Les cours commencent!

Classes started today, and luckily, I got to ease into it with a late start (noon!).  My first class was Francophone Literature, so, naturally, we'll be focusing a lot on the effect of French colonization on the literature of those areas.  I think it will be a very interesting class.  The professor is a little hard to understand, being that he speaks very softly and has an accent that is a little different than what I'm used to, but he seems really nice.  And we've already gotten the "I'm a visiting American student" formality out of the way, because, when my name was not called in roll, I said that that was because I am a visiting student and do not have my student I.D. card yet.  He asked where I was visiting from, and when I said Georgetown, he let out a pleasant, "Oh!." After class, a group of four girls came up to me and said that they go to Holy Cross, so we were all talking for a couple of minutes, and then they asked if I wanted to go to lunch.  We went to a student restaurant where everything is basically dirt-cheap, and I really enjoyed talking to them.  And it turns out that we're in the same History of Alsace class that meets tomorrow, so it will be nice to already know some people in the class.

My second class was in the Palais Universitaire, which is an absolutely gorgeous building.  That class is the Travaux Dirigés section (sort of like a discussion section) of my History and Anthropology of Religion class.  Our classroom is actually a part of the History of Religion library, so there are books lining the wall, and a small spiral staircase up to another floor of books.  At first, I was really intimidated by the class; the professor started reading through a list of texts, works by the likes of Max Weber and Sigmund Freud among them, and I was thinking, 'I don't even like reading Freud in English.'  I was literally wishing I could walk out of the class.  But then I realized that those were merely suggestions for topics for our 4-5 page paper that we have to write, due at the end of November.  The actual books we're reading are more general, history of religion-type books.  

So we can either choose one of those works to write about, or he also gave some more general themes.  One of them was, "expressing religion in sports." Bingo.  I could write a whole book just on the Red Sox (who will hopefully be clinching the wild card tonight, by the way!), so when I saw that topic, that's when I knew I wanted to stay in the class!  I have 4 classes tomorrow (or, rather, two sections of two classes), so I'll see how those go, but all in all, it was a good first day!