La Fin Approche!

The end is coming!

In proper French, the title of this post should be presque la fin du semestre or something like that. If I said “La fin approche” to a random person on the street they would think I was talking about the end of the world, like “2012 the world is going to self combust, join our cult.” I’m certainly not saying that, c’est ridicule.

Now that it’s December, my days in Paris are numbered. I have just over two weeks left in France. Unfortunately, I think will be spending most of them doing homework but that’s ok. The reason I haven’t done much work on these final projects during the semester is because I’ve been out and about seeing Paris and visiting museums and going on lovely flâneurs around the city(strolls,fancy new vocab I learned in class this week ;).Of course I haven’t done everything there is to do in Paris (that couldn’t even be accomplished if I stayed for a whole year) but I am really satisfied with the amount of stuff I’ve seen and done over the course of the semester. I am ready to go home.

Next Monday I have my last stage (internship) and my last entrainment de rugby. I don’t think I’ve talked about my stage yet. I’m not doing an internship but instead volunteering (most kids on my program are). On Monday evenings I tutor English at la Goutte d’Or, an afterschool learning center for kids in the 18ieme arrondissement. The center is supposed to help build study skills for kids in the quartier. The 18th is a heavily immigrant neighborhood, lots of Algerians and Africans. When I get off the metro, I don’t hear French on the street. It can be a little sketchy but I’ve never had a problem. I tutor one girl, Sarah (supposed to have two but Myriam hasn’t come in a while). We mostly work on verb conjugations or exercises that Sarah wants to work on in preparation for her English class at school. She hasn’t taken a lot of English and doesn’t understand a lot of what I say to her, even really simple questions. La dernier séance next week should be fun. We are going to listen to songs from High School Musical on my I-pod and fill in the blanks in the lyrics. She really liked Hannah Montana and HSM easy reader books that my mom brought from home so listening to the songs should be a fun last session. I am going to leave the books at the center because they don’t have any English books. I didn’t think that Sarah liked our sessions all that much but after I told her I was leaving soon she did seem a little sad and asked me for my email address so we can email each other.

As for rugby, after next Monday I’ll be hanging up my maillot. I don’t really have any desire to pick it up when I get back to Hamilton. I don’t really like the tackling all that much. My big annoyance is the fact that by the time I get my arms around a girl for the tackle, she other usually just passes the ball anyways and I end up out of the play. It seems pointless. We might be getting socks and shorts though next week so I can have a little souvenir of my time with les Gorettes (besides my many bruises). I am really happy I got to play this semester though. It was interesting to see how sports are organized over here and it was quite a different experience from any other team I have been on.

I’m going to track and knock of a couple last Parisian sites this weekend: La Grande Arche de la Défense and le Basilique Saint-Denis, where all the French kings and queens are buried. I’m not sure if they still thereare or not. I read that during the Revolution the place was ransacked and all the dead monarchs were thrown in a mass grave. Gross. These lovely little tidbits about the French Revolution never seem to end, do they?

Bonne soirée à tous!