Bonjour, ma famille et mes amies

I'm writing from my friend Scott's house - a very old, stone French countryhouse, small but with three stories. My room is on the top floor; its door is so low I spent the first few days bumping my head. I would have written before now, but I was having trouble with the blog and also having to get used to a different keyboard. On the French keyboard, for example, both the comma and period are not where an American typist would expect; neither is "a" or "m" nor many more letters. So my typing is quite slow. I'm hoping to finish something before we leave for Geneva, which will be soon. I'm staying in the village of Epinay Sur Orge (the Orge is a river that flows into the Seine). The village may be small, but has two boulangeries and its own Post Office. I've already been to the boulangerie this morning for two long baguettes and a half-dozen croissants. Everyone you see in the morning is carrying a baguette, and in the afternoon baguettes are ever-present too. Alexandre, Scott's 14-year-old son, showed me the correct way, the "French way," to carry a baguette: horizontally and at your side.

Epinay is a twenty-minute ride by car to Paris; Epinay also has its own train station with trains going straight into Paris. I arrived at Charles De Gaulle Airport at around 1:00 pm (13:00 French time) and by 5:00 I was standing in front of Notre Dame. No building I have ever seen comes close to the massive size, majesty, or creative imagination of Notre Dame. The hundreds of gargoyles and the brooding bell tower, where Victor Hugo's hunchback lived, particularly held me rapt, thrilled even. Scott, his girlfriend Christine, and I were fortunate: there were no lines to enter the Cathedral, and so we easily got inside, where a Mass was in progress, spoken in French, of course, and with music. I vowed to go back by myself the next day, which I did, to stare again at this phenomenon. After Notre Dame, we walked the narrow cobblestone streets of the Left Bank for an hour or so (perhaps more to come later on the Left Bank) and then had a picnic of cheese and bread sitting on the bank of the Seine. I have to say that to be sitting there on the Seine, within sight of the Tour Eiffel, watching my first sunset in France, felt unreal and very real at the same time.

Before heading home, Scott took me on a night-time tour of Paris. We drove down the Champs-Elysée, around the Arc de Triomph, and got out at the Tour Eiffel all lit up in blue to commemorate France being President of the European Union at the moment. Normally, the Eiffel Tour is lit with golden lights at night like the rest of Paris. A still-yellow full moon was rising, big and glorious. I do not exaggerate.