How to Fix a Laptop in France

I've been in Paris for a week now, and so far things have been mostly great. I say mostly great because while almost everything has been going as smoothly as I could have wanted, my laptop decided to die the day after I arrived in Paris, and I had to take it into a shop to get repaired. I've never had to get any electronic device repaired before, but I always imagined that it would be a fairly straight forward procedure: you take the broken electronic to a shop, they fix it, you pay them for their services and you leave with a newly functioning device. Maybe this is how it works in Canada (although perhaps not), but certainly not here in Paris. The problem is fairly straightforward: my hard drive needed to be replaced, and Windows XP needed to be reinstalled; simple, no? I left my laptop at the repair shop on Monday, with the promise that it would be ready to be picked up on Tuesday, however, everyday since Tuesday I've been told that it would take another 24 hours for such and such a reason...finally, today the repairman PROMISED me that it will be ready tomorrow, but I'm definitely not holding my breath. Oh well,I'm not going to complain, because as I've said, otherwise everything has been great.

Orientation began on Monday, and I have two preparatory classes for the next two weeks in order to prepare international students for their studies at Sciences Po: methodology and French language classes. I won't bore you with the details of the classes, but suffice it to say that the Sciences Po methodology classes are pretty intense. I enrolled in my fall semester classes on Wednesday, which turned out to be a bit of a disaster, and I wound up having to take classes such as 'French Intellectuals in the Public Space', and 'Enjeux politiques'...while I'm sure that they'll be interesting enough, these are definitely not the classes I would have chosen.

There's really not too much to say right now (This post is going to have to be on the short side since I'm not working on my laptop , and the keys on this french keyboard are in all the wrong places!), however one last mildly exciting tidbit is that I saw the Pope's motorcade this afternoon! I was sitting with some classmates at a sidewalk cafe on St. Germain des Près (right up the street from Sciences Po) for an afternoon drink, when suddenly the streets were all blockaded, and dozens of police officers were prowling the streets, a helicopter was hovering up above, and then the motorcade zoomed right past us. We were blessed with the Pope's exhaust! No Popemobile today, just motorcyles and black cars with tinted windows. Apparently he's in town for the weekend, and is giving a huge speech at Les invalides tomorrow afternoon; a few of us are thinking of going to try to see him, if only for the experience, and to be able to say that we saw the Pope in Paris.