good luck/bad luck

I feel so French.  I just waited until 16:00 (4 o'clock) to turn on the dryer.  If you wait until 4:00, the energy you use is cheaper.

It's Saturday here in Gif-sur-Yvette.  The weather here is gorgeous.  It's so great to live in a place where I can brag about the weather again.  The weather here feels a lot like the weather in LA.  No bugs, no humidity, mid-70's, light breeze, sunshine.  Ahhhhh.

So, I woke up this morning and noticed that the "freebox" reads "ERREUR."  This means the TV will not work.  Our TV, internet and phone are all hooked up to this box and there have been a few times when all, some or none of those three services have been working.  It's getting really embarrassing to have to keep calling our landlord to come down and fix this for us.  He's a really nice man.  His name is Jean.  I think he is an AV/Computer Engineer, so for him it's pretty much a piece of cake.  But, he does have to walk down a big hill to get to our place and I'm sure it will get annoying to him real soon.  So, I'm wondering how long I can go without French TV.  If we try to fix this ourselves, I can guarantee we'll lose the phone and internet.  Anyway, that's how Saturday started out.

We decided to take the bus to Chevry, an area of Gif-sur-Yvette where they are having this huge EXPO dealing with sports programs and activities.  There is also information for new arrivals to the area.  We returned our rental car yesterday, so we took the bus.  The EXPO was at the Chateau de Belleville and there were tons of booths, a kids play area, a nice lady at AVF (French Welcoming Association.)  We actually signed Gaius up for a FENCING CLASS for little kids.  He saw the booth and said, "I want to do that!"  So, his introductory class is the Thursday after school.  I found information on French Pastry Classes here in Gif. I'm pretty excited about signing up for that.

What we failed to notice when we rode the bus was that buses stop running at 13:00 on Saturday.  At 2:00, we headed over to the bus stop and read the schedule.  :(

What to do?  Hmmm.  We decided to call a taxi, but did not know where to tell them to pick us up.  So, we went back to the AVF booth (Welcome to France booth) and a nice lady named Nicole was happy to help us.  Can you believe that she had two women working at the booth who live on our block???  One of them is literally our next door neighbor.  Janine is a French grandmother whose two grandson's used to go to Gaius' school.  She volunteered to leave the EXPO and drive us home.  She gave me her phone number and said I can call her whenever I need to and if she is free, she will help me out.  She is totally getting a can of Virginia Peanuts!

Small town, huh?  So, needless to say, I will be signing up with the AVF.  They have a lot of activities like cooking classes, parties, wine classes, field trips, walking groups, etc. for new arrivals.  Pretty cool that we have two new friends who live on our block.  Not sure if we would have met them if we had not missed the bus!