Class! (contd.)

So this marks the end of my first week of classes. I went to a total of one (out of three) that I will continue to take in the future.

Originally, I was worried that I'd be taking way too many hours, and then I decided that I needed to do everything in my power to avoid taking classes on Fridays. So now I can add up ten credit hours of classes that I actually want to take ( a cog psy class, a linguistics class, a class about jazz, history of music from the middle ages, and the psychology of music). That's right--I just named five classes and they only add up to ten credit hours. Aw nuts. I'm thinking about begging my program director to give me credit for doing research in a lab. I'm going to be in a lab regardless, so I might as well get the credit for it. (I didn't want credit for it originally because I already fulfilled my research credits, but now that I need two more hours. . . ) I'm sure you're finding all of this absolutely fascinating.

Oh yeah, about the labs. I talked the director of research at the university ( who is American coincidentally), and she gave me the email addresses of some fMRI research labs in Marseille, who I promptly contacted. The bad news is that nobody really wants to train a newbie there. The good news is that the director of research here in Aix told me that I could definitely help out at her lab, which does psycholinguistic research with ERP. Apparently it would be helpful for her to have a native English speaker around because a lot of the subjects in her experiments are native English speakers. It would also be good for me to learn about ERP (although I think I would still prefer to do an honor's thesis next year using fMRI techniques because it's pretty kick ass that IU has an fMRI research facility and that undergrads are allowed to use this six million dollar machine). In a couple weeks I'm going to contact one of the labs in Marseille again, and I will get to visit it and learn about what kind of research they do there. Very interesting stuff, especially to me, since it mostly involves studies about correlations between second language acquisition and ability to learn music and vice versa. Blah blah blah, but I find it fascinating.

Ok, I know I've been bad about uploading pictures, but here are a couple of descriptions that you could easily imagine. . .

Everyone dresses very fashionably here. It's a little intimidating and, at the same time, a little stupid. Sometimes it's hard to tell the women apart--they're all stick skinny and clad in black from head to toe. Sometimes it's hard for me to tell them from Aix's architecture. Example: yesterday I was walking home from class when I noticed something peculiar in centreville (downtown for places not big enough to have a downtown). I saw this tall black lightpost emitting a puff of smoke. I thought, that's odd, even the lightposts smoke here. And then when I neared it, I noticed that there was actually a woman standing next to it smoking. The women here are so skinny and wear so much black that I can not tell the difference between them and lightposts. It's an interesting phenomenon that I will probably not adopt any time soon.

And another funny sight: yesterday, I saw another woman with a tattoo on her bicep. From far away, it looked like a colored rendition of the tradition skull and crossbones, but upon closer inspection, I saw that it was actually a tattoo of a tomato and two carrots that was laid out in the same position as your traditional skull and crossbones. (Don't worry parents--I didn't get any ideas from that.)

And that's my news for the moment. This weekend I've got to get out of Aix. It is absolutely charming, but I need to be taking advantage of my location. I'm at least going to Marseille on Saturday, perhaps someplace else, and on Sunday I plan to scale Mt. St. Victoire. Cézanne liked it, maybe I will too.

French word of the day:
ordinateur (or dee nat er) = computer

Je ne pouvais pas trouver un bot mot pour le mot du jour; alors, j'ai regardé la salle qui m'entoure qui est pleine d'ordinateurs et puis j'ai choisi ce mot très banal.