The First day of Classes

I feel like today was just like every other first day of classes: exciting up until the actual act of sitting in class then realizing it's not as fun as you'd thought. This june I'm taking two classes: French 4120: Le Midi, and French 3010. The first class (a 9:00AM ugh) is a special topics class, the topic of this one is the geographic and cultural region of Le Midi. A slight misnomer, the midi encompasses the south of France (save Basque) and has an accent, cuisine, climate, and general state of being much different than the north. This class should be somewhat like my maymester course on Le Pays Basque. Everyone is taking this 2hr30 class and it's with Dr. Bell (our UGA Prof). After a 2hr30 lunch break (in case you haven't already realized they take lunch VERY seriously in France) we go to our "french" class (3010). This is the one where we actually learn french. This is with an instructor from the foreign language school (Accent Francais), and we're split in half (9 and 9) with a TA in each. Before we got here we took a written placement test, and we took an oral exam the first day; based on our performance on those, they placed us in one of the two classes. From what I can tell I'm in the more advanced group, (take THAT guy in Toulouse) but it kinda scares me. From what I can gather I am definitely the youngest member of our group and I think I'm the least advanced in my French studies. In this class and the other class I'm a little worried about keeping pace with these other more seasoned students. The idea of a 6 page term paper in French by the end of the month really scares me. I'll yield to Coldplay on this one and say "no body said it was easy, but no one ever said it would be this hard." I guess I'll just have to put that much more into it (and hopefully get that much more out?) Anywhoo, the afternoon class meets Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. On Wednesday we go forth and conquer with the TAs (we go use French in the city). After June we start a completely different regiment; we'll get to that later.