20/184

The count: 20 days until Christmas break; 184 days until I go home. 2 months until my birthday.


I went to a Brunch aux Femmes last Saturday. It was a brunch for the women of the church that I attend and its daughter church. It was enjoyable to sit, eat some food and chat with others from the church. After we had eaten a bit, two of the women spoke about "les épreuves," the struggles/hardships that we go through in life. 
One of them made the point that we can't compare struggles. She said something to the effect of "One person failed an exam and is having a very hard time accepting that and seeing past it. Another person's spouse died and is beginning to live in the reality that they are alone. You can't classify the one struggle as worse than the other, because in the moment, they are both devastating." In the moment. 
One of them talked about the years when they thought that her daughter was going to die because she was very sick. She spoke about learning to take one day at a time, and how that is so incredibly important. She showed us a picture of her daughter now who has a son of her own and how precious that is. 
They each stressed that God gives us each grace to the measure of what we need. God acts and responds to each person individually, giving each what he or she needs to make it through.


We went to the Canadian bar again last weekend. We got to see our first bit of NHL hockey since being here. We couldn't stay long because we had to catch the metro to take us home and it only runs so long. Here's the problem: if a game starts at 7pm home time, it doesn't start here until 1am here. The metro stops running a little after 1am, except for Saturdays when it runs until a little after 2 pm. So we didn't to watch a whole game, not even a whole period (crazy North American television and running commercials every 2 minutes), but we got to see something, and it made us happy. The other two more so than me, I think, but that's okay. It was fun to watch them get all excited about it. :)


We started studying the passé simple in class this week. I know for a lot of you that means absolutely nothing. It's a grammar tense that I have never studied before. I have seen it, specifically in novels or other literary texts that I have read, but other than recognizing what it was, I never did anything else with it. Now I need to. It's a past tense, it takes the place of the passé composé in texts, and is not a compound form like the passé composé (p.c.)is. Basically this means that to say that "he was born" with the p.c. you write "il est né" and with the passé simple it is simply "il naquit." Anyway, it's a completely new bunch of conjugations and rules of usage that I need to try to understand. Not bad, just new.


We've been learning a lot about cathedrals in our history of art class. There are a lot of cathedrals in France. A very well-known cathedral happens to be Notre Dame de Paris, mainly because a) it's in Paris and b) Victor Hugo wrote about it (The Hunchback of Notre Dame). Fun/interesting/possibly mind-blowing or worldview-altering fact (I don't think it's that big, but it did take me by surprise): in the times when the cathedrals were actually built, they were painted. Yes, you read that correctly. Those beautiful stone buildings that everyone admires for their size, grandeur, pasty white-ish colouring, the stained glass and all those statues, were painted way back when. The cathedral in Amiens puts on a "light show" in the evenings. I don't know if it's all year, but they do it for at least part of the year. So cathedrals that look something like this today: http://chtivenol-photos.blogspot.com/2010/05/la-cathedrale-damiens_05.html used to look something like this: http://denimgenes.zipvelour.com/?p=205 or http://www.zphoto.fr/cathedrale_damiens_le_soir_photo403265.html. Fascinating, eh?


Thursday I got to help cook and eat an American Thanksgiving dinner in Paris. One of the ladies in my phonetics class is American but has been living in Paris for a number of years and she hosts a Thanksgiving dinner each year. It was enjoyable to be able to help cook a real dinner in a real kitchen, even if it's smaller than I am used to. It's Paris, space is at a premium. :) We had turkey, potatoes, beans, brussel sprouts (I didn't mind them, Dad!), squash, cranberry sauce made from fresh cranberries, pumpkin pie, and I made an apple crisp. It was a lot of fun to help make and we had fun with all the people who came out. Apple crisp is not common here, and pumpkin pie is very much a North American/Thanksgiving thing, so all the French people are always surprised by and a little bit wary of the pumpkin pie. However, they all very much enjoyed both. It was a good afternoon and night. 


Oh! We had snow here yesterday! Not a whole lot, at least not by our residence. I was sitting on my bed when I glanced out the window and saw some flakes floating down. I started freaking out a little bit because I was very excited and I scared one of my roommates. She thought something bad was happening. Nope, just snow. It was exciting. The good-sized flakes lasted for about 2 minutes tops in our little courtyard area. Not much, but it made me smile.


And now we're at a weekend again. The last weekend of November 2010. We are about a month away from 2011. Can you believe it? I have six more months here. At times that seems like a very long time yet. Other times when I look at my countdown I already start worrying about it not being long enough. So I'm going to work on making the best of these next 6 months, see what I can see, experience what I can and eat all the baguettes and viennoises and pain au chocolats that I can. ;)


Blessings on your weekend!


~Lynette