Week I - a warm welcome by the kings of houilles

Houilles is a town in the suburbs of Paris. It is pronounced "ooy". How do you get from so many letters to a single, simple sound? Well, the French don't pronounce their H; OU makes a oo sound, like woo; ILL makes this glide sound, as in boy. And the final ES is not pronounced. Thus, "ooy" (or [uj]).

I stayed there my first week with Fred and Georges. It was a lovely apartment where I had my own room and my own bathroom. Fred is a teacher, but he doesn't start his season until October, so he was around a lot, and Georges is a French navy colonel. They delight in good food, a good drink, and baroque music. To welcome me they organized a special dinner. Fred cooked up some wonderful courses, they invited Delphine, another friend I've met in July, and we all enjoyed several hours of eating, drinking, conversation and music. It was truly a royal welcome.

Following that first day I spent most of my time looking for apartments. To take breaks I accompanied Fred to go shopping, or help him in the kitchen, meanwhile trying to pick up some french. It is amazing to listen, to hear all these phrases and expressions that you never learned from a textbook. It is also amazing to listen to them speak in english, using words like "obliged" instead of "had to", or "pirates" instead of "terrorists". It's perfectly comprehensible, just... different. Makes you think about how you use your language, why you pick certain words rather than others, what it would be like if you were using those other words, and how you must sound when you yourself speak a language that is foreign to you. I've come to think that no language is truly translatable. All the words, and how you use those words, are so deeply rooted in a culture, that to simply stamp an english word over a french word takes away all of its original flavor. I had asked Fred and Georges what "accueil" meant, and after a few minutes of debate and searching through the dictionaries Georges told me it's something between a reception desk or a welcome, but there's no good single english word that catches the meaning of it. I suppose that is the case more often than we realize.

I had joined two choirs that first week. The first was with Fred, Choeur de l'Orchestre Colonne directed by Francis Bardot. It's a fairly big choir, I think probably close to 120 people. They sing big choral works with the Orchestre Colonne: this fall they're singing Verdi Requiem, L'enfance du Christ by Berlioz, and a new work, De Profundis, by Hilarion Alfeyev (he's still alive). The last piece is in russian. It is amusing to hear the subtle differences in pronunciation between the French and the Americans :-). The second choir I went to with Delphine, it is called Manufacture Vocale, conducted by Aurore Tillac. It's a smaller group, about 30, that sings a very wide variety of rep, as their website puts it "from classical to less classical". They each only rehearse once a week (which I suppose is normal for most people), but I enjoy them both. It is good to sing again.

Towards the end of that first week I managed to find a place to rent, but before I moved out I was lucky enough to meet one of Fred's old friends, Veronica (they call her Vero). She lives in Switzerland, and she came to visit him for the weekend. Last year she went on a six month trip around half of the globe. She took her bike and drove all the way from Lausanne to Istanbul! Then she dropped the bike, and backpacked (walked, hitchhiked) to Pekin!! She took many, many pictures, organized them afterwards and created a book out of them that she gave out to her close friends (Fred being one of them). It was an incredible story, and looking through the book while she was right next to me felt almost like being with her, sharing her experiences, her wonder and satisfaction as she reached the next country after country. It reminded me a bit of the movie "The Motorcycle Diaries", about two Argentinian friends who take their motorcycle and go on a long trip around South America. Sparked many thoughts in my mind. I suppose I traveled a fair bit, but I still feel like an ant. There is so much world to see.

My last night in Houilles reminded me of the first: we had another special dinner. It started out with a ti'punch, followed by blended beets mixed with fresh cream, followed by a piece of steak with green beans and potatoes, followed by a salad, followed by assortment of cheeses, followed by a tasty yogurt-like desert, followed by coffee, followed by a "digestif", followed by an hour of listening to Lully's Atys (the favorite opera of Louis XIV). It was heaven! A truly royal farewell. :-)