Never mind

I realized, after talking to Cecile, that M. Laugee isn't specifically mean towards me, that's just the traditional French teaching style. Plus I also realized he's probably stressed out. So he's not really that terrible, I was just freaking out. Lesson learned : )

Anyway, so Regina, Lauren, Joan (A Spanish student I met in class) and I watched "Fauteuils d'Orchestre" yesterday, a very good witty film but unfortunately due to my slow, lumbering, unwitty-in-French brain, I only caught a tiny part of the jokes. Oof, my French comprehension still has a ways to go so I can actually sound remotely funny + intelligent in response to witty comments.

Afterwards, I went into Gibert Joseph, the librairie (bookstore) and bought three French books to add to the pile intended for my poor mother to cart back to the States. I bought Voltaire's Candide, Ionesco's La Cantatrice Chauve (I read a part of it in high school, but didn't understand half of what I was reading, and thus missed out on most of the humor), and Flaubert's L'education sentimentale, I wish I had more time to read all of these books. I remember how Mathieu told Regina and I how he reads mainly French authors (or is that Arnaud who said that, I forget) because he believes that so much becomes lost during translation (word plays, meanings). I must agree, and this makes me somewhat sad, as my favorite novel of all time is Hong Lou Meng, which is the Chinese masterpiece of Cao Xueqin, acknowledged to be the greatest novel ever written in the Chinese language. And I know, that if I loved it through the awkwardness of translation, how much I would love it if I could read it in Chinese prose.

At least I know one of my lifetime goals: to read Hong Lou Meng in its original Chinese.