise bike and a functional elliptical, so we do 30 minutes of cardio 6x a week. so far so good!

i'm so excited for the weekend, a lot of my friends are going to paris on saturday with this school organization but i decided i was going to wait and go with a friend so that we can stay a night or two. so i'm hanging out with the cheques again on friday and going shopping on sat. with ivi, and probably going to wazemmes (the open air market) on sunday. but i have homework to do.....so depressing......so i'm going to end this entry here and go translate some french texts into english and some english texts in to french.

à bientôt!!

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Photos

building
ivi and i walked around last weekend and took pictures of pretty buildings

building
another pretty building

building
a nice building near la maison de charles de gaulle

for you mom
i saw this mini on the street and immediately had to take a picture.

a tree!!
this is the only tree i've seen on the side of the road in lille so far. i hope i will see more.