Pictures of Campus!
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 time so that students could switch if they decided they were in the wrong class without messing up their schedules. I appreciate this bit of forethought; actually, really, the people at the FLE department are very nice, and as mentioned before the class scheduling is much simpler here (though you either have to run directly from one class to another, or have a minimum 3-hour break between them). I have a feeling this other grammar class will have some overlap with stuff I already know, but I figure it’s best to play things safe.
My professor from Thursday’s other class, a francophone-lit class, is on strike; she explained that this means the professors will not be teaching their classes as long as the strike lasts, but they will try to be at their classrooms at the appointed times and, while there, will try to teach the students about things. Apparently the difference between this and not-striking is that, while striking, they throw out the syllabus in favor of material about the strike, have politically involved artists over to speak, and so forth. Our homework for the it class, for example, is an op-ed by the president of Paris 8, who’s in favor of the strike. The whole thing seems a bit convoluted, but one can appreciate the level of thought that goes into it.
Yesterday, with nothing better to do, I went for a walk. I have, since arriving here, decided the best way to learn a city is to get systematically and enthusiastically lost in it. I wandered about without a map and found myself in Montmartre, right by the hotel where MICEFA had sent us for the first 5 days. There was some kind of Scottish festivity going on in the neighborhood–which is full of Scottish places and has Scottish flags all over–with people dancing in pubs and a lot of men in kilts (which, incidentally, aren’t really an Ancient Scottish Traditional Garment, but rather an innovation an English factory owner came up with in the 18th century. This is among the wonderful, essential pieces of knowledge I learned in Intro to Comparative Politics last semester).
Anyway, I didn’t have the camera, so no pictures of French Scottish men in kilts, nor of those long, long sets of stairs that one finds in the streets around that rather hilly part of Paris. I must get a picture of those, very dramatic, especially at night. What I do have pictures of is the Paris 8 Campus:
The library building spans the highway:
This footbridge also goes over the highway:
For some reason these buildings look to me like they belong on a beach:
I kinda like the rust thing they’ve got going here, contrasts nicely with the grass:
A pigeon found its way into the building on Thursday. I found it wandering about several times. Or perhaps there were several pigeons. In any case, here it is by the escalators in the area between the library and Bâtiment A:
A thoroughly graffittied exterior stairwell in, I believe, Bâtiment B:
I’m somewhat fond of this little collection of bridges and stairs, which makes for easy cross-campus access from the area in Bâtiment A where mos of my classes are held:
And a very melodramatic rooftop shot:
