I am typing this post quickly and I am typing it on a French keyboard, which I have kind of gotten the hang of, but not entirely, so I'm putting this typo disclaimer at the beginning of my post...
Forst of all, France has a new President, or they will as soon as he is sworn in; François Hollande is now le Président de la République. It was great to be able to witness another countries democratic process, and if I had the time I would go into details- suffice to say that there are aspects of the French political system which I really like, and there are also aspects of the American system which I perfer. In anycase, I was really lucky to be here on an election year!
I also am now able to announce that I really like opéra! I had a field trip yesterday with my school itlanian class to the Paris Opera, the Opéra de la Bastille, which is about the epitome of opera culture (second only to the Russian Bolshoi in size, we were told on our tour). I had never known anything about opera besides the stereotypes which can be seen in Bugs Bunny cartoons... but after watching Cavalleria Rusticana (a story of love, revenge and murder in rural Sicily lasting one hour) and Pagliacci (again a story of love, jealousy and passion, but this time within a travalling italian circus- possibly an inspiration for the novel Water for Elephants?- lasting an hour and half); I have been converted as a fan of opéra. Of course, you don't get to go see the opéra in Paris everyday either, so big props to my school's library and Italian teacher who organised the trip and managed to get us tickets to the shows and places to take the tour of the operahouse.
This weekend I have the second-to-last Roatry weekend, which will be a lot of fun, but include some of our first good-byes as exchange students (besides the southern hemisphere kids we farwellled in December). So as I head towards the end this are just getting better and yet going faster as the time goes by!
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