One good thing that's come out of having to type up the Contact Details of Alliance students is that I have found weirder names than mine.

Hahaha.




Edit: Someone is named Juno! Haha. How amusing. :D

Last week, I finally tasted ratatouille.

It was sour. X[

Bloody and tomatoey and errr okay maybe there were rats.

Tonight there is a Charlie Co painting exhibit and I don't know if I'll attend. Hm. I consider consider consider. I see the paintings now, and I like the one with the blue people. They look like a clan of Nightcrawlers wearing neckties. There is also a piece where there is a man riding a crow, and another with an effeminate man with blue wings.


We be bored-ing, and my fingers smell like newspaper from organizing the archives.

I ♥ browsing the BeauxArts magazines here. That is all I did this morning. Glee.

Of all the places they could have put me in, they dumped me in the library.

OH MY LORDY I GLORVE MY JOB. ^-^


For the first day of our Practicum/OJT at Alliance Française de Manille (AFM - French school/cultural center in Makati), Carmel and I were tasked to organize the books in their library. Alphabetize, which turned out to be by author. I glee. Haha. The person responsible for the two of us hadn't exactly thought of something we could do that day, and the director of Alliance actually just told us to hang around. He even said we could make use of the free Internet in the library, which we did eventually. Hahaha.

Carmel has never seen me so giddy, since it was the fiction section that we first reorganized. I ran my fingers through the age-old dust particles that enveloped every book and squeed every time I saw a title I was familiar with. It was like the dust was their protective cover - yes, quite a thick layer - and now this gray shield has been marked with our fingerprints, just as it marked the space under our fingernails. Carmel and I had to douse our hands with rubbing alcohol after every couple of bookshelves.

The library was well-stocked with French literature, and I couldn't help listing down some of the authors I saw there. Their works were in French, of course, and it was gratifying to see some books by Beauvoir, Camus and Sartre in their original text. Haha. It was also a plus to be able to understand their titles! There were also about three rows for Honores de Balzac, half a shelf for Alexandre Dumas, Marguerite Duras, about two rows for Guy de Maupassant, a few books by Gustave Flaubert, Victor Hugo, Rimbaud, four whole shelves for Jules Verne, some works by Moliere, Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie, Kawabata, Nabokov, Arundhati Roy, and it was all so much glorve. In French!

I was so amused that I listed some of the titles in French. See if you can guess their English counterparts and their authors (oh these are easy):

- "Balzac et la Petite Tailleuse chinoise"
- "L'homme Invisible"
- "Le Portrait de Dorian Gray"
- "En attendant Godot"
- "Gens de Dublin"
- "L'insoutenable légèreté de l'être"
- "Sur la route"
- "Les aventures d'Arthur Gordon Pym"
- "Les enfants de minuit"
- "Le Seigneur des Anneaux : La Communauté de L'Anneau"
- "Les Villes Invisibles"
- "Le Pendule de Foucault"

Hahaha. Carmel and I also wandered over to their children's books section for fun. I spotted hardbound comics for The Adventures of Tintin, The Smurfs (Les Stroumpfs!), and Asterix. There were also French versions of Disney storybooks and Paddington Bear. Haha. We also applied for library cards/membership, so we can bring home some books. I'm planning on borrowing the english works of Balzac, since I don't think I'll understand every bit of French there. The first time the director talked to us in French, my brain went numb. I kept nodding. (O_O)

During our lunch break, we planned to go out because we knew the food there really strangles the wallet. But then we were invited by some of the staff to join them in the cafe, and it turns out we get free lunch because we work there. Hahaha.

Alliance's first major event for the French Spring Festival is the Dèguste, a Culinary Arts exhibit that will be held in the Ayala Museum on Thursday. We're required to go, and yes, I'm actually excited. Haha. I think it's free of charge so anyone can go, and you get to eat art. They have cakes on people's hands and you can just take them and nom nom nom.

And on an even happier note, our mentor just said we passed thesis. Final submission tomorrow okay. :)

And once again, because I don't think this giddy time will last so I shall just say it, the Untwin-twin kuneho has shared the glee as well. HOORAY.