Bye bye St Michel, I hope I never see you again :-)

That is perhaps the most negative title I have written, and karma will probably come and hit me one day by making me live above Gilbert Jeune or something like that. 🙂

Today was my last day involving my Sorbonne class. Thankfully, my oral exam wasn’t that difficult. Since September, we had read 10 texts in class, of those ten we had to chose eight to possibly talk about during our exam. Then, come exam time, you randomly select one of those texts along with a question to answer. My text was part of Les Memoires d’un jeune fille rangée par Simone de Beauvoir. So, I had read part of the texte aloud, summarize the texte and then answer a simple question about the sentiments evoqued by the author. I presented this to my professor and another, who was really nice, so it ended up feeling more like a conversation than a test. So, to any future students of the Sorbonne french as a second language classes, don’t worry, all the people at the Sorbonne are incredibly nice because they’re use to silly foreigners and all our mistakes. Even during exam time my professor was there for me, I mean yes she did have to grade my performance but she didn’t do it in a judging way if you get what I mean. So, Sorbonne exams finished, and now I can worry about other things!

Throughout this semester, my least favorite part of the day was taking the metro from my stage to my class, therefore having to pass through the chatelet metro station, take the line 4, and walk through St. Michel. Ask anybody in Paris and they will tell you that those are three of the busiest places around. After getting fed up with the grimy metro and fake deaf and mute kids bugging me everyday at St. Michel (no lie, they walk away singing anytime somebody actually signs their fake form), I started taking the bus to class. Note for future GPPers, Line 87 and 86 go straight from Bastille to Rue des Ecoles aka right next to St. Michel. For some bizarre reason it took me three months to figure that out, so today as I was leaving my test I realized that for the first time I went to and left class by bus without even seeing St. Michel. Silly me taking three months to figure it out, but at least I did eventually.

Fun fact from my stage: cotton is a horrible material for canvases, it moves and reacts to humidity and all sorts of bad stuff. Meanwhile, polyester is the perfect canvas and reacts to practically nothing except heat and accidents. Oh, the magic of science.