/U/

Blog neglect! It's been a while - my camera's battery was low and somehow photos I took last weekend were not saved. I really liked the ones from my Saturday walk near the Champs Elysees - a Prada across the street from what I understood to be the president's house and a historic church that had some megaphone-looking speakers on top - possibly a broken bell?
A few highlights since the last post -
On Sunday, my host mother had some family friends over, which included a few adults and 3 siblings between 16 and 23. That was really fun to hear them all talking and follow the conversations because they speak far faster than my professors - real French!
Ever the nerd, I'm excited to get back good tests and papers, but my latest phonetics exam is the best - I got almost all of the hardest ones right, where we had to identify specific vowels and semi-vowels in sentences the professor read, scored 3 for 3 repeating a dictation, aaaand finally on the other speaking section - all we had to do was read a few sentences, but I got 1.75 out of 6 points! It's the damned vowel /u/. I can't say it. Carina has even been trying to help me when we speak together because she's noticed my struggle. This week we've moved on to nasal vowels, which are as awful as the name sounds.
Tuesday was my dad's birthday - I talked to him on the phone and bought a present he may or may not like.
Wednesday I celebrated 5 years of vegetarianism! I had forgotten about it but my plans to meet up with a friend from high school became a celebration of the date, and better yet, she's a vegetarian too. She's doing a program here through her school, Duke, and it was our first time meeting up since we got here. Crepes make for a great celebratory reunion.
Today is Carina's birthday - she's 20! We're the same age now!
And tomorrow, my parents get here and I'm sure I'll rectify this lack of photos problem.