Musée d'Orsay, Laundry and "Gone with the Wind" (posted from the future).

Yesterday was my last day with Mom and A.B. We went to the Musée d’Orsay, which was huge and neat. We were there for about 4 hours (including eating lunch there) and we only saw like a floor and a half – we started with the impressionists, and that was my favorite part. But there were so many amazing paintings and statues everywhere, and the museum itself is pretty spectacular. It used to be a train station. We had a really nice time.

Then we walked around for awhile – we went over to the Louvre to see the glass pyramid, and we went to some little tourist shops, and eventually we took the metro over to Saint-Germaine-des-Près. We walked a bit and ended up in this quirky little café for dinner. The décor was all purple and orange, and they were playing all this old American music from disco to the Beach Boys. We had a nice meal and then said goodbye, and I went home to finish my homework and do laundry, which was an adventure in itself…

The washing machine turns out to be very loud, which I didn’t know, and I felt bad doing it at night. But my host mom didn’t seem to mind. When it came time to take the laundry out, I couldn’t get the door open until I realized you had to turn the dial over back to a certain place, and she came in and was like, “Qu’est-ce que vous faites?!?!” (“What are you doing?!”) Then she saw that I had figured it out and laughed and said not to worry (it was pretty late) because she’d had coffee that afternoon and was totally wired and couldn’t sleep anyway. Once I got the laundry out to hang on the line I also noticed that I’d left a tissue in the pocket of my jeans, so I had a great old time picking out little tissue bits from all my clothes. Oy.

Today we had class and then we met up at Fontaine Saint Michel for a treasure hunt in the Latin Quarter. Which would have been all well and good except that it rained ALL DAY. So we were wet and cold, carrying umbrellas and worksheets and walking in circles all over trying to find streets and plaques and buildings. It wasn’t much fun; all our papers got soaked and were falling apart. This morning was sunny and warm so I was dumb and didn’t bring my jacket – won’t make that mistake again.

Eventually, finally, we made our way to the Sorbonne and then met up with Mme Ayoun and had hot cocoa and eclairs at a café. Which was delicious, but I’m not positive it was worth it. I probably would have appreciated the neighborhood a lot more if the weather had been nice. Oh well, it’ll be a good story later.

Then I came home and changed into warm clothes and did a bunch of homework, and wrote some postcards. I’m not used to having to find time to do my homework; usually I have tons of time and just procrastinate, but here I really do have to make time to do it because we’re so busy every day. Yesterday most of my classmates just spent the day catching up on sleep.
After dinner tonight my host mom told me that “Gone With the Wind” was going to be on TV, and asked if I had seen it. I told her no, and she said it was one of her favorite movies. So we watched it together on TV – dubbed in French, of course. It was fantastic; I can’t think of a better way to have spent this evening!

I’m enjoying watching all these movies and TV shows in French; I think it’s really helping me. It’s also helping that I only speak French with my host mom. Now I just need to work on speaking more French with my classmates when we’re not in school!