Even though Kaitlyn woke up feeling slightly feverish (our thermometer reports her temperature at normal, but I don’t believe it), I refused to spend the day cooped up. Again.
Originally, I had arm twisted some friends into driving the 90 minutes to Lyon to see the festival of lights there. But the reports of huge crowds, a sick child, a personal case of the sniffles and rain combined to make me propose an alternative. So this afternoon we all went bowling.
The first time doing anything here is a little stressful. We figured out where you go to sign up for a lane (which is called a piste… same as the runs at a ski resort)… it was where the mob was crowding the desk. There was no line. There’s never a line in France. Last week, the word queue was in my French lesson and the teacher told me he didn’t know why they include it in the book since it is a concept no French person gets. (Yes, he’s French. Remember, he also blamed the drunk monks for messing up the language.)
Anyway, we finally got to the front of the mob and said we wanted a piste. Naturally, there’s a wait. So the woman asks us for a name, presumably to call when our piste is ready. So we gave her one. Then she seemed to want a last name. So we gave her one. Then she asked for another name. (It was incredibly hard to hear between the employee’s tendency to speak barely above a whisper and the rattle of bowling pins behind us. ) Turns out, she was typing the names of our four players into the computer that would later keep score for us. So when it was our turn to bowl, there was Jennifer, James, Mandy and Hartsock. Since we’d given a last name. Oh, well. Kaitlyn can’t read anyway.
The next hurdle was the shoes. She wanted our shoes then. So as soon as our piste was ready we could just rush off and play, I guess. We handed over the shoes and took stabs at our European sizes. Two of us had shoes a bit snug, but neither of us were willing to go back and try to exchange them.
Finally, she gave us a slip of paper with our number on it and we were sent to wait. Great… we have to try to understand the woman on the loudspeaker rattling off numbers in French.
We decided to get drinks and wait in the bar. All bowling alleys have bars. Only the ones in France have bars with giant cappuccino machines spitting out tiny cups of super-strong coffee. Amazingly, about the time we finished our drinks, I heard the woman call for vingt trois. I have no idea how I picked that out, but I did.
Once we got to the actual bowling we discovered that the same French form of etiquette that applies to standing in line (they don’t) seems to apply to bowling. Three or four people would all stand in the area where the bowler picks up the ball and commences bowling, sometimes since that space is small, they’d just wander into our lane, and there’s no hesitation to bowl at the same time as the person in the next lane. This is nothing like bowling in the United States. At one point, a guy decided to take a picture of his friends so he stood exactly in the spot where we’d release the ball… and looked amazed that we wanted him to move.
The best part is the way they have it set up for kids to bowl. Once you figure out that you need to ask for it. Every time Hartsock had a turn, bumpers would raise up in the gutters… making a gutter ball nearly (but not entirely) impossible. Kaitlyn would hoist her bright pink kids ball (I don’t know the weight, it was simply marked xxsmall) then run to the lane and stop in her tracks then toss the ball. Honestly, she was beating me the first half of the first game. Hey, I didn’t get those bumpers!
Grandma Murphy had gutter guards on her house maybe before the French put them in bowling alleys. On her house they didn’t particularly work well. Sounds like in France they let little kids have a ball bowling. You could use a fake ID when you register, and next time they will rise to the occasion for you, too. When your opponents complain you have unfair advantage, just say they appear automatically, there’s nothing you can do about it. What would happen if you threw the ball at someone standing in your lane?