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This week has been long.

On Monday and Tuesday I worked tirelessly (ok, procrastinated a lot and then finally completed in one long shot) the take-home exam for Susan's Painting Women in France class. Considering the fact that I submitted it at 2am on the day it was due, it had surprisingly few typos when I reread it post-submission. Results on that front pending.

On Wednesday I presented my Powerpoint on Père-Lachaise cemetery and Les Misérables, which went well and reminded me that I miss not having any English classes this semester. Not to worry though, because in what was almost definitely a Poor Life Choice I somehow saved all my hardest English concentration requirements for my last semester of college. So this fall will be quite the literature overload.

Then on Thursday we took advantage of the uncharacteristically sunny day to visit Père-Lachaise itself, but I won't tell you about that yet because I'm waiting for Lena to upload the pictures I took with her camera. I tried to buy a new one the other day at Darty, the French equivalent of Best Buy, but the exorbitant prices scared me away before I could make a decision. Blast you, Swiss camera thief. Wherever you are.

On Thursday night Erin and I went to an amusing French movie entitled J'ai toujours rêvé d'être un gangster (I've always dreamed of being a gangster). It was one of those movies that follows a handful of individual subplots, all of which involved the humorous hijinks of inept criminals. We were pleased to discover that we understood the plot and most of the scene-to-scene dialog. And sometimes we even laughed at the right times. Also we learned the vocabulary for "Get out of here or I'll break your face," which will undoubtedly prove useful in future.

Then for a change of pace on Friday, I saw The Other Boleyn Girl (called Deux Soeurs Pour Un Roi in French-- Two Sisters for One King) with Erin, Lena, Ornella, Leetal, Molly, and Molly's French host brother Nicolas, who was apparently there to ogle Natalie Portman. We had a brief moment of fear before the movie started that it would be dubbed in French, since we had forgotten to verify that it was "V.O.", or version originale. We lucked out, though, and had a good time pointing out the translation inadequacies in the French subtitles. The movie itself was good, I thought, but Ornella and Molly said it didn't live up to the book. I was also disappointed that they didn't give Natalie Portman an extra finger, for authenticity's sake-- one of the main reasons Anne Boleyn was suspected of witchery was the presence of a sixth finger on her left hand. Why does that detail from my fourth-grade Tudor history class stay with me when nothing else will?

I had kind of a hard night after that. Everyone else decided to find a bar, but I took a Metro back to my apartment. For some reason during the movie I had fallen into one of my (fairly rare) "down" moods where I miss being home. Maybe it was just the result of seeing familiar actors in an American film. Maybe it was the tortured stories of romance on the screen that reminded me that everyone I love is thousands of miles away. And maybe it was the added annoyance of paying literally twice the price of a ticket at good ol' Quality 16 in Ann Arbor, since the Parisian theaters apparently revoke their student fares on Friday nights. When I got home I spent awhile sitting on the balcony outside my room, crying quietly so as not to wake my host family, and wishing for a moment that I wasn't so far from from the familiar.

Speaking of the familiar, though, it is coming to visit me next month! The parents in the family that I babysit for in Ann Arbor are going to be in Paris for work, and they emailed me this week to say that they're bringing the whole crew along. I'm really glad that someone from home will be able to see my new neighborhood, since none of my friends or family are planning to make the trip.

Now that this post has served its function as distraction from my homework on the French sewer system, I should wrap it up. Next time I'll show you the pictures from Père-Lachaise, which include a decidedly creepy blast from the past. More about that later.

We will end with this really attractive picture of me eating a ficelle de fromage, which is essentially a giant breadstick with cheese baked both inside it and on the top.

This picture was taken with my laptop webcam, now the only camera I have since my French cell phone doesn't have one built in. These ficelles de fromage are available at the bakery on my street, and I order them constantly because a) they are full of cheesy goodness (observe the excess that has oozed onto the pan during the baking process) and b) they only cost 1E50! Much to my chagrin, though, it's the same young and relatively attractive guy who works at the bakery every day, so he is beginning to recognize me every time I waltz in and ask for the giant breadstick smothered in melted cheese. Awkward.