Nothing like a Napoleon Monday!

• This rainy Monday morning we had three hours of class once again. We focused a lot on "real" conversation skills and our prof was working on teaching us the more "normal" ways of saying common phrases. The French language very much flows, things all sort of run together, so normal pronunciation is very important for our new skills to actually be usable! We do a lot of partner work and she always moves us around in class so that we are not with another person that knows English well, forcing us to work even harder on our French, but in a good way!
• During our mid-class break, my "Flat Audrey" (a paper version of my roommate who is back in Iowa who has been traveling all over Paris with me) caught the eye of the guy next to me in class who is from Taiwan. He was curious as to what this little paper doll was doing in my folder so I explained it to him! This turned into an interesting conversation because he was under the impression that all American students have their own rooms and was surprised to find out that back at home I actually live with 3 other students! He was also very interested in my major (Communication Design) because he works in the marketing department of Proctor and Gamble back in Taiwan. I was impressed by his great English skills!
• Speaking of speaking, conversations here are always entertaining. They often tend to be a mix of French, English, sometimes Spanish with lots of hand signals thrown in! Verbal communication is just so much more dynamic when there are all these different cultures and languages to confuse things! But its fun, I'm learning so much more about English too!
• Then this afternoon, our group visited Les Invalides, which was built by Napoleon as a military hospital, which it is still partially used as today (since that was the purpose). There were so many war artifacts! But reading the poorly translated English was a lot of fun. The cathedral was very impressive, you can tell that Napoleon had no problems with his ego.
• I found out today that the Grand Palais is currently showing Andy Warhol! I bought a book about his work today and plan on going soon to see this display! (plus it gives me more motivation to keep on learning French, seeing as it is written in French!) I'm very excited! Please feel free to leave comments on here so that I can hear what you all think about my adventures thus far!