Saturday, August 7, 2010

church and Senlis

I have decided I know French better than Polish. :P Or at least I can guess at it better! It's much easier, I'm SO glad I didn't go to Poland for a mission trip. Just being in the airport I found it such a relief because I felt like I could almost read the signs!! Polish just looks like garbledy gook to me. French still SOUNDS like garbledy gook a lot to me but at least I can read the signs!

Today was my first visit to the church here with the Crosses! Their church is a little bit away from their village in a town called Nogent-sur-Oise. It is really cute and Charles said it is unusual for a protestant church to actually HAVE a church building, a lot of them meet in hotels and such. I did not get pictures because we were super busy but hope to get some next Sunday. They actually have a very decent sized Sunday morning crowd! I think the normal attendance is around 120 he said. Very respectable methinks. :) I helped Emma and Claire with a little Sunday School kind of thing during the sermon and they did so well for a 9 & 11 year old! I'm so proud of them. :) We played a few games and sang some songs, and the girls even told the story of Paul & Silas in prison. At the very end we also managed to teach them a Bible verse.

After the service Amy dropped me off in a town called Senlis for a little sightseeing. I was a little nervous going on my own since I can't speak french at all but Amy gave me her phone and dropped me at the big Cathédrale and said we'd meet back there. It was actually kind of fun!! After I admired the Cathédrale and took lots of pictures as surreptitiously as possible I went across the street to the Office de Tourismé. I got a little map of the town there and she pointed me in the direction of the Château Royal next door and the Musée de la Vénerie and Musée des Spahis. It only cost €2 to see all of it so I figured might as well! The Musée des Spahis was kind of lame, all it had was some different uniforms and a few weapons, and was all of two rooms. The Parc et vestiges du Château Royal was really nice! A pretty little park and you could see the wall that goes around the city. It was pretty cool to think that's been there for hundreds of years. I went in the Musée de la Vénerie which was about hunting and had some paintings. It was again kind of mehh but hey I saw it! The bummer was that everything was in french and the only english was this tiny little pamphlet that hardly told me anything about them that I couldn't tell from looking. After that I wandered a few streets but most of the shops and things were closed between the fact it was a Sunday and it is August (most of France goes on holiday in August!). I did find a little bakery though and managed to buy a chocolate eclair with the only three french words I know (bonjour, un, and merci :D). It was a VERY yummy eclair! I did take pictures and for those you need to go to my Picasa album as usual as I don't want to make a two hundred foot long post with all of them. :)

Tonight for dinner Charles did another really cool salad with lettuce, nectarines, some kind of cheese, some nuts and a dressing he made to go with salmon on a bed of some other random hodge podge of veggies (tomatoes, purple onions and capers for sure). I'm looooving the new foods! It's so fun.

Well this week should be busy! Hoping everyone at home is doing well. :)

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