In which we visit some of our old haunts

When our kids were in 4th and 1st grades and preschool, we spent 14 months living in the Paris area in Fontenay-sous-Bois, a suburb just to the east of Paris. (If you are a glutton for punishment, you can read about that year's adventures at Five Kansans in Paris.) Today, at the kids' request, we hopped on the RER and headed for Val de Fontenay, our former train station.

We started our afternoon in Fontenay by heading to the bakery that we had frequented during our time there in in order to pick up some sandwiches for a picnic lunch. Sapphire had suggested that it would be exciting if the people working there were to recognize us, and I had assured her that it was almost certain that they would not.  After all, it had been three years since we left, the kids looked a lot different, and sometimes the turnover at places like that can be quite high. So we headed in, and were greeted with, "Bonjour Madame," which was as expected, and walked over to look at the sandwiches in the glass case. And then I asked Cherry, in English, what kind of sandwich she wanted. All of a sudden I saw a light dawn on the faces of the women who working there, "Votre enfants ont grandi! La petite n'est pas petite! Vous avez retourné à Fontenay?" So we talked a little, the returning Americans and the bakers, about what we were doing in Fontenay and how long we were planning to stay in the area. 

Then we walked through our apartment complex (there were new "pelouses interdites" signs, and the hill going up to the playground had been torn up to allow work on the city's heating system) and behind Cherry's maternelle (preschool) enroute to the Parc des Epivans, which was a favorite of the kids when we were living in Fontenay. We arrived at 1:30 to discover that, despite the claims of the Fontenay website that the park was no longer closing for lunch every day, the entrance was locked, and we would have to wait until 2:00 to gain entry, so we sat on a patch of grass across the road and ate our sandwiches in the shadow of the cemetery wall and waited for the gates to be unlocked. Inside we discovered that the saddest of the pieces of play equipment had been replaced by something new (and much cooler) and that none of the blackberry bushes in the woods had even begun to set fruit, much less to have anything ready to eat.

Two hours or so later, we headed back out of the park and toward École Henri Wallon, which was where Sapphire and Ezio had had CLIN (with apologies, the link goes to a Google translation of a French wikipedia page) classes during the year that we lived in Fontenay, hoping to arrive at dismissal time, and hoping that their teacher would still be there teaching the CLIN class. We arrived just as the guardian opened the gates to the school and the students began to pulse through the gates. We waited patiently, remembering that the CLIN class had always been among the last through the gates, and finally, just as nearly all the waiting parents had been met by their children, we saw the CLIN students come out, led by M. Gutierrez, their teacher. And so we went in through the gate, and talked with him a little, and he introduced Sapphire and Ezio to all of the other teachers standing there, and commented on how big Cherry had gotten. And then we headed back toward the train station by way of the Auchan.

At this point, it's important to realize that I haven't brought a purse on a trip to Europe since I was in high school, and part of the uniform for girls included carrying a navy blue purse. Since then, I've always carried the important stuff in a money belt and stuffed what cash I would need for the day's essentials into a pant pocket for easy access. Through many trips to Europe this has worked beautifully, and so I blithely set off late last week, money belt safely strapped around my waist with passports and credit card, and purse safely left on the kitchen counter back in Illinois. This morning when I went to put on a dress for the day (the first time since we arrived that it's been warm enough for one) I discovered the error of my ways. Accessing a money belt under a dress would be tricky, to say the least, and of course the dress didn't have pockets. Fortunately, Sapphire had brought her small denim purse with her, so I appropriated it for the trip, stuck my credit card, 20€, and my phone inside, put on the money belt containing everybody's passports, and headed out the door with the kids.

Part of our rational for making the trip today instead of some other day was that we needed something (in the interest of not mortifying my youngest I'll give no further details) that was not readily available in the local supermarchés, but which I suspected that I might be able to find in the giant hypermarchés of the suburbs. So the last stop on our trip to Fontenay was a stop by the Auchan to pick up the mystery item as well as a couple packages of cookies for the trip home. All was going beautifully; we'd found what we needed, waited in line to have it rung up at the cash register, I'd put in the brand spanking new chip-and-signature credit card that we'd gotten just for this trip, and which I'd used a dozen times already, the card had been accepted by the machines, and I just needed to sign the receipt and be on my way. And then, "Avez-vous une pièce d'identité?" Well, yes, but it was in my money belt, which was under the dress that I was wearing, and hardly easy to access. "Passporte?" So there I was, in the checkout lane of a suburban hypermarket, trying to get at my passport by simultaneously pulling up my dress and pulling down my money belt in a desperate attempt to avoid both a run-in with the Auchan security guards and a display of my underwear. The cashier took down the necessary information, handed back the passport and receipt, and then, with as much dignity as I could muster, we headed back to the train station for the trip back to Paris.