Day 16: First day of real classes

Well, as you might have gathered from the title of this post, today was the first day of the real classes. My host family was shocked when I walked into the kitchen to get breakfast at 7:40 this morning, that is probably the earliest I have woken up since I have been here. I only had two classes today, but even that meant I was in class for 3 hours strait which surprisingly was not too bad. my first class was Theater in Paris, which seems like it will be really cool we read 4 plays and than go see all of them preformed which I am really excited about. I started reading the first play and it is really fascinating because it is a play about the European Union and how it is reshaping Europe from a french prospective, I feel like it is the first time that I have really gotten to see completely inside the french perspective. My second class is called Comic Strips and Society, and it is really different from any other class I have taken. It consists of analyzing comic strips (which are considered an intellectual art form in France) from both a literature perspective and an artistic perspective, I am super excited to get the book for that class and start reading. I got done at 12:15 so that was really nice, I had time to go buy my theater books and grab some lunch before I had a meeting at IES to check in about my homestay. When I got home I read the first play for a bit (it is called L'Europeenne) and than went to the kitchen to help my host mom prepare dinner, which was nice because even though I didn't help much we got the chance to talk more. This evening a friend and I tried to figure out how to get to Munich this weekend for Ocktoberfest and some sightseeing...quite frustrating until Nick (who I was complaining to on skype) found out where one can purchase a eurail pass in France, so we are going to go try to do that tomorrow. I have to say one thing that bugs me a lot about France is the lack of useful information they have avalible on the internet, apparently it is just a cultural thing for them, but I am definatly used to being able to find whatever I need on the internet. I found out that the postworkers are staring to strike tomorrow, which is kinda dissapointing because I put a bunch of postcards in the mail yesterday...oh well I guess they just will take forever to get to the USA. I feel like this is an important step to becoming more Parisian, experiencing a french strike! As my host mom said, it probably won't be my last.