Classes at l'Institute de Touraine and a truly French encounter...

So today marks the half-way point of my time in Tours, France. Tours is a small city about 3 hours outside Paris, on the Loire River. During these first two weeks, I have been attending classes about 3 hours a day at l'Institute de Touraine with the other 78 students in the program. They've divided us up into four classes with 15-20 people in each of them for our grammar classes. The grammar class lasts two hours every day, from 9:45-11:45am. It is taught by a French professor who speaks minimal to no English. Apart from the fact that there is no English spoken in the class, it's your normal French grammar class with written work and some discussion of the proper usage of certain tenses, modes, etc. For example, yesterday we each wrote an exciting
or incredible story that could be true or made-up; then we each read our story aloud to the class and they had to guess whether it was true or not. This was mostly to show that we knew how and when to use the Passé Composé and Imparfait tenses (There are two tenses to describe the past in French.) Today we did a general review of the Subjunctive mode; it was pretty much the most agonizing two hours of my life thus far.

The other class that everyone takes is an oral expression class. This consists of about 7-10 students (half of the aforementioned grammar class); during the class we pick some sort of general topic and talk about it, facilitated by a different professor who also speaks little to no English. Generally this goes pretty fast once the conversation gets going, but there are a couple of students in the class who understand very little of what's being said, therefore can't contribute much. But for the most part I enjoy the class because it's very small with little risk of completely humiliating yourself.

So the afternoons are generally ours to spend however we want. Since it's Friday today, most of us went home early because it's been a pretty long week. Other days we've gone window shopping (ask me how to say that in French, there's a funny story there), or actual shopping for little things at Monoprix or une Pharmacie; once we went for a leisurely lunch at a really fabulous Crêperie, and another time we had that little misadventure involving the post office (see previous post).

And now for the story of my complete and utter humiliation on a street full of French onlookers. So it takes about 30-40 minutes for me to walk from the house where I'm living to l'Institute de Touraine. It's a pretty easy walk, no really hilly areas and in a generally good part of town, but most mornings I've been taking the bus. This morning, however, I was thinking I'd walk because it was a little chilly and it would help warm me up, plus I could use a little fresh air. about 10 minutes into the walk, my foot lands wrong on a little indentation on the sidewalk and I totally wiped out, skinned my knee up pretty bad and twisted my other ankle, and scraped up one of my arms. There were several people in the vicinity who looked right at me and just kept walking, no "Excusez-moi, vous avez besoin d'aide?" One little kid actually outright laughed at me. But I got right back up and hobbled the rest of the way to class. On the bright side, the fall did not injure my beautiful brand-new black pants!