party animals... encore!

With no plans, parties, dinners, or other such invitations on the calendar, we were going to just hang out and nest on Saturday night. Since Paul had gotten home late from his business trip to Turin, we missed our Friday night pizza and so if we felt like going to get pizza, that would have been an option. But…. party animals that we are…. the phone rang around 3:00 on Saturday with an invitation for dinner that night. I find it so fascinating how “impromptu” everyone seems to be!

We were invited to the home of a friend of a friend… this gets complicated… my best-est friend Ginny has a friend who once lived in Lyon – she has lived all over the world, actually, but she had friends who still live here. She told them that we were here and she called to tell me that she gave her friends our phone number. So… friends of a friend of a friend called to invite us for dinner around 8:30.

Their home was in the same town where we have our other French friends, so the likelihood of getting lost again was a bit reduced. The only problem was that this home had no address, exactly… no house number. Just a street name. We didn’t quite understand how that worked until we got there and the house went on and on and on… all down this one street! OK… so we found it. Yay! And… we were on time!!

We were promptly introduced to everyone… and all French names that don’t sound familiar to my ears…. It’s REALLY hard to remember names when you have no frame of reference…. So like… you meet a new person name Joe, and it’s easy to remember NewJoe’s name because you probably know lots of Joes. But when you hear a French name and can barely re-pronounce it, much less try to spell it… well, remembering it is REALLY REALLY difficult.

So with our truly bad French, we found ourselves in the company of 6 gracious people of whom only 2.5 spoke English. We weren’t expecting them to talk English to us all night, but when invited, I did mention that maybe it’s too early to have us over for dinner when our French is lacking. Our host said, “No, if we don’t do it now, we will put it off and never have you over!” Well, it was a wonderful evening for us. They may have thought we were exceptionally boring since we didn’t do much speaking once they all got to speaking French at a rapid-fire pace.

We had a wonderful dinner and then we eventually said our goodbyes and headed back home. I’ve yet to write a Thank-you because I’ve debated a million times in my head whether to write it in very bad French or better English. Paul has a French tutoring lesson… he said he will ask his tutor to help him!