Party, Police, Pot, Pancakes

Well I have definately had an interesting past two weeks, and surprisingly many of the things that happened start with a 'P'.

I will start with the first week:

That week I went to approx. 5 parties...

First I had another "Pancake," as they say in Britian or "Crepe (french thin pancake, you know probably) Party." I made crepes in my little room and alot of people from my appartament building came and ate them and left 5 extra chairs. Its becoming a bi-monthly deal. I found a good mix at a nearby store so we make them out of that, but my stove is not that warm, it takes quite a few minutes to make what should take a minute.

The next night the international relations office put on an "interntional party." And, being french, they gave us horrible directions, we went to the wrong place first, but we found it right after that. they had a live band for the first part of the night and then "party" music for the rest, they played really good songs. I was happy to hang out with friends and dance, but i really really REALLY wanted to jitter bug and salsa and no one knew how. One spanish girl thought she knew how to salsa, but not with a partner. I have a long list of friends to teach how the little bit of dance i know. then maybe i will have a blast at the next party dancing with everyone. i didn't get back home till like 4:30 because 3 of us decided to walk home while 4 went in the taxi. i didnt get to bed till 5 i think (that is so late, i usually go to bed at 12 ish).

so i litterally slept the next day away and on saturday we held a birthday party dinner in Vieux Lyon (Old Lyon-its beautiful at night) we went to an Italian place then got ice cream. (her birthday is actually on the 31, the same night as Meg's which i kept saying to my self but it jsut clicked! I forgot to say happy bday to Meg... !!!Happy B-Day Meg!!!) the ice cream came in 4 sizes Simple-one scoop, Double-2 scoops, I dont remember the name for 3 scoops and then American-4 scoops! I was a bit upset that the biggest amount of food was called "american". obviously some people think we eat alot in the US, as in we are pigs, over indulgers, gluttons. Well i agree, we do eat alot and i almost bought the 4 scoops just to be like "heck yea i can eat that all even after a large dinner!!!" but in the end i settled for 3. Lots of resturants like to use the word american to mean "large amount of food". After that we walked across a bridge, that you could make shake by jumping, to a place called the Cavern where they had the best guitar player i have ever heard and he did the little trumpet thingie with his mouth when he wanted "another instrument." Made me think of the Riley and Krysty. Then i went home early because i had to reach the metro and because the smoke was killing me in the low roofed Cavern...

The next day i went to a different church than usual. It was actually close to the lutheran one I have been going to but i took a different tram. I had to get up extra early. So i got there and waited an hour for the service to start... I thought " I dont know why they started an hour later today." I found out later that their real pastor has been very sick lately so i thought that was the reason, but it was not. They prayed alot it was basically a Sing/pray type deal for the first hour and by the time the sermon came around I was tired. Basically i slept through the whole sermon, it was long. Shame on me... then i found out they had a little Christian Book store next door so i went there and finally bought a book written by the person who runs the largest Church in the world, Yoogi Cho of South Korea. Very good book all about HS (really wanted it to figure out some stuff in my life, that book has been a good resource to seek a deeper relationship with Christ and to understand things better, and to follow Him better, and to ask Jess alot of questions... A very good thing, it's called Esprit Saint mon Associe' /Holy Spirit my Senior Partner in french) I also asked the workers if they had the book "Case for Christ" in french but they couldn't find it in their system!!!!!!! That book is exactly what these Intellectual French people need! It proves how reasonable the Christian faith is according to Historical methods, researched by an athiest who later became a Christian because of his conversations with the most knowledgeble people on the topics. If you haven't read that book yet go to www.amazon.com and buy a cheap used copy (by Lee Strobel). so i am very disapointed that we couldn't even find it in French, but it has to be so i will just keep looking i guess. After that the manager introduced me to the 2 new American Missionaries, we ate some middle eastern food and talked abit. We had fun finding our way to the "middle eastern" part of town. then i finally went home late in the afternoon. I found out later that day that the time had changed for fall!!! I finally understood why i was so early for church and why no one was at class on wed and thursday. HAHAHA They only way for me to get to class early is to believe that its the wrong hour. I made american pancakes for some Welsh friends that afternoon (that was another one of the "parties")


Monday was a pretty eventless day, i slept through my night chior class cuz i felt a touch sick and must have been tired from all the "partying" i had been doing.

Tuesday was the last party night, it being Halloween, I bought my birthday friend some chocolats wrapped it in X-mas paper and taped a singing santa candy tube to it. Yes in france they are actually so Americanized in their Christmasness that they had xmas stuff out B4 Halloween!!!! I wrote her a card saying "Fill in the Blank: -------- Birthday! Liv, From Clay. Answers A) Scary, B) Merry, C) Happy. (Answer C)." After that i went to a friend's of my friend Alice. We all dressed up. I was Cesar with a toga, sandals and a christmas wrapping paper/ leaf crown thing. I got some great pics while Alice and I were waiting for the pizza. We also played "answer repitidy questions" (as alice's friend called it-we basically answered quickly general knowledge questions that she asked in english.) there were 5 of us there 3 french, 1 canadian and I. After that I went home and stayed up to 5 figuring out train ticket stuff so i could start my first voyage in France.

Other things that happened were...

A few run-ins with the cops. The first happened a couple of weeks ago. First i was riding my bike down the narrow one lane road that every one rides their bikes down. A cop van was coming down the road infront of me so i decided to ride over to the left side so we could more easily pass. Well they just stopped me politely said that i was supposed to ride on the right side of the street, ok not a big deal, being the dumb american helped. The next time i had a less pleasant encounter with a cop. I was riding down the same road the saturday b4 all the parties that i had. I saw a cop car coming so i moved from the middle of the road to the right of the road. They stopped so i was like " what are they doing?" so i thought... oh they are letting me by. so i rode foreward, but as I did the cop driving turned the car towards the other parked cars blocking me off. So again i was like what the heck is he doing... And then I got it.. their was a parking spot behind him to my left and he was getting ready to back up into it. ( I being the absent minded professor that I am didnt realize that he, going to park, was doing it all wrong.) I also thought that it was a touch rude to not let me by, but then i realized that he wasn't backing up so OBVIOUSLY he was letting me pass on the left before he parked. so i turned my bike around and started to ride by the open passenger window And the cop driving completely lost it, he freaked out on me like I have never been freeked out on before. All that I could understand was that he wanted me to stop riding my bike and that he had something to say to me. now that i think about i am very glad that he had blocked himself in when he did the little block me off manuver. So yea he was not a happy camper, he was more of a crapy hamper if i might say (yes cole i do remember that from like forever ago, do you?) Once he stopped freaking out (my number one pet peve is people who get mad at me for no apparant reason (i guess i should expect it in all my flakyness, but i don't, its my pet peve (sp?) maybe this will be a turning point for that p.p.). And you would think that I being the "dumb american" that i could easily get by with it all. But no for some reason he thought i was French (I had jsut bought some fancy french looking pants recently and was wearing them... idk) and he let me have it. I couldn't get a word in I just had to wait till he was finished and then i gave my 'confused, i dont understand nor know how to express myself in this situation look' haha which I have used to tick off other french people ( once i brought a book back late to the library and i gave the look and said i didnt understand and the librarian at the desk left asking another librarian to take care of me... They must have had to deal with that alot that day...) but anyways once they found out i wasn't french(his 2 friends started to talk to me while our upset little french man cooled off) (i guess i could take that as a compliment) they asked me if i was english which i promptly said OUI to (woops i actually ment i spoke english not that i was english, i should have said no (non)) . and then his two other friends started to explain that i had done something wrong or illegal or what ever and that the rules were the same in england as they are in france. they said in french and english " y ou know the rules are the same in france as in english..." I told them that i was not english that i was american to which they responded... " the rules are the same in England as they are in France, make sure you follow them." So basically i have no clue what i did wrong and if i ever meet a cop again i will probably get introuble for it. I left the situation very shaken up and annoyed. Cultural misunderstanding in a very bad way.

The next strange thing that happend was that i encountered a person high on pot the campus court yard. At first it was interesting cuz i wasn't quite sure he was high, but then it just got down right sad. And again i was just my usual falkey (sp?) self so i took me a while to figure out what this guy's deal was. I had jsut finished talking to a friend (Daimen (spelled right?/From Vancouver Canada) about no one showing up for class when i started to walk away. Some guy did the little psit psit thing, called me over so i went to see what he wanted (he didn't look like a bum who would ask for money and he was already smoking so he didn't need a light (the most frequent reasons French people talk to me haha) so i was surprised) he started commenting on my red "Hermosa" shirt with the little surfer dude on it. he said in quite good english (after trying french and getting the a form of the "look" , i think) that he wanted to live the dream that the guy was living on my shirt. I was glad that he was complimenting me. What a nice french person... I looked at what he was smoking and kinda thought it could be something illegal, but it wasn't obvious because most people over here wrap their own cigarettes anyways. Then Harold (might be a psudoname because that's not really a french name, the french can't really say H's)told me to sit down and read something about communism and Heigels Dialectic (which i remembered from history yea!). he kept talking wierdly. he finally asked me if i wanted some of his "pot"... OF COURSE I REFUSED *taps foot with impatience...* So i was sure he was on something, and since he was so open about talking about stuff i decided to ask him a religious question. I asked him what he thought of God... and he only had the attention span of about a sentence, (its really sad now that i thing about it) and then i just kinda sat there with him going off about who knows what. It just got really wierd, he started flapping his legs and arms about and then i felt really sad for him and really embarassed to even be around him. Needless to say this situation went from an interesting situation to a very sad situation. I really feel bad for Harold. I found an excuse to leave, which was really hard, and prayed for him as i left. Another thing needless to say, dont let yourself be bound to anything like that, you loose your humanity.

The one good thing I got from this last situation was pity. I learned what God's pity was that day. Earlier, I read a reference to pity in an online devotional (yes Joel Osteen if you remember my story about him from my twenty till devotional, sorry inside joke, if you ask i'll explain it). It was one of those "oh that was nice" type of things. Then i encountered Harold as i left i really felt pity for him. I realized that he was like all of us humans. we are all sinners and we are helplessly "high" and unable to control ourselves and our sin nature. That night I was listeneing to my music and a song came on that mentioned Jesus' Pity. At that moment I realized that Jesus has that same pity for us that i had for the high guy. We are all helpless, stuck in our sin, But! God is not mad at us. GOD IS NOT MAD AT YOU OR I!! :) He sees us helplessly flailing about in our self made problems and he longs to help us out, to fix our problems. However we have to reach for his hand in effect saying that we really do need Him to save us from our sins. He is not ashamed to take our hand as i was ashamed to be around harold. The beautiful thing is that Jesus can help us immediately and eternally, if we just ask and turn to him recognizing the same horrible condition that all us humans are in. Reach for that hand! You won't be disapointed.
God Bless,
I Love You All!!
Clay