J'ai la bonne chance.

I suppose going to France is good luck in the first place if you like chocolate, coffee and wine. I've run into even more good luck than that, though, and not just because I "like everything," a charge [illegitimately] put upon me by my roommate freshman year.

I am happily living with a French family, which does include the temperaments of two teenagers, whose whining I can tune out due to the language barrier. My weekend has been full of little outings. On Friday night, I tried to go to a girly movie night with the British assistants, but couldn't find their house... cellphones are indeed an amenity. When I returned home, Katia and Jean-Marc invited me to a party across the street for Michel, who works at the school. We walked in the door and had to make our way through multiple rooms until we found the backyard which was tikied out with a cheesy seascape painted on the wall. Yes.

Something I'm learning: at French parties when anyone new joins the group they make the rounds, kissing both cheeks of everyone and introducing themselves. I'd consider myself a pretty physically intimate person, but my reaction to this custom makes me feel like a stiff American board. This is especially obvious when bisoux'd by teenagers, like my housemates, who at first were only nearing me out of grumpy submission to manners. But I'm getting better.

So at this birthday party, I was thinking about how the early ice-breaking kisses made it especially enjoyable and far from the awkward I-know-you-but-not-really parties I've frequented in Portland. Then the birthday boy magnified this thought by breaking out his guitar. He put his foot up on a chair, minstrel style, and sung catholic school songs that everyone seemed to know, and then a couple of French ones that had English bits thrown in, which they sang with lower, more dramatic voices: "And you will never forget me." Pausssseeee. Then he made everyone line up facing each other for a party game, yes a party game, and we danced and sang a little. And THEN someone put on a you-tube video and all 20 some people at the party did a dance for Michel in the living room. It was a line-dance sort of thing like the ones the cool kids in middle school learned at church camp (that's the only way I could explain why they knew them and I didn't).

Needless to say I slept in Saturday morning. And was then swept away to L'Ile de Ré, an island that is attached to La Rochelle by a long bridge. We spent all afternoon in and out of the water. I played soccer in the sand with the boys and played in the water with little Ana who went totally crazy for the waves. The kids are starting to warm up to me I think. Katia asks me if they bother me and I want to say no, in fact they are cute even when upset and their moods are really interesting to me, but I just say no, of course not, they are very polite!

Ana and Katia pose for me. Theo and Luna, who will adamanty NOT pose for me, have a conversation sitting side-by-side, via texts. For some inexplicable reason I still think it's cute.

Ana making a castle and the port of Sainte Martin, one of the villages on Ile de Ré. It's picaresque with the little carousel and the French flag flying high. 

As the sun went down we piled into Katia's friend's boyfriend's (....) apartment bordering the tiny port town Flottes (still on Ile de Ré). The friend, Axcelle, came in with bags of groceries and we snacked for an hour before the real guests arrived, far more posh than our barefoot and sandy selves. I picked the bones out of the fist and watched Ana exhaust herself cutting the fatty rims off two packages of Italian ham. We ate and drank well and I kissed everyone. Twice.

And when the evening came, the lighting rivaled even that of the late afternoon on the beach. This picture is from the window of Francois's bachelor flat.