Sunday, April 26, 2009

sunday, sunday



the rain today further underlines the fact that there is nothing to do on this day of the week in montpellier. stores are closed, and while normally i would take this chance to go for a meandering walk or a laze on the esplanade, the inclement weather renders this impossible.

it is quite nice to listen to, though, and makes the world outside my ceiling-window (i would say sun roof, but I don't know) an impressionist painting.

Thursday, April 23, 2009

I've been around.

The address of this blog - the jillsinfrance part specifically - has been a lie for fragments of the past two weeks. I have not been in France. To be more precise, the not-France part of my stay was Prague, Istanbul, and London, and all three were lovely (prague-london was broken up by a lovely stay in Paris with my mom). The point is, though, I was travelling and yes, it was what you'd expect it to be, it was the excited faces people make when you tell them you'll be studying abroad: yes, it was really, really, great. I know this is a travel blog, I know I need to be writing about my travels, but when I try to fit the last fifteen days in one panoramic shot...impossible. There's not enough words, not enough pictures to show you, not enough quirky events to recount to make up for the feeling. And I guess that's the challenge for travel writers: to take that undefinable feeling and describe it, illustrate it, deliver it to an audience of hundreds or thousands. I'll write about the cities soon, promise.

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Senior year? ...Excuse me?

Since I constantly obsess over my future (yeah, even in France), of course I was up at the bright and early hour of 7AM Eastern Standard Time (a cushy 1PM here in Montpellier) to register for classes that I meticulously obsessed over in the hours before I went to sleep for the past two weeks or so.

Thanks to my most excellent senior-status registration time, I just signed up for Readings in French, The French-Speaking World Outside Europe, Early French Literature, Humanities II, and just for kicks, Folk Music in America. It's weird since I'm technically not taking any English classes for the first time in my undergraduate career (career is such an odd word, I feel, to describe the things you do in college, but anyway..). But fear not! I will be TA-ing a 200-level creative writing class, and I'm super excited about that.

Which reminds me, I really haven't been doing as much writing as I've wanted to this semester, which just shows how hard it is to motivate myself without a real deadline in mind. But then again, it's a beautiful day and there are always free benches at the park. And I can put off my homework just a little longer..