Not the trains

“We aren’t in Texas anymore.” was the first thing that came to my mind when Paul told me that his co-workers wanted to know my first impressions of France. Everything was different… obviously things looked different … but also the smells were different… and the most surprising thing of all was that the sounds were all so different. There was immediately a new language with strange voice inflections as well as words.

Just in the apartment, the floors creaked louder than I could have ever imagined on these hundred year-old hardwood planks. And when someone in the building turns on the water, the pipe just outside the kitchen window makes a loud water-rushing noise. There are delivery trucks and street-sweepers... and a very unusual sound is one of an opened water hydrant gushing water out onto the street to clean it. Here, the sirens sound different for both the police and the fire trucks – we have a fire station about 3 blocks away.

Every morning, pigeons are scrounging for food just outside the kitchen window. They coo a lot. I don’t quite know how food gets out onto the roof, but they seem to find something... or else they just like to hang out there.

But the most frightening sound of all is one that I have now gotten used to. During my first week here, I heard a really, really loud sound of breaking glass that lasted for about 5-10 seconds. It was so loud that it scared me as I rushed to my front window to see what was happening. To my surprise, the big green glass-recycling bin was being emptied into a dump truck and what I was hearing was the sound of thousands of glass bottles falling, and possibly breaking, as they fell into the truck. They come every Friday to empty it. I now look forward to their coming!

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