Belleville
Thursday night, Christian and I went out to dinner and the theater. Dinner was at Barcelona, a Spanish restaurant downtown. We went with Christian's boss Doug and also his colleagues Ioana from Dartmouth and François from Lyon, who were visiting for the day for a series of talks. It was good to see both of them again, though it would have been better to have seen them in France, where we had gotten to know each other. The food was pretty good, and the wine was a surprising Basque white.
We bid everyone adieux and then we walked over the Yale Repertory Theater for a performance of Belleville. We didn't know much about it, other than it had good reviews and was about two American expats living in France. Sold! The story went in a direction we didn't quite anticipate--the playbill cover's washed-out, grimy grey was perhaps a good indicator it wasn't going to be a comedy of culture clash. Still, the acting was solid and the dialogue done well. A lot of things reminded us of our lives in France. Not the actual Americans themselves, they were far too... américain. But the things around them triggered some waves of nostalgia. The final scene of the apartment being cleaned out reminded us of how empty our apartment was in Lyon before we left -- all our memories packed away.
We bid everyone adieux and then we walked over the Yale Repertory Theater for a performance of Belleville. We didn't know much about it, other than it had good reviews and was about two American expats living in France. Sold! The story went in a direction we didn't quite anticipate--the playbill cover's washed-out, grimy grey was perhaps a good indicator it wasn't going to be a comedy of culture clash. Still, the acting was solid and the dialogue done well. A lot of things reminded us of our lives in France. Not the actual Americans themselves, they were far too... américain. But the things around them triggered some waves of nostalgia. The final scene of the apartment being cleaned out reminded us of how empty our apartment was in Lyon before we left -- all our memories packed away.