An American Girl in Avignon

April 5th (jour 13)
Okay, so it turns out that Paul had no idea when his parents were returning today. French people really need to keep more food in their pantries. Kristina and I had bread, cereal, yogurt, and fruit today…because there was nothing else to eat in the house. Remember that we were supposed to have at least four meals provided for us this weekend. We would have just gone out to a café and bought something, but since it’s Palm Sunday, more cafes were closed than usual and we didn’t have the money to spend. Getting a little grumpy and hungry, I asked Paul, our host “brother,” if there was anything we could fix ourselves for lunch. He just sat on the couch, watched TV, and told us to eat whatever we could find. Umm…okay. At least he made coffee this morning, or I would have been really, really grumpy.

Now usually I am pretty easy going about stuff like this, but our money has been spent already on food we weren’t getting. Not cool. I think the reason that Paul was just sitting on the couch this morning was because our loud friends had frightened him last night. I really don’t know, and part of me doesn’t blame him. Plotting our escape, Kristina and I schemed to show up on Danielle’s doorstep, the home of Kyle and Adam, begging for dinner and claiming abandonment. Hey, I could totally deal with her cutting my food for me if we got a decent dinner out of it (she frequently cuts Adam and Kyle’s food for them…so adorable and funny!).

Kristina and I sat outside on the patio, staring at the wall, bored out of our minds. While everyone else was having a picnic, we had to stay at the house and wait for our family to get home…whenever that may be. Thankfully, we had huge bottles of water to drink while we waited for them to get home. Bottled water is so cheap here! To keep ourselves entertained as the beautiful church bells tolled in the background…which reminded me of how much I would like to go to a French church, we flipped through Adam’s Lonely Planet French phrasebook to amuse ourselves. Some of the stuff in there was absolutely ridiculous. There was a whole romance section on how to say sexual phrases (remember we are in France, and there are condom dispensers on some street corners….I am not kidding!)…hmm, and one would use this section to say all these things to someone whose language they don’t speak. Perverts. Where are morals nowadays? By the way, sorry to be crude and childish (and kind of go against what I just said, but…), look up the f-word in French on word reference.com; the example sentences are laugh-out-loud hysterical. Good for it you need a laugh.

Just when Kristina and I were going to say forget it and wander the streets of Avignon to find an open café, the family returned! Hallelujah! I feel like I am walking on eggshells here, because neither of us knows how to act around them. I have a pile of dirty laundry upstairs that the mom is going to show me how to do tomorrow evening, but as silly as it sounds, it took me awhile to get up the nerve to ask if she could teach me. Weird, but when one doesn’t know the cultural norms, things that you normally would have no problem asking to do in an American home are treated a little differently when you are out of your element.

The family played some strange Moroccan show tune music and danced and sang around the kitchen cheerfully as they arranged a vase of colorful flowers they had brought back from their country home. It was really entertaining, and even though I found their behavior a little strange (and almost smirkable), I reasoned that it must be the spring weather getting to them. Yet, I really enjoyed seeing the seemingly straight-laced family loosed-up and enjoying themselves. They are beginning to grow on me.

Thankfully, the dinner tonight, although really late, was excellent, and made up for our lack of anything descent that day. It was awkward though, because the family never said anything about what we ate when they were gone…or explained why they left or why they didn’t tell us. I found that a little fishy. Maybe they did tell us they were leaving, and we just didn’t understand. They don’t seem like the type of people who would leave us out in the cold to fend for ourselves, because they are a genuinely nice family, and I know that although things are really awkward at times, they mean well…and I like them a lot. En tous, today was an odd day, but you’ll have those. It just means that tomorrow will be better.