Rugby! Fete A Lire!

Yesterday was the World Cup of Rugby, hosted by Paris. England played South Africa....and to celebrate Susan and I decided to go meet a friend of her friend at a bar/restaurant near Les Halles to watch the game. Cynthia (my new Chinese friend, the cousin of my Qufu friend) also called me and decided to meet us with 2 of her friends! Now, I know nothing about Rugby...but it's fun to watch with passionate fans and the players are cute...
Susan's friend's friend (AKA Bert) was really nice...and Cynthia's 2 friends (a Chinese guy from Jinan!!! and a Chinese girl from Shanghai) were super awesome! We had a great time chatting in 3 languages...French, English and Chinese! It made for some interesting sentences and lots of laughs. I hope we all get together again soon!

Then Susan and I caught the metro home...only to be surrounded by a bunch of old drunk Scottish rugby fans celebrating the loss of England to South Africa. They noticed that we were laughing at their jokes and then decided to include us in their hilarious banter. One of them decided to "speak Scottish" so we couldn't understand...but I understood enough to know that he was saying something about us being "sexy" so i laughed and they got a huge kick out of it and told everyone I could understand Scottish. Then an Australian Ruby guy got on the train, and proceeded to sing a funny...and obscene...song about Ruby...and the hilarious Scottish guy that said we were "sexy" in Scottish covered my ears so I "wouldn't understand" and hear the "bad" words! It was hilarious!! For all the fans of the movie Old School out there...A drunk Scottish man in a kilt gave me earmuffs on the metro!! AMAZING! :)

Then today Rachael sent me a message and randomly invited me to go to a presentation/lecture by a bunch of authors as part of the Fete a Lire at the Memorial de la Shoah. As it turned out...they were all authors of various works about the Holocaust/World War II...which is right up my alley (yaaaaay history nerd!). Rachael had no idea, but we realized that we both have a strong interest in Holocaust lit and so have made plans to return soon to the Memorial de la Shoah (a museum/library/center for everything Jewish/Holocaust oriented). I'm psyched! The lecture/round table was really interesting...and I especially loved this older author who wrote a memoir about his experience as a young Jewish boy in Fascist Italy. He was really interesting, not as pretentious as some of the other authors, and spoke French with a delightful Italian accent. It was great to find connections in their work and discussions to my classes with Matt Hockenos at Skidmore (especially the class I took on Nazism, Fascism, and the Radical Right...and my thesis on History and memoir). After the presentation, Rachael and I bought books and had them signed...I bought 2: "Pour Violon Seul: Souvenirs d'enfance dans l'En-deca 1938-1945" by Aldo Zargani (aka my favorite) and "Recits d'Ellis Island: Histoire d'errance et d'espoir" by Georges Perec and Robert Bober (Bober was also on the panel, and was one of my favorites). It was a great afternoon...I feel content and cultured now!