9 Mars: Just call me Anna

So today we had Mass with the townsfolk. I call them townsfolk because that's exactly what they are to me- country folk who live in this town of 30 people- yes, only 30 people. We went from 6 mill Parisians to THIRTY villagers. The nice thing about living in a monastery is the fact that the church is attached to your house so we didn't have to leave for church until about 11:12 to get to Mass by 11:15. There were about 20-30 people other than us for Mass. The priest did a fine job of introducing us and I have now officially taken on 'le prenom' "Anna" since it is proven to be entirely impossible for the French to pronounce the "H" enough to say my name. And since I have to force myself to hocker in order to annunciate my name clearly enough, I have backed down to accepting Anna as my new persona. Anyways, we were kindly introduced and shown the hymnal and taught the melody. I feel so much more welcomed here than I did in Paris. The only pathetic part was when they tried talking to us and our limited conversational French didn't get us too far- little awkward. Oh well, hopefully we'll get better or we could all resort back to hand gestures and pointing. : )