will WE play in Peoria?

This afternoon, I stopped at one of the giant grocery stores I don’t frequent and was stumped by some of the checkout lanes.

I’ve gotten used to the lanes that are reserved for the customers who bother to sign up for the super-duper-special loyalty cards. I’ve seen clerks make people put all their groceries back in their cart and change lanes if they try to sneak through without one of those cards. So I try to apply caution before putting my stuff on just any old conveyor belt.

Two of the checkout lanes had no lines… which was suspect. But I didn’t understand what the signs said so I went ahead and got in line. Plus, I was starting to drop the stuff I was carrying (I didn’t have a cart, just an armfull of spaghetti supplies for weekend company.) The cashier gave me a suspect look. Do I have a scanner? A what? Whatever it is, no. So she shooed me out of line. Before I could feel too stupid about it, a man was shooed off right behind me.

After struggling with the self-check out lane, I examined the signs again on my way out. It appears that some people go around the store and scan their items as they put them in their carts. I’ve got to go back and follow someone around with that thing to see how it works.

So I went and got my haircut again this morning. I’m still not sure if I like it or not. I guess the real test comes tomorrow when I wash it and have to fix it myself.

It started out well enough. The woman who seems to be the salon’s owner wasn’t there when I walked in. So, without thinking, I agreed to let a woman I’d never even seen before color my hair. She speaks no English. If she does, she spoke none to me. She tried politely to hold some sort of conversation with me, asking where in the US I’m from, why I’m living here, do I have any children. She told me that she had no trouble understanding me; I think that was a compliment to the way I pronounce the little French I know to say. Or, I’m telling myself that.

After a little while the owner arrived. When she saw me she greeted me and shook my hand. I think that means I’m an official regular customer now.

I can’t read the magazines in the shop and while someone is glopping goo on one’s head, it’s best to not try to concentrate on a book (I’d brought one for the sitting-and-waiting portion of coloring). I can look at pictures. And the more pictures of crazy haircuts I looked at, the more likely it was I’d find something I thought was cute. I did. Then I completely lost my mind and pointed at the pictures for the hairstylist.

After she washed my hair, she put me in a different chair so that the owner could do the actual cutting. Apparently, only the owner actually cuts hair unless the client is a kid, then any old person can do it. I felt a little relieved because this owner woman didn’t see me pointing out any pictures. She’d left for coffee and had just returned. (I swear, a customer came in and had the woman dry her hair in exchange for a cafe.) But before I could say anything, the hair-color-woman rushed over with the pictures to help out. Gee, thanks. Next thing I know, hair is flying all over the place and all I can think is “Bill is not going to be happy” and “Maybe I can find a nice fall hat to wear.”

When the scissors finally stopped, I thought “that’s not so bad.” But it is short. And I’m just not sure what I think now. But if I decide I don’t like it, I think I’m going to have to figure out how to find another hairstylist. I wonder if that woman who speaks English who I haven’t been to in a year would remember me?

The clock in our kitchen is set to read out in what we think of as military time… to help me get used to the 24-hour clock used for official times in France. After a year of staring at it, I still don’t get it.

The past two nights I’ve hustled Kaitlyn off to bed and tucked her in all in a rush, thinking that it was nearly 10pm. Both nights, it’s been nearly 9pm.

Then again, both nights she fell asleep within 10 minutes of the goodnight kiss. So maybe she needs to go to bed earlier all the time.

The prospect of spending the afternoon shopping, lavishing myself with the birthday gifts I was instructed to buy myself sounded lovely. The reality was, it wasn’t really so much fun. I went to the mall instead of going downtown… likely a mistake. The mall is so small that I’d circled the entire place within 20 minutes of arriving. Even the stores that are also located in the shopping district downtown are smaller and don’t carry everything the others do. The department store in the mall is a serious let-down. It’s an H&M. I’ve only gone in once and I vowed never to return.

At the shop where I’d found one thing to buy, the clerk asked me if I want to be on their mailing list. Oh, sure, why not. I don’t get any junk mail or catalogs here. So she asked my address. Mine is 798… and I’ve been told that here you cannot say seven-nine-eight or seven-ninety eight. It’s seven hundred ninety eight. I find that just too hard to believe so I said “seven-nine-eight.” (in French) And that woman just stared at me like she had no idea what I’d just said. I guess it is true.

My real quest was to find a pair of shoes that can substitute for my glaring white sneakers. No luck. I’d worn loafers there, to try to blend. They hurt my feet and as soon as I got home I rushed to change into Keds.

This morning when I took Kaitlyn to school, there was a handwritten note taped to the door: the class was going to the library today. This is a big deal because there is not a library in the school. The teachers walk the children to the town’s library… several blocks away.

I watched them as they left. The line up in pairs and hold hands with their partner. One teacher leads, the other brings up the rear. Today the English teacher was there; she helped run interference with potential traffic issues.

It is so cute the way they all walk down the sidewalk, holding hands. Kaitlyn was so excited about going to the library. Just yesterday she asked me to take her, but I wasn’t up to the task of tackling all those French books.

When I picked her up for lunch, I learned there was one little mis-step in the trip. Kaitlyn marched right through what was apparently a sizeable pile of dog poop. The stuff is everywhere; people let their dogs do their thing wherever they happen to be at the time. Luckily, the kids keep slippers in their backpacks for rainy days. (You might say today it was raining dogs.) Now I’m avoiding getting the poop-coverd shoes out of the plastic bag the teacher wrapped them in so that I can clean them.

Today after ballet class, Kaitlyn and I decorated for Halloween. We brought two big plastic bins filled with Halloween decorations… although not everything we own made it. (For instance, our black fake trees with orange lights are in storage.)

Kaitlyn carefully unwrapped everything and we put out our ghosts, haunted houses, spiders and vampires. Most are bowls or containers, which is especially tough in a house with so little (aka: no) counter space. So now they are holding fruit, veggies and coffee and their usual containers are on top of the fridge. (Well, I can’t see them there)

Then, Kaitlyn wanted to get a pumpkin to carve. Pumpkins here aren’t pumpkins like we think of. They sell them pre-sliced in most stores because the flesh is several inches thick. I bought two last year and didn’t do anything with either and ended up just tossing them. So I don’t even know what they’re like to try to cook with, but I guess they aren’t much like the canned pumpkin I’m used to.

We went to the marche in our little town. There are usually a couple of produce vendors there. Not today. Just one, and he had no pumpkins. The Petit Casino in town didn’t have any, either.

We did see an older lady on the street who had picked something up off the sidewalk… as we passed by her she held out what was in her hand and said “noisette.” Hazelnut. I don’t know if she took it home to eat . Probably. People here just pick stuff up and eat it. Nuts, mushrooms, whatever. I tried to convince Kaitlyn when we passed back by the same spot to leave the nuts on the ground for the squirrels.

Since by then I was starving for lunch, we went home. I fully intended to drive into town this afternoon and try one of the better fruit and vegetable stores there. But I was just too tired (I couldn’t sleep last night) and then it started to rain and, honestly, the idea of struggling with one of these massive mutant pumpkins just didn’t appeal. So we didn’t go. I do feel a little bad about it. Maybe this weekend, when Bill can be the one to try to stab the thing.

Then Kaitlyn decided she wants candy. It is Halloween, after all. I pointed out that we don’t have any because she doesn’t even like it. She wants candy corn. I don’t think they sell that here. Maybe I’ll try to make cookies in that shape. (yea, maybe I’m crazy)

It all makes me miss Target and pumpkin patches.

Those poor monks… just trying to stay up all night and chant… then trying to stay up all day and not doze off at their tables in their rooms praying. Yet they get blamed for everything.

Today, my French teacher told me his theory about why French is such a, well, messed up language… with thousands of “irregular” verbs and exceptions to every rule (except the rule stating that every rule has an exception.) Blame it on the monks.

Here’s his take on things: hundreds of years ago everything written in French was written by the monks. And the monks like to hit the bottle a little. So, with the aid of perhaps some green liquor, a monk or two went to work and, well, made some mistakes. Repeatedly. Until it actually altered the language.

I don’t know if I believe that. But it does make you wonder… does that mean that learning French would be easier if tried after a drink or two?

Simply put, Americans don’t belong at Disneyland Paris. Truth be told, Disneyland doesn’t belong here, either.

Disneyland stands for everything truly American: walking around eating giant roasted turkey legs, standing in line without cutting to the front, and getting onto and off of the rides quickly because you don’t want to hold up the line of patiently-waiting-non-cutters.

I remember when people made a big stink because Disney had to change its policy and serve beer in and wine inside the park. They said it was a culture thing. Maybe so. But there are a lot of other cultural differences that have quietly been accommodated. And they are the very things that annoyed us. A lot.

Saturday checking into our Disney hotel, everything seemed fine. All the negative reviews I’d read about customer service seemed wrong. Sure, the hotel is in desperate need of physical attention, but it isn’t dirty. It’s a little like the hotel where we stayed at Disneyland in California. And it’s definitely a far cry from our experiences at Disneyworld. Here, we stayed at the Newport Beach Club. We stayed at the “same” hotel in Florida. You’d think they’d be exactly the same, since the company probably already has warehouses of nautical Mickey Mouse junk. Nope. The one in Florida is more Mickeyed out.

Once we’d found our room at the hotel (it’s a big hotel), we walked the 15 minutes to the park where we stepped out of France and onto Main Street USA. The facade was all Disney, but the similarities beyond that were harder to come across.

Kaitlyn wanted to go on Buzz Lightyear, so we got in that line. I was relieved to see the sign saying there’s no smoking in line. I am apparently the only person in the whole place who read it. I might not have cared quite so much about the people in front and back of us smoking if they hadn’t all cut in line to get there. Then the line-jumper behind us let in another line jumper who then, along with her two daughters, proceeded to bump into us and nearly crawl up our backs at every chance. Finally I turned around and said “ce n’est pas necessaire a pousser.” (it’s not necessary to push) I’d been trying to figure out what to say and that just came out. And the pushing stopped. Bill thinks they were freaked out to discover we could speak French and probably spent the rest of the time wondering how much of what they’d said we’d understood.

While we were in that line, Kaitlyn checked out the map of Disney Studios and insisted we go next to Radiator Springs. (That’s the setting for the movie Cars) There, Lightning McQueen takes you on a tea-cup like ride, except you cannot make your car spin. They should have made it so you steer left to go right.

Across from Cars is Crush’s Coaster… featuring the seaturtles from Finding Nemo. You have to be 107 centimeters tall to ride, which I don’t think Kaitlyn is. But the guy measured her and said she was “just” tall enough. So we got in line. A second guy measured her, with the same result. I got out of line because I’m a coaster chicken. I wandered around, checked out the Monsters Inc area (they should have called this the Pixar Park), bought a coffee with whipped cream on it, ate the whipped cream and tossed out the coffee, then positioned myself where I could try to snap a picture of Bill and Kaitlyn zooming by on the ride. I waited and waited. They never went by. Then I heard Kaitlyn crying. I looked to the exit and saw Bill…. furious. The guy with the measuring stick at the end of the line had said Kaitlyn was “just” short and wouldn’t let her get on the ride.

I managed to divert Kaitlyn’s attention by taking her to the Monsters area where she could scream into a scream-meter. It took a little longer to get Bill to calm down.

We went into a show called “Animagique” for a diversion. When it started, Kaitlyn turned to me and in a very defeated sounding voice said “it’s in French.” I hadn’t thought about that. Mickey Mouse was speaking French. Luckily the star of the show is Donald Duck. And he speaks English.

Next to that is Aladdin’s carpet ride. It’s like the Dumbo ride, only the carpets don’t just go up and down they also tilt forward and backward. It’s not a ride I’d normally ever go on, but tired of missing out, I went. Bill sat in the front of the carpet and made it go up or down (mostly up). I sat in the back with Kaitlyn, who immediately put her hand on the tilt controller. I admit, she and Bill managed to freak me out a little bit. But it was fun and by the time we got off everyone was in a good mood again.

When we’d checked in at the hotel, I stopped to make reservations to eat dinner with the princesses. It was in a place all decorated with scenes from Cinderella. But she wasn’t there. And that was hard to explain to Kaitlyn. Two of Cinderella’s mice friends were there. And so were Belle and Ariel, with their princes. In the amount of time it takes to eat a French meal (and this was a French restaurant complete with hoity-toity gross French food like fois gras), the mice and princesses came out to do their same little routine three times. I was impressed when Ariel made her second visit to our table and remembered Kaitlyn’s name.

As we were leaving the park at nearly 10pm, dog tired, I wondered if it might have been worth the extra 300 Euros to have stayed at the Disneyland Hotel. It’s right at the entrance. Not outside the entrance.. at it. You walk under the hotel as you go into the park. The rooms that are probably even less affordable have a view of Main Street.

Our hotel may need some paint and may not have a view of the park, but it does include breakfast. I’d read on Trip Advisor that you’re better off opting for the breakfast inside the park. So we did. We had a 9:15 “reservation,” which meant get up, get ready, get packed and get out. But we could barely get Kaitlyn up. Even the idea of still being at Mickey Mouse land couldn’t rouse our sleeping beauty. Bill finally dragged her out of bed and to the bathtub and we left the hotel at 8:30. One perk of paying the extra price to stay at a Disney hotel is you get special extended hours in the park. Today, those hours were from 8-10am. If we had realized how relatively empty it would be, we’d have bagged that stupid princess dinner and gone to bed early to get the full two extra hours in this morning.

Still, in the half hour we had before our breakfast time, we went on three rides… Pinocchio, Peter Pan and Dumbo. Kaitlyn loved them all. And we practically walked onto all of them. We really only had two long waits today… Autopia and the Rockets. Seems Tomorrowland is the land of long lines. We refused to even get into the long line for Big Thunder Mountain, for fear of a repeat of yesterday’s coaster calamity. (even though she’s been on Thunder Mountain in California). We nearly walked on Pirates of the Carribean and Haunted Mansion… two that are normally horrible long waits. We found out the Haunted Mansion here is scarier than either one in the U.S. And the little speech about the “chilling challenge to find a way out!”… it was in French. Although thanks to the ride I may finally remember how to say “come back” in French.

Even without the long lines, getting on the rides was still frustrating… thanks to some of the guests. Some people think nothing of getting their child into a teapot or rocket, then standing there to snap photos (always plural, mind you) before either getting into the ride themselves or then kissing their child goodbye as if they’ll be separated for months then going out to wait. When Kaitlyn and I were on Dumbo, the operator had to stop the ride because one of those people whom the world revolves around had not left the inside area of the ride after the strapping-in, picture taking, kissing ritual. She propped herself up against the fence to make it appear she was standing outside it… and the ride started. When one operator realized what she’d done they stopped the ride to drag her outside. I cannot be entirely sure, but I think that may be grounds for expulsion from the parks at home.

We finished the day by taking Kaitlyn shopping. We skipped Main Street and went to the string of Disney stores in the Disney Village we had to walk to on the way to our hotel to get our luggage. Apparently, everyone had the same idea; the place was packed. Kaitlyn looked and looked and looked. The only thing she wanted was a reversible Belle costume. Frustrating, given the hoops I made others go through to get a new Mulan costume here just last week.

But now she’s sleeping next to me on the train… in her new red ball gown.

I did it. I broke down… gave in. I am even a little ashamed.

Tonight on the way back to the hotel, I stopped at Starbucks.

The Starbucks was one of the first things I spotted when we first emerged from the Metro on Wednesday. We had no idea where our hotel was, but all would be well, there was something familiar in our midst.

Then I noticed something really peculiar. People walking down the street carrying their Starbucks cups. Especially in the park. And it looked, well, funny. Everyone at home walks around with some sort of drink, or food, or both. You never see a French person walking down the street with a drink in their hand. Never. There are times and places to savor a coffee and the sidewalk is only one of them if you are sitting at a cafe at a table on the sidewalk.

But tonight, I became one of those people… one of those cup-toting Americans.

Earlier today when I was hopping Metro trains like I knew the route out of habit, I wondered if anyone would mistake me for a Parisian. I was by myself, so one one heard me speak English. I had tucked my camera away in my purse, which I’d bought in France, so I didn’t look too touristy. I thought. Till I looked down and saw my white sneakers. Oh, well, maybe someday I’ll figure out what shoes you wear to walk hundreds of kilometers other than sneakers. French women don’t wear tennis shoes. Unless they are playing tennis.

Then tonight on the Metro, I discovered the need to learn some key French phrases. All five us us were getting off the train.. or trying to. A group of young women were busy talking and blocking the door on the train; they didn’t budge. As I was worming my way through that blockade, I was met with a woman storming her way onto the train even though no one had managed to get off it yet. I only had a split second to decide what to do to make sure Kaitlyn and I got off that train. So I pushed my shoulder right into her… sending her back onto the platform. She made some snippy comment to me in French; Bill called her a f-ing idiot. He says both words are the same in both languages. Note to self: ask at next lesson for some handy rude phrases to use (depending on the teacher).

While I was busy thinking about my rudimentary rude French, I was reminded that my loudspeaker French is also sorely lacking.

We were on our next train when the conductor (do you conduct a Metro?) announced I have no idea what. It was as clear as the drive through at Taco Bell. In another language. About 90 percent of the people on the train got off the train. So we got off. Then there was another announcement on the platform, and everyone got back on the train. So we got on the train. Then there was another announcement in the train and everyone got back off the train. Almost everyone. We stood in the doorway looking positively befuddled. It is safe to say, we were not blending in. A French woman explained what was going on and luckily Bill understood what she was saying. So we got off. Finally, the conductor got the final stragglers to get out and he left… going back the way he came. In other words, the wrong way.