It may sound corny but one of the highlights this week for me has been getting letters from friends back at Redeemer. The simple process of opening envelopes and reading encouraging notes sent across the ocean really is a great feeling and it shows how lucky I am to have such good friends. Now I just have to find the time to write back some equally long and humourous letters! Looking back over this week I realized it wasn’t one of the more “touristy” ones that I’ve experienced. Instead, I found myself quite occupied with more pressing, but less interesting activities. I finished applications for summer work, polished off a five-page essay for grammar class, and applied through Redeemer’s Financial Aid Department for the 2010 Application for Scholarships & Bursaries. On Friday night I was able to get out and enjoy an evening with a handful of young adults from my church. We attended a play called “Marc L’Expérience” (the Mark Experience). It was an amazing show put on by a number of local Parisian university students who are all members of Christian groups on their respective campuses. Without costumes, music, lighting, or even a stage, they delivered an incredible rendition of the entire book of Mark. The text really came alive that night and in the audience we got a greater sense of how the words on the page might have been lived out. Afterwards, in discussion with some friends, I came to realize how much of the depth of the Gospels we may actually miss out on because of the fact that there are not normally read or acted aloud. Speaking the truths orally, in the way in which they were originally conveyed, seems to bring them to life in a sense, really demonstrating the power of spoken word. I was happy to have experienced that evening and I was actually proud that these students sacrificed so much of their time to practice and memorize the entire book of Mark.
Saturday, I went with two of the other Redeemer students on the same study program to visit the Centre Pompidou. The Centre Pompidou is the nucleus of contemporary and avant-garde art in Paris. The building, which houses works as diverse as Picasso’s cubist paintings to documentaries by modern filmmakers, was built to appear inside out. The enormous walls outside are surrounded by pipes, elevators, water ducts, and scaffolding while the inside features clean, polished stone. The museum is practically too large to explore in one visit. There is an adjacent library, a video area, children’s workshops, computer lounges, cafés, and a performance centre for dance and theatre. We quickly reasoned that the bulk of the centre would be better to discover when we had a full day at our feet. Heading out in the quarter known as “Les Halles” we strolled through markets, shops and local food outlets. Emile Zola described the area as “the belly of Paris” for a reason: he was referring to the meat, vegetable, and fruit stands that have been thriving in this quarter since the 12th century. We stopped at a café, explored a smaller but less cumbersome photography museum and went our separate ways for the evening. It seems like I’ve seen so much in Paris so far, yet every time I take one of these little detours I get taken aback by interesting places like these.
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