feedburner
Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

A Rendezvous in the Rain

Posted by Mark Tags: , , , ,

One of the obligations of a pastor is tending to his sheep no matter where they happen to be...in this case, the town of Aix-en-Provence. After much debate as to the pronunciation of Aix (without resolution as far as I can tell...is the "x" pronounced or not??), we headed off to this university town (no less than 15 universities here) to meet up with a family from my dad's congregation that happened to be in Aix while we were touring through Provence. The objective was to meet up with them for dinner at a local French restaurant, but the objective was complicated due to a precipitation event (also known as heavy rain). We arrived early to check out the town as we otherwise would not have seen this place. Aix is a university town which reminded me a lot of Boulder, Colorado, but without the mountains and hippies. As we were walking around waiting to meet up with our French connection we decided to dive inside a hotel bar next to the rendezvous point to avoid what began as a sprinkle and turned into a two hour deluge. While consuming our pre-dinner drinks, the roof in the bar began leaking water onto an unsuspecting patron (which was somewhat humorous I guess), but I was quickly repaid for my schadenfreude. While waiting outside for the rain to let up, an elderly French woman berated me for failing to go inside the hotel and call a taxi for her (I tried to explain to her my French wasn't that good, but she didn't seem to care...but then she went back out in the rain and walked away, so maybe she didn't really want a taxi and my French really is that bad).


After waiting the requisite time (and realizing the rain wasn't letting up) we ran through the puddles while dodging the rain drops with the family in the tourism office. We promptly put the kibosh on any notion of wandering the streets looking for a place to eat and instead ventured a couple blocks back to their apartment (they rented a flat for a week instead of a hotel, which seemed to be a great idea as price wise it tends to be cheaper than hotels if you are staying for any length of time longer than a few days). This turned out to be a wonderful idea as we ordered some pizzas, noshed on local specialities (tapenade, cheeses, breads), and enjoyed local wine while discussing the various virtues of our Swiss experience and traveling in Europe (the family lived in Europe as well, which made for great stories and lots of laughter over shared experiences). Their daughter is currently studying in Aix for the semester so we were able to hear about her experiences as well (click here to check out her blog).

Traveling abroad tends to have a lot of ups and downs, but we have found that taking the time to make unique memories has made this adventure all the better. We had a great time visiting with the Jenkins family and are very thankful to them for giving us a taste of their experiences as well. Plus, I think my dad can now deduct the expenses of his trip as work-related (just kidding, although if he could I'm sure he would encourage his congregation to include him in their travel plans more often).

(If you've noticed I was able to snap a couple photos before it started to rain, but unfortunately I didn't manage to take any after that, so you'll just have to imagine the rain looked like...)

0 comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)