AAA: no shame

Hi everyone,

So there's something I'd like to confess. I feel like I should have done this a while ago, but sometimes there's no 'right' time to do it, y'know? But admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery, or so they say. So even though it might not be to everyone, at least I'm getting it out. Here goes.

I have

an apple addiction.

Yes, yes, I should have seen this coming, what with the apple being France's national fruit or whatever. Like many others before me, I thought myself resistant to this innocent-seeming fruit, but I underestimated it's subversiveness. Let us not forget what the original Forbidden Fruit was...

My daily sporadic cravings have gotten better since the worst; now I am down to 3 a day from last week's 4 (with peanut butter..). If I can get down to 1 and maybe a glass of the juice, I will consider myself accomplished.

But for now, I appreciate all of those that follow and encourage me in this time of struggle.

Just remember, an apple a day may keep the doctor away, but more than that and you tempt the devil...

Yeah...it's been one of THOSE days ;)p

Love y'all,

Rachael

Disappoint?

Wednesday, I started my third class, written French without having too much trouble finding the classroom. Y'know, which is always good. I'd had a pretty awesome day beforehand, despite having woken up a little later than planned for our last trip to the new apartment before moving in. I caught the right RER B train just in time, made my connection with almost no waiting, and was able to meet Alejandro and walk to the apartment a couple minutes early. Once we'd settled business less than 10 minutes later, we made the relatively short trip up to my school's quartier and wandered around looking at leather bags and glasses before getting hungry.

But here's the best part. We ended up coming up from the metro from the wrong exit, making us walk a couple blocks to where we wanted to go, but on the way we caught site of a place that said it was a Mexican restaurant. We were a bit skeptical, but decided to check it out anyways. (I like to think that it was in this moment that the nostalgic culinary gods took pride in my faith of good Mexican food. )The place was authenticly Mexican-looking (none of that Tex-Mex feel!) though not overly done and with good taste. The music playing, while I couldn't exactly name the singer, it was definitely one of the CD's Mom listens to a lot at home. We ordered from the lunch menu, which gave us a pretty good deal: entree and main dish for 13 euros. Alejandro and I decided to each order something different so we could try a little of everything. Me: sopa de tortillas for the entree and 3 tacos (1 chorizo, 1 carne asada, 1 of carnitas) plus rice and beans. For entree, Alejandro got a tostado de tinga, and for the dish, burrito de piccadillo. When we got our plates, we were a tiny bit disappointed to see that the portions were significantly smaller than what we'd received back home, but then again--this is France. Huge portions are kind of a no-no here. But while the taste wasn't exactly like what we were used to from home, it was close. Maybe as close to it as we were gonna get. Or maybe not?

Well, we went back last night to try the dinner menu. As we'd enjoyed our lunch there fairly well, we were once again pretty excited. Unfortunately, after looking over the menu, we saw that they didn't have much else in addition to what we'd already had for lunch a couple days before. And it was expensive. Each main dish was at least 17 euros, and each entree was at least 8. After thinking of a way to get the best deal we decided to each get our own main dish and split an entree. Three quesadillas for the entree and carne asada plus a chicken taquito with mole poblano. As for myself, I ordered the dish of chicken mole poblano. The entree, while not bad, was a bit of a disappointment, mainly for the price. First, they were more empanadas than actual quesadillas, and they were small. Didn't think they were worth the 8 euros..At this point, I was beginning to get a little skeptical on how my mole poblano would taste. After all, mole is the specialty of Papa's hometown, and I've had some of the best. So when I got my plate and found that the mole tasted almost exactly as I remembered it, I was pleasantly surprised and pleased. And there were corn tortillas, which again, while not exactly the same, were close, so definitely used those to clean my plate. Alejandro however, didn't like the mole (sad for him) but then I just ended up getting his taquito. We got our bill, and cringed a bit. A total of 47 euros. I felt a little bad as ok, yeah it wasn't horrible for me, but it wasn't worth that much, especially when one of us hadn't enjoyed it. In the end, We skipped dessert there and went to the McDonald's a couple blocks away. I got a brownie ice cream thing (really good) and Alejandro ended up getting like an entire meal. All in all, I think we've decided not to go back for the time being and instead have kind of made it our mission to scope out other good Mexican and/or Cuban restaurants that aren't overpriced. But hey, at least if we get desperate again, we know this one is there.

This is a pretty good place to be

Last night I needed to write down that I'd finally found a new place to move to. But yesterday was also my first day of second semester, and I didn't really go that much into how that went, so I'm going to take the time to do that now.

You see, it's funny how things happen. Last month, I would've told you that despite being here for about 6 months already, I unfortunately wasn't close to being fluent like many people (including me) thought I would become. Now before you jump ahead, I'm going to say that I am still very far from being considered fluent, but I'm closer. Definite, solidly, closer. Over this past break, I'd started to realize that not only was I now being to understand everything that was being said on the streets, but I was finally being able to comprehend almost all of what my French friends spoke about, which--let me tell you--has always been much more difficult than understanding my teacher who used proper French and pronounced it well.

That isn't even the best part though. I went to class yesterday a tiny bit nervous because, despite my intentions, I hadn't really reviewed on my break. After the surprise at finding out that my teacher is actually a woman, (ok, yes, I should have noticed that the first name ended in -nne, indicating a girl's name, but would you imagine a lady with a name like Fabienne?) my nerves were eased when I remembered that first days almost never start out with actual work. My hunch was confirmed when my teacher announced that we would start off by participating in a type of speed dating-like activity to get to know each other a bit.

Here is what I learned in the first 10 min:

-Unlike my last general French class, at least half the students are American,

-Where my last class had people from 18-60 years old, here, the only people older than 21 were 23, 26, and 32.

-No priests/nuns-in-training, (not that that was a terrible thing or anything, but now it feels more like a real class),

-There were only a couple of us from last semester, everyone else was fresh from their respective country,

-Therefore, said fresh people's speaking and comprehension abilities were sub-par to say the least, which,

-MADE ME FEEL LIKE A FREAKIN' PRO.

Ok, so I felt a little sorry for them as they stumbled and struggled, often asking me to kindly répéter s'il te plaît, as I spouted out my French confidently and with ease. Of course, I remember being in their spot when I first arrived. But I'd be lying if I said that it didn't make me feel just a little bit (read:really) good.

Yeah, I saw many faces like this one yesterday..the poor things.

It made me glad that despite the fact that I haven't been home or seen my family and friends for the longest stretch of my life, it's worth it if I'd finally started to be comfortable with the language. At least with non-natives.

But if you know me, I'm not exactly the type of person to truly take pleasure over someone else's discomfort, so in return, I've decided that I'm going to give my new fellow classmates the best advice I can think of: swallow your pride, but be confident. That they shouldn't be afraid or hesitate to practice their speaking as much as possible, even if they know that they're making mistakes. Because once you become comfortable wrapping your mouth around French words and hearing a foreign language come out of your mouth, you stop focusing on how much of an idiot you sound and start focusing on applying what you learn in class into your day-to-day life.

Well, there's still more I want to write, but I think I'll stop here for now. Tomorrow Alejandro and I head back to our new apartment to give our landlord the rest of what we owe her in rent and to collect the second key. Getting even more and more excited! :)

Much love!

Rachael

Second semester: start.

A bit to recap:

After a little over two weeks of vacation, started one of my new classes today. And for those of you wondering what exactly I did during this vacation, I'm afraid I'll have to disappoint you by saying that aside from babysitting, all I basically did was stay inside and cower from the cold. However, in my last post I mentioned that I wanted to make my vacation productive, and that I still managed to kind of do. Ok, I didn't review as much as I would have liked *coughmeaningmorethantwonightscoughcough* but apparently that wasn't as detrimental as I thought it would be..more on that later in a later post.

For the past couple of weeks, Alejandro and I had been e-mailing and e-mailing countless people renting out apartments. It got to the point where we realized we weren't going to be able to snag a two-bedroom, but Alejandro volunteered to take the living room in the case of a 1-bedroom. Really, très gentil. After who knows how long (ok, a couple weeks) of scouring Craigslist, Fusac, and a few agency sites (a last resort) Alejandro came across an ad for a place on some website I'd never heard of but that had been recommended by a French friend. He e-mailed the renter and before we knew it, we had an appointment to go visit the place. At this point, I'd expected to only find a place that fit within our budget outside of city limits, but while this place is closer to the suburbs, it's only a few stops away from where I live right now.

Well off we went one morning, finding the place easily thanks to Google Maps and Streetview (seriously though, how did people live before the internet???) We called the renter to let them know we were just a few minutes away and were surprised to find it was actually a woman. Up until then we'd communicated by e-mail only..it was funny that we hadn't considered this possibility because she hadn't given her first name and had never indicated her gender.
Anyways, we got to the place, which is a 2 minute walk from the nearest metro, and only had to climb (thank god!) 3 flights of stairs to the top floor where the apartment was situated. I'm going to try and keep this from getting terribly long, so in short, we liked the lady, liked the apartment and discussed possible move in dates if we were chosen to rent it (there were other candidates for such a good place, of course). Then a few days later, the renter (herein known as Laurene) e-mailed us and let us know that if we were still interested, she was offering the place to us. I couldn't believe our luck. Shortly after that we pooled together our monetary resources (following a scare concerning my funds..or lack thereof) met her again, paid half, signed the contract, and got a key (second one is being made).
So.
YAY WE FOUND OUR PLACE!!


AND IT EVEN HAS A WASHER...DOUBLE YAY IS IN ORDER, NO?
I think so.

Anywho. The place is great but again, will refrain from going too much into detail tonight. We move in March 1st, which is a school day for me, but I'll just work around that somehow. But in the mean time, it's time to get back to reality, do my homework that I've already been assigned and get to bed. I do believe I have 6 hours of class tomorrow...better than 7, but still not cool :(

Tootles,
Rachael

Oh snap a cold snap

Greetings to everyone :)
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Just checking in, I assure you, despite the freezing temperatures that Paris has recently gotten, I'm still alive (though barely leaving my apartment...or my heater for that matter).
It's a chilly--if sunny--27 degrees F right now. There hasn't been enough precipitation for snow yet, but that's expected to change sometime in the next few days. It's been over a year since I've seen snow in Paris, so it should be nice. And as I don't have to drive, and the metro is underground, even better!
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I'm a few days into my break now, and I've got until the 20th of this month to laze around. I'm kidding, actually I want to make this as productive as possible, especially since I ended my semester strong. (I did pretty good on my French finals:) ) Last night, I made myself go over some of the review packet I'd made a few weeks prior. Because what's the use of acing finals if the slate is wiped clean a few weeks later?
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I mentioned that I was planning on moving, and now the date is set. I have to be out of here by the end of this month, though unfortunately I have yet to strike lucky in finding a place. The good news though: I've now got a future roommmate. His name is Alejandro and he's also part of the ISA program, but was attending the business school. He'd been wanting to switch to independent living for a while now, so when I decided to move, it was perfect. I have to admit, that at the beginning of the year I was really happy I'd gotten my own place, but over the course of the last couple months reality kind of sunk in and I realized that having one's own place is more expensive than sharing, especially in Paris. But as I know Alejandro well enough and I'm not getting placed with some random person, the economical factor is definitely worth it.
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However, finding an available and decent 2-bedroom apartment hasn't been easy. I must've e-mailed about 20 different owners already, but all of them have replied that the place had been rented. We kind of have a suspicion that maybe it's because we mentioned we're foreigners in our e-mail...;/ Regardless, we both need a place by the end of this month, and so will probably have to actually call some of the people and hope for a more favorable response. (And hope that our French is good enough and/or that the person doesn't speak too fast..)
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Well, maybe I should go out and do something, despite the chill. I can at least take advantage of the couple hours of daylight, right? The bookstore and then maybe a cafe sounds like a nice idea..;)
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Love you all,
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Rachael