Paris and Hausfrauen

I've started to feel like a real deutsche Hausfrau, with all my baking, cleaning, and general "puttering." I suppose grocery shopping for two also enhances this feeling of homemaking, and I've even dubbed myself upon occasion a Putzteufel (directly translated: cleaning devil). Part of it is also my erratic hours: I spend up to twelve hours a day at inlingua or companies during the week, and combined with working Saturday mornings, all this time away from home makes me want to hunker down and nest all weekend when I finally have free time.

It hasn't all been hunkering, though. Two weeks ago we drove to Paris (I can DRIVE to PARIS! I know!) to see my sister Sarah perform with Montréal-based Compagnie FLAK onstage. Aside from the sheer novelty of rendezvousing with one of my siblings on the streets of France's capital city, seeing her perform was also an incredible experience. The piece was beautifully executed, and the small theatre allowed us to feel much closer to the stage and more intimately connected to the movement there. Afterwards, the director of the theatre gave a rather long-winded speech concerning the strong ties between Québec and France, wrapping up with an energetic attempt to regain the crowd's wandering attention, "Vive le Québec!", about the only part of the whole spiel that I actually understood. Shockingly, all my French has completely deserted me. German seems to have occupied the foreign language part of my brain and shoved out all other structures and words there. It was great fun attempting to order and pay for food in French, only to find myself babbling on in an incoherent mixture of the two languages. I'm surprised I wasn't implored to speak English, although perhaps I shouldn't be considering France's reputation for its treatment of foreigners.

We also had a lovely couchsurfing host who was incredibly accommodating. She hails from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and we commiserated about our constant need to define our birthplaces in relation to Toronto or Vancouver. When I mention I'm from Canada, people invariably cheerfully ask: "Oh! What part?" When I answer "near Toronto," they nod wisely and say "mm, Toronto." But not REALLY Toronto, although I was certainly born closer to it than our CS host. I can't imagine how she navigates that one; perhaps "somewhere in the middle" should be her standard response. It turns out, in a bizarre twist, that we actually attended the same Explore program in Trois-Pistolès two summers ago and participated in the same afternoon activity group. We didn't discover this until the last day, and I thought it was a bit more than coincidence that made me wind up on her lovely pull-out couch for three nights.

My birthday is on Sunday, so we'll be celebrating with various people over the weekend. And today happens to be Bastian's father's birthday, so we're heading to the Allgäu tonight for dinner and beer: Lots and lots of beer. The weekend has arrived, and in true Hausfrau style I've already got a pound cake in the oven and a coffee date at 4p.m. Life is sweet, particularly on days like these.

update: just withdrew my slightly blackened pound cake from the oven. definitely haven't achieved hausfrau status yet.