La Rentrée. Adults and children scurry around getting organized for the year. Bob and I, determined to improve our ability to converse in French, have committed to 10 (Bob) and 18 (Sharon) hours of French lessons, board games, photo club, chorale, and French civilization and, so that our bodies will also get a workout, gym, biking and walking.

To this end, t he first Saturday of September over 2,000 clubs and associations hawked their wares to 100,000 people. I wondered if I joined up for belly dancing if I might begin to look like this:

Once again we joined about 1,000 other new Montpellierians for a presentation by the mayor and her 80 deputies. Every year about 4,500 new folks move here, most of them from other parts of France, and most of those because they want to escape the rain of the north. Montpellier is the fastest growing town in France.

Bob has been spending lots of time getting his photos framed and hung on the walls of our apartment so that we might have a warmed space into which to invite our French friends who all want to know how it feels to be back. We are trying out a less ambitious, less expensive, and less time consuming approach to some of these get togethers: an aperitif dinatoire…an aperitif with enough “hand food” that it passes for dinner: e.g. quiche, vegetables, olives, and nuts. It is so easy to pile plates high with vegetables and fruits during this harvest season. The tomatoes are so sugary they taste like candy, at only 1.80 € a kilo.

One of our friends, Michel, looked in on our apartment periodically this summer, so we biked to the Mediterranean to treat him to clams Palavasian.

A get together with another friend Marie-Martine gave her a chance to practice on a harpsichord during a one hour workshop

on the national day of patrimony, where most French museums open their doors and close their cash registers.

How does it feel to be back? Sunny with lots of opportunity for bike rides and

walks along the rich green fall gardens of the Esplanade at the center of town

We came to France, in part, because we were attracted to the voice of the common people demonstrating on the streets. US papers covered this massive French demonstration last weekend against increasing the age or retirement. Thousands and thousands marched for hours in the streets of Montpellier.

There are also smaller weekly demonstrations against French deportation of immigrants. For example, as you may know, about 1000 Roma have been deported "voluntarily" with 300 euro for each adult and 100 euro for each child who leaves, but this money does not mask instances of rough policing, destruction of homes and confiscation of identity papers by those managing the process.

Finally, and most importantly, Bob and I are cheering for my sister who seems to have successfully adjusted to a new course of treatment that she has phased in during the last four weeks. In the midst of it all, she managed to find, order, wrap and get delivered—in spite of her Stage IV lung cancer—a picture of us last summer at a singing workshop as one of three presents she found to celebrate my September birthday. (She is now officially two years out!)