CAVILAM--Centre Audiovisuel Internationale Des Langues Modernes

So I left Chapel Hill with a BS in Business Administration in the summer of '82 greeted by the worst job market in over 22 years.  Seven months later I secured a job with an industrial air cleaning equipment company--SANTEK, traded on the NYSE.  After two years of learning the ropes of marketing a white elephant my friend Tom Benjamin told me he was going off to France for a year to kill time before he entered Law School and did I want to go too?  YES!!!  I figured this company didn't have much longer before its demise, so I spent a glorious weekend in Paris before descending down to the very heart of France in Auvergne to a town called Vichy, known for its EAU.  Oh!  H2O!  I tried it and its very minerally if that is a word.

My French family's home was a mile from school, so each day I would walk to and fro twice a day, once for the morning classes and once for the afternoon ones after lunch.  Anny Planck was the epitome of Stevie Nicks.  Wow!  She was a great teacher with a great sense of humor and beautiful.
Rudolph was a stomach doctor from Russia.  We did everything we could to communicate since I was the first American he had ever seen, and he was the first Russian I had ever met.  With our rudimentary
French skills we had the whole class on the edge of their seats at one moment and laughing the next.
There were classmates from Syria, Eygypt, Lebanon, Iran and northern Europe.  Class was intense.
There were walls, walls between nations and walls counter to this foreign tongue.  You kind of felt them coming down over the three month period, but they remained.  We all seemed to have them, except maybe Anny.  She did not project herself onto anyone.

By three in the afternoon my brain would be fried after putting it in a French blender.  The walks did me good.  I'll never forget stopping each day for a "pallet d'or"(patties of rich dark chocolate filled with ganache cream and with a fleck of real gold on top of the half inch thick disk).  That was just what the doctor ordered.  I would savor this along the way and then pass out for two hours before dinner.  Dinner/meals were interesting chez les Detruits.  That will be my next blog.  It was an AWAKENING!!!