Day 2: The Voice

It's Wednesday and I just got home. Class was much better today. I'm used to the pace and am really enjoying myself. It's really challenging, but in a good way.

Today was our first day of "laboratoire". We sit in desks with dividers between each other and wear headphones. Our professor sits in the front and asks us questions, which we hear through the headphones, and we answer and can only hear ourselves in the headphones. Everything he says is taped, so once we are finished, we can do it again ourselves (each desk has some kind of crazy tape-recorder device that is a little old-fashioned, but is also quite sophisticated at the same time), pausing and rewinding if we need to.

I MUST get a snippet of one of these tapes for this blog. Seriously, you have to hear this. Listening to his voice makes me blush. I'm not kidding, there were times when I became too flustered to do the exercise and would quit talking altogether - I was speechless. He's talking to all of us at the same time, but that french voice, coming through the headphones, sounds like he's whispering sweet nothings in my ear. I was so sad to hear that we will not have lab tomorrow. But we will have lab again, so I will enjoy looking forward to my next rendez-vous with that voice.

Tonight will be fun, some girls are coming over to my apartment for dinner. We'll only speak french. One girl is German and she doesn't speak English well, so she can't stand to switch over to English because it's too confusing right now. Another is going to a business school in Paris this September and even though she has been accepted, she still must pass a language test next month, so she too does not want to speak English at all. So that's good for me, because I'm lazy and would probably fall into English otherwise. I think, though, that all of us are able to speak only French and are looking forward to the challenge. Otherwise, I guess we wouldn't be here.