When Someone Offers You a Tractor Ride, You Say Yes

I’m almost certain that Westhouse has had more rain in the past two weeks than California has had in the past year.

Of course, as the cliché goes, there can’t be rainbows without rain. And there we have it--the view out of my living room window last week.

Because lycées here don’t have the same extracurricular programs that we have in the US, I joined the church choir with my host mom as a sort of artistic outlet. On Saturday, we sang a special service for a couple’s Noces d'Or, the 50th wedding anniversary. It seems like everyone here got married when they were sixteen; couples who aren’t even that old have been married for fifty or sixty years. This was the first time I had ever been to church in French, and I understood nothing. Well, not nothing. I understood amen.

Afterwards, we went to visit my dad who was working at his brothers vineyard that day, hand picking wine grapes. They had just finished and were eating lunch when my host mom and I showed up, and offered to show me the processing plant for the wine grapes. I’d never seen two tons of wine grapes be mashed up at once, so I figured, why not? 

Two tons. I wasn't kidding.

My host uncle hopped into the tractor and patted the the window ledge beside him.

So, I took a fifteen minute excursion through the French countryside with the left half of me sticking a window of a tractor. There's a first time for everything here. I'm digging it.

Settling in to life in a foreign country is hard. It’s really freaking hard. Each day is better, though. My French keeps improving and things become more routine. As my host mom  likes to tell me all the time--il viendra. It’ll come. In the meantime, I’m having a totally rad experience.

And, on a completely unrelated note, here are some nice landscapes.

View out my bedroom window

Sun rising over the village while I walk to the bus stop in the morning.
Hashtag blessed.