Sunday in Rennes

The following is an unedited video of church. This is essentially 3 hours of French class with no instruction. It can be very tiring. The first hour was Priesthood / Relief Society. I was very happy that when the Bishop spoke I generally could understand what was going on. But then when Bernard got up (the first in the video) to speak I was lost. I don’t know if it was his accent or what, but I have interacted with him quite often and I feel dumber and dumber when I had hoped my French would be getting better. Second in the video was Antoine. He is Martine’s son and the Bishop asked him to speak about EFY. After Priesthood / Relief Society was Sunday School. The Sunday School Teacher is Sister Giuo (sp?) Just a month ago I couldn’t understand a word she said. I am getting more, but I find her and her husband very difficult to understand. Again I don’t know why some people are easier than others. I know that some French people talk to us like we are babies, but I can understand some French when they are talking to other French people. At the end of the video I had to capture the Sunday School president getting up on the stand to signal that time is up. It is quite funny. I caught some of the intermediate Hymn and elder Lyman giving a talk. This was all done on our iPod which I am sure is against the rules and I do feel a little guilty, but I wanted to capture some of this.

I had a pretty good day at School. Typical of my perception of French we have gone to class now for a week and no one has even asked us when or if we are going to pay. We plan on paying, but I found out that Mary didn’t pay until nearly the end of semester. It will cost us $700 for the two of us (or more if the dollar continues to fall) I think it is worth it, but if this were just about learning French this would be a very expensive language training. The final bill for just Kim and I is going to be around $3000 for language instruction.

As I get closer to planning our trip home I have to decide when and where. Currently the cheapest tickets are with Iceland Air. The reason is that Iceland is not on the Euro and when the country crashed they crashed hard. The devalued their currency and essentially gave everyone a 50% paycut. So now 500 Euros is worth twice what it was worth before. So most likely we are going to fly with Iceland Air. Today the cost of a one way ticket in July is about 550 Euros and the next cheapest airline is 1900 Euros. Things may change, but July is a big travel month so I don’t expect things to trend in our favor. We will probably buy tickets at the end of this month which is a sad thought to be planning our departure so soon. Now the question is should we stop over in Iceland for a few days. What is there to do and see in Iceland? I don’t even know. It will only cost us about $20 to have a stopover but of course we would have to rent a cottage or something and of course we would spend money on anything we would do. But when are we ever going to go to Iceland? Speaking of trip planning I plan on working in England the last week of February. I don’t know what we are going to see there. I think we are planning on have a Jane Austin day and maybe a Shakespeare day. It will still be Winter so a lot of places are not open. So if we see where Jane Austin is buried, so what? Is visiting the movie site of Pemberley visiting England or visiting a movie set of England. I know one thing we are going to catch some movies. If we see no other movie we are going to see tangled. McKala has seen it in French. We’ve been catching subtitled American movies like Afterlife but the kids movies are dubbed as are most of the Adult movies. BTW we watched After Life and I liked it but no one told me that the movie was 1/3 French and of course the French don’t put English subtitles. I guess it was sort of a warmup to watching a real French movie. I know after watching After Life that I am not ready.

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