Winner! Winner!

For the last few months my roommate and I have been helping a thirteen year old French girl with her English. My roommate and I were walking down the street one day, talking like normal and a woman stopped us in the street. Having heard us speaking English she wanted to know if we, or someone we knew, would be interested in giving her daughter English lessons. Her daughter takes English in school, but it is different having people to actually talk to. We agreed and called her up the next week to begin the lessons. We go twice a week for an hour each time and it is a fun way to help the girl learn English. We talked about shopping and jewelry and trips to other countries. We played Uno, which is an awesome game for learning numbers in another language. What is most interesting though is the phrases that stick. Somewhere in the early weeks we were learning opposites and came across right and wrong. At some point I used the phrase “I’m always right” and for the next two weeks our little pupil decided this was her phrase. While it can be quite annoying when someone who knows that phrase says it all the time, it was a bit more endearing coming from her. Sometimes I wondered if she knew what she was saying, but hey, it is a good phrase to repeat no matter what.
Then a few weeks ago we were playing a game and I won. (yes yes, I know, like normal) Well I was gloating a bit and said “winner winner chicken dinner!” She picked it up and loved the little sing-song voice that goes along with it. Problem was she couldn’t for the life of her remember the order of the words. The next week we came back and she did something correctly and said “winner winner dinner chicken!” My roommate and I busted out laughing and told her to try again. ““winner winner dinner chicken!” We repeated the phrase in its true form again. She got it and was singing it as we went out the door.
The next week we came back and the phrase came up.
Here’s how the conversation went :

Our French amie: “winner winner” ………uhhh… “dinner chicken!“

Stares from us

Our French amie: “no no, winner winner” pensive scrunched face…… “DINNER chicken!”

More blank stares

Finally she says, “ok, ok, winner. Winner”…wheels turning…… “DINNER CHICKEN!”

We had a laugh and once again reminded her it is “winner, winner, CHICKEN dinner”
As we were leaving she was repeating it to herself. We’ll see who’s the winner this week.

Soup

I’m going to give you a little heads up if you ever come to France and want to eat soup. If you look at the menu and it says that you’re getting vegetable soup with tomatoes, zucchini, mushrooms, beans, spinach, etc… and you don’t like one of those ingredients…then consider not getting the soup. The reason? All soup here is puréed. The only soup I had eaten puréed before I came here was tomato. I bring this up today because I made chicken noodle soup last night. I chopped up the carrots, turnips, zucchini, onion and mushrooms, threw them in the pot, boiled the water, cooked the chicken and put in the noodles. Then, we eat. If you don’t like celery? You avoid it. I told the people I work with that I was going to have chicken noodle soup for lunch. They’d never heard of it. I explained how it was made and they were dumbfounded. Soup that isn’t puréed? Weird. You now have fair warning that if you want some nice chunky veggie soup, it isn’t going to happen in France. Find yourself some beef bourguignon stew instead.

Thanksgiving Take 2

As you know we had to work on the real Thanksgiving, so we celebrated this weekend instead.
We went to the market on Saturday morning in search of a turkey. We didn’t find one. What we did find, and decided on getting, was turkey breasts. I didn’t want to sit at my landlord’s house all day on Sunday and babysit the cooking turkey, and I’m not a huge fan of taking meat off bones, so we went the easy route and got big fat turkey breasts.
Later on Saturday my roommate made a sweet potato pie because it was just about the easiest thing we could make. Initially we were trying to make a pie without an oven, but that turns out to be a bit difficult. Once we decided to borrow our landlord’s oven, it became a bit easier. We oculd have had apple or cheery or peach, but sweet potato was the closest we could get to pumpkin so that was it. My roommate also made a batch of stuffing. I realized as she was making it that stuffing recipes vary across the spectrum. At my house, we have stuffing that goes in the turkey and stuffing that doesn’t. We have it with and without celery to accommodate the many different taste buds. I found our that our family recipe does include sausage, but that’s never been in my stuffing as long as I can remember. Well the stuffing my roommate made had apples and sausage and turnips. I’m no food snob though, so I enjoyed it immensely.
Sunday afternoon we began the entire meal preparations. I got all the potatoes peeled and in the water to boil and put the turkey in two different pans sautéing in butter and spices. While all of that was going on our stuffing was in the oven across the way cooking and the fruit for our version of waldorf salad (apples, pears, bananas and whipped cream) was prepared. I let the turkey simmer in chicken broth for a while and then started the gravy prep. I didn’t know how to make gravy before coming here. Mom always does it, and I just never bothered, until this year, when gravy is needed for many dishes. I improvised off of my remembrances of her making gravy and it turned out pretty good each time. This time I thought it was great. It got to thickening a little and the stuffing came back to our apartment. We were ready. The wine was poured, and football was on my other roommate’s computer. We shared our meal with a Portuguese friend who we had to explain all of our traditions to. The meal was great and I ate too much like I do every Thanksgiving. We all went around the table and said what we were thankful for before dessert and enjoyed our pie. Chalk this one up to a Thanksgiving in France success!

L'Isle Sur La Sorgue

The last city on my parents' visit was L'Isle Sur La Sorgue, a little place to the east of Avignon. Some of the guidebooks call it the Venice of France, but I'm convinced these people have never been to Venice. Sure, it has little canals that run through it, as it was once a city who lived off of miling, but Venice is just a tad more grand than LISLS (abbreviated because the name is too darn long). The city was cool though, don't get me wrong. It was a fine place to spend our last two days because it was calm and interesting and located close to a pretty drive through the Luberon hills. We got settled in the hotel and headed to the tourist office to find a map. After picking up the map from the office we decided to take the little tourist circuit around the city just to get our bearings and find out what there was to explore. I can't say the walk was all that exciting. They had us walking down some pretty boring streets, but we did see lots of waterwheels! These were used in the city's milling history. We saw the old church, that was built in the baroque style, which dad was not fond of, but it was a bit different than the rest of the churches we had seen on the trip, so interesting none-the-less. After searching for a restaurant on the first night we ended up at a little place that had a delightful dinner of beef canneloni. The one thing about French restaurants is that they all serve the same thing (beef, duck, fois gras, salmon, entrecote, etc..) this canneloni was definitely new and scrumptious. Mom had a dessert that she about died for. It was a house dessert with three little desserts made from orange. She couldn't stop saying how wonderful it was. Chalk that place up to a success!

The next day we decided to take a Rick Steves drive through some of the little towns around Provence. We drove though one of the most beautiful towns in France, Ménerbes, but it was pretty deserted, so we just walked through the town a bit. Then we made our way to Vaison la Romaine which has an "upper" city and a "lower" city. The upper city is the old medieval town, whic the lower city is the modern day town, still old, just not as old as the upper city. We walked across the old Roman bridge and through the medieval city, but it was also pretty dead. It must have been the time of year that no one (aka tourists) really inhabit the city. Finally we stopped in Suzette for a meal at a Rick Steves' recommended lunch place. After inconveniencing the owner to make up a table for us, we proceeded to have an unplanned 2 1/2 hr lunch. We tried to be patient and enjoy being on vacation, but we're American, we get antsy after sitting and waiting for food for an hour. At least it was good!

Back in LISLS we did some walking around town and checking out the antique shops, part of what makes LISLS a destination. That night for dinner we went way different and ate at a modern little chinese place. It was packed, which is usually a good sign. The food was good, and very different than our cuisine from the rest of the trip, so a nice change up.

The last morning of our vacation we woke up and headed out into the town to partake in the markets. My mom and I had expected just antique markets, but there was good, and clothes, and dogs, and cassettes, and mattresses, and soaps, and well, just about anything you could want. It was festive and entertaining, but a bit draining. We decided to head off to Lyon early, but wanted to grab some lunch. We stopped at a place and were the very first people in the door and placed our orders before anyone else arrived. An hour and twenty minutes later we got our food. There was serious discussion as to whether dropping 40 euro on the table for our entrees and leaving would have been acceptable. Unfortunately this long lunch pushed our whole day back, but we made it to our desitnations and got on trains, me heading to Clermont for 4 more weeks and mom and dad to Charles de Gaulle in Paris for their flight home the next day.

Pont du Gard

There is a site so renowned in France that it made it on the Euro 5 note. Since you probably don’t happen to have a 5 euro bill sitting around, I’ll just tell you that the site is called Pont du Gard. I thought it would be best not to leave France without seeing this site, so on our way from Carcassonne to L’Isle sur la Sorgue, we stopped and took a stroll across the old aqueduct. It was pretty amazing. It was built in the first century to help water travel between cities and eventually became a toll bridge to cross the river. It was maintained for many years and would not look as grand as it does today without some repairs, but it is still quite neat that it is standing. It made us wonder how long it will stay standing?
One small outrage. Rick Steves said that parking at the Pont du Gard was 5 euro. When we went to pay for parking it was 15!!! 15 euro to spend an hour seeing a marvelous site. Tourists, your money is much appreciated. Boo.

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving in France isn’t exactly the same as it is in the States. By that I mean it is not celebrated. Obviously. The French don’t so much care about the discovery of America. Or America in general for that matter. Everyone that I work with though knew that it was Thanksgiving so I was explaining to them that we were going to try and make something traditional for thanksgiving, but there is one big problem. We don’t have an oven. They have much more turkey here than we have at home. At least more turkey breasts and the like for making on the stove top, so that isn’t a problem. They have all the vegetables that we need, we’re going to make stuffing and gravy, but we’re going to have to miss out on the pies. We investigated making a no-bake pumpkin pie, but there is no canned pumpkin. There is also no corn syrup, pecans or molasses. I’m sure they are available somewhere in France, but not readily available in Clermont, so our search ended quickly. At this point we’re at a loss as to how to celebrate Thanksgiving desserts without those ingredients, so we’ll make due. This weekend we are going to make a Thanksgiving meal because unlike at home, we have to work all day here. I can honestly say it is the first time, and I hope the last time, that I have to work on Thanksgiving.

In other news, when I got to work this morning, one of my co-workers wished me “Happy Fete” because Thanksgiving this year is also the Feast of Catherine of Alexandria. She was a noted scholar in the 4th century and apparently appeared to Joan of Arc several times. She was a martyr who was supposed to have died by the “breaking wheel”, an old form of torture, but according to legend, the wheel died when she touched it, so she was beheaded.

Happy Turkey Day!

Carcassonne

Carcassonne was the next town on the trip. This is the place that I really wanted to go to before I left France. I had heard nothing but good things about it and wanted to check it out. Apparently in July it is jam packed with tourists. By jam packed, it literally gets full because it is a walled medieval city. There are about four hotels in the walls, and one of them has suites that go for 1600 euros a night. Not exactly in my price range. Thankfully, in November it is much easier to get a room at a reasonable price, and while the city was not deserted, it wasn't too crowded to enjoy. We were there on Nov 11, which is a free day for the French. This had virtually no bearing on our stay except that the castle was closed and a few restaurants were closed, but it didn't stop us from enjoying the city. We didn't really do much except explore. There were no "must-see" sights, so we wandered the city walls both during the day time and at night, we saw the church, we shopped in the little stores and we had a drink at the 5-star hotel. The had a really neat bar area in a library. Their restaurant was open on Nov 11, but the meal was 130 euros. Right. We ate across the street and it was scrumptious. The best part about Carcassonne was that we just relaxed and enjoyed being on vacation.