l'Alliance Française

On Thursday, I finished my first week of classes at the Alliance Française de Paris. To save money and allow time and energy for other things, I'm taking the "extensive" class, which meets 3 times a week for 3 hours each time, rather than the "intensive" class, which meets for 4 hours every weekday. It turns out this coming Monday is a holiday for Easter, so I'll end up with 8 classes over the course of 3 weeks. I'm hoping to take a slightly more intensive class (also 3 hours a day, but 5 days per week) for a couple weeks while we are in Lyon.





As I'd hoped, the class is extremely international. There's Irina, the slim and stylish Russian woman who takes the seat closest to the teacher every day and sits silently though most of class with a completely placid expression on her face, her slight smile rarely growing larger but never disappearing. (She'd make a great poker player.) Next to her, there's Anne (German), who spent several summers in Detroit growing up and so speaks perfect American English. Irina and Anne are both married to native French speakers (one French, one Swiss) and have close to perfect French accents. The other students in the class include Mustafa (from Bulgaria), Thomas (from San Francisco; grew up in Dallas), Noriko (from Japan, but now living in France and married to a Chinese-French man), Patricia (from Spain), Emilia (from Argentina), and Ezgi (from Turkey). There's only one person whose name I still have not caught; I think she's also German.

Our teacher, Anatole, is extremely animated, amusing himself (and sometimes us) through the long hours of class by cracking jokes about "Super Sarko" (Sarkozy) and the French press. He talks fast and tends to go off on long tangents, and by the end of class, my brain is ready for a break.

Luckily, since our place is 7 metro stops away from the Alliance, getting home provides a built-in 30- to 60-minute mental break. I have yet to take the most direct route to get back; instead, I wander down some new street to check it out, sometimes letting myself get a little lost, knowing that I will inevitably hit upon a metro station and be able to make my way home from there on some combination of Paris's extensive choice of metro lines. A few times, I have walked all the way back to our place, taking meandering routes that were probably twice as long as the most direct possible route. Grocery stores inevitably present themselves, and I stop in briefly to pick up whatever we might need that day -- milk, bread, fruit. Many, many bakeries also present themselves along whatever route I take, and I try to resist looking too closely at their delectable offerings, although I don't always succeed, as you'll see in the last picture below.

Seen around town:

Rudy's shoe shop, not far from the Alliance Française :)



We've seen lots of chocolate bunnies here and there in these weeks leading up to Easter, but my favorite one so far is the one pictured on this poster for the 24th meeting of Parisian ukelele players and their friends. (Sadly, we did not pack our ukeleles.)



Our latest exciting bakery discovery -- chocolate flan!