La Vie est si Belle

When I finished class this afternoon, I thought I had nothing to do today. I figured I'd just go home and waste some time on the computer. 

As I was heading out to the metro I met up with Krishna (a brazilian friend who's going to start his masters at UNIL). He was with one of his Tandem partner, Renato (Tandem is a program where 2 people who speak different languages fluently get together to teach each other their respective languages). He was a half Japanase, half swiss german guy who's around my age. He's had about 2 lessons in Portuguese and with the tendrils of vocabulary he cobbles together the sentence "voce e muita bonita". European guys are very compliment-y.

Anywho, we ride the metro and once Renato leaves Krishna offers for me to accompany him to his next Tandem meeting which will be at Rue de St. Francois. Having nothing better to do, I comply. 

 This Tandem partner was a Lausanne native who wanted to learn Portuguese, although on this particular day, they'd be talking in French so Krishna could learn. He told us to meet him at the Cathedral. Once he gets there, he points to the top and tells us that's where we're going today.

We enter and some lovely classical music is emanating from within (it was a free concert as part of the Festival de la Cite), filling the Cathedral and making it seem much grander than it probably is. We then ascend several flights of a stone spiraling staircase. First stop was the bell tower, which coincidentally started to ring whilst we were there, scaring Krishna to death.

We kept ascending higher and higher and getting a better view of the city. All the while the guy from Lausanne (I forgot his name) was telling us in French about the history of the Cathedral and the surrounding areas, telling us what certain buildings are or used to be, and answering our questions about vocabulary and pronunciation. At the top there was an amazing view of the Alps, the lake, France on the other side of the lake, all the ornate old buildings around the Cathedral, the countryside off in the distance, and another mountain chain (whose name also escapes me) behind it. 

I was getting that feeling I have all the time at UBC (but hadn't been having here) of being thrilled at how fantastic life is. How great it is that you can be under the assumption that this is going to be a quiet, uneventful day, and then suddenly unexpected surprising things happen which are much better than you could've planned. And not only has today been a fantastic day, yesterday was too. In my joviality, I naively extrapolate those 2 data points and take it as evidence that life is always surprising and marvelous.