5 July-9 July

5 juillet

This morning I was at the manier and made some phone calls to people to see how they were doing.  These old people are already pretty deaf, and then when you throw in my accent it is sometimes difficult for them to understand me...Veronique helped me out when I had trouble.  The benevole Danielle came in to do some phone call visits too.  She has the cutest little black dog that I love to play with.  Veronique and Danielle started talking about their kids which was quite amusing.  Veronique talked about her 14 year old twins and she gets so exasperated with them because they never make their beds in the morning and sleep in until 11 every day this summer.  She says that they just get up and then are on the computer all day skyping or facebooking their friends. 

I am loving taking the tram or the bus a lot more than taking the metro these days.  It is so much nicer to just stay above ground and see the city as I go.  It also avoids all of the going up and down that is required with the metro.  For lunch I had a interesting mix of things on my sandwich—salmon, mozzarella, and tomato—it was actually super good.  That afternoon I met Marzia who will be my work partner for the next month.  She is really nice and super smiley and so I think we’ll be able to get along well.  She is from Rome but goes to school in Spain!  She is very good at her French as well.  qSo many languages, it blows my mind. 

I got done with work at 3:30 which seemed like a gift!  I watched the movie Marie Antoinette—the newish one with Kirsten Dunst.  I remember that when I watched it years ago, I didn’t really like it but decided to give it another chance since it’s been recommended to be several times and since I visited Versailles and the Petit Trianon in May.  I don’t know if I would explicitly recommend the movie…but I did like it a lot more than I thought it would.  The coolest part of watching it was knowing exactly where that room in Versailles was or where a certain area was located in the gardens on the Petit Trianon. 

That night we had soirée familiale (FHE).  Jared taught the lesson and talked about having goals and saving money to attain those goals.  He talked about how attaining these goals and dreams takes money and attaining these goals is important than buying a new pair of shoes or than bonbons (candy).  Jared talked about how he has had a job since he was 14 when he started working at a pet store and then later worked at a vet clinic.  He paid for his whole mission and is really good at saving money.  This subject is something that Elder et Soeur Rutman are concerned about with the JAs because they feel like a lot of them are just hanging out in life and not really progressing towards anything by going to school and such.  Whenever Jared speaks in French, he puts on more of a missionary personality that is more serious and formal.  But when he speaks English, he is goofy and hardly ever serious. 

For the game that night, we played Pictionary!  We used the chalk board for all of the drawings.  When it was my turn to draw, I was afraid I wouldn’t know the words, but I ended up knowing all of the words on the first card and about half of the words on the card that I got when I went up the next time around.  I had one of the JAs explain in French to me what the words that I didn’t know meant.  In guessing the words, sometimes Jared and I would yell out the word in English because we didn’t know the word for the object in French…if the people in the room didn’t know that English word then we got ignored and just waited until someone guessed the French word.  It was a good way to learn some random vocabulary words such as bark, lock, knight, next, swan, dice, and lily pad.  Soeur Rutman made a delicious fruit pizza where the crust was a sugar cookie with cream cheese frosting and then nutella on top of the fruit.  The JAs had never had anything like it so I guess it is an Americanish dish.  I found out that apparently they have EFYs in France as one of the JAs is a counselor at them.  I talked to some of the amis (investigators) that were there about French and Italian movies.  This one guy whose name I don’t remember told me about how he loves American western movies like gone with the wind (which is not a western…but I guess they ride horses and stuff in it so it seems like it to him).  We also talked about spaghetti westerns which is an Italian genre of film that I studied in my cinema class that are Italian attempts at making western movies…they tend to occur in Spain or Italy and often would use American actors.  Not that I needed another one, but I had another awkward bise experience.  There is this really tall JA named Robin (like Robin Hood he told me) and he came to bise as he was leaving because you bise everyone when you arrive and again when you leave.  So we did the first cheek and then on the second cheek I guess I didn’t stand on my tiptoes as much or something, because I completely missed his face and just was in the air below him.  It was an awkward half a second and then he bent down farther and we succeeded in touching cheeks…..ahhhhhhhh I will not miss these bises.      

So French people keep adding me on facebook…and since I don’t always remember all of the names of the JAs, I am assuming that it is them adding me…hopefully.  After FHE, Stephanie and I stayed and used the internet and talked and laughed with Jared and Elder and Soeur Rutman.

Still everyday, whenever I introduce myself to someone, they say oh Melissa like that song by Julien Clerc!  And they start singing and I just say oh really that’s cool like I haven’t been told it 20 times before.  Either they talk about the song or they say oh Melissa like the girls in little house on the prairie!

6 juillet

Today was a loooong but good day.  All three of us BYU interns had to be at the manier at 9h30 so we met up and went over together.  We read our horoscopes from the paper on the way.  I was destined to have a day where I would have to make up for all of my laziness in the past few days…hmm.  At the manier, we were having a sort of summer volunteer orientation/welcome session since most of the other interns are here now.  There are 4 girls that came from the same university in Spain and then there is a French girl from Marseille.  They had some fruit and bread for us to eat then everyone went around and introduced themselves.  Jared cracks me up because it speaks French really fluidly and with hardly any accent and so the French women just melt and sigh whenever he starts speaking because they are so impressed with how good he speaks and can’t believe he’s not French.  Haha…if I ever need anything, I’ll just have him ask for me and he’d for sure get it.  We played a little jeu de société (board game) with fake scenarios where we would have to say what we would do in that situation.  For instance, if you were doing a visit and the elderly person asked you to go get some money from their wallet then go buy some bread and the bakery downstairs, would it be okay to do that?  Or if you get to someone’s house and you’re supposed to take them somewhere and they start complaining and don’t want to go, how do you coerce them to change their mind and go with you?   We then all ate lunch together.  Everytime I’m at the manier, it just feels like paradise because the setting is just so picturesque and feel surrounded by the beauty of nature and the beauty of France.   During lunch, Jared and I talked to the coordinators about facebook and Veronique was so funny going on about how she doesn’t understand how people can have hundreds of friends on facebook…she asks her sons if they understand the real definition of an “ami” (friend).  Jared and I laughed with them then reluctantly admitted that we each had about 500 facebook friends.   

It was really difficult trying to figure out what language to speak.  The Spain girls speak Spanish to each other but I talk French to them and they like speaking English to us in order to practice.  But if they start speaking to me in English, it’s kind of snobby to keep speaking French to them.  Confusing.  Marzia, my Italian collègue, and I headed out to visit Mme Dernaucourt near Rond-Point.  Mme was overjoyed to see us as always.  She had the movie all ready to go when we got there.  We watched The Descendants in French.  It’s an American movie starring George Clooney…it was really good and powerful but didn’t ever really get not depressing…it just kept being sad.  Mme served us strawberry sherbet and we started watching another French movie called Les Intouchables that is about a low-class black man in a big city that gets a job working for a paralyzed extremely wealthy white man.  The movie was about the clashing of these two worlds and the change of each character as a result of their interactions.  Mme is quite a chatterbox during the movies and makes sure to explain to us what is going on to make sure we got it.  Or she will also warn us when a particularly funny or sad part is coming up.  We didn’t finish the movie because Marzia and I had to leave.   Mme introduced us to her “cute and single” physical therapist that came in as we were heading out the door.  Mme also warned us again about being physically accosted on the beach and on the streets. 

It was very amusing and enlightening to get to know Marzia better.  She told me that when she was 16, she went with some friends to Spain and fell in love with her now boyfriend who is from Ecuador.  When she finished high school, she moved to Spain to attend college and be with her boyfriend.  She learned Spanish by living there.  She is majoring in languages and aspires to be a translator.  She said that learning Spanish and French easier since they are so similar to Italian.  But English is completely different according to her.  When we would be talking about a certain verb was, she was able to say it in all 4 languages that she knows and show me how some were similar and some were different.  All of the girls from Spain are big coffee drinkers and big smokers.  Marzia has to smoke every 3-4 hours so before we went down to the metro, she asked if we could wait a bit for her to finish her cigarette.  She asked me if I wanted to smoke and I told her I didn’t smoke but that it didn’t bother me that she smoked while I was with her.  She was telling me about some of the BYU kids that did the internship last summer and how her friends that were here last year that they were nice but weird because they didn’t drink or smoke or party and I told her that that’s how the 3 of us Americans that are here this year are too.  She told me about some laws that she had been told existed in America…which I’m pretty darn sure they don’t exist.  One of them was in California and it banned anyone under 21 to go to a tanning salon.  The other one was in Texas and banned a woman from going to the dentist unless she had written permission from her husband…I can see this law being existent in regards to an abortion…but no way for a dentist!  She thought it was crazy that Americans could drive when they were 16 but couldn’t drink until they were 21.  Marzia is also convinced that Jared and I have a thing going on between us because she saw us talking a lot at the manier…but she just doesn’t get that we are just friends and we both know English so that’s why we talk more to each other than to other people.  She would bring up things that we could go see or go do in Marseille and then coyly add oh and we can invite Jared! with a sly grin.  Oh la la she cracks me up.  She is super sweet and even though we come from extremely different backgrounds, I think we will be able to get along well and work together well. 

Marzia and I had to go back to the manier for a super boring and long meeting for all of the benevoles over the south territory.  Two hours of every person having to share their opinion on every subject.  We scurried out when it was done.  I had a headache so I got some food and slept for a few hours.  Around 11h30, Stephanie came in with her two BYU friends Mindy and Jacqueline.  They are doing the Petits Frères internship in Toulon which is an hour train ride away down the coast to the east.  They came to spend the night with us and go sightseeing with us the next day.  It was a big crowded with 4 in the small apartment, but we made it work and had fun.  I felt super young amongst them as they have all served missions and are done or almost done with school, but I got over it and we all had fun together.  I’m guessing that we will be sightseeing with them most weekends.  Mindy served her mission New Caledonia which is a French-speaking island out by Tonga.  Jacqueline learned French through school and study abroad and served her mission in Japan.

7 Juillet

Oh my my my today was a fantastic day.  A huge reason that I picked to do the internship in the city of Marseille was so that I’d be sure to be able to go see the Chateau d’If which is the island prison featured in The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas.  I read this book in 7^th grade and have ever since wanted to come to Marseille and see the Chateau d’If.  It is a huge literary pilgrimage that I thouroughly enjoyed.  The 4 of us BYU girls took a boat out to the little island.  It was a beautiful view as we exited out of Vieux Port in Marseille and into the clear blue open Mediterranean Sea.   It was a beautiful view looking back at Marseille and seeing Notre Dame de la Garde up on the summit of the hill. 

Chateau d’If was built in the early 1500s under the reign of Francois I to be a fortress that would protect Marseille.  It did so until 1580 when it was converted into a state prison.  It was a prime location for a prison because of its location on a small island.  Many politically rebellious French were held here throughout the years.  During the revolution of 1848, Protestants were held here.  German prisoners were held here during WWI.  Alexandre Dumas wrote The Count of Monte Cristo and set it in Marseille during his present time which was the mid 1800s.  In this story, Dantes is innocently put in prison here at the Chateau d’If when one of his friends betrays him.  Dantes is there for years and years.  He communicates with the Friar in the neighboring cell through a hole in his cell wall.  Together, they dig a tunnel to get out of the chateau.  Dantes escapes jail and goes back to Marseille under a false identity and plots revenge on the man who betrayed him.  Added to my list of movies to watch post France is Count of Monte Cristo.

I bought a French copy of The Count of Monte Cristo with a Chateau d’If emblem stamped on the bottom!  There were picturesque views wherever you looked as one stood on the top of the chateau.  We changed into our swimming suits then took the boat just a bit farther out into the sea to the Frioul islands.  It was beautiful with lots of boats at the dock and desert vegetation all over the rolling hills.   After some getting lost and plenty of walking, we found the public beach and it was just splendidly gorgeous.  The water was clear clear blue and was cold at first but then felt so good.  There were seagulls out in the water and constantly flying over us.  We watched one seagull come off of the surface of the water with a fish in its mouth!  It flew away to somewhere where it would be bothered by the other seagulls.  We also watched some seagulls fighting over this small wooden rod.  Not sure why they wanted it.  But they chased each other in the air for a while.  Then the bird that had it accidently dropped it from its mouth so the other bird swooped in and snatched it up.  There were people farther out into the water on a boat that would jump in to go scuba diving.  There were lots of snorkelers and also some cliff divers.  We swam out to touch the yellow buoys, then just lay on our backs and floated and let the current carry us back towards shore.  One of those perfect moments. 

We took the boat and then the metro back to our house.  Mindy and Jacqueline gathered up their things to take the train back and then we stopped by this pizzeria that I had come across the other day that is just around the corner from us.  It ended up being a treasure find!  This sweet lady with a large german shepherd runs it and was really excited that some of us were from Utah since that is the name of her dog.  She made us pizzas at the oven in the corner (I got one with goat cheese and ham on it) and then gave us slices of apple tart as a gift.  The pizza had that delicious thin crust and tasted almost as good as pizzas I’ve had in Italy.  We made tentative plans with Mindy and Jacqueline to go to Carcassonne next week to see the medieval fortress and also to attend the medieval festival that will be going on.  This Saturday, the 14^th of July, is the French national holiday called Bastille Day (comparable to our 4^th of July).   It commemorates the storming of the Bastille prison in Paris in 1789 that sparked the French Revolution. 

Stephanie and I finished off the day with a trip to the produce store and the grocery store and then watched a movie I had rented on iTunes called Invictus until we fell asleep.  Stephanie and I have been getting along super well and have become good friends in just the week that we’ve been together.  She is 6 years older than me but we both feel like we are the same age.  She is so good to answer my endless French grammar or vocab questions.  She is super easygoing and willing to go along with my sometimes crazy sightseeing plans and isn’t bothered by my almost constant chattering.   

8 Juillet

Today I played piano for choir again before church and then for sacrament meeting again.  There is just one girl that plays piano in the ward and she has been gone these past two weeks.  I am encouraged with the progress my French is making as I feel I am now able to understand basically everything that is said in church.  I just have to keep focused enough during church to actively listen and not zone out.  Oh man I know I’ve said this before, but you know you’re in France with the sacrament bread is so dang delicious.  There is the cutest little boy at church with the biggest brown eyes that kind of overtake his face but he is adorable.  He was walking back and forth between his family and one of the missionaries during sacrament meeting today.   The missionary gave him his watch to wear for a while and then clipped his missionary batch onto his shirt.  My heart melted, it was just so so so cute.  I was so tempted to take a picture right there in the middle of sacrament meeting, and probably would have if my camera didn’t make sounds when it takes a picture.

Oh my word I eat bread and cheese with breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  I can just never get enough.  Thankfully with all of the walking I’ve done this summer, it doesn’t have dire permanent consequences. 

Stephanie and I used the internet for a while in the YSA center on the upper floor of the church and wrote emails and such.  Then we headed back home to eat.  We were planning to go back out later and walk around somewhere, but it just felt too good to sit and do nothing.  We both caught up on our journaling then finished Invictus.  It was so good and I understand why everybody recommends it now.  Very powerful movie. 

So I kind of made up a recipe tonight based off of something I ate in a restaurant in Paris.  We made couscous and then a sort of broth/vegetable/soup thing to go with it.  I boiled some water and then added chicken bouillon, big potato wedges, big slices of carrot, big slices of onion, two chopped up garlic cloves, and then salt, pepper, and herbes de provence.  It ended up being super good with the couscous!  It was super healthy as well as cheap and tasted and looked like something fancy and expensive.  The meal was delicious but the making of the meal was a bit of a disaster!  So I didn’t read the directions on the couscous box well enough because I was supposed to boil the water and then pour that water onto the couscous and let that simmer for 5 minutes.  But instead I just put the water and couscous all together and then set it on the stove…disaster.  The water evaporated right away and just made the couscous burn!  So I decided to start over making the couscous.  Dumb me pours all of the couscous and water into the sink because I was thinking oh the couscous is small enough, it will go down the drain.  But I had forgotten that there isn’t a garbage disposal and thus I clogged the sink.  I used a colander to get all of the couscous out of the sink but then it was still all clogged up in the drain with more of it.  So Stephanie and I figure out how to open the sink down below and brave Stephanie puts a bowl under the pipe and pulls out all of the nastiness couscous that was clogging it.  Then when we were starting to clean up, Stephanie without thinking pours a bowl of water down the drain and she had not yet put the cap on the pipe to seal it up.  So water comes splashing out into the cupboard down below, onto the floor, and all around the apartment!  It is more amusing now than it was then.  But we got a bunch of towels, wiped everything off, and eventually got it all cleaned up.  I don’t really feel like making couscous for a good long while now J

9 juillet

This morning consisted of a planning session at the manier where we planned out the week and who we would visit when.  Then we made a bunch of phone calls to make the appointments and finalize everything.  Marzia and I will be working together for all of July, but these next two weeks we will also be joined by Maxime, a French boy that is from Gap in the Alps region but who currently goes to school in Marseille.  He is 19 years old and is studying marketing.  He said that he is volunteering with les petits frères in order to help people and have an enriching experience as well as to build up his CV (resume). 

The food bank had brought food to the manier and so they gave us volunteers some salads and sandwiches for lunch that had been brought.  We also had these delicious delicious cherries.  I don’t know if cherries are good in America because I never really ate them before France and Israel, but I am a big fan now.  And they aren’t the fake nasty maraschino cherries…they’re the real delicious deal. 

It was a funny dynamic between the three of us because Maxime doesn’t speak English but Marzia and I do.  But obviously he speaks the best French and sometimes he wouldn’t understand what we’d say.  Or Marzia would start talking in English and he would want us to explain what we were talking about.  It’s super interesting to talk to both of them though and hear their perspectives on things and compare and contrast our different countries and lifestyles. 

The three of us went to the Rue de Provence office to pick up a car to drive to our appointments.  Maxime can drive since he has a France driver’s license.  But he hadn’t ever driven in Marseille before and so Marzia were a little nervous about driving in the city and kept bugging him making sure he really knew how to drive.  I learned that almost all cars in Europe are manual stick shift.  I also learned some good driving vocab words throughout our journey from Maxime.  I learned the verb for starting the car, the verb for stalling the car because Maxime did that quite often, the word for brake, lane, and other things.  Also learned the word for right of way.  We used this GPS that the Petits Frères gave us.  It was fun to figure out how to use with it all in French.  But it doesn’t give you much of a warning before you have to turn a certain way, so I was helping navigate by looking at the GPS.  Maxime and I had some misunderstandings sometimes because the phrase for go straight is tout droit (don’t pronounce the t’s at the end of the words) and the phrase for turn right is à droite (pronounce the t at the end)...so they sound extremely similar.

We got to the apartment of our first visit.  The lady opened the door and said she was really sorry but she was really tired and was waiting for the doctor to come because of her headache.  She said she needed to rest and was really sorry.  The poor thing was shaking all over.  We offered to stay with her until the doctor came and offered to get her whatever she needed but she refused and said that wasn’t necessary.  We reluctantly left.

Our second appointment was on the far eastern edge of Marseille.  We visited a sweet 90 year old lady named Mme Colonna-D’Ornano that lives in a nursing home.  She is from Corsica and ardently argued with Marzia (Italian) that Corsica is French, not Italian.  Madame descends from royal Corsican blood.  She also descends from several important French generals and marshals of the past 150 years.  Madame never married and her only living relation is a nephew that lives in Paris and calls her from time to time.  Madame had pictures all over her room of her parents and family and of herself when she was young.  One picture of her was absolutely beautiful and showed her long beautifully wave black hair that she said went down to her legs.  She also has a collection of old drawings of Napoleon (born in Corsica).  She has a family document that was written 200 years ago in old French.  She talked to us about Napoleon and how he never did anything for Corsica but did lots of things for France.  She said she gets lonely at the nursing home and doesn’t really feel like she has friends since most of the people living there aren’t mentally there most of the time.  She said she has her photographs to keep her company though.  She talked about how she was at the end of her life and she is slowing down and doesn’t go out anymore because it is difficult to walk.  We encouraged her to be positive about things and encouraged her that she is still very intelligent and is doing quite well considering she is 90.  We talked about politics a bit and she talked about the ban on Islamic women wearing their veils in public and she is completely for it and said that they are in France so they need to be in France.  We asked what she had done for work during her life and she said she had never really worked and was always able to live off her parents and she took care of them throughout her life.  She took us out onto her balcony and showed us her magnificent view.  She looks out at beautiful rocky mountains that are extremely close to her.  She can see the Mediterranean sea out to the right and the sun shining over that.  Her view is full of greenery with lots of different kinds of trees.  She also sees lots of birds and listens constantly to the cicadas during these summer months.  All of the buildings in her view are decorated in that Mediterranean way with light yellow dry wall and blue or white shutters and the red clay tile roof. 

Maxime and I talked a lot during our driving time.  He told me that most of the films he watches are American and his favorite movie is Gladiator.  He told me about how most of the popular songs are American and I asked him if it bothered him that he couldn’t understand the lyrics and he chuckled and said ya but it’s more about the “air” of the music and the feel of the music.  He asked me to translate some of the lyrics to the American song we were currently listening to on the radio.  And then we started talking about church.  He asked me if my family was “croyante” or believing which basically means religious.  I told him yes and then he said he was catholic and had done his communions but he only went to church during Christmas time.  He was shocked/impressed when I told him that I went to church once a week.  I told him I was Mormon which shocked him because he said he thought that Mormons didn’t use electronics and that they had religious clothes that they wore all the time.  I set him straight and explained that missionaries do have a dress code, but in general, Mormons wear normal clothes.  He asked what our “valeurs” (beliefs/values).  I panicked a bit because I don’t feel super confident in French church vocabulary but I did my best.  I told him that we believe in the Bible but also in another book The Book of Mormon.  I told him that we don’t drink alcohol, tea, or coffee nor do we smoke and we obey the law of chastity.  I told him that we think that families are very important and that our church teaches us to be charitable and give service to others like Christ did.  I told him that we believe in doing what Christ has told us to do.  I explained to him that we have modern prophets, just like the prophets in the Bible, who receive revelation from God for our day.  He commented on how rare Mormons were and I agreed but told him that the church was in France and that there was a church building in Marseille at Rond-Point du Prado as well as a young adult center that organized activities. He kept asking more questions and so I kept talking and it was a good conversation.  I came back and recounted the conversation to Stephanie and she said I did a good job in giving an overview and the French words I had used were correct so that made me happy.  It made me happy that I got to share that part of me with someone that wouldn’t have heard about it if I hadn’t worked all these years to learn French!

My favorite French phrase these days is “Il n’y a pas de soucis” which basically means no worries.  I love how whenever I learn a word or a phrase, I start hearing it all around me, all the time by people I am talking to or listening to. 

If you ever want to do something in fast and efficiently, don’t come to France.  Everything is just relaxed and slow.  At the grocery store, lines take quite a bit longer than in the states as the cashiers sit down in chairs and go at a normal pace, rather than a rushed, trying to be fast and efficient pace.  Once you get used to it and know to expect things to be like that, it doesn’t bother you anymore.  The cheese I bought for the next few days is Brie!  I feel like I still haven’t made a dent in exploring the French world of cheese with all the choices of cheese that are at the store…but I’m making some progress at least.  There are 370 different types of cheese in France…one for every day of the year!  Of course they aren’t all available at my grocery store.  It would truly to take a lifetime to become a true cheese conaisseur.  The best grocery purchase of the day was 4 little cups of delicious chocolate mousse for just one euro!        

I love observing people out our apartment window as they are on their balconies.  People hang up their laundry or sit and chat with a cup of coffee.  There are also cats on the roofs from time to time.  I watched one this morning chasing a little lizard who scurried to safety up and over a wall.