Not a Tourist

I have been in Paris for nearly two weeks now, and it has been an incredible journey thus far. I have collected over 1000 pictures of nearly all of the arrondissements, my classes have begun this week, and today I met an interesting young man from Haiti. Truly I would have been lost without this boy and I am grateful for his help in setting up the mundane administrative trinkets like creating a school account at Paris 7 and setting up a lab account in order to use the classroom computers. It may not seem like such a difficult thing, but travel 4000+ miles to a country where you only half decently speak the language and definitely don't know administrative-specific terminology and you have yourself one hell of a nightmare. 

Over the past few weeks I have spent my time mostly with the EDUCO girls, who have been very sweet and always helpful in terms of academic matters. I mean, we're all on the same boat right? I have selected one of my four classes: Afrique Subsaharienne. This class is a taught by an extraordinarily verbally-gifted French man, who had me hooked for more than half of the class time (mind you, classes are four hours long here on average and my attention span holds for about 50 minutes or less). The other three classes I am still attempting to determine here. See, the unfortunate part of this experience is that I need to fulfill my technical and CS electives in order to graduate early next year and I have not had much luck in finding classes that map even partially to that which is taught at Cornell. The professors were mentioning bits and pieces of material that I have already covered in my core CS classes at Cornell, in short I was bored out of my mind. 

So, in light of this, I have decided to stick to courses which are programming specific and/or expand on a specialized area. There is a cryptography course at l'Ecole Normale Superieure that I am really interested in taking. I just hope that it's the right level and all that jazz. 

Well, I know I'm leaving you on an off-note here, but I have very many administrative details to attend to (namely, selecting courses).