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This weekend certainly was an interesting one! Charlie and Phil were off to Amsterdam so it was a weekend without doing stuff with them - however I certainly had my plans! Le FEDE which is the student organization with L'Univserite Catholique de Lille hosted a Gala party on Saturday night with many sponsers including Fashion TV. It cost 16 euros for admission but was definitely worth it as most of my friends were going. I got there, after dressing up in nice black pants, red shirt with my black sweater vest... which was a good thing because everyone was dressed up!
It was in our the RU cafeteria which normally is a rather large area with four different areas for eating in as well as an actual club room downstairs. All of this was covered in red or black fabric - from the floors to the walls - everything! They had themed rooms as the entire theme was the world. Paris was the largest room with the Moulin Rouge bar. Then the club room was London which had live bands but had the smokers too... :-(. The one cafeteria room was New York and the hallway downstairs was Milan. By the time it got going, there were people dressed up fancy everywhere sipping glasses of champagne, or wine, or beer.
Since Fashion TV helped host the Gala, they threw a fashion show which I think was televised but not sure... but I was able to get a good standing spot for that and it turned out to be rather cool as I've never been to an actual fashion show like this before! I'll hopefully upload some of the pictures to my webalbums - I can't upload all because I don't want anyone flagging the lingerai photos and getting my account canceled - but I'll just say there were some rather provocative outfits!
Everything was so posh and I was so glad we all dressed up for the night. I had a good time hanging out with friends and actually ended up randomly running into a girl who is planning to study next year at Clarion! So we spent a bit of the night talking and will of course talk more later on. After the night though, I came back and crashed as it was going on 4 am if I recall!
Sunday was a relaxing day with me sleeping in and then I spent the rest of it doing homework and working on projects for this week and doing some studying for my DS's because they started for me this week. DS's are basically midterms for the French students.
Today really threw me off though! Because this weekend all of facebook and friends and everything was talking about Daylight Savings Time - so I figured that it was worldwide and affected me too .... WRONG!
After one of my friends asked what time it was here and he said that I was now only 5 hours ahead I started to get worried! I didnt want to have my time screwed up - but none of my clocks nor my computer had changed time. So I did the next best thing - I got online and looked it up! Apparently Daylight Savings Time for me here in France is on March 30th! Even after figuring this out I still was worried because this week is an odd week for me. Normally I dont have class till 1 on mondays then I am in class until 6. Well, for the Art du Spectacle kids which I have been semi-adopted into as I'm taking half their classes... there was a special presentation of three actors from the Theatre du Nord performing improv this afternoon for us. Because of this, our two afternoon classes were then meeting this morning - and I had a presentation to do in the first one! So I was really worried that I had missed giving my presentation but thankfully I was fine!
That being said, my presentation went fairly well! The classes are Analyze Textes and Practique du Jeu which are mainly about different types of acting and styles - and this week's lesson as well as my presentation was on Bertolt Brecht. I chose him because back in Fall 2007, Clarion did Brecht's Threepenny Opera which I was in - so I knew a lot about his style of theater. I think they liked my presentation about him because I included pictures of our production showing how Brecht's ideas and style actually looks when presented live! I was also able to speak off the top of my mind about things to answer their questions. Being I'm the only international student in all the Art du Spectacle classes - and Charlie who is bilingual in French and English decided not to come to class! So being able to think off the top of my head and answer questions I hadn't thought to prepare and them to understand was a good sign that my French is getting better!
But being my classes got moved to the morning, I had to book it to my 1 pm History of France class - and the first of my DS's! I was worried because I had no idea what to expect and couldn't find some of my notes to study from ... but it was surprisingly easy! Only three questions and the first two I knew right off the bat and was able to talk about them in short essay form. The last question I wasn't sure and just came up with something, which ended up being wrong - however since our professor told us what she had been looking for to get full credit once we were all done with the DS, I realized that if I had thought a little harder I could've figured it out and gotten those 4 points. DS's are out of 20 points as are all grades here in France. However what is nice is that in order for me to get an A back home in the states, I only have to get a 16 out of 20! So the fact I completely got the 4 point question wrong isnt bad because I got the two 8 point questions almost all right!
The next thing this afternoon that was different was the improv from the Theatre du Nord. The Theatre du Nord is the main theater company in this region of France and decently popluar as well. Three of their performers came to La Catho and presented an hour of Improv for those of us in Mr. Martinache's classes (for me it's Travail du Spectateur.) Mr. Martinache works at the Theatre du Nord so that is how he can manage things like this! It was really cool to watch! although I think I only understood about 60% of it because there were times between the different skits from the previous past season's shows when all three of them were talking at once and it was hard to follow and for my mind to keep up understanding it all! There were many good funny bits mixed in with the odd, sad ones too! And the three of them - two girls and one guy, were amazing as well. There was a question and answer season afterwards which was cool to listen about them talking about different things with the Improv show and other things they do as performers.
I also talked to Mr Martinache about getting involved in doing something for a show here - and he basically told me and Charlie that we just need to get him a resume and letter of motivation type thingy and he can see what he can do - so hopefuly that will work out and I can do something with a working theater over here in France though I doubt I'd be onstage (That would be great to do though!)
Now naturally, this all seems to be like and interesting weekend so far ... but as the title so states - there's one thing still left to discuss. I was just relaxing here in my room when about 11 pm - we lost all power in my residence. Some of us werent' sure what was going on at first but we just kinda chilled out in the hall and Mark and I chatted about things (he's from Wisconsin) while people mingled in the hall playing guitars and stuff. Apparently, all of Lille - or at least the entire Vauban area which is a 6th of the city - lost complete power! After about 25 min though it thankfully came back on and since it has been fine. We've had somewhat of a storm come through today which has made the weather really odd. Sunny, cloudless skies at times then after a class it's pouring down rain, dark and windier than Wyoming! Perhaps it's the remnants of an Atlantic hurricaine or something - but it was odd to lose power. Then even more odd that the French just went on about things! They pulled out guitars, hung out in the hallways chatting and basically just waiting and relaxing till we got power back!
Well, as I have class at 8 am and it's my busiest day, I'm off to bed after I upload some pictures of the Gala!
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| Gala a Lille! |
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