Easter

Easter weekend was a fairly slow one. It was the beginning of our spring break, so most people had taken off for their various adventures. On Saturday night, I went out to dinner with my friend Ali and her mom and aunt who were visiting, which was a lot of fun. We found a nice little restaurant that I hadn't been to before and I got ribs, which is an interesting concept in France. I felt sort of funny eating them with my hands, but the waiter assured me that was how I had to do it.


I planned to go find some sort of Easter Sunday church service with Ali and her family the next morning, so I got up early and dressed up and headed out to meet up with them. They assumed that someone at the hotel would be able to help us find a church service, but no one really seemed to know where we might find one. Even Ali's french host mom had no idea where to go for an Easter service.


We decided to just wander around Montpellier to see if we could find some churches that might have a service for us, since France has quite a lot of churches and a very catholic population. We were able to find 2 pretty size-able churches in the city, but both showed no signs of people around and they were both closed. After awhile of searching, we gave up on church and decided to just go walk around a park for awhile and get some coffee and breakfast. 


It wasn't a total loss, since I wasn't ever really set on going to church, but it was really strange to be in a country that I know to be so christian and have such a hard time finding a service on Easter Sunday, of all days. It was also interesting that no one seemed to know where we should go. I guess a lot of French people are religious but don't actually leave their houses to worship? Who knows, guess I should ask around and see if I can figure something out. Another weird thing was that even the night before when we were looking up Montpellier churches online it was really difficult to find any information other than the fact that the churches existed. None of them had websites, let alone information on when they had services, holidays or any other time. 


The rest of my Easter was a little more successful, although not necessarily Easter-y. I met up with my friend Lauren to lay out in the sun for a few hours. The original plan was to go to the beach, but it was a little too cold, so we stayed in the city and went to a big grassy park. to soak up the sun. We got a little chilly from the wind that annoyingly wouldn't stop blowing, but otherwise had a nice afternoon.


For dinner, Jalynn and I had our friend Emily over. We cooked chicken and mashed potatoes and watched Sex and the City (one of our favorite dinnertime rituals) and afterwards enjoyed the chocolate kinder egg that we picked up at the grocery store as a replacement for the Easter baskets we knew we would be lacking this year.