Queuing Up

In the past few days I have spent at least an hour each day in a "queue" of some sort. Whether it's to pay for classes or register for certain events or even to ask a simple question, you must first establish yourself in the long snake of a line which often wraps around itself several, several times. I've never experienced anything quite like French bureaucracy, and I don't think anyone does it quite as well as the French. That being said, you do tend to make friends while in queues! It's become quite the social event here...
And of course classes! They started this week and I couldn't be happier. Classes only meet once a week for two hours, so it leaves a lot of time to discover Paris/do coursework. My drawing class was this morning and, given my stunning wealth of artistic talent, the first thing we were asked to do was to draw a portrait of a person sitting next to us. My prof said my drawing was very "stylized and actually quite funny!" :/ But! I did speak in French to my partner and the kids sitting next to us. I've found so far that French students are much nicer (or willing to make new friends?) than their American counterparts - e.g. as people walked into our drawing class this morning, almost everyone said "Bonjour" to the people already in the class and everyone else responded with a polite "Bonjour" back. And as we split into groups and started drawing, people just started talking to each other as if they were good friends already. C'était vraiment très genial.

P.S. Today I had the most delicious lunch (tartine au jambon) at a cafè called "Au Chai de L'abbaye." Google provides the following pictures as I forgot my camera:

Cafè!

One type of "Tartine au Jambon."