We're in Paris!

Saturday, May 28, 2005

Katie, Krista, and Karen have sat around the Toronto airport for around six hours this afternoon, and you know what? There are worse things. Let’s play the “direct comparisons to U.S.” game, shall we? This morning in DFW, the lines were long, and I honestly can’t think of anything that was actually running efficiently. We arrived in Canada, where the clean, efficient, gorgeous airport struck my children full in the face. They’re so used to inefficiency that they actually find organization disorienting and noticeable. Or how about the rude Dallas check-in employee who barked rudely at the Korean lady in front of us in line? Contrast the multi-cultural Toronto, where the first few minutes after landing, we had already talked to a Filipina woman and a Bulgarian woman (we made a sale for Thom’s book, KING’S RANSOM,; the woman was impressed that we could converse about King Boris and the Bulgarian Jews during WWII). We played on these moving sidewalks forever. Canada has been a blast, but we are ready to get on the plane to Paris!!!!!!

Sunday, May 29, 2005
L’enfer, c’est les autres
Church in Paris was a wonderful experience for me—and an exercise in patience for the girls. After having slept pretty well, but for too short of a time, on the plane, we were feeling fairly well adjusted to the time change when Alexandre Cumming, Yann and Rita Opsitch’s friend, picked us up at the airport. We were only a little bit late for church, and I was pleasantly surprised to see how diverse the crowd gathered there was. About half the church is African, maybe 1/4 of the folks are white French people, and the other 1/4 are a wide variety of ex-Americans, Belgians, and visitors (a guy from Houston is working in Paris for a month, etc.). The singing was very good, and the communion service was as good as those at Minter Lane, which is the highest compliment I can pay. The man, originally from somewhere in French-speaking Africa, who spoke about communion gave a clear, thoughtful, 3-point sermon about the value and purpose of participating communally in God’s plan, and I understood nearly every word out of his mouth. Clear=good. Then followed three other folks who prayed over the bread, the wine (which I was surprised to see was unfermented grape juice), and the offering, of which I understood little (one guy might well have been speaking wookiee). We sang some more, and then the one who was preaching got up and spoke for far too long (and thus begins the slanderous, probably libelous portion of my blog for today, so don’t take anything I say seriously, since this man is probably the nicest, best person in the world). Anyway, his words were far less distinct and far too fast, and, as I began to tire of struggling to understand French and as I became drowzy, he began to take on a sinister appearance. Not clear =creepy bad guy. Here was a person who could have starred in pretty much every French film as the businessman who smiles at every one, laughs at his own jokes (I certainly didn’t, since I didn’t understand them, but I noticed that nobody else laughed either), but who secretly has a collection of little boys in his basement. The end of the sermon couldn’t come quickly enough for me!

Ria
Ria is Alexandre’s mother, and she is wonderful. The consummate hostess, she anticipates one’s needs before one ever could get around to having any. Katie and Krista were blown away by the house at Vaux sur Seine. It’s a four-story house; the girls’ favorite parts are the low-ceilinged attic that houses the toys and bedmats of Ria’s grandchildren and the lush garden, with its cherry, apple, apricot, and hazelnut trees that provide a restful outdoor eating experience. She feeds us, packs us lunches, and tries to give my girls money for souvenirs. We try to stop her, but she says, “Would you like to be here in this big house always alone? Me neither! I’m glad for your company.” How kind.


Foreign Language Jokes
Ria comes originally from The Hague, Netherlands (I incorrectly originally posted that she was from Belgium -- my apologies, Madame Ria!), and she has some accented words that are different from the French I learned in school (perhaps my experiences will form another blog someday). I have learned from her several alternate pronunciations of things that L’Ecole Francais wouldn’t like, but that I like very much; one such expression is her version of moi, aussi (me, too); Ria says MO-shee. She pronounces most v sounds with an f; thus, she says “faire la FEH-selle” for faire la vaiselle (wash the dishes). When she first moved here, she offended many people, she said, by saying “vous this” and “vous that”; but her pronunciation of FOO caused people to think she was always going around calling everyone crazy or fou. Which reminds me of a joke Ken told me last week from Russia, his “only joke in Russian,” he pointed out. It took him 45 minutes to log onto the computer to check e-mail, it took 10 minutes between every “click” to do anything, and he kept getting cut off from me on the telephone. When he mentioned these things to the students, they understood immediately, of course, the infrastructural problems that Russia has; they quipped, “Yes, we call it the inter-nyet!” 

Katie and the Place de la Concorde
There’s a sight gag in the movie French Kiss that has Meg Ryan continually missing seeing the Eiffel, even though it’s right there. For Katie, the scene would need to be modified to the Place de la Concorde. Tomorrow I will try my best for Katie to see its monuments. She slept in Alex’s car as he and his mother toured us around briefly on our way out to Vaux Sur Seine. Thus, she missed L’arc de triomphe, l’obelisque, the place where the guillotine was set up, and all the other cool things around there. Then, the next day, when we saw the Obelisque, etc. from the Bateaux Mouches, the touring boats that run up and down the Seine, even though Katie only fell asleep for five or ten minutes, she missed that part of Paris again!