Monday, October 3, 2005

What do you do when it’s 11:30pm and you are outside of Paris at a Rosh Hashanah dinner with a large family you don’t really know and all of the public transportation workers go on strike and you really want to get back to your room in Paris? For a moment, I thought that would be me, but luckily there was a really nice guy named David at the dinner (who is also a political science student) who offered to drive me back to the apartment (and if you think gas in the USA is expensive, try Europe).

I went to dinner at the home of the cousins of my parent’s friends. The house is in Issy-les-Molineaux, a little suburb outside of Paris that seems to be Paris minus the loudness. I arrived at the home very early (I arrived at the time I was told to arrive, I didn’t realize that actually means arrive 1 hour later) and so I talked with the cousin’s little boy, Joseph who was so cute. He takes English lessons once a week and so he told me, “I speak English, I am five years old.” When I told him (in French) that he speaks English better than I speak French, he said to me, “That is because I have been learning French for my whole life.” Leave it to 5-year-old French boys to cheer me up. I talked with the rest of the family (nearly 30 people, almost as “bad” as the Goldman/Garfinkel Thanksgiving). I hate small talk, and that is really all I can do with my grasp of the French language--and so at dinner (where the food was really good, but I don’t know what I ate--some kind of meat with apples and the appetizers were all really spicy--I think the woman said she was from Algeria but I could be wrong), I spoke with David and his cousin Fanny who both know English from studying in the UK. Everyone kept asking me if I was Ashkenazi or Sephardic and I didn’t know what to answer. Am I a bad Jew, or is that just what living in America teaches me?

When I went to Issy, I arrived by metro easily, after all, the strike was not supposed to start until tomorrow. Little did I know that public transportation workers are like Jewish holidays and always start the evening before.