Fresh Eggs and Choc'n Crisp

Last night we got to know our landlords, Mr. Martorell and Josienne, as well as another ILP student Benoh (sp??) from Germany. Mr. Martorell doesn't speak any English at all, so most of our conversations with him consist of rapid-fire French followed by us nodding our heads as though we understand. In fact, in one of our first conversations with him, we were able to divine that he is from Algeria but has lived in Montpellier since 1993--we're not sure if he left because two Algerians tried to kill him or whether he killed two Algerians. We like the former better. Anyway, he brought us fresh eggs in the morning from some chickens that he keeps, although we have no idea where he keeps these chickens. Either way, this morning we ate Choc'n Crisp cereal instead. We also bought our first bottle of French wine, for a mere 4 euros. It's from the Languedoc region, which is where Montpellier is.

Our first class went well--John and I are in different levels but both of our classes are very small. He only has one other student in his class, so he gets a lot of one on one time with his instructor. I have five other students in my level, and we all seem to understand about 50% of what our instructor says as the class is entirely in French, but both John and I were pleased with our first day and feel that the classes are going to be extremely beneficial. We've made friends with a group of students from several different levels and several different countries. I guess not surprisingly they all speak English, so we haven't been conversing with them in French so far. Although since English is the only common language among all of us, I suppose it's the easiest to use for everyone. We all ate lunch together at the University cafeteria (the real university, not ILP), which is only 5 euros but the food was not as exquisite as I had imagined all French food to be. Still, it was fun to see a french college lunch.

So far John has been finding the pronunciation and the adjoining of certain words to be a major obstacle for both speaking and comprehension, but I think he is doing better than he thinks. He can read French pretty well, and I don't think it will take him long to figure out the pronunciation once he gets used to it after a few weeks. Starting next week, we're going to try to speak to each other only in French as much as possible (but we'll keep blogging in English).

John is going to set up a slideshow online for us to post all our pictures, so tomorrow after class we will post a link to that.

A bientot!