II forgot for an hour or so that I was in France. I forgot who I was, what I was wearing, who I was with and the early hour not far away that I had planned to wake as, dancing with my eyes closed, the surrounding situation melted around me. It’s good to feel easy someplace new, easy enough to throw your inhibitions to the wind and dance like a crazy girl in a night club in a little town in the south of France. It kind of makes me giggle to think about it.

I’m starting to fall into step in my little dorm room. The students downstairs seem less of a black cloud presence and more like individual hormone-wracked stressed out little boys. On a face-to-face basis, they’re really quite nice. I still can’t understand Monsieur Lafitot’s southern accent that comes tumbling out when he smiles and jokes with us, but this should come in time. Or maybe we’ll just smile back and laugh along for the next 7 months.

I can clearly understand the boys next door, Cyril and Luc, and happily accept their invitations out to the night clubs of Pau on the promise I made myself (nary an invitation to a social event should be passed up while this adventure unfolds). I didn’t know I wouldn’t be getting back until the wee hours of the morning or paying 11 Euro to get in, but I was also ignorant of my own confidence which, when given a beat in a dark room, tends to make surprise appearances.

So I was dancing “à l’américain,” arms going everywhere, hips following their example, eyes shut tight to the very best parts of American songs remixed and mingled with heavy smoke and fake fog, green lines of laser light and a flurry of foreign eyes. I surprised myself that I forgot where I was, I wasn’t paying attention because I was so inside myself – in that very place I wanted to be all along – that it didn’t matter. I coyly smiled at myself. I swelled and swayed with possibility.

Drunk more off the thrill of using my dusty French tools, of oiling them up and building upon them than the near lack of alcohol in the drinks, I forced my hosts to return me home before the sun came up, catching the tail end of the night in three hours of sleep. By morning light I was somehow dressed and ready to go with Carlota the Spanish assistant to the town of Lourdes, where the Madonna was spotted once in a little rocky cove. Now you can spot her plastered all over in the shops and along the streets leading to the miraculous place.

Lourdes is quite pretty in places, cradled in the nape of surrounding fuzzy green hills, constructed of the usual pale crumbling rock walls and tile roofs, heavy paint-chipped shudders and bridges over brooks. The street that serves as the main city vein is lined with French and Spanish cars from which the devout spill into the streets and follow crowds toward a cathedral where Mary’s healing water trickles from faucets underneath. They buy buckets emblazoned with blue Vatican symbols and hollow plastic Marys with child to fill with the holy water. Otherwise considered a lucky combination of Hydrogen and Oxygen, this precious fluid is then given to the elderly, poured on wounds, or simply consumed. Some sit in the semicircle of benches labeled “malades” (the sick) radiating out from Mary’s cameo cove, others drop to their knees, and still others are wheeled through in metal carts pulled by young virgins dressed like nurses. My tired brain was entertained by this solemn collecting of things to place in the home, busts of Jesus grimacing in pain, more rosaries than you could ever fit in your car, giant candles half as tall as me, and my favorite of all – holy candies made from the water of the cove. For a little Mary in your mouth.

On the way home I fell asleep in the car before Carlota and her mother treated us to a lunch at McDonald’s. What a funny little day.