nanciennes

part of our big welcome

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I mentioned that the French have a little tradition—What? The French have a traditon? No…—of welcoming new people to town. Everyone comes, has a Q&A with the mayor, learns about their new town & leaves feeling more oriented and at home.

Nancy hosted an event like this last Saturday, and we were lucky enough to hear about it & register in time. (Thanks, Lauren!)  So we got up early on a grey Saturday and walked to the center of town, where a banner welcomed us: Welcome New Nanciennes!

Place Stanislas all decorated

They’d turned Place Stanislas into a garden-map. From the second floor of the hotel de ville, the town hall where they were hosting our welcome breakfast, you looked out onto the garden and saw that it was arranged as a map of the Lorraine region. I’m already starting to feel like a group Lorraine-dweller—maybe that’s because I’m used to being a proud Buckeye.

After the mayor gave a welcome speech, we headed out to our tours. There were something like eleven to pick from, and people (an astonishing number of them) rushed to register for their tour in time. We got lucky: it was starting to drizzle and most people were deterred from the bike tour.

We stuck with it and got to see a whole new side of Nancy that we never could have figured out on our own. The “water tour” showed us old factories turned into sustainable building projects, a water garden, the canal systems… even in the rain and through my giant plastic poncho, the views were gorgeous.

part of the canal system

Joe & I want to do the tour again to stop and read plaques, take pictures and poke around the neighborhoods to really know the area better, because on Saturday the bikes just kept on a’ rollin’.

So we walked, we biked, we were bused to the next stop (our meeting with the mayor)… and we worked up a good appetite. When they released us from the meeting, we were in a large room with different booths for businesses and organizations around town. I was comforted when people started scrambling for the free pens and mints: It was like being at the fair’s commercial tent, only if you made it a competition.

And then the food came, on small silver trays carried above the heads of countless waiters. They walked between the masses of people until they were so surrounded (think soccer in elementary school—the flocking) they couldn’t go anymore. They lowered the tray, revealed tuna sandwiches on ciabatta, mini paté lorraine, scewers of mozzarella and tomato, creamed smoked salmon on baguette, cheeses cheeses cheeses… it keeps going. They lowered the tray; hands reached, scrambled, clawed. Thirty seconds later, the waiter was retreating to the kitchen for a new tray.

This went on for an hour, starting slowly. We frantically searched for a mass of people or a tray floating just out of arm’s reach. In between, we grabbed glasses of wine. This was as close to a buffet as we’d see in France, and I couldn’t believe how into it I was getting. The room had completely switched to mass consumption mode.

It was like a big tease. Slowly. One waiter at a time. Then two. Then so many waiters you didn’t know which tray to turn to. Then so many sandwiches you thought you would fall asleep from being so full, just fall asleep right where you were standing.

While chewing on something, (God only knows what; cake, I think) the mayor walked up to Joe and me. I couldn’t believe it. I was afraid my teeth were died pink with wine, and I was choking on my mocha-flavored icing. He was asking where we were from; he was telling Joe to eat more cake and stop being so skinny; he was saying that he knew Ohio, had spent time in  Cincinnati. Then he was lighting candles on the biggest chocolate cake I have ever seen in my life, and a mass of people had swallowed us into the heat and musk of their bodies.

So it worked. I felt so welcomed—by the major, by the French, by the familiar feeling of the scrambling room, by the sun that had stopped the rain and warmed the room through the windows. I was smiling, ready to snuggle into the next person that bumped into me and fall asleep.