with the roar of cars/and the lulling of the cafe bars/the sweetly sleeping sweeping of the Seine

Yesterday was my first class with Sweet Briar. It was Atelier d'Ecriture, which is a writing class focusing on improving grammar and vocabulary, and getting rid of the anglaisismes (Englishisms) in our french. The professor had us translate some English sentences into French, and most of us tried to translate word for word, which led to incorrect translations.
I feel like I'm going to learn a lot in this class.

Tomorrow starts my Art History class, which I'm pretty excited about. We have a lecture class, and then in the evening we go to the Louvre (after closing hours!) for weekly "visites". And since we get a card to get into the Louvre free as art history students, we can get to a lot of other art museums free. Saturday I went to the Musée Rodin with a couple people and we got in free for being art history students. It's a pretty sweet deal.

ALSO on Saturday we discovered a spaghetti bar where you get free pizza with any drink you buy during happy hour. Since most of us don't get dinner with our families on Saturday night (we get 7 breakfasts and 6 dinners a week with the program), we decided to go there for dinner. Three euros for a glass of wine and then enough "free" pizza to fill us up. I love finding cheap ways to eat.

Today I went to Musée Marmottan Monet with some people. It was a really nice museum, and just the right size (not exhaustingly huge like the Louvre). After that three of us checked out Shakespeare and Company, which is the famous English bookstore and ex-pat hangout near Notre Dame. It was really neat, and luckily we are all people who can easily spend a lot of time in bookstores, so nobody got impatient for the others to finish looking. :)

Thinking with the Thinker at Musée Rodin: