Daunting

I went to my first meeting of the French club last night. I had to bribe myself with chocolate cake to go, because I tend to talk myself out of things, but in this case, the meeting was at one of my favorite faux French bakeries with a chocolate cake to die for and if I ended up just embarassing myself all over the place, AT LEAST I HAD CAKE.

I got to the meeting a few minutes before 8, because I'm anal-retentive that way, but that also meant I had to skulk around the bakery looking for the French club. You would think it would be easy to find a bunch of Francophones in a bakery in the middle of Red State USA, but amazingly, no, it's not. So I ended up grabbing the local free newspaper and kind of stood around, pretending to read the weekend listings. Having a newspaper or other literary prop when going to a restaurant/bakery/deli by yourself makes you look a little less dorky.

In the end, I finally went up to the cashier next to the dessert section and asked if he knew where the Francophones were. He was actually really nice and told me the French people met outside and newsflash, I wasn't the only one roaming the bakery looking for them. Nice!Cashier actually ended up corralling a bunch of us lost souls and we then thanked him by standing in front of his station, blocking the entrance for other paying customers, and possibly driving Nice!Cashier nuts by repeatedly saying to each other, "Bon soir! Je m'appelle..." and asking each other to "Repetez, s'il vous plait." To his credit, Nice!Cashier didn't make us move and when I went to order my slice of chocolate cake, he even cut me a slice from a freshly baked cake. Now that's la bonne vie.