the invitation

It was probably during the second week that I was here that I met a really nice lady in our apartment building. She was so nice and welcomed me to the neighborhood. She even spoke English when I told her that my French was pretty bad. I later discovered that she was the ONLY person who was kind enough to take the time to really talk to me, other than just a friendly “hello.” We didn’t know where exactly that she lived in the building, but we saw her often and chatted with her a bit.

Just after the Christmas holidays, she showed up at our door one night and invited us to dinner and asked if we had plans for Feb. 11. Six weeks away... Non! So we marked our calendars without a clue as to when to arrive or where to go.

The big day was approaching and I was expecting her to come by and give us the details – maybe on the weekend before the big event. But we never saw her. We were getting worried that maybe something had come up and the plans were cancelled. She did finally come by on Thursday night and tell us to show up around 8 and that she lived on the 3rd floor. Paul said d’accord, (OK) see you then.

Then we started to become puzzled. We live one floor up from the street. We would call that the 2nd floor but over here it’s le premier etage (first floor). But the problem is, when you get into the elevator and you press floor 1, you end up on the floor above us. Seems we live on the mezzanine floor. OK, with all the confusion, where does our hostess actually live? Thank goodness Paul ran into her on Friday and, being a stupid American, asked exactly which floor is the third floor. She laughed and pointed to the list of call buttons at the inner entrance door where her name was listed (which was also nice because we didn’t know her name.) Yeah, in the elevator, you would press 3, but from our place, you go up the stairs for 3 flights. In American terms it’s the 5th floor (go figure!).