Stuck on a Roof in Roon!

France, 1997. This was in the days before Famous Hat, back in my youthful days of Floppy Hat. A group from my parish had gone to France to see Pope JPII in Paris for World Youth Day, and we visited several other cities as well. When the natives would ask which places we had visited, I'd respond Paris, Chartres, Lisieux, and Lourdes, and they somehow understood that, but there was one city I could never pronounce to their satisfaction. French is a perfectly phonetic language - IF you're French - and though I spent six years studying it in high school and college, I could not pronounce "Rouen" in such a way that they could recognize it. I'd tell them I'd been to "Paree, Shart, Lizyoo and Loord," and they would reply, "Ah, wee! Say boh!" but no matter what I tried: "Roo-eh? Roo-ah? Roon?" they never knew what city I was referring to. Finally I would give up and tell them the capital of Normandy, and they would reply, "Ah - Rouen!" something that sounded to my ears identical to my FIRST attempt at the name.

The hotel we stayed at in "Roon" was set into a hill, so that ground level in the front was the third story in the back. My partner in crime, "Ethel" (names have been changed to protect the guilty) and I gazed out the back window at an enormous fountain in the courtyard below, which beguiled us with its promise of cool water in the August heat, as well as the shirtless men collected around it. We set out to find some stairs down to the courtyard, but the only stairs we found led us deep into a parking garage. Finally we decided to go out and around. We had to climb onto a roof which was about four feet up and walk across it, and on the other end we were faced with an eight-foot drop into the courtyard.

"If we hang and drop," said Ethel, "it should only be about a three-foot drop."
"Or," I pointed out, "we could just slide down that conveniently located light post."

A word to the wise: if you are going to slide down a light post while wearing a sundress, do NOT let your partner in crime go first unless you are absolutely certain she does not have a camera on her person. Yes, I am immortalized on film sliding down this lightpost in a bright yellow sundress. This is NOT a picture I would put on a dating website! But we had succeeded in our quest, so we splashed around in the fountain until being joined by Richard Bonomo. When we asked how he had reached the courtyard, he pointed out the extremely obvious set of stairs leading from the lobby where we had lately gazed upon the fountain with such desire. How did we miss them? I will plead blonde, but I don't know what Ethel's excuse is since she is most definitely a brunette.

Ah well, as Richard Bonomo always says, "C'est la vie, c'est la guerre, c'est la pomme de terre," or that's life, that's war, that's the potato (literally, "apple of the earth").

Famous Hat