First Exam Over! And other news...

Exam past:
My first exam has come and gone. It wasn't that hard. And, just like I have my philosophy for explaining to myself why I don't really study, I have a technique for making myself feel better about mistakes I know I made. Such as that one with the verb suffire: I don't even know how to conjugate that in the present tense. There's no reason for me to know it in the passé simple (a literary past tense) so I don't need to feel bad about not knowing that one. However, it turns out that for the other two possible errors I had (that I noticed), I guessed brilliantly. So overall I think I did fine on the exam.

Exams future:
I got most of my exam schedule.
- Comparative Linguistics: 8 a.m. (grumble) on January 10 at some far away place.
- Translation and English grammar (the grammar one is the exam that I have to take to get the full credit for translation, even though I've never been to one of the classes): 8 a.m. (grumble grumble) on January 15 in the same far away place.
- Introduction to Anthropology: 2:30 p.m. (yeah!) on January 16 in that same random far away place. I don't understand why they didn't schedule all the exams at the actual university.
Plus:
- Choir: there's not supposed to actually be an exam, but it says I have some sort of assignment for the evaluation. First I've heard of that.
- Translation from English to French: it also says there'll be an assignment, but I know that's code for "We haven't scheduled the exam yet so ask next week."
- Dutch: that one's next Monday. Lovely, having an exam on my birthday...
- General Linguistics: this is the interesting one. You see, the course is open to people in both the translation and the teaching French as a foreign language master degrees. They have to choose one course out of about four options. Most of them go to all of those classes, and then sign up for the exam they think they'll do best on, and therefore get that credit. Apparently I'm the only one signed up for the General Linguistics exam, which means that they can't really have an exam for me. So tomorrow I need to ask (beg?) my professor to do a paper instead on an exam, which would be easier on the system.

The good news is, I only really have to study for Linguistics and Anthropology.

And more news!! I got a nice form letter (it sounds like a form letter) from Air France apologizing for inconveniencing me, and with it was a gift certificate type thing for 60 Euros, which is a bit more than what I spent on the hotel. So I feel reimbursed. Not quite as nice as being given normal money that I could spend anywhere, but it'll do.

So to all my poor American friends with their exams actually before Christmas break, good luck to you.