I sat through my first full French Catholic church service yesterday. Tt had his first communion, so we all went to a painfully long 2-hour service during which I was constantly distracted by T who cannot sit still for literally more than 30 seconds, and was only really interested in the cool white hat that the dude wore. I didn't blame him for being bored, only for being a child.
Afterward, we went to a restaurant in the "vrai compagne!" and had an exquisite 4-hour French meal of seemingly endless courses (mushroom & gravy pastry, fish something, meat ratatouille and mashed potatoes, then cheese, and then dessert!). I was sitting across from Frank (sounds like: Frahhhnk.), who is a deceptively serious-seeming man who liberally filled and re-filled my glass with wine, wine, wine and tried to convince all of the children (including his own 4 year old son, who clearly never listens to him) to steal olives from the kitchen and bring them to our table. His wife wasn't totally excited about it, and I discovered that The Host Mom doesn't drink alcohol.
Frank: Admit it -- you came to France to taste the wine!
Me: I never said otherwise
The Host Mom: Too bad, she came to the wrong house -- we don't even drink wine
Me: Oh, it's okay -- that's why I'm coming back next year.
Then everyone decided that next year I will find a man at the international pastry school in Yssingeaux, not far from Le Puy. Apparently my mission is no longer to learn French, but instead to meet men & taste all of the wine in this whole country. As you can imagine, I am not entirely opposed to this idea... :)
Afterward, we came back home and were met by a frantic neighbor speaking rapid-fire French and frantically gesturing towards the corner of the yard where a small geyser was supposedly errupting underneath the big flowering bush. A few hours later, there was a giant hole where the bus had previous been, deep enough to fit an entire Host Dad and neighbor Jean-Paul. I never was brave/stupid enough to actually go to the scene of distress, and instead watched from the window, but this is the story I was able to piece together:
While we were merrily eating and drinking ourselves ridiculous, the neighbor noticed a bunch of water flowing out from the yard onto the road. She did some amateur neighbor investigation and found the senseless geyser right at the corner of the yard, where her house and ours meet the road, almost completely hidden beneath the bush.
The Host Dad turned off the water and then he and Jean-Paul worked to rip out the bush and dig a hole, going in search of the broken pipe. Several hours of work and mud and curses later, a removed man-hole cover and exploration sous la terre to find the water meter led to a few key discoveries:
1. The geyser did not erupt yesterday; the sub-terranean water meter showed a stupifying volume equating to 10 YEARS worth of water usage for this family, ringing the water bill up to approximately 7,000 Euros. Using today's currency conversion rate, it would be equal to $9,938 US dollars.
2. Despite the urgency of the situation, the giant hole in the front yard, the grim faces and panicked voices of the desperate home owners, in France people (plumbers, in this case) do not work on Sundays. And when there is a holiday the following day, they certainly do not make exceptions. "We will come on Tuesday," they say, very honestly and unapologetically.
3. Jean-Paul is a genius. He is a neighbor who works in a factory doing something I don't understand, but who also knows how to find hidden water meters, dig massive holes, and repair broken water pipes. This man enabled us to stay chez nous until the professionals come tomorrow and do their jobs.
4. The Host Mom and Dad probably will not sleep again until they find a way to reconcile this problem of the water bill. At least they find humor in the situation, however; at lunch today, The Host Mom said, "Well, it's pasta and rice until we pay the facture. Or win the lottery."
I was surprised, most of all, to learn that she has lost a bit of her optimism about the situation. Yesterday, in speaking with the neighbors, The Host Mom discovered that 6 or 7 other people had similar problems. Originally, she thought that they would all band together in "solidarity" and back her up in fighting this enormous facture. However, today she said that no one else's bill was so high and that most people probably won't even care to help her. Apparently, in the law it says that people are responsible for personally regularly checking their water meters, and maybe this includes meters hidden beneath man-hole covers, several meters beneath the road.
In other news, I ran for 50 minutes today, have 29 days left of my sejour en France, have less than 100 pages left to read of my book and exactly 1.5 friends left in this town (0.5 of which is like sunshine in Scotland; if you are smart, you never count on it being there).
Mandy Moore has a new album out. It is quite crap.
I finally got the name & e-mail address of someone who MIGHT hopefully possibly be able to tell me if I will be returning in the fall or not.
I'm having a serious sense of "déjà vu" from the Holland Tulip Incident, involving the cruelty of pollen, the deceptive beauty of flowers and the sheer relentlessness of my immune system when there is an intersection of those things. I thought this had passed, but apparently it has also returned. This is Attack of the Pollen Part 2.
Histamines advance!
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