berlin, here i come!

Yesterday, my friend Agnès came over to the apartment to plan our trip to Berlin next month. We're skipping 3 days of classes to attend the Berlinale, one of the top 3 film festivals in the world. This is seriously a dream come true - and I'm so excited!

I hate to admit it, but I felt pretty popular yesterday. I saw 3 different friends, one who left this morning to return to the States, Agnès, and a Canadian friend who I went to the theater with. We went to the Théâtre de la Croix Rousse to see "Le Nouveau Testament", a play by Sacha Guitry that deals with adultery among the Parisian bourgeoisie in the 1930s. It was an interesting play, but the production could have been better. The stage was set up like an impossibly humongous living room with at least 20 couches, some of which were used as seats for the audience. There were also strange video screens used intermittently throughout the play as stand-ins for movie theater screens and windows into the thoughts of one of the main characters. But I wasn't too impressed by the overall production, to be frank.

Friday night was the big dinner with the Georgetown group. As predicted, none of them are people I see myself hanging out with on a regular basis. They are nice enough people, but they have gone out to bars for the last 3 nights in a row (I went out with them on Friday, but declined yesterday night because I was really tired coming back from the theater). 5 of them will be at Lyon 3, but who knows how things will develop over time.

I'm on my way to meet two of my Japanese friends to plan a little trip to Dijon for this week. With no exams or classes, I'm going to try and make a few other day trips too - possibly to Grenoble and Geneva.