Boursin: a delicacy for the simpleminded

I'll explain the heading for this entry by relaying the conversation I had with my host parents tonight at dinner (with Dave Sedaris-esque translations).

Dad: Do you know the cheese Vacherin?
Me: No, I know it not.
Mom: One can buy it solely in winter. We must snack on it after dinner.
Me: I am in accordance.
(we snack on the Vacherin)
Me: Mm!
Mom: You enjoy?
Me: Oui! (then, after a pause) There is a French cheese that I like, which is called Boursin, but in the United States it is very expensive.
Mom: Ah oui, le boursin! It is not expensive here.
Me: Yeah, I saw it in Monoprix, less than two Euros.
Mom: Yes. But in France, that is not considered a real cheese.
Me: Oh... I like it.
Mom: I will buy of the boursin for you. But it is not a true cheese.
Me: The Vacherin is like the fondue.

So just in case you thought buying that $6 boursin from the Busch's cheese section makes you cultured... it apparently doesn't.

In other news, I had my first Louvre visit today. We spent an hour in line getting our unlimited access student cards, so now in theory I can go back whenever I want. We spent a lot of time looking at 18th-century female painters (Vigée-Le Brun and Vallayer-Coster, for those wondering) but on the way out we passed the headless statue of the Winged Victory, and I had another one of those gasp-of-realization moments that I'd had when I first saw the Eiffel Tower. It was incredible to be five feet away from something that had only ever existed in my Humanities 101 textbook.

Meanwhile, back at home, Tilo was busy retching all over my possessions. Just kidding, but I did wake up this morning to discover that he had had a little kitty barf on the one blanket I brought from home. Since I was already late for my first day of French class and didn't know the word for blanket or vomit, I decided not to tell my host mom until later ("vomir" turned out to be the appropriate verb).

Speaking of French class, it went well despite being three hours long. Mondays and Wednesdays are going to be looong mornings. It's pretty interesting though because we are required to speak entirely in French (not like UM, where the "French-only instruction" means that the prof talks to you in French until she has something important to clarify, and the students whisper in English during the lesson). At the Institut Catholique (le "Catho") you can't whisper in English to your neighbor anyway, because the classes are international. In mine we have American, Japanese, Taiwanese, Peruvian, Thai, and Korean students. It was interesting and a little confusing to hear the various students' first-language accents coming through as they spoke French. My professor is really nice though, and she seems like she'll be a stickler for correcting our pronunciation mistakes, which is good. Tonight at dinner I was telling my parents that my French prof is actually Italian (not that you can tell from her perfect French) and that her name was Madame Palmiero, and my dad laughed and said, "Ah, she must use her hands a lot when she talks," then added "PALmierO!", imitating the sort of accent that Americans always use when they're impersonating pizzeria chefs ("Mama mia! The cheese-a is perfetto!").

I really hope the class helps me become more conversational in French so that I can talk to my host family more animatedly at dinner. Right now I mostly say "oui" et "merci" and "ah!". I thought I'd known a fair amount of French before I got here, but it turns out that the kinds of things you learn in high school and college French are not really all that applicable to everyday conversation. I have a lot of random phrases stuck in my head that are more or less useless in casual conversation ("He is going parasailing" "Do you think the windbreaker suits me?" "This changes nothing"). In talking to the other girls in my program, though, we realize that we are largely at a loss for the things we need to say to our families on a daily basis ("If I bought a pack of yogurt at Monoprix would you mind if I stored it in the fridge?" "I was wondering if there is a laundromat near here" "Tilo vomited on my blanket this morning"). All in good time, I suppose.