It is currently approximately 11:18 PM / 23h18 here in Paris. Around 8:45 PM, I put a load of laundry in the wash, in our tiny little laundry room. Three washers, two dryers, seems like they could have put a bit more but it’s right downstairs and it’s only €3 so I don’t mind having […]

Wanted to make sloppy joes for dinner yesterday. Lacked microwave with which to thaw ground-beef patties. Recalled experiences in past weeks involving items placed on kitchenette shelf above neon lamp. Deduced that if lamp could melt package of Mars bars, lamp could thaw beef patties. Thus a new tool was created: the Julian Joiris Microwaveless […]

Yesterday I discovered that my grasp of French grammar has, in the past year or so, inadvertently defenestrated itself onto a detonating explosive and been killed in a shooting accident. The class I switched over to is going through stuff I know, and that I know I know, but that I can’t seem to do. […]

This week, after all of last week’s intro stuff, real classes are starting at Paris 8. Well, all right, I’ve had about 1.5 real classes. Actually, 1 real class, because they were both about 1/2 classes. Except one of them was half of a double-length class. So yeah, 1.5 classes. Yesterday was my first real […]

I haven’t posted in a few days, mainly because things have just been pretty boring around here. On Thursday, I decided that the grammar class I was taking was a bit too advanced. I’m trying to switch into another, easier one; the FLE people, quite wisely, deliberately put those classes at the same day and […]

I’m halfway into my first week of class. Monday was at the MICEFA building, a pretty low-key course about foreign poets in Paris. Turns out it’s being run as something of a writing workshop, which is nice, that way I don’t feel I’m slacking off on my major. The first thing we did was work […]

I’ve come to the conclusion that the French design their bathtubs and showers specifically to irritate me. According to the check-in sheet I got for the dorms, the bathroom is suppose to come with a shower curtain. It didn’t, in my case, but it’s supposed to. This makes it all the more puzzling that the […]

Title: Registration Rant and Other Stuff Enh, not much of a post, but I took some more pictures of the dorms and figured I’d upload them, so here they are. This is Bâtiment B, where the entrance is: This is the entrance lobby, with security desk and all that jazz: This is the view of […]

So the dorms here are somewhat awesome. All single studio apartments, one-room with kitchenette and attached bathroom, pretty spacious, in these really cool buildings that are kind of Blade Runner meets nautical. Dorms at night: These really cool super secret magic walkways are reserved either for emergency use (according to one sheet of paper taped […]

So this was supposed to go up 2 or 3 days ago but then I moved into the dorms, which are very nice but lack wifi, and I only got an ethernet cable today. Tragic, I know. The past two days, I visited the quintessential Americanities: McDonald’s for dinner, Starbucks for breakfast. Had to go […]