I now understand a little more about electrical wiring in France and I also understand why our Handbook for the school states; “You are however responsible for buying and paying for expendable items such as light bulbs, electric fuses, etc.”  Well, the first day here I learned where the breaker box was for the flat and also why there were some fuses mixed in with a box of cloths pins and light bulbs. I changed the one that I overloaded but last night while DeAnna was cooking dinner I managed to take out all of the power to the flat. I tried resetting all the switches and pushing all the buttons I could find but there was still no power and I didn’t have enough fuses to change them all, so off to Cora I walked (imagine Walmart and Sams club ten 10 and this is Cora, it has 2 isles for just cheese.)

Normally this store is closed on Sunday but they were having a special off sale of 20% off one item so the store was packed with tons of people. I managed to buy all new fuses and a flashlight, praying this would fix the situation. I got back and swapped all the fuses and still no power. So I headed back to Cora to see if there was something else I could purchase to fix the situation, but even if there was it was all in French so I didn’t know what to get so I headed to one of the other families that just arrived from Norway that will be attending class with us and asked to look at their fuse box to see if I was missing something. Their box was not the same as our but it had a big black box with two buttons. So when I arrived back at our flat I managed to pry open a non-descript white box that we had and determined it was the master power for the flat because after I pushed the green and red buttons the power to the flat was restored.