If you guess that means I spent the day outside enjoying the advent of spring, you guessed right. We had stake conference today (which is the meeting we have biannually in our church where all the wards meet together for church - there are about 8 wards in the Paris stake). Since the Versailles chapel isn't big enough to fit everyone, they rented out the Palais du Congrès for the morning. Which means I spent the day at church essentially à côté de the Versailles Palace - it's about 100 feet away from the golden gates.This is the view that greeted us as we stepped outside at the end of our meeting.
Before we stepped outside though, I have to report. I've been acting as the music president of my ward, which means I'm in charge of all the music, which also turns out is because I'm the only one who can play the piano - well the only one that can sight read all the hymns, but there are some others that are getting there for sure.
Part of this role I hold inspired me to also attend the stake choir. I'm just going to say that stake choir has been one of my happiest memories of France - combined with Versailles. They kind of go hand in hand since stake choir always takes place in Versailles. The choir director, Blandine, is probably the most talented of all I've encountered and picks the most fabulous songs for us to sing, as well as being able to arrange music herself - which helps when you need to convert English songs to French. There's just something about singing together that makes you bond with people. I experienced the same thing in my vocal performance class at BYU. I loved those classmates! despite the fact that we were all really bad, especially one guy who had this funny way of leaning his body to the left which really bothered our professor who was a stickler for performance posture.
For our meeting today we sang two songs. I wanted to capture one of them as a memory to my experiences in stake choir and to hear our voices singing in French, so I asked little Lizzie Gaston to record one of the songs for me on my camera - though I told her not to get any video since we're not supposed to take videos or pictures of church meetings. So here's a nice little shot of the floor to the Palais du Congress while we sang "J'ai Besoin de Toi" (I Need thee Every Hour).
:-)Let me also say that as I'm getting a little bit better at French it's super entertaining to hear talks in English that have a translator standing next to the speaker and repeating the words in French to the audience. I get to compare how they say things and know when they screw up. E.g. today the speaker was telling some story about how some guy was on track to become a jailbird and the translator, who was pretty fantastic, stopped dead and looked at the speaker with an absolute blank face. Guess France doesn't have jailbirds.
He also must not have known what Indian corn is - no Indians in France ;-) The speaker was talking about how some farmer was growing maize, no idea why he didn't just say corn, but whatever, each time the translator swapped it to French he came up with some completely unrelated plant or vegetable that started with a 'g'. Corn in French is "maïs" so I'm pretty positive he wasn't getting it right.
Picnic Time
To take advantage of our surroundings, two of my friends and I had planned to have a little picnic in the palace gardens after church, and when we got there we realized we were just going to have to rent a boat too.
Which we did, skirts, high heels, and all.
Every boat we passed either shouted "Hello" to us, or we shouted "Bonjour" to them. On our way out to the middle of the fountain/lake/huge mass of water, a woman in another boat waved her hand at us and burst out "I just got engaged!" We were all really excited for her and totally approved of her fiance's choice of scenery for the big moment.
Aahh, Versailles.
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