Going to Mass and driving the tunnels

We went to mass for the first time today at the Prieure.  It was really quite nice.  We had no clue what the words were, but the ritual is about the same.  The priest seemed to be a nice fellow.  Deb and I were also invited to visit a Member of the congregation from Ambialet who is a former English teacher in Freench schools.  It was really nice to hear fairly good English and we will take her up on her invitation.

After mass and lunch, Deb and I decided to venture out and try driving the 6 speed Mazda.  The tunnels here are old troop train tunnels that were redone as road tunnels after WWII.  They are so tight, it is amazing.  They make the Parkway tunnels near Pittsburgh look like the Grand Canyon! Anyway, as I entered the first tunnel, we detected a light coming towards us from around the corner.  Sheer panic ensued as we pulled over as far as we could, and then around the corner came a motorcycle.  The situation reminded me of cartoons when I was a kid in which a huge shadow would be approaching a cartoon character who would be paralyzed with fear and then a small chipmunk or bunny would come out of the dark.  Just when I felt some relief, 2 vans and a car came through.  Now the vans seemed to leave me no room.  We actually bent the mirrors in so we would not knock them off!  After we made it through the second tunnel, we breathed a sigh of relief.  As we drove I noticed a large number of cars parked in the villages near Ambialet with mirrors knocked off or badly scaped sides of cars.  Coming back was even a bit scarier, because we turned out of the curve of the tunnel, seemingly leaving less room, and we had a number of cars come at us.  Still we survived.
When we got back to town I decided to take another walk down to Ambialet via Heartbreak hill.  I am convinced this was misnamed by a French person, who really meant Heart Attack hill.  When I arrived at the bottom, I tried to find some students, John, Lori  and Tim.  They were supposed to have been heading, I thought, to some ruins.  So I walked over the damn and down along the river because it seemed many people were going that way.  It turned out they were just walking along the river.  So I tried to fnd someone that spoke English to help me.  I found no one out of the 10 or so people I spoke to during the search, so I tried to pantomime a ruin.  Placing rocks neatly and kicking them over, placing them leaning on each other, whatever I thought looked like ruins.  People looked at me oddly, some laughed and shrugged (I guess that is  universal), one man hastened his wife up the path away from me, and a few looked and merely stared.  I started to realize it may have been looking pretty crazy.  In my old mental health days someone that was speaking in a strange language, putting rocks on to of each other and kicking them over would probaably had earned at least a 72 hour commitment to the psych ward.
Tomorrow is my first couple of classes to teach here.  I look forward to having some semblance of control and some knowledge of something I am comfortable with at this point.  Au revoir.