The next day I went by the Alliance Francaise because I was interested in taking a French class. My hope was that I could find something that met an hour or two per day either every day for a week, or every other day for two weeks. What I found was a class that met for four hours per day, five days per week. So, of course, I signed up for two weeks!?!
I entered a beginners class which had begun the week before I arrived. Since I had taken some classes back in St. Louis, I was at about the same place. My class was an interesting mix. There were a few of other Americans, but also people from New Zealand, The Philippines, Croatia, Brazil and Poland. Everyone spoke at least passable English, and most spoke excellent English (and they confessed that learning English, and Italian for that matter, was much easier than learning French; whew, I thought I was just slow). But, the class was taught completely in French, so we were all learning together. We had two teachers; one who taught the first 2.5 hours and a second who taught the final 1.5 hours. Fortunately, my biggest worry of just getting exhausted by four hours of class time was averted because the teachers were both excellent; high-energy and engaging to keep the 4 hours from becoming too laborious.