Classes, Festival and Nice!

Classes are starting here at GTL this week.  Tuesday was basically sitting through a few monotonous orientations, except for the one by a professor that's been here for a few years about daily life in France.  She told us a lot of stuff, like seltzer water usually comes in a hard bottle with a red cap and skim milk is usually color coded green.  

Yesterday I had my first User Interface Design and Technology and Society classes.  The UI class looks like a lot of fun, even though I'm taking the same class as a bunch of graduate students.  Most of them are French students who are also taking classes in other tech schools around here.  Apparently they're having a bit of trouble already with some of the English technical terms.  Tech & Society looks kind of interesting, but It definitely seems like a lot of work.  It's my first real history class with a lot of reading and writing associated with it.

Today I actually don't have any classes, just meetings to take care of rent and residence card issues and such.  There's also a presentation on travelling in Europe that I'm looking forward to for tonight.  

We're looking forward to the festival this weekend in Metz.  I'm not exactly sure what's supposed to be going on, but it looks like there's going to be a few live performances, some fireworks, and apparently a lot of dancing.  It'll be another good experience.  Next weekend (the first one out of Metz!) I'm thinking of going to Nice with some people.  We wanted to get to the beach early if we were going to go, so I figured that it would make a good first trip.  I think we're going to take a TGV to Paris and then one to Marseille, and then a train from Marseille to Nice.

I hope everything's going well at home!