Bones!!!

Although class is starting to get insane (last week was Business Statistics and a ridiculous, expert-level Microsoft Excel crash course), I'm still having a blast over here, of course. Things are starting to mellow out a little, though, with the onset of some tough classes, group projects and assignments becoming due shortly. My French has gone absolutely nowhere, unfortunately, and in reality I don't see it improving much in the short time that I'm going to be over here. I hope to get a little time to work on it during one of our study weeks coming up this fall.
After the post-bar exam results celebration, I took it easy for a few days, then decided on Thursday that it would be a good idea to stay out until 6 in the morning on a school night with some friends from the American University of Paris. It was a good idea, of course, in some form, but class the next day was brutal. I ended up passing out at 9pm on Friday night after a school happy hour and missed whatever the class ended up doing that evening. Saturday was awesome, though - I went with an AUP friend to the Catacombs of Paris, which is by far the coolest tourist attraction I've seen in a very long time. The Catacombs were built about 250 years ago when a bunch of ancient cemeteries in downtown Paris started exhaling toxic fumes and causing death and disease all over the city; the French government called on the archbishop of Paris to exhume about 6 million skeletons and move them into a vast system of quarries which snake throughout the entire city 60 meters below street level. The end product is a dark, muddy tunnel that you can walk through whose walls are made of solid, arranged piles of real human skulls and femurs. You have to see it to believe it, as my pictures don't really do it any justice. After that, we headed to Ernest Hemingway's Latin Quarter apartment, checked out some quirky bookstores, walked around the Notre Dame and City Hall, then met a group of my classmates near the Bastille for drinks.
Sunday was homework and laundry day (20 bucks for 3 loads!!!) and I ended up meeting some of my group that night at a cool Canadian bar to watch the Eagles beat the Raiders. Today we began an Organizational Behavior class, taught by a hilarious Australian guy, and we were divided into small groups for a project about the herd mentality among prison guards in places like Abu Ghraib and Corcoran State Prison. My group is made of two Americans, a German, a guy from India and a girl from Taiwan, so it'll be interesting to see how everyone reacts to the readings, based on our different cultural backgrounds.
Thanks so much for all of the emails - I'll have more pictures up asap!