So the past few days I have been invited to two different people’s homes for a meal, and the experiences have been so enjoyable that I think they warrant a description here. Two nights ago I was invited to a professor’s house for dinner with some other teachers from the area to kick off our vacation (Yes, as of Friday I have started a 10 day vacation from a part time job that I have been at for less than a month, with irregular hours, at best). One of the teachers, Claire, is 25 and in her first year teaching. She’s very cool and picked me up from my place and we drove there together. Driving in France is a whole other experience that I will have to get into at a later time. The meal was a very nice affair, however, I forgot that French dinners last 5-6 hours and I consequently missed a Halloween house party at another assistant’s. Oh well. We started, as is traditional, sitting around the salon with aperos, which consist of some sort of alcohol, in this case red or white wine, and snacks like nuts, olives, chips, etc. Then the hostess started bringing out, one by one, various other little foods. First little tartines with shrimp and smoked salmon spreads. Then a little later came a kind of parmesan frittata that she served in tiny individual bowls. Then a mini parfait with cucumber, tzaziki, smoked salmon, and chives. THEN tartines with foie gras and fig jam. All of these things were served over a few hours time, and by 9:30 I was starting to wonder if that was the dinner, I was certainly full enough! However at 10:00 we moseyed over to the table to sit down for the plat: stir fried beef and rice, which as usual was served with a fresh baguette (fresh bread goes with everything here). After dinner we had a moelleux au chocolate, which is like a chocolate cake that is liquid inside. I didn’t leave until midnight, and we were not the last to leave! Meals here generally take a lot longer, and when you invite people over for a meal, it is not at all usual for it to go on well into the night. It was very tiring by the end of 5 hours of listening and trying to understand French. It’s also difficult to not be able to express myself or contribute to the discussion as much as I would like to. The company understood however and were very nice about it. There were only a few times towards the end of the night that I let my mind wander during a conversation and then of course was asked my opinion on what has been discussed for the past 10 minutes. Oops.
I don’t really have anything planned for this vacation because I want to discover Toulouse more. I definitely don’t feel the same pull to travel every chance I get as I did when I was studying abroad. I think part of it is the budget I’m on as a teaching assistant, but also I don’t feel like I’m on a constant vacation here as I kind of did studying abroad. I feel like I’m truly living here and am perfectly happy staying in the area. Also, Toulouse continues to be wonderful place to spend time and explore. Everyday I discover a new neighborhood or square that is more charming than the last. I’m pretty sure Toulouse if known for having great architecture so I’ve been trying to take in more of that. There are also a ton of museums that I want to check out. I’ve been finding a lot of cute bars and cafés in my neighborhood that are a lot lower key than the ones in the center of town, which I like. Fun fact: a lot of bars here serve tapas because we are so close to Spain.
My friend Amy, who teaches and lives outside the city in a village called Muret, has been staying here with me in Toulouse for the past few days of vacation. Which brings me to my second story. Today Amy and I were invited for lunch chez the cousin of her French advisor in the US. She had made plans to meet with this mysterious cousin, and when she told him she was staying with me in the city he invited me as well. So, at noon, Jean-Louis came to pick us up from my house to bring us to his house. Spoiler: We didn’t return until 10:00pm this evening. We arrived and were immediately greeted by his wife, and their 2 sons who are 14 and 11. I guess by this point it’s naïve of me to have thought we were going over for a 2-3 hour lunch, but I was still caught off guard by the pace and extent of the Sunday lunch. We once again started with aperos, and a bottle of rose champagne. When we sat down at the table we opened a red from Bourgogne and were served salads with grapefruit, shrimp and avocado mmm. Then Jean-Louis cooked fresh duck and salmon on a kind of propane grill outside (it didn’t have the grates it was just a flat surface), which we ate with a gratin, kind of like scalloped potatoes, and of course, baguette. After the meal a cheese platter was passed around, and then his wife came out with a gorgeous apple tart she had made a la mode. Somewhere in there we opened a Bordeaux as well. After lunch we had coffee then a digestif (congnac, cointreau, calvados etc.) It was such an enjoyable meal, we laughed and joked and had wonderful conversation. At 5:00 we were still there and discussing French cinema, so then we ended up watching a movie together. Then, even though we hadn’t done much, they wanted to feed us again before we left, so we had a salad with some leftover meat and potatoes, around 8. The time passed so quickly I couldn’t believe it was 9:30 when we were finally leaving. They were such an easy couple to get a long with, and I can’t get over how nice it was for them to spend their entire Sunday with us. At one point we were talking about the differences between typical French meals and meals we have at home. We were talking about how we never usually drink wine or any alcohol with lunch in the US even on the weekends. I was trying to explain that it is kind of stigmatized in the US, and JL and his wife were explaining that in France it is more a accessory to sharing a good meal together and facilitating discussion and is not at all unusual to open several bottles of wine during lunch if guests are over. That might explain why there is wine in the teacher’s cafeteria at my school….When we realized that the cuisine in the US isn’t THAT much different than in France (except for some of their more exotic dishes), I think they were kind of disappointed, so we were talking about how even though we eat the same vegetables, we prepare them different ways, I was trying to say that we sauté things in a pan, which is “a la poêle”, but instead I said, “a poil” which means naked. TO my credit sound the same except for the “la.” The 11 year old appreciated that. On the way home JL kept telling us that if we needed anything to just call him or his wife, if we wanted to come again for dinner or just a drink or if we had any problems at all. SO nice.
The strikes are continuing here in Toulouse but are not as bad as other cities in France. We don’t have rioting like Marseille or Lyon. We do however have a pretty serious fuel shortage. Almost all gas stations are on strike so no one can get gasoline. The trash pickup has also stopped so there are some areas where it is piling up in the streets. The TGV trains that run throughout France have also been unstable, which is part of the reason I didn’t want to plan anything big for this vacation and risk being stuck. The airport has also been blockaded I believe. The busses in town work some of the time and other times not. It’s all pretty random and I can’t tell if it just seems that way to me because I don’t understand everything or if it actually is just irregular.
My best friend Emma from my study abroad program in Rennes is hopefully coming to visit Wednesday to spend a few days here in Toulouse, and then if the trains are running we’ll head up to Rennes for Halloween, coming back on the 3rd.
OK well that’s all for now! Bisous!
Linz
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