First (and Second) Day of School

Today was my second day at the language school, and I am loving it so far and learning a lot!
On the first day, I had to be there at 8:15 am for the placement test, which had a writing and an oral component. To my surprise, I was placed in level B2, which is a level higher than I completed in high school. To be honest, I found it very difficult yesterday and became a bit discouraged, because I had trouble understanding some things that the teacher said and the other six students in the class seem to speak more fluidly and eloquently than me. However, I did find it easier today and I think that being challenged will be good for me!
The best part about the school is definitely all the people you get to meet, people of all ages, backgrounds, and nationalities. For example, I have made friends with a woman who is from Serbia but lives in Switzerland, and there is a guy in my class who was born in Nepal, lived in Italy for most of his life, and now studies in the US. Everyone has a different reason for learning french; one woman needs it for her job as an aid worker in a francophone African country, some people have French friends, others have just moved to France or married a French citizen, they are a few people who just want to learn it for fun, and there are those like me whose country has french as an official language. That's not my only reason for learning it, of course, because I also just love the sound of the language and want to be fluent in something other than English.
The teachers are all very friendly, helpful, and funny. Right away they got us practicing our french: while all of us new students were waiting for our placement tests to be marked, they made us tell them some stereotypes of French people that are common in our countries. The answers were hilarious: apparently pretty much everyone in the world believes that the French are a bit stuck-up, that all French men are Casanova's, that they drink wine and eat cheese all the time (which is actually pretty accurate), that they drive badly (but not as badly as the Italians), and that they refuse to speak anything other than french. I felt kind of bad for the teachers for having to hear all of that ... but they did ask for it!
Today was very fun as well. During the morning the fire alarm went off and we all had to evacuate the building, but we even practiced our french as we waited on the sidewalk for the firemen to let us back in. While my teacher (and all of the other staff!) had a cigarette, he got us to practice le subjonctif by coming up with good and bad advice for what to do when asked to evacuate a building!
Despite the long hours at school (9 am to 5:15 pm today), I still had some time to sightsee when classes were finished for the day. I visited the Île de la Cité this evening, taking the very crowded metro to the middle of the island and walking from there to Notre Dame. The crowds were not very thick, probably because the temperature had dropped quite a bit and it looked like it might rain, so I was free to take pictures without worrying that I was standing in the way of someone's camera!

Notre Dame is truly stunning, and as an added bonus the bells started ringing just as I arrived. But I think that some of the most interesting views of the cathedral are from up close:

 The guy below looks like he had a rather nasty encounter. Is he perhaps John the Baptist? Whoever he is, at least he's lucky enough to have a statue of himself on the front of Notre Dame cathedral, even without his head in the right place!

I had planned on returning to the rue Washington after seeing Notre Dame, but as I was turning to leave a sign caught my eye: "Mémorial à la Deportation." I walked in the direction indicated by the sign, all the way to the other side of Notre Dame, where I found the memorial inside of a beautiful garden, filled with roses and surrounded by a stone wall. The memorial was built in the 1960s as a tribute to the thousands of Jews deported from France during the occupation by the Nazis during WWII. In particuliar, many of them were arrested in July 1942, in what became known as the Vel d'Hiv roundup (after the Vélodrome d'Hiver, a bicycle racing stadium where they were kept for five days without adequate food or water, before being deported). The interior of the memorial had already been closed to the public, but I was able to look inside and read the sign in the garden. It was so sad, and I was shocked when I read that in France alone, 160 000 Jews were deported! I am definitely planning to return when the memorial is open so that I can see the inside as well.

On a happier note, I am really starting to settle in here. I enjoy staying with my host family and the student from Holland, and I love practicing my french while getting to know the other students during and between classes at the language school. Hopefully now I will be able to start picking up the teachers' beautiful Parisian accent!