Day 2 so far

I slept pretty well on my shiny new (satin, so they are literally shiny) sheets, and woke up at 8:30 to have plenty of time to get ready in time to walk to the local Lutheran church, which has a 10:30 service.

The only wrinkle so far with the basement suite is that Mackenzie and I can't figure out how to work the shower head. (It may actually be broken, or we may just be clueless. Either way, we'll talk to our landlady after lunch.) So we ended up taking sort of baths this morning, for the first time in a really long time. But hey, at least it worked all right.

Oh - while eating breakfast this morning, we noticed that not only do they translate all the nutrition facts and stuff on the cereal box into French, they also translate Rice Krispies' "Snap! Crackle! Pop!" into French! The version a la francais is "Cric! Crac! Croc!" Hee.

We were both slightly nervous to see if the Lutheran church was more conservative than we're used to - as in, would we be the only women who weren't wearing a dress? - but we decided on the walk over that if so, we would just take the attitude that this is after all a "foreign" country, so we could just use differences in local custom as our excuse. ;) The walk is not far at all, and the weather was absolutely beautiful.

As soon as we arrived in the parking lot (which was nicely full), we saw that we wouldn't be the only women wearing pants, which was a relief. :) The church has recently gotten a new facility built, and it's very pleasant. A cool surprise upon entering the sanctuary: our friend from KCC, Kristina, was there! So we sat next to her and her friends.

The service was very good. It's clearly meant to be inter-generational, since we sang both hymns and more current worship songs, including my absolute favorite Michael W. Smith song (Agnus Dei). The sermon was good, as well, and it only took Mackenzie and me a little while to get used to how the pastor said "about" and "been." I think it'll take longer to get used to "again" and "against", for some reason. Maybe because that's not as big a part of the stereotype Americans have for Canadian accents. We also noticed that his accent got a little stronger when he started talking about where he's from - Saskatchewan.

Another plus about the sermon was that he showed a clip from The Fellowship of the Ring to illustrate how when one person takes on a big goal - like Frodo accepting the responsibility of taking the Ring to Mordor - other people might just join in to help. And even though there were some minor technical difficulties in showing the clip (just like home!), it made Mackenzie and me quite happy... and also made us want to watch the movies again. Hee. But more importantly, we decided that we certainly wouldn't mind coming back to that church again, though we do want to try other ones that were either recommended to us or looked good when we looked around for churches near this house.

Now, time for lunch. More later.