Catching up

Good morning world. :) Only ten days left until I come home. It's a bittersweet feeling. On one hand, I have really grown to appreciate many aspects of European culture...and on the other hand, I'm ready to be with the ones I love (and not have to worry about getting stuck in a dark alley somewhere with no way home). Cars are a marvelous invention. Of course, if I were here for longer, I could really settle in and take care of things like that, but living as a half-tourist, half-resident can be quite a hassle. That said, I wouldn't trade my experiences for anything.

I think I've pretty much wrapped up my shopping (hehe, no pun intended). Tomorrow is my last real free day before the next whirlwind of travel begins. Tuesday, Kendra and I will set off for the Netherlands to visit Laura and Isabel until Sunday. :) I'm so excited! The Monday after we come home, we'll head to Nantes to spend some time with Clémence and her family, and then on Tuesday, we're setting off on an adventurous road trip in search of a little village called Mortagne-sur-Perche. My great-uncle has traced his ancestry back to this little town and asked if I could possibly find it and bring something back from there. I couldn't find any bus lines that could get us close enough, and then I had the brilliant idea of asking Clémence if we could make a road trip. That way, we can hang out and have some more good times together before I leave...AND I can find this village for my uncle Gene. Happiness all around. :) Wednesday, we'll be back in Nantes, heading for Paris to stay the night with Clémence's sister who is graciously opening her apartment to us to crash for the night. If we took the train to Paris the morning of the flight, we'd run a high risk of missing it. So...anyway, that's how the next week and a half should pan out if things go mostly according to plan, but life never does...so who knows?

I'm thinking about what I've done lately, now that school is out. Taking the ALP exam was a huge milestone...it was hanging over my head for so long. I hated it. But, nevertheless, I'm glad I took it because it definitely enriched my experience here. The exam was probably the strangest exam I've ever taken, though. Here's how it worked. First of all, I walked in, drew a card, and took a seat at the desk in the office to prepare my answer. My task was "Prepare a tourism itinerary for a group of 20 adults on an October afternoon based on the theme of 'medieval Angers.'" Hmm, ok -- most of historic Angers is medieval. :P It really wasn't as difficult as it could have been, because I had access to a collection of tourism brochures in front of me to prepare my presentation. After about 30 minutes, I walked into the jury room and sat down across the table from three judges and the older of my two professors, and then I presented my itinerary, responding to questions from them as I went along. This church here, that church there...you can see this art gallery that's housed in this abbey...that tower dates to blah blah blah...I was pretty nervous, so some of my French broke down, but I felt like I was able to show them that I knew the material. I didn't make it as far as the chateau, which I really wanted to mention, but they decided we need to move on. Hopefully that won't count against me too much. The next phase of the exam felt extremely risky, because I had to draw three cards at random from a selection of questions about Angers and Anjou. They could have been about anything or everything. :P Fortunately, I nailed all of them without having to stop to think. Praise the Lord. Then all three judges picked a letter of the alphabet and asked me to come up with something that started with their letter that was related to Angers/Anjou. M...Mauges.....F...Fontevraud.....B...Bateau, gabares...check, check, and check. Fortunately, they seemed quite satisfied with my explanations of each one, and I noticed that they were putting down checkmarks as they took notes -- that bodes well for me! After all of that, it still wasn't over, though. I still had to piece together a three-part model of a cathedral and give the terminology of certain parts of the architecture in both English and French before it was over. The results will be posted on the 8th (the same day I leave for Holland) - so I can check them when I get back. It's a little unnerving to know that my score will be posted on the wall for everyone to see! :P Anyway, whether I passed or not, I'm thankful to have had the chance to take the class. I'll get a certificate either way, and if I passed, I'll have a tourism diploma of some kind. That could be useful in the future.

Anyway, after the ALP exam was out of the way, I spent Saturday at the beach with the young adults group from church. Well...I say that we spent the day at the beach, but that gives the wrong impression. We stepped off the train in Le Pouliguen in Bretagne into the cold, the drizzle, and the blustery wind, and we thought about climbing back on a train to go back! And, of course, I had picked *that* day to wear my new shorts, since it had been so much warmer the day before. :P We decided to make the most of it and found shelter under the awning of a closed restaurant on the beach, and when it stopped raining, most of us braved the chilliness to play some soccer in the sand and take a walk down to the edge of the sea. Our picnic was rather "n'importe quoi" (whatever, anything, and everything), kind of like us, and we had a blast. We walked around the beach for a while after lunch, ate homemade brownies to celebrate a birthday, and laughed hysterically as Stephane tormented Yolande with the soccer ball. (She gives the perfect reaction every time.) Then on our way back through town, we were passed by a string of cars honking to celebrate a marriage. That's one tradition I love here. If someone gets married, they have a procession through town and you can honk all you want. :) We celebrated with them and then headed back to the train station. Unfortunately, it started raining again as we headed back, and no one could really remember *exactly* which direction the train station was.....and we only had ten minutes to get there. I think we made it with about 2 or 3 minutes to spare because Yannez picked the right direction. Yay, Yannez! We were all so tired...and my hot shower that night felt SO good.

Oh, and church the next day was so wonderful! We had great conversations over lunch about our experiences here, French wedding dinners that last until breakfast, and even international politics. Wei Wei got her first Chinese Bible, too. :) And then we had to say our goodbyes (the not so wonderful part). :( I don't like goodbyes. I had to say goodbye to Magdalena, then Yumi, and Gaelle this past week, as well, and then we had our farewell dinner at Stephane and Véro's place. That was one of the BEST parties we've had here. I don't think I've laughed that hard in a long time. Half of us had tears in our eyes from laughing, and my stomach was sore. (the best kind of soreness, for sure) Léon tried to explain a strange Chinese game, we all broke out into Sunday school songs from our childhood (like "I am a C-H-R-I-S-T-I-A-N and Father Abraham), and Stephane tried to poison me and Kendra with tea from his mother. (No one likes it, so they try to get rid of it when company comes...and then Yannez started reading the box, and it was "best consumed by October 2008.") :P The taco soup and apple pie that Kendra and I made together were huge hits, too, which made me happy. All the other dishes I've tried to make for picnics have turned out a little strange because the ingredients aren't quite the same here, but these two were pretty simple -- and it gave them a taste of what my momma's cooking is like. Now they all want to come home with me. :) Seriously, I really do want them all to come visit, however unlikely that might be. (With God all things are possible!!!) At least they want me to come back here, too, and do ministry! (and play with Stephane and Véro's new baby when it arrives in October!) :) They said that the west of France is one of the most needy areas when it comes to missions. Heh, wonder why God sent me here. 0_o

Oh yeah, btw, in the middle of all the other things I was trying to do last week, Joselyne informed me that it was urgent that I defrost my refrigerator. I didn't have time the next day, and I asked her if I could just wait until I moved out, since it would only be two weeks. She adamantly insisted that it couldn't wait. :P I didn't have time to take care of it the next day, and when I got home that evening, she had left a note for me on the table saying, "If you would please defrost the fridge *tomorrow*." *sigh* Alright, so I did...but I couldn't stay and watch it all day. I knew all that water was going to have to go somewhere, so I tried to catch what I could with the plastic trays inside, but there was still a little water on the rug when I got home. It wasn't a big problem though, fortunately, because I would have hated to have done something accidentally to these wood floors. That's the last thing I want to deal with right now. Anyway, getting all the water to my window to dump it out was a bit of an ordeal...you know, draining the tray into a plastic wash basin, climbing onto my desk, pouring it down the roof into the gutter...that's just what I thought I'd be doing last week. :P What a house I live in. (Oh, btw, Wei Wei said that Joselyne explained away the "stair stains" episodes by saying that she had had something to drink. Evidently! lol Makes me feel better about her sanity.)

Oh hey, I watched a movie in French last weekend: l'Arnacoeur. And I understood most of it! :) I was so happy. Yolande had to explain a few things that were mumbled in the movie, but for the most part, I knew exactly what was going on. And, it was actually a pretty good movie; I wish it was available in English. As it is, I could watch it with my buddies at home, but they wouldn't get anything out of it. lol Darn this cross-cultural thing.

Kendra and I wrapped up school details with the head of study abroad last week. We ended up talking to her for a while, and she related some of her impressions of the U.S. from her visits. She absolutely loved San Francisco (that's the city that all the French talk about for some reason), but she hated Atlanta and didn't want to ever go back, just because of a random racist comment from someone in the airport. Evidently, she noticed that most of the cleaning and runway employees were black, and when she asked a black man where to find something in the airport, a white middle-aged woman rushed over, took her by the arm, and assured her that "he wouldn't know." Granted, she might have indeed asked a homeless man, but in general, I can see how she would get an unfavorable impression. That was 20 years ago, too, so she admitted that it may have improved since then. They have a much different perspective on black/white racism here in France, so I think that *any* sign of it, however small, is really striking to them. However, they have their own problems when it comes to the Arab/North African population, so it seems pretty hypocritical to me. Oh well, we all have our prejudices and blind spots.

Even though I think that French people are a bit obsessed with appearance, I do think she did hit the nail on the head when she started talking about the obesity problem she witnessed, though. She went to Las Vegas and saw an obese man in a wheelchair, pushing buttons on a slot machine, with a straw stuck in his mouth, drinking Coke out of a supersized cup with a straw. She thought he was handicapped, but then she saw him move his motorized wheelchair to the bathroom and get out of it. She realized that he was only in a wheelchair because of his size, and he was just conserving his joints. She's right; that doesn't happen here in Europe. I haven't seen one single person in that condition. They do have a mentality that values self-care. It's certainly a healthy mentality. I wish it would catch on in the US, but we're so busy in our rush to go nowhere that we don't think we have enough time to think about it. If only we would STOP and realize that our striving to be busy all the time isn't getting us anywhere, and to top it all off, it's making the journey to nowhere absolutely miserable. :P

She also started talking about the difficulties of travel nowadays, with all the restrictions and paperwork brought on by terror threats. After 9/11, the U.S. become more or less paranoid, a mindset which is reflected in all of our rules and regulations. We noticed that the French and Europeans in general don't seem quite as obsessed with security measures as we are. She agreed, and contrasted our attitude to theirs by reminding us that Europe has already been through so many wars and tragedies on its own soil that they've just adopted an attitude of fatalism. What happens, happens. Rules and regulations just make life difficult, and they don't prevent determined people from committing crimes. If anything, they can accelerate the adaptation and evolution of terror techniques. Makes sense to me. The longer I'm here, the more I realize that America's youth is really quite evident to the European world. They tend to view her as the kid sister. :P

Anyway, I've rambled on about anything and everything for quite some time now. I wouldn't blame you if you read this in installments. :P I just got burned out on processing things these past few weeks, so I guess I'm catching up. There's just too much to process after it's been building up for 5 months, at least for someone like me. I'll talk about my trip to Normandy and the D-Day beaches later. :)