A Sad Day

Dear Friends,

Today is the last day of this wonderful adventure.  The weather is overcast and cool with an occasional shower.  It is exactly like our moods, kind of sad with an occasional tear. We walked down to the Vieille Ville for breakfast which has been our habit on weekend mornings.  The pain au chocolat, omelette and café tasted even better than normal.  The ordering, etc. was all in French and we understood the waiter's comments including his use of pronouns.

After breakfast we took a stroll around the Vielle Ville and even tried to visit the Musée Volti in the Citadel which was closed when we did our official tour three weeks ago because it had no electricity.  Unfortunately, it still has no electricity which fortunately means that we will have to return to Villefranche another time to see the museum. We were able to visit the Cocteau Chapel, which is actually La Chapelle Saint-Pierre that was decorated by Jean Cocteau.  It is a very small chapel right on the water that was for the fishermen.  Jean Cocteau decorated it with pastel chalk in the 1950s.  It is beautiful.  We also bought a birthday present for little Dobby and a table cloth in a typical Provence design.

We now need to pack since the taxi will pick us up at 4:45 am tomorrow morning, assuming that I said the time etc right when I called to arrange for it.  I guess we will see tomorrow.

We are having dinner tonight with a wonderful woman from Wyoming who was in the school in a more advanced class.  She is a great democrat and lots of fun.  She is staying on in Villefranche for a couple more weeks.  We are going to eat at a restaurant called L'Aparté.  It will be our third time eating there.  It is small and run by two women, one is the waitress and the other is the chef.  The food is fabulous, the ambience is great and the women are very friendly and helpful.

There are a couple of things that we wanted to mention that we have not included in past posts.

As we have mentioned several times, a very important part of this experience is the amazing diversity of people that we have met.  The other day during one of practical lessons, we were together with the two advanced groups.  We were put into teams to compete on our knowledge of French culture and geography.  I was on a team with another American, two Russians and a Palestinian.  We named ourselves the Équipe Guerre Froide as we had two Americans and two Russians with a Palestinian to mediate our disputes.  The other American was a young woman who had worked in NYC for a big law firm for 5 years who got tired of it and quit and was deciding what to do next.  One of the Russians was the young Russian woman in our class who loved Russia but was completely estranged from it now.  The other Russian was a wealthy businessman who owns a villa in Monaco and spends holidays there with his wife and two children.  He did not fit the stereotype of a Russian male.  The Palestinian woman was actually born in Egypt and currently lives in Geneva and works for the UN.  Her family has been displaced and now lives all over.

We also did not post about the last dinner that we had as a group from the school.  About 40 of the 60 students were there.  We took over a restaurant by the water.  It was a great time.  After dinner, Julien one of the professors who also is the one that arranges all of the outside of school activities sang some songs.  He started out with a few French songs that nobody knew but were nice songs.  After a while he was taking requests.  Somebody asked for "Frère Jacques" and Jane was able to divide the group into three groups to sing it as a round.  That was followed by a wonderful rendition by Jane with the group joining in of "La Seine est aventureuse".  We ended the evening songfest with a tribute to Pete Seeger by singing "If I has a Hammer".  It didn't matter which country you came from or how old you were, everybody knew the song.  Music is indeed the universal language.

More later (as we are not ready to admit this is the end),
Jane and the Unabashed Liberal