Monday Musings, vol. i

Good morning from one of our local Starbucks!  K.J. and I have been trying to think of a way to schedule me some regular time on my own, and today is the first morning we're trying something new:  me popping out the door early.  I was a little afraid we wouldn't be able to find something open.  K.J. recently spent a morning on a ruthless search for a place open before 9 a.m. to buy milk.  Coffee, of course, is a different matter entirely to milk.  And I feel the need to reassure my mother that it was daylight when I left, and there were plenty of people around to make it safe to walk down the street.  

All the people out on the street are scurrying off to work, blues music is playing, and the soft murmur of two Frenchmen meeting for coffee is my background this morning.  

We had our second service at EIC Ternes yesterday.  There were about half the number of people there as we had last week, which is probably pretty normal considering last week was Easter Sunday, and we knew a lot of people were there from the mother church who wouldn't normally be there.  Since it was less crowded I was able to meet  someone who had visited last week and came again that I didn't meet before, which was good.  Hearing the stories of people from vastly different backgrounds than ourselves is a humbling thing.

We're enjoying watching the spring slowly arrive.  The leaves have finally come out of their buds in the trees on our street.  Everywhere there are trees the horizon is sporting that lime green color of new leaves.  The temperature reached 70 degrees yesterday.  I know how crazy this sounds to our fellow Alabamians, but that feels really hot to our bodies now.  Speed-walking to church and climbing stairs out of the Metro made us all feel a bit clammy, but then after church the sun disappeared and rain blew in, and it felt much cooler.  Layering is a springtime must.  And I think we'll actually really need a summertime wardrobe this year. 

I hope it's a good Monday and a good week wherever you are.  We have an appointment this week with a French government office regarding our visas, after which we will hopefully have all we need to rent our own apartment.  We shall see...French bureaucracy has been notorious for a long time.  Being part of a church filled with people from all over the world, we've heard a lot of stories, and it made me laugh when I came across this in a memoir by an American journalist living in Paris in the 1930s writing about his experience with the prefecture.

"...the nearest foreigner who chanced to

have asked for something he was forced

by law to have and could seldom obtain."

- The Last Time I Saw Paris, by Elliot Paul -