les drapeaux en fleurs.

i spent sunday afternoon wandering through town. it happened to be a few rare hours when the sun was out. i walked from my house on the west side of town to the east side to place stanislas, parc pepinière, and la vielle ville. place stanislas is a large square with several fountains and statues, very fancy. la vielle ville {old town} is the oldest part of the city with small, winding cobblestone streets, a basilica, tall stone walls, and some tunnels. there was un marchée au puces {flea market} on one street, and of course because it was sunday and sunny, lots of people were out walking. the town feels rather empty during the day during the week. only on saturday and sunday afternoons do places get busy. once kids hit the equivalent of middle school, they attend school on saturday mornings. so the only real day off is sunday. i also walked through parc pepinière. this is a huge park north east of place stanislas, and of course, it's beautiful and immaculately tended. as i was walking, i noticed these small groupings of different colors of flowers. at first, i couldn't tell what they were but as i got closer i realized they were representing about a dozen european countries' flags. i guess they ran out of normal flower beds.
today i started classes at the university, but they aren't real classes, kind of. the normal university classes don't start until october, but for a couple of weeks before, the department FLE {français pour les langues étrangères---french for foreign languages} holds intensive french review courses for students arriving in nancy from other countries to study at the university. they are interesting because there are students from all over the world, south korea, japan, belgium, germany, poland, italy, and us dumb americans. i feel like an idiot as i bumble along in french while these german girls speak perfect french and it's their fourth language or something. but it was comforting for our professor to say that it's good to make mistakes because if you're perfect you have no reason to be in class. so i make mistakes and get corrected, especially by my host brothers and sisters. after 4 hours of these reveiw classes, we had our literature class which is just the LC students. this professor was very nice and she was kind enough to show us around the university campus and take us to a little cafe for a cup of coffee. the day was not that difficult, it is just long and extremely tiring to strain to listen, comprehend, respond, be corrected, and think in a foreign language. but that's why i'm here and i've already noticed that i can understand better than when i arrived.

alors, les drapeaux:




p.s. my apologies if this post makes little sense. all the jetlag i ignored last week is catching up with me.