Our time in Grenoble

In France, it's customary to take long vacations at least twice a year.
Before marrying Tim, my longest trip anywhere was 7 days, tops. Usually a weekend. But we've been here 14 days already and we have another week before we head home to the states. The length of this trip has really given me the opportunity to get to know Tim's family in a way that wasn't possible before we were married and during the wedding. We've had the time to fall into a routine here, make multiple visits to friends and family members, meet church acquaintances of my in-laws and attend a few events there. It's been such a special time for me too, to reconnect with the culture in which I was raised and see how another intercultural family "does life" here. I have loved every minute.
I've been collecting memories with my camera phone. We've brought out the big camera a couple of times, but sorting/editing/publishing those always takes a back seat to our client's pictures, so who knows when I'll be able to share those.

Here's what our days have been made of:

Thankfulness. We have so much.
Table time is sacred here. Twice a day, my mother in law cooks a delicious (multiple course) meal and we gather and pray and feast and talk across the table. I really want to bring this back to Chicago, lengthening our meal time and making it into a restful, recharging time of day.

Look at these two pictures. This is the same room.

 

How often have I not invited friends over "because I don't have enough space"?  Our table at home in Chicago seats 4. I keep letting this little detail put an endpoint to my hospitality.  The Tabailloux family home is not large, they actually eat their family meals in the kitchen. However, every year they host up to 23 friends and family members for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner. They do this by moving the couches outside onto the patio, bring a long garden table inside, dress it up, and seat everyone on gathered chairs and stackable stools. We were shoulder to shoulder and loving it. I got to know lots of Tim's cousins just because the proximity was so close, we had to talk. I'm going to invest in a table with leaves, stools, and long tablecloths when I get home. And who cares if my dishes don't all match. Spending quality time together across a table is more important.

 

After Christmas dinner,  my father in law, Jean-Luc, passed around printed lyrics to Christmas carols and we all sang together. It was such a sweet time of remembering Jesus' birth and the dire and miraculous circumstances surrounding it. Tim played the piano. Is there an end to his list of talents? I haven't found it yet.

I got this necklace from Tim's grandmother, Mamie Suzanne. It's a Huguenot's cross and presently has come to signify the faith of French Protestant Evangelicals. My mom has this necklace from our time living here in the 1990's and so do all the Tabailloux wives. I have now joined the club.

 

He's so handsome.  I want to nuzzle my cheek in that beard every minute.

We climbed up to Grenoble's Bastille. This is the view from the top.

This "telepherique" was built for the 1968 Grenoble Olympics. I felt confident about riding down the mountain in that little bubble until I climbed inside, then had to do some controlled breathing exercises to make it through the slow ride down. A lot more intimidating than a ski lift.

 

The mountains around the Tabailloux home are breath-taking. I took this on a ride to the grocery store. The most mundane of tasks are infused with so much beauty around here.

The French know how to party. Every occasion is a special occasion. Every friend brings a bottle of wine when they come to visit, and we open it and toast in their honor. It's so fun to clink glasses and celebrate every little thing.

My father in law was a good sport about wearing the birthday hat all day on his birthday. He's the most endearing man. This is him receiving birthday wishes from a land line. The novelty!

Tomorrow morning, we'll board the high speed TGV train to Paris. When we got married four months ago, we knew we had this luxuriously long trip to France plus this detour to Paris ahead of us and we had a hard time conceiving of taking a nice honeymoon. What could top Paris? So we went to Wisconsin, and it was kind of boring. We are so excited about our little lover's excursion to Paris! I think we're both thinking of this as our real honeymoon.

Chapter 10: Shortening the distance

Keeping in touch with the Atlantic Ocean between us was hard to do. We had to work around the 7 hour time difference, family obligations, and limited privacy.  It was also a really healthy challenge because it made us get creative in how we communicated. We started making videos for each other. Tim was back and forth between the mountains in Grenoble and Paris doing some videography work for a corporate communications firm and I flew down to Florida to be with my family for Christmas. The videos were brilliant for sharing all of our travel, experiences, and family events with each other. Whatever we did or saw throughout our days, we shot a few seconds of video so we could show each other what we were up to. We used everything from my macbook's Photobooth application to Tim's Canon 5D Mark II camera to film these clips.
Please enjoy a musical mash-up of some of our video mails set to music :)

If his goal was to win me over with all those classic Parisian scenes and Chartreuse mountain views, he achieved it. He probably won you over too.  I watched his videos over and over again.

We were hosting these videos all over the place and sometimes trying to email them to each other without success. I got tired of the chaos of disorganized information so on Christmas day I created a private blog for us to post our news to each other.

I tried to not make the design too feminine, so he'd actually want to use it. This blog was a communication tool that really worked for us since we were both blog savvy already. It was like a bulletin board: whenever one of us had a thought, video, or picture to share, we posted it and let the other person check it at their own convenience and leave a response.
I love this diptych of our opposite places. He was in the mountains and I was at the beach.

This was when the longing started. He was always on my mind and I wished so badly to be with him in all he was doing. Even though it was hard, these digital greetings and updates helped us immensely to understand one another and share our lives.
But still, I had to get up there to see him and decided to make it a little sooner than I originally planned.

Our first day in France

It took less than seven hours to fly from Newark to Switzerland. Here, it is customary to greet a friend or new acquaintance with a bise (pronounced: bees), short for bisou, which means a kiss. Each region of France has its own way of doing the bise, some start on the left cheek and then kiss the right, some regions kiss four times and others two. Tim says here in Grenoble they start on the right and just kiss twice, unless the person you're greeting is from up north and stubbornly holds on to their own style of doing the bise four times. It happens very fast when you first see someone; a fluid, thoughtless good manner for all French people.
All I have to do to survive here is smile often, listen closely, speak sparingly, and most importantly: start on the right.

Chapter 9: See you soon

On Monday morning, I got up early, put on some coffee, and started working on importing, sorting, and editing my pictures from the day before. Tim joined me about halfway through this process and offered to show me a few tricks of his trade before we left the house to go out for breakfast.  Once again, he was very kind and not overbearing in his guidance on how I processed my pictures.
"You could do this to warm up the white balance if you wanted to, but that's just what I like."

It is a cozy thing to wake up and sit at the kitchen table with someone, drinking coffee and talking. I loved this part of our time together, and I still really love my Tim time every morning.

Aixois bistro is one of my favorite Kansas City restaurants, and it's French, so we had to go.  We had just enough time to eat a nice meal together before he had to start his drive back to Chicago.
When we got settled at our table, the conversation suddenly became halting and awkward. It was like all the natural ease we'd had flowing suddenly stopped and we could barely come up with a new topic to discuss over breakfast.

As we were finishing our meal, I excused myself to go to the ladies' room, and as I was washing my hands in the sink I remember staring at my reflection in the mirror, inwardly demanding that girl to tell me what was going on.
And then I realized: he still didn't have an answer from me about whether or not I would come to Chicago. He was about to leave and had no idea what I was thinking. I felt horrible and resolved to go right out there and tell him that I did want to put forth the same amount of effort into this that he already had and travel to Chicago to see his life there and meet his friends too.

When I returned to the table, Tim was getting his coat on to leave.
"Want to take a walk before I go?"

Excellent. I would have plenty of opportunity to set this straight.

The weather was bright and cold as we set off through Brookside and Tim and I were able to converse easily again.
Lesson in dating: the forward moving walking process is so much easier on new relationships than staring at each other across a table.
We talked about our families some more and what it was like to grow up in two different cultures. I had a hard time finding a natural segue into telling him I wanted to come visit and after a long loop through the neighborhood--with our endpoint in site--bless his heart, he asked me again.

"So do you think you'd want to come up to visit sometime in the next couple of months?"
"Yeah, I really do."
"Really?!"
"Absolutely. Maybe in January if you have a free weekend?"

He was so excited. I was so excited. I think he even did a little skip/jump on the sidewalk like he always does when he's happy. He told me all about what we would do and what he would show me in downtown Chicago and how we would meet his friends and hang out with his brother and his fiancee.

"..and we can go ice skating in Millennium Park and go up in the John Hancock Tower and we'll go to a Blues bar..."

He had all these ideas. It was adorable.

We got back to my house, and in a matter of minutes his car was packed and we were in front of my house saying goodbye. We hugged. The kind of hug that lasts one and a half seconds and you're both wearing thick overcoats and when it's over feels like it was no real hug at all. It was the only time we'd touched since the first awkward hug when he arrived. Closing that space made me jumpy. We said 'see you soon', and he was gone

I went inside, laid on my couch, and tried to lock every memory into my head and analyze all that had happened. I was relieved that it was over so I could rest and think and be alone. I called my mom and told her that I thought he was wonderful and perfect, but I couldn't be sure until I got to Chicago and saw him in his own environment.

And then I went on with my day, and I started to miss him. The next day, he called me as he was boarding his plane to France.

And now, one year later, we are about to board a plane to France together to spend Christmas with his family. It will be the first time I've been back to the country where I grew up since 1998. I'll start this series back up in January on the anniversary of my first visit to Chicago to tell you all the details of that trip, or you can sneak a peak right here.  Thank you so much for reading. There's plenty more coming.

Chapter 8: What next?

After the Crossroads, we drove to Loose park and left our cameras in the car this time.
My awesome moment of feeling fun, free, and lighthearted about the whole situation fleeted as soon as I realized that our time together was drawing very short, he was planning on leaving in the morning, and we hadn't talked squarely about what was going on between us or where to go next. I channeled that uncertainty (in classic Bethany style) through feeling pressure to say and do the right thing, and I had no idea what that was in the moment. My greatest fear was that he was about to ask me to be his girlfriend, and even though I wasn't ready to say yes to that, I really didn't want this process of getting acquainted to end. I could feel the conversation coming soon, and I was right.

After walking a couple of laps around the park, Tim piped up:
"I know this is kind of early, but I really like you. And I'd love it if you came up to Chicago to visit and meet my friends and my brother sometime."

To which I replied:
"Thank you!"

I know this was awful. But it was the only honest reply I could give right then. He looked confused. Of course he was confused, he had asked me an important question and I had completely thwarted his answer.
"I'm so glad you came down here, Tim. It really means a lot to me that you were willing to go through all this work so we could get to know each other in person."
"Yeah, of course. I knew if I didn't come now, I wouldn't have the chance for the next couple of months and the emails would fizzle out before then. I wanted to give this a good shot."

He was so straightforward. Clear-thinking. Decisive. And my thoughts were all half-baked and soggy.

"I had a lot of fun today."
"I did too. It's too bad I have to leave in the morning."
"What time do you have to leave?"
"Well, don't you have to be at work by 9?"
"Well, yeah, usually...but I took a personal day so I don't have to go in tomorrow."
"Really? You don't have to go in at all?"
"Nope."
"Very nice! My flight to France is on Tuesday afternoon, and I haven't done any Christmas shopping for my family yet, so I better be back in Chicago by tomorrow night."
"So we have until around noon tomorrow."


Taking the personal day was my little insurance plan for giving us more time together: if we didn't like each other, I was just going to tell him I had to be at work and then he'd have to leave early the next morning. But that wasn't the case, and it was a good time to tell him we could have the next morning together. It's okay to lie about omit these things when you have a stranger from the internet staying at your house.

Maybe the conversational tangent about having until the next morning distracted him, or maybe he was encouraged by knowing that I was enjoying myself with him, but either way he didn't bring up the unanswered question of whether or not I would come visit him and I was grateful to have some more time to think about it. We still had one more hurdle to conquer that evening: meeting all of my friends.

My church in Kansas City was the heartbeat of my social life. Most of my friends attended the Sunday night service and I never missed. I was excited to see what Tim thought of it and wanted to introduce him to all of my people. I had told a few of my closest girlfriends the unfolding story of our initial contact online and they were eager to meet him in person. Everyone got the same line:

"This is my friend Tim. He's visiting from Chicago."

Most everyone glided right passed this and asked all the normal "what do you do" and "where are you from" questions followed by the "great to meet you, gotta run!"
A couple of others who weren't in the know shook his hand while giving me a look that said "male visitor from out of town? this is interesting." 

It was important to me for Tim to see that part of my life, and after I'd had some more time to think about it, I decided I did want to make a trip to Chicago to meet his friends and see his life out there. Unfortunately, I forgot to actually tell him this. 

Chapter 7: our first date

I grabbed a wool sweater, hat, and my beloved and beat-up Olympus E-410 DSLR camera that my parents got me for Christmas several years ago. It looked very shabby next to Tim's Canon 5D Mark II camera and luxury series Prime lenses, but Tim was so sweet and encouraging about my photography efforts. 

"Oh, cool! Is that your camera? Can I play with it?"

I was embarrassed to hand it over, but he looked at it and figured with it like it was a new toy, pronounced it "very nice" and handed it back. He could have taken that opportunity to be proud, condescending, and even arrogant about his camera, but he didn't. I liked that. 

We hopped into his Mini Cooper, and I navigated us down to the Crossroads, Kansas City's art district.

"Can I warm up your butt for you?"

"What?"

He laughed and hit my seat-warmer button. Seat warmers in the winter = true love.

He started making more cheesy jokes as we drove, and I was just a sucker for them. His international background gave him comedy material that I'd never heard anyone use before, like eastern European accents and jabs at French cultural norms. I knew exactly what he was talking about and it was so funny to me. We started speaking in mixed sentences of French and English (or Franglish, as we call it) and I was so impressed that his French and English were equally perfect.

I suddenly realized that I couldn't put him in any one box or attach a specific label to him. Was he French or American? Ridiculous or sincere? Professional or whimsical? He seemed to have all these opposing character traits and he made them work together in his personality.

We arrived at the Crossroads (which were deserted that Sunday) and started taking pictures.

I tried to take a nice portrait of him, because I knew photographers spend their lives making others look good and rarely get their own picture taken, but this was the best I could do back then with my Olympus.

Then he asked me if I wanted to try his camera. His camera that cost thousands of dollars, that he used to run his business, the one that if anything happened to it he would be screwed (I didn't know then that he had two more of those at home).

"Are you sure? What if I break it?"

"Haha! You're a funny girl. These things don't break."

"Yes they do!"

"True. But it's all insured. So have fun."

So I tried his camera, and it was a dream. He took the above photo with my camera. Why didn't I wear the strap if I was so worried about breaking his Canon? What was I thinking?

Then, as I handed his camera back to him something happened, some chemistry laden exchange that I will never forget for my whole life because it was the first time I felt weak with romance over my husband.

He looked at me like I was a prize he wanted and planned on winning,  and with a confidence he had waited to unleash until that moment, said:

"Come over here. Let me take your picture."

And this is what it did to me. My eyes got drunk. I became all sheepish and delighted and dizzy.

Then I tried to pull myself together and give him a serious model face.

And he cracked a joke and made me laugh.

It was so much fun. It was easy and full of light and happiness. In my mind, we became partners that afternoon. We were equal, balancing each other out with our differences and similarities. I had started to trust him, and he made me quit taking myself and the weekend so seriously and just enjoy the unspoken things that were happening. 

And we got our very first picture together.

Chapter 6: December 5th, 2012

The concert ended and we mingled with some people we knew there. Tim introduced me to his Kansas City photographer friends, Dave and Jessi who are wedding photographers with the Smiley Face Collective. He had met them on the Don't Give Up workshop they all attended. Incidentally, Dave and Jessi's blog was how I found Tim in the first place, but somehow that didn't come up in conversation on the night of the Christmas concert. I really enjoyed meeting them, and especially appreciated that they didn't ask any questions about what we were doing and where Tim was staying and why he was even there. They were just happy to see him and wanted to hang out, so I invited them over for brunch the next morning. The name of my game was still to surround us with a buffer of other humans until further notice. 

When we got home from the concert, we made small talk on the couch for a while. That conversation is lost on me now. I think it involved youtube videos, stories about our parents, and eating M&M's from the candy dish.  I think we were both eager for a break from the work of getting acquainted with our real life selves and happy to have some privacy and rest. I showed him to his guest room and then retired to my own room. 

I distinctly remember feeling bitter against the culture of dating and all the hoops it made me jump through. Meeting potential suitors on the internet, for goodness sake, and having them drive 8 hours just for us to size each other up. It was tiring and uncertain. I went to sleep having no idea what the next day would hold.

December 5th dawned bright and cold. I went to work in the kitchen getting food ready for our little brunch party. I invited Graham over as well, so that made 6 of us. Pretty soon the house was filled with friends making easy conversation, all getting to know one another, and I had the opportunity to fade into the background and quietly take in their conversation. This put me at ease and took off the pressure I had placed on myself to produce conversation rather than listen and learn about the kind of person Tim was. I started enjoying myself and getting comfortable being around him. 

I wanted Graham to be there and get to know Tim specifically because I needed a trusted male friend's opinion of him. I wanted to watch Tim interact with a new guy in the room and see how he acted in that situation. I know that men have this secret man language they speak with their eyes, and I wanted to be able to talk to Graham later, privately, about his impressions of Tim. This may sound manipulative and sneaky of me, but let's just remember: stranger from the internet. That is all. 

[sidenote: I'm still really glad I did this. You should do it too when you meet someone from eharmony.]

Tim and Graham talked about taxes and their own small businesses and other entrepreneurial jargon that made them sound smart and responsible. They did the secret eye thing and came out friends, which I liked. Dave and Jessi brought laughter to the room. Anna and I procured crepes, fruit, and bacon. 

I love this picture that Dave snapped of Tim and Jessi right before we sat down to eat together. 

We had a wonderful time, and when everyone left to go enjoy the rest of their Sundays, I wasn't nervous or uncomfortable at the idea of being alone with Tim anymore.  He asked me if I would show him Kansas City and proposed we go out to take some pictures, just the two of us, and I really did want to go.