David's Diary: Monday, Sept. 17, 2001

Lannion, France

Lannion has typical houses that demonstrate the architecture in this area of Brittany. The houses have blue shutters, delicate curtains, and are usually painted white. The blue shutters make a striking contrast to the white walls and flowers often provide an extra splash of color. The picture above was taken less than five minutes walk from the center of town.

Located in the Cote D'Armor department, Lannion is a major university town. Nearby is the Centre National d'Études des Télécommunications where the first overseas Telstar satellite communications between France and the US took place. This continues to be a major center of telecommunications research today.

La Poste

Lannion is also big enough to have a large post office. We not only took advantage of its "Cyberpost" (a Macintosh computer connected to the Internet for 30FF/hour), but today is also school mailing day. While Karalee and I are the home instructors for Jocelyn, Kevin, and Allen, they also have assigned teachers at the Greater Vancouver Distance Education School. Every nine or ten school days we take the children's completed work and mail it to their teachers. Today was our first mailing so last night and this morning was spent gathering all of the material together, checking schedules and agendas to see that enough work had been completed, and filling and addressing three large envelopes. It was then my turn to head to the post office where the work was posted to Canada. It will take seven to ten days to get there, then the teachers will need time to review the work, and finally we hope to hear from the teachers by email to provide feedback to each of the children. Getting marked material by return mail will be an even bigger challenge, but we will worry about that when the time arrives. For now we are just happy to have the first two weeks of school behind us and the completed material on its way to Vancouver.