R.A.S.

Tuesday, October 9. R.A.S. is an acronym for Rien A Signaler, which is French for "Nothing of Importance to Report."

I enjoyed my class at AF today much more than yesterday. There are nine students in the class: 2 from Brazil, 1 from Spain, 1 from Italy, 1 from England, 1 from Viet Nam, 1 from Korea, and 2 from the US. Everyone speaks and understands well; there doesn't appear to be a lot of difference between this class of B2.2 and my B2.4 class other than the subject matter. And what we're covering is helpful to me: prepositions and some verb tenses.

Today, we have an oral comprehension exercise that is an interview between a reporter and a representative of a pharmaceutical company discussing the effect of various drugs on AIDS, Parkinsons etc, research, synthetic vaccines v. live vaccines and so forth. However, it is much easier for me to understand because the interviewer and the interviewee don't speak so quickly.
One thing that we are doing in this class which is very cool is that one student prepares an oral presentation for each class. Yesterday, the woman from Viet Nam (she's a nun!) related one of the stories from Alphonse Daudet's Lettres de Mon Moulin. And today the young woman from Korea speaks about traditional Korean dance. It's very interesting and fun to hear what others choose to talk about. I'm assigned to one day next week so I have to figure out what to talk about if I decide to stay in the class. Won't be hard - I can just pick an entry from my blog!

Stop at little food shops (une dalle de saumon, les betraves, salade piemontaise, concombre en creme, puree de carrottes). Dinner at home. Go through big envelope of mail that Eleanor has forwarded. Start reading Le Malade Imaginaire. Pedometer: 3,463.