last day

So since my last post I've been to Chomonix, Marseille, and Taizé. Chomonix was a short visit, we ate lunch and prayed there for a little while, then moved on to Marseille on the Mediterranean coast. It has a very different feel culturally from the places we've been so far. A little more laid-back I guess.

We spent two nights in Marseille. We prayed over the city, and took a boat out to the island where the book, The Count of Monte Christo took place. While most of us where there Isaac went to a neighboring island and spent an hour being attacked by vicious, man-eating sea-gulls. In the process he lost his cell phone. So when the rest of us finally joined him on the island we had to help him retrace his steps looking for it. However, being the good friends that we are, we willingly followed him into perilous territory after laughing hysterically at his ordeal. We also took pictures of him first; he was kind of messy. He, he...I'm still laughing. I would be more sympathetic if it wasn't so incredibly hilarious. Anyway, we followed Isaac into the gulls' territory and they took a lot of dives at us and screamed a lot, but with six of us they were far less emboldened than they had been with only one. We eventually found the phone by calling it continually with Mike's phone till someone who had found it answered it. (How the person found a phone abandoned in such a dangerous place none of us ever found out.) So this story ends happily. : D

After Marseille we went to Taizé (and I left all the gifts I had bought my family behind in the hotel...brilliant). I think this was one of the highlights of the trip for me. I really liked the feel of community the place had, no sense that you're trying to break into somebody's established clique, everybody's willing to let you be their friend. It's super easy to talk to people there for the most part. However, people there are from all over the world, especially Europe. There was a German holiday during our weekend there so a lot of people were from Germany. I only know toe things in German: hello and something else impractical and maybe slightly inappropriate, definitely not a way to introduce yourself. :s I really liked being there and feeling lost in a group of people speaking seven different languages. Usually though people used English as a common language. The services were pretty cool. There were very simple worship songs sung in fifteen different languages, with no real visible worship leader. The worship times always had a long period of silence (which for a room of two thousand people was very impressively silent), this was a good time to focus as they were usually towards the beginning of the worship. They would also read a verse about Jesus between songs in many different languages. I was sorry I only got to be there for a day. Someday it would be really cool to go for a whole week.

Today we're back in Paris, in a suburb called Saint Germaine, and we leave tomorrow. Wow, this trip seemed really short. I'll miss you France.