No sleeping in today, it was up early to go to Kaitlyn’s new school to check in with the director and make sure everything is ok to start on Monday. Thank goodness for Cindy, the woman who teaches English at the school. She is an American who has been living here for 15 years now. She happily serves as interpreter for new parents who can’t get much past bonjour. (and even those who can) The meeting went fine; the director agreed that it’s best to send someone Kaitlyn’s age only for the mornings because the new place and the new language can be overwhelming. Always good to have someone with some expertise tell you you’ve made the right decision. Then Cindy showed us which door to go in, where to put Kaitlyn’s book bag, told us what to put in that bag and showed us examples (bag contents are to be: change of clothes, snack with her name on it, yellow notebook for teacher to leave us comments and vise-versa, slippers which are more like keds to change into after playing in the rain or snow outside). When we walked into the classroom, Kaitlyn sat right down at the little table, took out a pen and started drawing. The teacher walked up to her, and wrote her name on the paper. Kaitlyn was so thrilled. She checked out the little kitchen, the little house. And when the teacher rang her bell so the students knew to move to the reading area to start the day, Kaitlyn went right along with them. When we tried to leave and take her with us, she fell apart. The teacher offered to let Kaitlyn stay. So, just like that, we left our little girl at the French school with a, well, French teacher. Two and a half hours later when we went to pick her up, Kaitlyn was all smiles and chatter about how much fun she had. The informal report card from the teacher? tres bien! Naturally, the aforementioned book bag requirements, along with the bag itself, necessitated another trip to Carrefour. That guy with the microphone who narrates your shopping experience is going to start narrating my dreams.
The big event for the afternoon the delivery of our washer and dryer. Before it arrived, Bill looked around the spot we’d designated (and measured) for it and pointed out there is only one outlet. I started to panic. Part of why we chose this house was because we thought we could cram in an ok size washer and dryer in this one spot that had the plumbing. Now, we’re talking about the washer in one place and the dryer in the garage… I’m moving from panic to complete blinding anger at the leasing agent. All I can think is: I knew we should have chosen the house in Meylan with the space for a full size American washer-dryer in the garage. If we have to have the dryer in the garage might as well put both out there and have room to wash lots all at once. When the delivery guys arrived, they asked where we wanted the washer. We pointed and said ici. He looked, nodded his head. Then the endless game of charades continued as he acted out placing the dryer on top and asked, in French, if that was what I wanted. oui. Then I left the room, unable to see the result of the discovery that we have but one outlet for two major appliances. Bill found one of those converter thingies that turns a single outlet into a double outlet and the delivery guys seemed to think that was a perfectly normal way to plug in a washer and dryer. I rushed upstairs and sorted out a week’s worth of dirty clothes… whites, super darks, sorta darks, tans, pastels. Sorta darks won the laundry lottery since it seemed Bill would need jeans for the weekend. Two pairs of jeans, one pair of corduroys, one button down shirt and a few of Kaitlyn’s things filled the washer. Filled it! That was ok, it’s better to sort laundry into more precise loads, right? A quick consultation of the owner’s manual (which is in French) to make sure I knew how to run this thing… and that’s when I actually looked at the bottle of detergent we’d gleefully picked up earlier this week at Carrefour. Right there is a picture of a front-loading washer, alright. With a red X through the door for the detergent dispenser. Oh, nothing is ever easy. Ok, how many mililiters does it say to pour in? 130. Our rental kitchen supplies include a measuring cup… with the smallest measurement of 200. Bill poured some water in that, then into a glass, then poured some out, then dumped that out and poured in a can of orange juice that was 150 mililiters… so we ended up with what he declared a good guesstimate of how much detergent to dump on our clothes. The whole time the washer ran, I pictured that episode of the Brady Bunch where Bobby decides to wash his own clothes to try to hide the fact that he’d gotten his suit all dirty and the soap suds fill Alice’s laundry room. Nothing like that happened. An hour and a half later, or so, the washer finished. I put the clothes in the dryer, guessed at which setting was really dry, not sorta dry and hit the go button. We didn’t stick around to see if it worked and I’m too tired now to check it.
The evening ended with a wine tasting party. It’s an annual tradition among the ISE’s and some of the French people from the office. That meant I had to be very careful who I spoke to, because I could not be 100% sure they’d understand me. Although we nearly didn’t make it to the party at all. In the middle of downtown Grenoble… the most confusing place to drive ever… (yes, worse than Burbank) the GPS system stopped receiving satellites. The screen went from telling us where we were and how to get where we were going … to showing our dot on a blank screen. Clyde, as we call him, was completely lost. And so were we. The streets are not labeled. If they are, you cannot see the sign in time to make a difference. We were pretty sure the river we needed to cross over was to our right, but when Clyde would grab a signal for a few seconds, it was always just long enough to tell us to turn left, then he’d lose us again. Somehow, we found our way to the river and to the correct bridge over the river and we made it to the party. There were 20 wines to taste, each brought by a party-goer. You tasted each one and rated it on a scale of 1 to 5 on a ballot. There was room for comments, but we didn’t really have any. Except for the one we noted smells like sweat socks. The three wines voted the best are awarded lovely prizes. The trophy for the one voted the worst is a toilet seat that the winner is to display at his or her desk for the next year. Good thing for Bill, the wine we randomly chose off the shelf of, you guessed it, Carrefour, didn’t come in last.