Spontaneous Adventures

This past weekend was all about family, as everyone came into town to see little Noha and his parents. Noha’s cousin, the three-year-old son of Laurie’s brother, was the darling of the house for the two days that he and his parents stayed here. However, they forgot to explain to him that not only was a stranger going to be present, but that that stranger was living in his grandparents’ house, and spoke differently from everyone else he had ever met. As he stared at me silently, I could practically see his mind trying to process the ideas that his parents and I were hastily trying to explain- “USA”, “other side of the world”, “differently language” and “staying in Tata Coralie’s old room” are a number of difficult ideas to assimilate all at once. However, once the initial shock wore off we had a grand old time for the rest of the weekend. Though I have to say that watching Alvin and the Chipmunks dubbed in French adds yet another bizarre layer to the auto-tuned pseudo reality already present in the film. As for the other aunts, uncles, and cousins I met this last weekend, I won’t even begin to try to explain it here. In fact by the third family visit, my host mom pulled an old album off the shelf to show me who belonged to who between her five siblings and their children. I think this Christmas I may get a taste of what it’s like for newcomers at my well-loved King Family reunions. (On the topic of family, thanks to Aunt Lisa and Uncle John for the package- it was a pleasure to see my host family try cheez-its, candy corn, and Reese’s peanutbutter cups for the first time!)

But since it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything, I have to continue my catch-up with the rest of the week. Let’s see…

I had a truly magnificent day yesterday (Tuesday). It started off by finding a fat letter from home on the table this morning before school, which as I discovered during English included clipping of the latest plot twists of my favorite comic strip back home. (For leisurely plot development and boldface statements, there’s nothing like good old Mark Trail). I then found when we got out of PE for lunch, that my French teacher was going to be absent today, which in the French system means I had no French class. My only other class wasn’t until 4:30, so when I ran into Dora (the exchange student from Iceland) and realized that she was in the same boat we decided to spend the afternoon out. We went to the Subway next to the school because it met the following three criteria: it’s fast, cheap, and better than McDonalds. While we eating, a friend in my class who was also there told me that my only other class that day, Earth Science, was also cancelled. So I was free for the rest of the day!

We thought about seeing a movie, but there were any that finished early enough for Dora to get back to class on time. So we walked into the downtown, which is not at all far from school, to enjoy the shopping of two girls who are equally impressed by French fashion and would like winter wardrobes which are not over equipped (being from Iceland) or under equipped (being from California).  It was also, however, the shopping of two girls who are very well aware of the unfortunate exchange rates and their teenage budgets.

After this, when I told Dora that I have not yet had a crêpe since arriving in France, that we decided to go on an adventurous crêpe-hunt. I had one memory of passing a crêpe stand at the bottom of a certain narrow staircase between two streets, located near the Gallo-Roman ramparts. While we had formerly felt extremely French and culturally sophisticated on our afternoon out, we quickly lost all credibility as being real French inhabitants, because we eventually stopped by the Cathedrale and office of tourism for a map. Armed with our maps and ready for crêpes we only got mildly lost as we made our way through the ramparts and up several streets (it turns out the ramparts weren’t anywhere near the staircase) before finally stumping upon the staircase. I’m sure that this staircase dates from at least the Middle Ages, because it’s quite a specimen. A flight and a half high, you enter the should-wide passage and find that by the time you spill out onto the cobble-street below it has widened to nearly four times the width. When we stumbled off of the stairs, we were pleased to find our quest successful and enjoyed the nutella-filled reward together on a bench.

As for today, there wasn’t a great deal out of the ordinary which happened. Though my ballet friends may be interested to know that during conditioning at rugby practice, someone commented on the ease at which I was able to hold an abdominal strengthening position. They laughed when I gave them the very true explanation: “It’s nothing next to ballet!” . People may think that rugby is an intense sport, but when it comes to strength building it doesn’t even compare to class at Hanneke’s!