Team Retreat

14 Octobre, 2008

Collobrières

This past weekend marked the successful conclusion of our first six weeks in France. It’s rather amazing that the time has passed so quickly, and at the same time it seems that we’ve very much settled into life here in Montpellier. It’s a strange dichotomy: we’re still just beginning, and it seems as if we’ve been doing this for a long time.

To celebrate a successful first six weeks, we took a team retreat this weekend to a small village called Collobrières this weekend.

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There is a couple there who own a small “maisonette” which they make available to missionaries and other Christian workers in France to use expressly for this purpose. When I mention that the maisonette (literally translated ‘a small house’) was small, it would be difficult for me to exaggerate how little it really was. The house had two rooms, one serving as a bedroom, with just enough space for a double bed, a bunk-bed and an amoire. The other room served as kitchen and living room all rolled into one, with a stove and sink in one corner, a table taking up most of the rest of the room, a couch against one wall, refrigerator and hot water heater on the last wall. There was a lean-to bathroom off of the bedroom, which actually was relatively nice. Needless to say, our first challenge of the weekend, after figuring out how to get into the maisonette, was to make ourselves fit into the space. Being the only boy, I got the whole kitchen/living room to myself each night. 



I digress for a moment to relate some of the creative problem solving we had to do to properly open up our small home for the weekend. We had instructions, but being both a little ambiguous and in French, it was not necessarily obvious for us to figure out how to accomplish all of the tasks required to get the house up and running.

We arrived in Collobrières after several hours of driving (no one knew how long we were on the road, and it didn’t matter, this countryside is so incredible and we were entertained for good portions of the way by Laura and Erin dramatically singing along to various Disney movie tunes from their childhood – they know all of the words too!), and found ourselves in a super quaint village nestled in a small valley. It was gorgeous. We had a map to get from the city to the maisonette, but it wasn’t very specific, so to get there we drove out of town, me inventing decisions for which way to turn each time we came to a place with a fork in the road. I was the navigator for the trip, and so at this point I was used to making up directions to get places. Our route from Montpellier to Collobrières was completely invented, the directions we had printed off in advance serving only as loose guidelines as we changed our route based on confusing ronds-points, roads that were completely unlabeled, missed turns with no way to get back, and various cities that we encountered that were not even mentioned on the map we had. So as we made our way through Collobrières and I was asked if I knew for sure where we were headed and I said “no,” the team wasn’t too thrown off base. We eventually stopped and asked two people out walking their dog where the place was that we were looking for. It turns out that we had gotten pretty close, but had just gone too far and missed it.

And so we arrived at our home for the weekend. First priority was to figure out how to unlock the place. The instructions stated to find a key to a shed in an abandoned mailbox, unlock the shed, then inside would be the key to the maisonette. We found the shed key easily enough (the shed was actually called a “hanger” and we’re not really sure why), but found it impossible to unlock the shed. All five of us tried to no avail, and I also discovered it impossible to break into the maisonette without the key, the door and both windows being properly locked. Eventually it was discovered that there was a specific length into the key hole where the key would turn – not all the way in, nor just inside of the hole, but some unidentified distance partially into the hole. We got in, found the key in the dark (thanks to the small flashlight I always carry from Adam Go – I can’t tell you how many times it has come in handy in a tight spot), and got into our tiny home.

Fortunately the last visitors hadn’t figured out how to turn off the electricity or the water, so all that we had to do was plug in the fridge, turn on the gas under the stove and decipher how to run the hot water heater. At this point we had high hopes of being able to shower. We figured it all out, at least so we thought. The fridge worked, the stove worked, and the switch to turn on the hot water heater had been flipped. We left to go search out groceries.

That night we discovered our first real challenge when we started running out of running water. By the time it got time to brush our teeth the water was gone. There was no sign of hot water, so what water we had we heated on the stove to use to wash faces, etc. We read in the instructions that the maisonette runs on a very small supply of water, as the region always is running on a water shortage. The supply that the maisonette does have takes between 4 and 8 hours to refill.

The next day we seemed to have even less water. The hot water heater was still not working, and so it was decided that more desperate measures needed to be taken. Claire and I worked on the hot water heater for almost half of an hour, and finally figured out how to make it work after discovering the gas tanks behind the house that needed to be opened (just one, though!), the three valves that needed to be opened inside the maisonette, the other dial that needed to be turned that we couldn’t see behind the folded up picnic table umbrella, and how to properly set the dials on the water heater that were behind the removable panel that we couldn’t find the night before (which setting do you want: snowflake, sun, or +10?). We later discovered to our dismay that we turned on both the hot water heater and the radiators in the house because we set the hot water heater to “+10” instead of the sun icon. Dinner that night was a very warm and stuffy affair despite the chilly air outside.

Saturday morning and early afternoon was spent in the city. We visited a chestnut roasting stand. The guy there was roasting the chestnuts in a roaster shaped like a train engine. He had the prime location just off of the 12th century (very narrow!) bridge that leads into town. We were in search of lunch, and asked him where would be a good place, and so he pointed us to two (out of about 5 total) restaurants in town. They were both a little expensive, but there was a local pizza place up the street (literally, you had to go either up or down a hill in this town) that we
checked out.




It looked closed, but the owner had just opened the shutters, so we asked when they would open. They were closed for the day to prepare for the big festival the next day (we were told that so much had to be done! as they were relaxing in their restaurant, eating lunch and drinking some wine…such is life in southern France). We asked where we could find a good inexpensive restaurant in town. He exclaimed that he was the good inexpensive restaurant in town, and promptly opened his doors to us and invited us in. We were all shocked, because he was definitely closed, but told us that he would open his place up just for us to have lunch. It took him a while to get the kitchen fired up and dash out of the restaurant for some immediately important errand (leaving us in the restaurant with these two little old ladies who also worked there). However, once we were served, we had a fantastic meal! Pizza in southern France is very different than in the states, and it’s good! Tip is always included in the price of food at restaurants here, but we left him one anyway for opening his restaurant up specially for us.

Afterwards we went back down to the chestnut place, and I had my first fresh roasted chestnuts! They were pretty good – I wouldn’t fly all the way back to France for them in the future, but I really enjoyed them this weekend (Chestnuts roasted on an open fire…how can you resist?). We then visited a monastery close by, which was in this incredible setting up in the mountains. The road to get there was super narrow, and the locals were out picking chestnuts for the festival the next day. We got the scoop from two of them when we stopped at a particularly scenic outlook.




After the monastery, we returned to the city, remembering that we needed to by butter and water at the grocery in town. We left with one stick of butter and 16 liters of water. The water only lasted us one night and we went and got more the next day! We celebrated Katie’s birthday and enjoyed the evening together.

Sunday found us checking out the chestnut festival in town. The town had somehow exploded with people and artisans selling their wares (lots of chestnuts, and
everything else from hats to exotic olives, which Erin immediately sampled).



We had chestnut ice cream (glace marron), which was amazing, and were able to explore the ruins at the top of the city, which were super cool. It felt like we were in Narnia or Middle Earth. We had a great day and went back to the maisonette, armed with more water and had dinner and played Nerts all night (which is a new big favorite of mine). Katie snowed us all every game, but we had good fun anyway.




Sunday night, just when we thought we had made it with the challenges in the maisonette, suddenly the stove stopped working mid heating up water for evening cleaning rituals. It was quickly discovered that we had run the stove gas tank out of gas. Fortunately there was an extra gas tank next to the stove, but it was impossible to change the two without tools. We found none in the maisonette, although we discovered several other things we had been searching for all weekend. We decided we had to go out to the shed/”hanger” to try to find some. Claire came with me, which was good, because it was totally dark outside but for the moon which was fortunately out. As funny as it is after the fact, going outside to a creepy shed that doesn’t belong to you in the middle of nowhere in a foreign country to search for tools which you’re not sure exist in the dark and without any lights in the shed was needless to say, unnerving. It felt a little bit like I was in an episode of Scooby Doo and was about to stumble upon a creepy monster. I succeeded in getting the shed open in the dark, and then was able to find proper tools, once again thanks to the flashlight I always keep on my keychain. Once this was accomplished, it was a simple task to change the gas, and we were back in business.

Our last night was spent relaxing, and we got up early the next morning to take off again for Montpellier. Miraculously we got everything back into the car (was was much too small for ourselves and our luggage), and got back to Montpellier successfully. We had to stop for gas once on the way, and when we were stopped calculated that our little diesel car that hardly could power up the steep hills we were driving on was averaging almost 50 miles to the gallon. We felt much better about our little car after that.

We’re back in Montpellier now, well rested and ready to go for the rest of the week!