Saturday, September 4, 2010

Day 5 - Ridiculous


Today's pictures are brought to you from my first trip to Lausanne, the big city closest to my little home in Bournens (pronounced Bor-no).  Every Saturday, the farmers come to the city and sell fresh produce, flowers, and spices on the city streets until noon.  My Swiss family is a huge fan of all things fresh (yay!) so we went to the market.  What a beautiful, pleasant day.

Yesterday's post got me thinking about expectations. I was expecting Lausanne to be beautiful, I am expecting to enjoy my time here, and I am expecting there to be uncomfortable moments. But I'm glad for the unexpected - the things that are popping up that I was not prepared for. These are the times when I'm learning the most and sometimes having the most fun.

Today was full of unexpected silliness. For example, I was not at all prepared for a headless, bodiless mannequin to appear in my path only wearing a pair of jeans. The picture is made perfect by the woman framed by the pants, walking away in the distance wearing only leggings, as though she up and left her jeans in the street. And there they stand all by themselves, as if to say "so what? I don't need a person to look like great jeans. whatever, it's fine."

I was also not expecting to look up and see this pompous orange tabby glaring down at me from her balcony. "Hey, you in the scarf. Yeah, you hanging out with the Swiss family.  Nobody's fooled, you are totally American. Go home and eat a cheeseburger. This is MY city."

Do I have mental conversations with cats? Yes, all the time.  And we're moving on.

My favorite unexpected moment was the dinner I had with the father of my Swiss family. The mother went out for the evening so after the children were in bed, it was just him and I and some excellent Thai food. I was a little nervous because he only speaks a little English and I speak even less French and I have this unbecoming tendency to chatter to fill awkward silences.  Well, I needn't have worried. He speaks English far better than he gives himself credit for and he tells the most interesting stories. Before I knew it, an hour had passed and I was falling over laughing about the time he went to California with a friend and they dyed their hair blonde to pass as American surfers so they could surf on a pros-only beach.

Ah. Hipster and intellectual tendencies aside, anyone who has talked to me for five minutes knows I'm quite silly. I can take a rather stupid joke and make it last for way longer than necessary.  The moral of the story here is that though Mensa is rejecting my application as we speak, I'm glad that my grand European adventure is not affecting my love of the ridiculous.

2 comments:

  1. Oh Ellie! Enjoying your blog and living vicariously through you! Everything thing sounds wonderful and glad you are doing fine. Love you! Aunt Debbie

    ReplyDelete

I love to hear what you're thinking! Thanks for the comment love. :)

 

design + development by kiki and co. creative