A Day of Little Details: Catholic Mass in France

I fear that the sneezing robot air freshener has a cold.  Its sneezes have become twice as loud and rather prolonged, and instead of a fine mist, it expels drops of congealed vanilla fluid.  The poor thing also seems to sigh pitifully post-sneeze, as if each expulsion is simply more than it can bear.

This morning I strolled on down to the church for my first French mass.  Last week I tried to go, only to find that I'd gotten the time wrong.  Since the town is so small, there is only one mass every Sunday.  It really surprised me how comfortable I felt during the service.  Walking in, I was worried I wouldn't be up to speed on the local customs.  Do they still shake hands and say peace?  Does a basket still get passed around during offerings?  Is there hand holding during the "Our Father?"  It was all identical, except I understood almost nothing.  It was fun to listen to all the songs in French, but I had to look the readings up online later, and every bit of the priest's homily was lost on me, because he was Indian and spoke French with such a thick Indian accent that I didn't have a chance.

For lunch we had chicken curry and an excellent almond cake topped with violet-flavored glaze.

Violet is such an interesting flavor.  After that, I did laundry, but they don't have a dryer here and it was raining, so I turned my bunk bed into a tent with all my damp clothes.  I'm going to refer to it as Fort Fresh from now on.  

It wasn't a super eventful day, so I'll tell you something interesting that Nico told me about driving in France:

When you get your license, you start out with 12 points.  If you get pulled over and ticketed, these points get taken away.  For example, speeding a little, like 15 miles over, will lose you a point.  Speeding a lot might lose you 3.  Every infraction has a corresponding point value, and if you lose all your points, you get your license taken away.  At that point in your sad driving career, it's impossible to ever get your record back to its original pristine 12 point status again.  When you get your suspended license back, you get three points.  Lose those and you might have to do without driving forever.  Normal people with just a few lost points have opportunities to take remedial drivers' ed classes to gain them back.  It's a lot like a kindergarten sticker system, except you don't get a pizza party for having all 12 of your points at the end of the year.  Still sounds more fun than ours, though.

On an unrelated note, it's gotten quite chilly over here, so it's officially fuzzy socks and sweatshirt weather.

Bonsoir, mes amis!