Exams... Not Fun in Any Language

Yes my friends, it is once again that time of year when the minds of young, strappin' individuals are striped of their ability to process properly by being crammed full of a plethora of facts known as "what you learned this semester". But what's that? It's a BONUS ROUND! So we get to take them in French! So far I'm still alive.

Booths in the Place
de la Cathedrale

The way that it works here, at the international area of the university, is that we have one week (this week) where we take the exams for the "option" classes that we chose outside of the French language class schedule and next week we have the language tests. This allows us to rest in a continuous state of semi-stressed existence until we explode, or more commonly, stop trying to predict the French way of running things.
Today was quite fun because after classes and ICRP meetings were out of the way, almost all the people on my program went to a pub/microbrewery called Au Brasseur and hung out for a couple hours. It's fun to go into these types of places as a group of 18 or so and try to figure out how to have tables situated as close to each other as possible. We are always arranged in different groups too, so the conversations never get old.

Place Kleber

On the way home from Au Brasseur I stopped at the university's international program Christmas party and watched some of my classmates sing, dance and put on skits. It was fun to see everyone out side of the class atmosphere, we're all such great, fun-loving people when we don't have to use one specific tense or grammatical form to communicate with each other. A group of the professors even did a number! They sang out of key wearing colorful wigs and boas. It was fantastically fun (and might be even more so when brought up in class tomorrow...).
Chris had come with me to the Christmas party but he left a little earlier to get home and have some dinner (our host mom was out of the house this evening). It was lucky that he headed back because when he walked in, the kitchen was full of smoke because our host mom had forgotten that she had left one of the burners on after leaving.

A Christmas booth display

Nothing bad happened (other than the sausage not being quite as edible any more) so we called it a success. The other course for dinner was sauerkraut with bits of ham and some kind of dumpling-like stuff. Anyway, it's Alsatian (I've found that practically anything in France that has German origins is "Alsatian") and really good. I first had some of it at my favorite marché de Noël in Place Broglie for lunch between classes this week. I plan on eating much more at the marchés in the future. À plus!