L'Opéra Garnier

So it's starting to dawn on me that I'm not gonna be in Paris for much longer. I am sort of excited to get back, but I'm also gonna be pretty sad to leave. I have the rest of this week and then two weeks of vacation. The first week of vacation I'll be in Greece, and the second I'll be going to Biarritz in southwestern France for a few days and spending the rest of the week in Paris. Then I'll have two weeks of classes, then one week of finals, then a plane back to the States on May 26th. So let's see: what happened? I got sick again, but just a cold which has given my voice a gravelly quality. Not sure if it makes the French sound better or not. Learned a lot about protein structures Thursday and Friday...I had dinner with Glennis Friday night and we finished a whole bottle of wine. Yes it was pink wine, and yes she drank more than I did. Saturday I met up with my cousin, Nate, who's here doing research for a few months. We checked out Notre Dame and the Musée Quai Branly. Sunday we got a tour of the Opéra Garnier, which was cool because it was the first tour I've gone on here where I haven't zoned out for the majority of it. That's where I took my two pictures:


Here's a shot of the seats:


And here's the painting on the ceiling, done by Chagal for free. Unfortunately I couldn't get the whole thing in one photo, but it is pretty.So the Opéra trip was pretty cool and we're going to see a piece there in a few weeks. After that Glennis and I got together with some French guys for go-karting, which was 16 euros for 10 minutes! That's more than 24 dollars! Crazy! I also got my grade on the Mouse Development course: 55/100! I know that sounds terrible, but it was actually right around the class average. So I passed my first science class in French! I also have a phone interview for the Beckman scholarship, a scholarship for undergraduate researchers, on Friday, and I'm starting to prepare for that. In fact, in order to get ready I should probably go write a paper that's due Thursday. The grading is very different here: this particular professor doesn't seem to care if you write well, all she cares about it is that you argue and discuss exactly what she wants you to argue and discuss. She gave me a 5/10 on my last composition because I didn't answer the prompt the way she wanted me to. Sorry, small rant. Oh, lastly my Mudd email account seems not to be working anymore: I'm trying to clear it out, but I'm not sure that that's going to work. My main email address will now be facehugger200@gmail.com. Well, tomorrow includes a visit of the sewers of Paris, so hopefully I'll be able to post on that before going to Greece.