And so it seems I shall be getting married by the end of this year.

Well...according to French cultural superstition, or what have you.

Tonight at the Seder they were pouring out the wine and finished up one bottle on my cup, apparently that means you will get married by the end of the year, so I was told. Craaazy, that's happened to me a billion times this year. Hmm...Anyway, I told them all that was veritably impossible...

Then the head of the household turned to me and said softly, "You'll invite us to your wedding, won't you?" and earnestly awaited my answer.

I was like, "Of course!"

And in my head added all those qualifications that inevitably follow..."if" blahblahblah...etc. Qualifying statements that used to never exist, but in my new post broken hearted (and healed!...though I may protest too much) state, now exist. Blah.

Anyway, one highlight of tonight's service...rather exciting...

Long nonsequiter:

By the way, I have a great fear of the word exciting in French now because the other day I said I was really excite (avec accent sur l'e) to see my friend...and my French guy friend walking next to me at the time corrected me quite emphatically, saying..."No...if you say excited it means you are sexually excited, sooo turned on, can't wait to get into bed and have sex with this person...because you're so hot for them...blahblah." Mine virgin ears were scarred.

Now I never use that word, ever. Although there are many moments when I'm just about to say it...Darn. So useful in English too.

Back to subject:

Yes, so the "exciting" thing about tonight's service. We were all praying in the synagogue and suddenly someone accidentally hit the alarm. Since no one can use electricity or anything, after about 10 minutes of stopping prayer and grumbling, mumbling...we recommenced the prayer. The women up above (yeah, hate the separation, but what can you do...most French synagogues are like that, on s'appelle "traditionel"...) all moved toward the sides to get away from the alarm and closer to the center of the synagogue where all the prayer was going on. Then, after 5 minutes...someone hit the electricity by accident, and all the lights went off. It was sooo weird, like medieval times. There is many a story about Jews in the middle of prayer and things going wrong, and them continuing despite these factors. It was just like that. Everyone scrunched up close to the center of the synagogue and we finished the prayer with the alarm blaring (after a while it went off) and in the dark. People were trying to read the prayer books with the minimal emergency lights around the synagogues. I have to admit that it was quite a bonding, exciting (in the English sense), experience.

Another cool tidbit, since the people I spent the Seder with, and most of the syngaogue, are Sepharadic Jews...from Morocco, Algeria or Tunisia, we did parts of the service in Arabic. It was awesome. There would be a whole slew of arabic words and a hebrew word in the middle for the names of certain things. A couple people there were fluent in Arabic and would sing Jewish songs in Arabic or talk to each other in the language. It was quite grand...and I tried out the alliteration as well as the hebrew arabic (they had the hebrew letters spell out the arabic words).

Now if only people could coexist like the Judeo-Arab language...