Almost done my first week of classes!

L'Universite de Nice is interesting. It's not pretty. At all. It actually kind of looks like an underfunded inner-city high school. I guess it makes some sense since it's free for French students. That's right, French kids don't have to pay for college. Hard to comprehend.

My classes seem interesting though! All the other students are international. I'm the only American in my speaking class and I get asked a lot of questions about how things are in America and about my opinions on things. It's funny -- on the first day of class when we were going around introducing ourselves and I heard that people were from South Africa, Taiwan, Columbia, Norway, and Chile, I thought to myself "gosh, yet again everyone is interesting and foreign with cool life stories; why can't I be exciting?" (a common thought that goes through my head in diverse classes at UMD). Then, after a few minutes, when it was almost my turn to speak, I realized that I was in Nice, not America and we were talking in French, not English. Here I can be interesting!!!  I almost laughed out loud to myself. I guess it's a good sign for my French-learning that I sometimes forget what language I'm listening to.