Flyin' the Colors on the Door (on the inside!)

  

rooftops 

literally and figuratively

Still in the dark. I called Madame Helleputte and she said to call the reggie. That's the property owner but we don't know who it is or what the number is. She said she would give us a call when SHE found the number. Meanwhile... we live with a minimum of electrical things turned on. Thank goodness the sun (what's that???) is out today. Paul took the day off because daughter arrives tonight after a fun week in Paris. The architecture students took a field trip to see Paris and Kate is making a side trip before going back to Rome. I hope she doesn't mind being in the dark.

a day at a friends house 

Sitting in the dark

The fun never ends. I spent the day yesterday in the suburbs with my French friend Armelle. (And, yeah, I had to speak French all day.) I took the Metro, then the bus out to her area and she picked me up at the bus stop. We went to the market, the bakery, and the mall. We fixed lunch and sat around and talked. Her daughter joined us during her lunch break. It was a really wonderful day. Paul picked me up after he finished with work.

I hadn’t fixed a dinner so we went out to eat. It was late when we entered the apartment and were greeted with the smell of electricity burning. I quickly unplugged the computer, the modem, and all the other doo-dads associated with my electronic communications headquarters and then we tried to diagnose the problem. No luck.

Well... every now and then we get ads in our mailbox for home repairs. I had 2 of them tucked in a drawer. Paul gave one of them a call. He told the answering machine of the problem and asked that they call us back. After an hour, no call came so we tried the second number. This time, Paul made sure that he told them to call back “tout de suite”. No call.

Today I waited patiently (in the dark) for the electrician to call. I had no computer, no TV, nothing electrical turned on. Around mid-afternoon I was going kinda stir crazy so I took off for the mall. I returned... never did I receive a call about the electrical problem. I finally turned the computer and phone back on. I decided I would fry happy.

no to the CPE

  

a day of protests and strikes in France

  

protesting the CPE in Lyon

  

no school today - kid across the street bangs a drum

  

It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World

or (subtitle) “the national sport of France”

Early today from my window, I started noticing lots of people walking in the direction away from the river. Mid morning I heard chaos from my window. The manifestation (protest parade) had arrived on the street below. The parade went on as far as the eye could see. There was lots of noise, chanting, singing, rapping... fireworks going off, horns blowing, and sign holding.

Karaoke trucks went by. These are flatbeds with a speaker system set up and the group in the back of the truck are leading the walking group in a song with lyrics to protest the CPE. I couldn’t tell you what they were saying, but I heard a lot of “liberte” and CPE (pronounced “say pay ay”) so they rhyme. I even heard a song set to the music of “Limbo Rock”!! Ah, you got to love the French.

each school has a sign you cant read

  

patriotic little old men take part

  

Communist party protests the CPE

  

and the Green Party participates

  

Yay! I saw the sun on Saturday!

  

Random thoughts

No fair just teasing us. The sun was out last Saturday. Today it is so rainy, a Gulf Coast kind of rain, a gulley washer, hair-washing rain. Check out our weather. I was so excited when we walked around the city on Saturday. It seemed as though there was a rebirth of sorts. Lots of people were out, the restaurants started putting chairs and tables outside, people started wearing colors again (not all black, gray and dark green). It has warmed up too. So last night was the first night in months that I slept with the window open. But I had forgotten how noisy it can be!

They took away the Green Monster. They have these big green barrels all over town where one can put empty glass bottles for recycling. One of these things will fill up in less than a week because the French are very serious about wine-drinking. Around the holidays, the barrel would fill and people would place their bottles on the ground around it. Amazing how many empty wine bottles there were. Well, on Monday of this week, a big truck pulled up outside my window and took away the Green Monster. Creatures of habit are still dumping their bottles on the street where the barrel used to be. What will I do now with my bottles?

Paul is studying for his driving test. France will accept a drivers license from a few select US states. Texas is not one of them so you have a year to drive with your old license while you attempt to get your French one. Everyone says that it’s a killer test. (Paul has been driving for nearly 40 years and has never had an accident.) So we borrowed the CDs “code de la route pour les nulls” (Driving Rules for Dummies) from one of our American friends who recently passed the test. I will keep you posted on the progress of this endeavor. Problem is, May 6th is when the year is up!

LSU will beat UCLA and I hope they aren’t cry-babies and go into denial as did USC when the LSU football team won the championship a few years back. A note to all my UCLA friends (one at last count): LSU will win. They showed the Florida/Villanova game on TV yesterday afternoon. This morning, they are again showing ‘March Madness’ . . . yeah, Florida/Villanova again. -

A tiny taste of Spring

  

Merde!

We were going to church this morning and as we were standing waiting for the Metro, Paul told me of an incident he witnessed in Paris last week. As he was passing the vending machine for tickets, he saw a man standing there trying to buy a ticket. As Paul went by him, he heard the man say (in English) “Ok Joe, what did you do wrong?” We chuckled about how being clueless has become a way of life for us.

We got on the metro and commented that there seemed to be more people riding today than usual. We got to church and something strange was going on. We were handed a paper that said “recollection”, whatever that is. OK, so we thought we would just wait it out to see what was happening. I suggested that maybe daylight savings had happened and we didn’t know it. Paul said, ‘no way’.

Finally, we decided that if we didn’t recognize what was happening after about an hour, we would call it “church” and leave. So... we left.

We noticed that the restaurants were opening early... we noticed more people were on the street... Uh oh.. Maybe IT IS an hour later. We walked through art/craft market and the crafty clocks said it was an hour later. Merde!! Encore!

Huere d’ete begins one week earlier here than in the states.

Yeah, clueless is a way of life.

Yooo Hoooo!!!! FINAL FOUR! 

celebrate and have fun 

where's the cat? 

Is this a joke?

Marie-Christiene is the lady in our apartment building who has been so kind to us. She was the first person to speak to me and welcome me to France. She’s awesome! She had a soiree (dinner party) a few weeks ago and we’ve been wanting to invite her to our place. Kate is coming home for a weekend visit during the first weekend of April so we decided to invite Marie-Christiene over for a meal and to meet Katherine on that Saturday.

We knocked on her door, she answered but was talking on the phone. She asked us to wait “un moment” while she finished her conversation but then suddenly the cat escaped and ran down the stairs. She then ran out to nab the cat. The door almost shut tight (and would lave locked Marie-Christiene out of her apartment) had I not stopped it! Her friend Jill was still on the phone that she had placed on the window ledge of the stairwell when M-C returned with her brother’s cat.

My American Au-Pair friend from French school’s theory that the French love dramatics came to mind!

OK, so finalment, we went inside and invited M-C to come dine with us on April 1. But she didn’t believe we were serious. She thought it was a joke.

In France, April 1 is a huge prank day, much bigger than in the US so she thought that asking her over was just a big prank. After we convinced her that we really did want her to come over, she checked her calendar and said OK!

I just hope her acceptance wasn't a prank.

Learn more here.

P.S. And how 'bout them Tigers? Sorry Texas, this one's for us.

yeah, i know, a little bit blurry 

back to the pub

We get hungry earlier than the restaurants want us to be. On Saturday, as we were walking around and started to get hungry, we began to look for a place to eat. It was almost 12 noon but nothing was open yet. So we ducked into an Irish pub (they are always open!) to fill our bellies with a beer. As we were sitting there, people started to come in for lunch and the guy at the table next to us ordered a hamburger and fries. Suddenly a "plat du jour" didn't sound so good. I wanted a hamburger with tons of freedoom fries!!

We both broke down and had a hamburger and it was SO good!! (Thank you St. James Pub)
Well, tonight we are going there again for our monthy dinner out with the Americans. Can't wait!

Buffett again:
I like mine with lettuce and tomato
Heinz 57 and french fried potatoes
Big kosher pickle and a cold draft beer
Well good God almighty which way do I steer?

the sky is white 

where is the sun?

Things are warming up a bit here. That's the good news. The bad news is that the sun is still nowhere to be seen. Check the weather for this week. Click here.

 

class reunion

Last night I was invited to I-ju’s for dinner. She is one of my school buddies. I don’t attend my French school anymore, and neither do any of the other guests who were at the dinner party, so it was a kind of “class reunion”. And what a fascinating night it was!

I ran into the Japanese couple (two former students who are now “together”) at the metro station and we rode together to the stop near I-ju’s place. They were pretty bad French students when we had class together and seems they haven’t improved much since then!

At the final metro destination, I-ju’s boyfriend met us and took us to their apartment. He spoke to me in English and I was a bit surprised since I was the only one among the Japanese crowd who knew English. So we followed him through narrow streets and up lots of stairs to the dinner party.

I-ju and her Taiwanese roommate were working hard to finish the cooking when we arrived. She prepared quite a spread with Sushi and Tofu and a few other things that I actually recognized. (like rice)

Our hostess speaks Japanese, English, (weak French) and Chinese so she could talk to everyone there. Her boyfriend is Taiwanese and speaks English and French. The conversations through the course of the evening were fascinating as we all tried to communicate. I brought my dictionary and someone else brought a pen and paper and (of course) all the Japanese had their little computer-thingys that tells you everything you could ever want to know about a word, its usage, its conjugation, and how to say it in 5 other languages.

The CPE manifestation (protests) are the topic of the day in France and were also the topic at our dinner party. Japanese, Taiwanese and Americans just don’t grasp the concept of this strike… I guess because we have a cultural “do your best… work real hard” mentality. The boyfriend is a student in a French university and his take on all of this is that the French are simply “self centered.” Interesting observation….

About halfway through the evening, the Japanese could no longer hold their cameras in their pockets and so we had the picture-taking session. It was lots of fun! Like a good American, I forgot my camera. Sorry… no pictures of this great event.

Trouble 

oh no

I got a voicemail message this morning from my friend Pat from Houston who was asking if the French violence was near us. I then decided to check the online news and was pretty surprised to see that the protest we were in the midst of yesterday did indeed turn violent.

The majority of the crowd had gathered in the main square and was making a lot of noise so we thought the marching was over. But along the path that we were planning to take home, there was another march. People were carrying red flags with a white crescent and we remarked that we thought it strange that they weren't the typical flags that others carried.

As the protesters approached the square, the crowd started whistling. Paul mentioned that whisting (in France) is a form of booing. I got kinda nervous and said "lets get the heck outta here ... I don't have a good feeling about this."

Good decision. Read here.

Kids protesting the CPE... do they know what it is?? 

never too young to start 

out and about today... among the crowds

The protest thing is still going strong here in France. We didn't know that we would be caught in the middle of it again as we went out for our weekly Saturday morning exploration walk. As we were crossing the bridge of the Rhone, I heard some young voices behind me. I turned around to see some young kids, maybe 7, 8 or 9 years old carrying their own signs to protest the jobs law. My thought... "Wow, they start these kids out pretty young... I wonder if this kid even knows what all the fuss is about!"

manefestation again!

  

sunbathing today

Today I sunbathed. If you think I sat on the beach in a bikini and covered myself in suntan oil, think again. It was -3C degrees yesterday... I haven't seen the sun in months.. so when it came peeking through my window, I grabbed a blanket and pillow and layed in the sun like a lazy cat. It felt SO GOOD!!!! To quote my favorite musician, Jimmy Buffett:

"I gotta go where it's WARM!

I gotta go where there ain't any snow
Where there ain't any blow
'Cause my fin sinks so low
I gotta go where it's warm"

the older crowd 

see the guys on top of the sign