Bonjour les parents

Well my parents came and went.

We had a great visit, albeit too short! They had wonderful weather and we packed a lot into just a few days. My Dad was here for only 2 days - Saturday and Sunday - then headed up to London for some business until Saturday. We made sure he got to taste all the pastries, charcuterie and wine in 2 days he would have in 5 before heading to the land of fish and chips. We did a day trip and picnic to Cordes-sur-Ciel, a beautiful little village about an hour and a half from Toulouse built on a hill with Gisèle and had a lovely dinner at home with Gaby, Gisèle and Gilou. After my Dad left my Mom and I spend a great 4 days in Toulouse before she left on Thursday just walking around the center. I had rearranged some classes so that I could spend as much time with her as possible.

Here are some more photos and cliff notes of their stay in Toulouse (if there are more pictures of food than people, don't worry that's normal):

First day in Toulouse grabbing a coffee at la place St Georges

Wine tasting with Gisèle

Day trip to Cordes-sur-Ciel

Stopped in L'isle sur Tarne, a cute village on the way home

Wine and various duck and sausage appetizers by the fire

Rooftop view of Toulouse with Alberto 

Toulousain sausage and wine from Burgundy dinner

Lunch outside with Gaby one beautiful Wednesday

Exploring an abandoned château with Alberto

A bientôt!
Linz

St. Honoré

So my parents are coming to visit next week and I could not be looking more forward to their visit.

Gisèle and I have been discussing all the things we want them to do and taste while they're here. Now that Gisèle has been to visit my parents in CT and has discovered my father's sweet tooth, she has lots of ideas.

We have decided that my father needs to do a sampling of all the traditional French desserts: Millefeuille, Paris-Brest, St. Honoré, etc, hand-selected from the patisseries that do them best. Naturally, this requires testing the aforementioned pastries at local bakeries to see who makes the best version.

Our first taste test was this Friday, I present to you the St. Honoré, apparently named after the patron saint of bakers (only the French). It's a small cluster of cream puffs dipped in caramelized sugar, topped with whipped cream:

A bientôt!

February Funk

So I've been in a bit of a funk lately. I'm not sure if it's the winter blues, all my crazy travel catching up to me, the disatisfactoin with my job, or what.

This week my classes have been so blasé. I know that not every class can be amazing, but I'm feeling like, hey, I'm only here for another few months, what awesome things about America can I bring into these kids lives? Music usually works pretty well, so I devised, in honor of Black History Month, (ok and maybe a little bit  the recent passing of Whitney Houston) a lesson featuring black American musicians that traces some of the different music genres (jazz, Motown, Stax, funk, rap, etc) throughout America's history with Civil Rights and segregation. Sounds good right?

As Gisèle would say, it's kind of like making mayonnaise (you know that can only be a French idiom because who in America makes their own mayonaise??): you can add the eggs, the mustard, and the oil, but sometimes it just doesn't take.

That was kind of how it went. We trudged through Louis Armstrong, Martha and the Vandellas, Otis Redding, thank god they perked up just a teeny bit for James Brown, then back to sleep for Etta James and even Whitney Houston. I was pretty bummed, but hey, at least I got to listen to Otis Redding for an hour of class, right?

So if singing funk wasn't going to get me out of my funk I moved on to the next logical thing:  food. What better pick-me-up than cooking something delicioso?

Now that I have only 2 months left here, I've started a list of things-I-must-do-before-I-leave and, like any self-respecting, die-hard foodie/gourmand a list of things I must learn to cook, I mean really nail down, before I leave. Included are: quiche, crêpes, madeleines, and savory cake.

Hold the phone. Savory cake? I know it sounds strange, but the French have this thing about savory baked goods, and I have to say, I think they're on to something. It's essentially like a loaf-cake that you can add whatever you want to; Olives, sundried tomatoes, goat cheese, gruyere cheese, sausage, lardons, the list is quite extensive.

Yesterday was my roommate from last year, Gaby's, birthday so I decided to try my hand at this Frenchie party dish. I went with black olive, semi-dried tomatoes marinated in olive oil and garlic that I found at the market, and grated emmental cheese. Here is the recipe, it served about 12 slices, I appologise in advance for the metric and less than precise baking instructions (remember I'm working with a gas oven whose regulation consists of a dial numbered 1-10):

Cake Salé:

250g flour (I used ½ whole wheat, ½ white)

5 cl oil (I used olive but you can use vegetable)

20cl milk (again, here you can use juice from the olives, dry white wine or a mixture of both) 

4 eggs

About 100g grated emmental cheese, 100g tomatoes, 100g pitted black olives sliced in two

Zest from about a quarter of a lemon

11g of baking soda

Salt and pepper

1. Preheat oven to about 200°C

2. Sift the flour into a bowl and break the eggs in the middle, incoprotaing the flour little by little 

3. Add the oil and 20cl of milk (or olive juice, or wine) 

4. Mix in your ingredients, add salt and pepper, zest, and finally your baking soda. 

5. Pour into your greased  pan

6. Tip: it looks pretty if you sprinkle some extra cheese and a few olives on top to brown-up in the oven. 

7. Bake for about 40-45 minutes until a knife inserted comes out clean

And voilà. 

"Soyez les Bienvenus"

Inside the médina in Meknes

A month since my last post, and to my credit its been because I've been on the moooove. The first weekend in February I went skiing again in the Alps, then two days after getting back it was the February holidays and I had bought tickets to go to Morocco with my friends Amy and Alberto from Toulouse.

Morocco is a place I had wanted to visit for some time. For me going Morocoo was exotic and just the name conjured up images of brightly colored emboridered fabrics, tiles, fountains, mint tea and deserts. Also, it was the home country of so many North Africains, or pieds-noirs, who live in France, flouting the typical and much protected "French" culture with their head scarves, arabic-tinged French, darker skin, and markets mannerisms that refuse to fit into the quiet and closed French mold. So, in a mixture of ambition and nativité I booked a week in Moroco and agreed to meet Emma and Helen (my American girlfriends from studying aborad who are also assistants in France) in Budapest for the second week. 

One of the babs in Meknes

In Morocco we split our time between Fez (a larger city) and Meknes (a smaller town) with two daytrips to villages of Sefrou and Moulay Idriss. The best way I think to describe a place like Morocoo is a Kerouacian-like stream of consciousness, as to put a place such as that into any kind of Cartesian order as an outsider would be contrived and nearly impossible. For me the best part of Morocco was the ambiance, people watching, and wandering around in the médina - or old city center. As far as monuments go, the mosques are closed to non-muslims, and the royal palaces tthe majority of all the cities and towns are closed to everyone but the King. We did however get to go into a few beautiful mausomeums and medreas or coranic schools.

We landed in Fez and took a cab to the city center. At the airport we were ushered into an old Mercedes by a man wearing basically a fleece snuggie with a pointed hood (think KKK meets Harry Potter) which I would later recognize as requisite tenue for all men, and gives you the impression you're at some wizarding convention. We bargained for the price as we had been instructed to do, reluctantly threw our luggage on top of the car, and were off into the setting sun. It wasn't quite the desert I was expecting, more rocky and hilly with tons of olive trees everywhere, almost like Southern Spain. The layout or Morocco is very medieval in the sense that the villages and cities end very suddenly and you find yourself in the countryside with fields and farms immediately after. From a high point in the towns you can clearly see the end of urbanism and are surrounded on all sides by rolling green hills.

Main square in Meknes

All the cities are centered around a médina which is a labyrnth of winding streets and alleys within old ramparts accessible through keyhold shaped "doors" or babs spaced throughout, usually with roads for cars and other commere expanding out from this center, yet still not in any kind of mappable order. Near the bigger main cities there is usually a nouvelle ville, or new city with bars and restaurants that are more lax about Muslim customs. 

The cab spit us out at one of the several Aladdin-like babs to the médina, since cars cannot pass through the tiny streets. It being impossible to pass as anything but a tourist (but at least French and not American tourists) we were immediately assailed by patrons of restaurants, hostels, stores, everyone is trying to entice you into their restraunt shoving a menu under your nose, calling you friend, offering up indiscriminating « bonjours » « hellos » and « holas » trying to guess your nationality. We plopped ourselves in the first hostel with running water we found.

Stalls at the food market in Meknes

The next day we had our introduction to the 1,300 year old médina. It's buzzing with activity in every cubit of air. It is an impossible labrynth resonating with the sound of life. Kids shreiking kicking an empty water bottle off walls that are 3 feet apart, men shouting « balak balak » as they push handcrafted pushcarts chock full of everything from blood oranges to bread to sardines jockeying with donkeys and pedestrians. Everyfew meters are intricately carved cedar doors set into dizzying mosiacs of colored tiles.  Everyone seems to be doing something: setting up or breaking down endless displays - handmade leather sandals next to knock off Nikes, platters or almonds and dates, barrels of olives, heaping piles of pastries dripping with honey,  shuttling trays of steaming mint tea from one boutique to the next, There are women and men squatting in every available space bundling mint, herbs and other greens I've neve seen before.  Veiled women order from sacs overflowing with couscous, rice, and other grains, men dole out change in scale encrusted hands over crates filled with silvery sardines surrounded by a gaggle of alley cats. People stop around pushcarts laden with steaming pots to eat a bowl of snails standing up, or drink a bowl of hot milk. A call to prayer sounds like a bomb drill at first to untrained ears. Then the giant key-shaped doors open and you catch a glimpse inside the unassuming facades that open into tiled courtyards, the sound of running water, green the color of life, shoes are taken off at the door, someone washing themself at the fountain in the middle of the courtyard. Take another turn and you are among the ironworkers or ferroviaires with loud banging and sparks flying everywhere, another and the stench tells you youre in the tanneries district where they use pigeon droppings and ammonia to clean the raw leather, take another turn and webs of string criss-cross he length of the street. You are in the couturier district where kids with trained hands stand in the street holding colored strings making mechanical patterns in the air while their counterparts, operating out of tiny windowless workshops with doors ajar weave the fabrics.  

Crowded street in Meknes

What I found the most mesmerizing was how every meter was occupied, the spaced people work out of could be literally a single square meter, and if it is then that 's where you go to work for the day, everyday, probably for your entire life.

It is such a consumer society but the rapport is completely different than that in the US or Europe. It is so much more social, loud, unconfined. There are always tons of people in the streets, men women and lots of children – so much life. I couldn't stop thinking that all the North Africans who immigrate to France must have such a difficult time adapting to a place with comparatively fewer and muted social interactions. In France when in the street or in the metro you have the impression that people are just there to get to where they're going and rendez vous are always planned, in Morocoo the daily life plays out on the streets and in those spontaneous exchanges with neighbors and venders.

I much prefered Meknes to Fez as its a town much less accuspomed to having tourists, so while you still can't exactly « blend in », no one solicits you to buy things. We were lucky enough to have the chance to stay a few nights in a riad or typical Moroccan home with colored glass windows, high painted cedar ceilings, a roof terrace and an open patio with banana and orange trees in the middle. A man I give English lessons to in Toulouse lived there for 7 years and turned his families old house into an Inn now kept by a Moroccon couple. It was a much needed respite from a country where bathroom is a loose term that encompasses anything from a hole in the ground to an actualy bowl, and warm running water is a luxury.

Mint

Amy and I also tried a Moroccan bath, thinking that after Istanbul last winter we had seen it all, au contraire. The first thing we did afterwards was take showers, and I had visible scabs from how hard this woman scrubbed my dead skin away!!

Inevitably, I got sick from the water, the kind of sick where you don't know to sit or kneel when you get to the toilet. Of course this didn't happen while we were at the riad but the three of us sharing a tiny room in Fez. The local remedy is eating spoonfuls of dry cumin washed down with tea, so that was a first. 

Wandering around the médina

Dead end

Coranic school

Fez

Outside a mosque in Fez

Tanneries in Fez

Morocco was was my first experience in a place where so little for me is so much for someone else, and interactions with locals were often hard to judge. Overall people were incredibly nice, and always welcomed you with "soyez les bienvenus", literally: be the welcome ones. For me, this invitation seemed like an olive branch in such a foreign place, yet took on such a complicated sense. You  never knew if people were helping you only to demand money at the end, which leads to tourists being overly cautious and closed in my opinion, and that really limits the human interactionly and you feel especially badly when the person was actually just trying to give you some local advice, or talk to you about life in France. We experienced everything from a really uncomfortable encounter of having to, in no uncertain terms, tell a local boy to stop following us home, to playing soccer with a gang of kids who spoke no French, to exchanging addresses with an old man who ran a bathroom whose dream it was to come to France with promises to send him a postcard.

It was a beautiful place with an irreplicable culture, but by the end I was ready to be in a city where they use toilet paper, I didn't have to bargain the price of everything from water to a cab ride, I could open my mouth in the shower, and look at a legible map and know where I was.
On to Budapest...

View of Fez at sunset

It's an Epiphany!

As if all the holiday eating weren't enough, there's another food-related holiday celebrated the first week in January in France: Epiphany. Originally there is some religious significance, but the laïc frogs dropped that and kept the best part: the cake. Starting just after new years all over France the pâtissieries start cooking up these special galettes that have a tiny trinket baked inside. The tradition goes that the youngest person at the table hides underneath and calls out who gets what piece as someone doles out the cake above. Whoever finds the fève is the king, or roi, and wears the paper crown. There's 2 kinds of galettes in France and some invisible demarcation of who celebrates with which one- there's a briochey kind with large grains of sugar or dried fruits baked on top, and a flaky kind with a layer of almond paste in the middle. In the Southwest however, we don't discriminate, and celebrate with both. So all this month I've been having these cakes with friends, colleagues, etc.

Saturday I went skiing in the Pyrenees with my high school. Some of the more motivated gym teachers organize a few weekend field trips over the winter where they rent a coach bus and take a bunch of kids to one of the stations around here. We got wind in the English department that it was only 20 euros to be a chaperone so we showed up in force: Aurélie whom I went to the Alps with over Christmas, Sandrine, and myself, plus the 6 gym teachers.

I must say, it was a bit awkward seeing my kids outside of school, let alone at 6 in the morning wearing snowpants. I mean, interactions outside the classroom in the hallways are at best passable, so this was pretty weird. I can never tell if they think I'm cool, or not. Sometimes they cry out "hello!" from across the hall, and sometimes act like they've never seen me before in their lives. Who knows. Luckily "chaperone" was a loose term and we really didn't see them once they got off the bus and got skis strapped on them.

Still, the day was a bit long. I need to really lower my expectations after a week in the Alps of incredible skiing. First off, I got myself going at 5:30 on a Saturday to be at the school ontime for the departure, which was late. Then, we took over 2 hours to get there. THEN renting equipment for 20 kids from a store that was the size of my bedroom, no exaggeration, with only one 60-something year old guy working, worked about as well as it sounds. Plus the equipment was from 1989. And he gave me skis about half a foot too short.

There was unfortunately no real snow as its been so warm here, so we were skiing on manmade snow and icy slopes, surrounded by brown scenery - not at all mode Alps. Just when I was getting good and cranky, we stop for lunch.

The professors picnicked apart from the kids, and it had been suggested to bring a little something to share with everyone, pot luck style. We settle down and someone brings out a bottle of white for a little coup de blanc to start with the duck fritons, paté, and assorted dried sausages. Then someone pulls out a homemade quiche, a savory cake, charcuterie, 4 kinds of cheese, and a few bottles of red. Then its cakes, another bakery galette de rois, coffee, chocolate, clementines, and homemade pear liquer to warm us up for the slopes.

I'm telling you, with the French, you don't joke around with meals. All in all it was a good day, not the intense skiing I'd hoped for, but a sunny day with new colleagues and a very traditional French "picnic."

A plus!
Linz

The good, the bad, and the ugly

The good: I don't know if you remember, but last year I had lost my wallet out in Toulouse one night, and after hours at the police station filing a report, I heard nothing back. Then a few months later I saw on my blog that someone had left a comment on the post I had written about the whole affair telling me that they had found my wallet and brought it to the police station. I went to check, not really believing it since I hadn't heard anything from the police, and lo and behold, a almost 4 months later and only weeks before my departure, I was reunited with my wallet. OK, so cut to this year. Yesterday I ran into town during some time between classes to check out the nation-wide semi-annual sales going on right now (I've been holding myself back for weeks), I go into a store, try something on and leave. An hour later I decide to go back to the store to buy it. I wait in line and pay. As I'm putting the bag and my wallet back into my backpack someone standing in line behind me says "Lindsay?" I stand up and look at the woman speaking to me racking my brain for who this person could be. "It's me who found your wallet last year, how are you?" The woman's Australian living in Toulouse with her boyfriend and she recognized my wallet. (Well, and me apparently we talked breifly that night at the bar and when I left, she saw it had fallen out of my bag on the floor #notoneofmyfinermoments). We exchanged info and are getting drinks sometime. How crazy?


The bad: I'm STILL waiting for a used computer that my parents sent me from the US a month ago. My parents have been calling UPS stateside and I've been calling the post office here incessantly. Two weeks I called the Post and they told me that three weeks wasn't unusual to wait and to call back next week. So I do this past Friday and when I re-read them the package number they tell me that I'm calling the wrong agency, and its actually a different one (i.e. I was calling UPS when I should've been calling FedEx). Talk about information that would've been useful when I called and gave the same number weeks ago. So I go on this new agency's website and search the package number. My package shows up and I see that it has been stuck at cusoms in Paris since December 28th, and that since that date they have allegedly been trying to reach the sender or receiver for "additional information." So I call the number on the site to find out what the heck is going on up there, and of course am greeted by an automated service. In my very best French I specify that I am the recipient of an international package. And I wait, and wait...and wait.

Twenty minutes later a woman answers. I re-read her the package number. Why do they even bother with the machine? Is it just to give the caller the illusion of being busy, annunciating single word answers like an idiot in a spelling bee alone in your kitchen only to be put on hold and asked the same information by a human?  She responds "Ohhh you need international shipping. This is the national division." At this point, I'm done being the nice foreigner who appologises for her accent or her need for things to be repeated at least twice. Thanks to all the merde of late, my angry French has progressed from fumbling, suject-omitting, and unconjugated to relatively well articulated French that communicates I'm pissed off, even if my accent makes you laugh.

I explain that I've already waited for 20 minutes and clearly stated to the putain de machine that I was looking for international. She assures me she will connect me toute de suite, madame. Right away. I wait. And wait. What a waste of time. And how scary that this many people are calling about international packages on a Friday morning? I do the dishes. I knit a mitten. I go to the bathroom. Thank God for hands free. Isn't it funny the things people will get into while on hold to "stay busy"? And don't they always pick up just when you start praying they won't? Maybe it's an American thing, like I will not let my productivity be derailed by something as banal as being put on hold. Maybe the French accept this bureaucracy as part of life, sit back and have a coffee or smoke a cigarette. Just chill.They probably do. I bet they do. Heck, maybe that's what the person who was supposed to be answering phones was doing too. Unfortunatley, I didn't have either, so was up to my elbows in dishwater when someone picked up forty minutes later. 

She explains that I need to send an email to customs including the contents of the package, and also promising to pay a 20 percent tax on non EU imports should they choose to impose it upon (eventual) delivery. Then they will release it. It was this  exact tax I was trying to avoid by having a used computer sent, and not a new one. Merde. I've sent the email and still haven't any news. I'm quite sick of being the one to waste my time and pick up the pieces after somethign that wasn' my fault, but, c'est la vie. 

The ugly: OK, there really isn't any ugly, I just liked the title. Unless you count the ugly appartment building being built next to my house. Plus the frog's are ga-ga about Clint, so it's fitting.

A bientôt!
Linz

Let it Snow

Woowee a lot to catch up on!

I had a great Christmas here in Toulouse and managed to set an eating record among the frogs: 3 Christmases in less than 2 days (and I only had my sights set on a personal best...imagine if 'd really gone for it??). We celebrated the reveillon , or Christmas Eve, with Gisèle's boyfriend's family at his daughter's new home. We had all kinds of traditional seafood appetizers: scallops, oysters, shrimp, plus the requesite foie gras served on little toasts with a sweet champagne jam, and her spin on foie gras macarons. And that was just the appetizers. I can't go on because my stomache is starting to hurt, but that gives you just an idea of what a feat 3 meals in 2 days was. 

Afer all that chow I hauled myself over to the Alps for a week of skiing. I went to Les Arcs in Bourg St Maurice with a colleague who works for a French non-profit that organizes all kinds of sporty vacations all over the country. The morning of I had one of those uh...what am I doing moments as I was going essentially alone (she would be working the whole time) and would be meeting all kinds of people and speaking in French the whole time. I mean, I know I can be incredibly funny and witty in English, but what if these new frogs didn't get my humor?? Then got on the train and was on my way.

In the end I had an absolutely fabulous time. Part of the vacation package was intensive ski lessons from 9am to 5pm. I was in a higher level of skiers and essentially in a group with all men in their mid-30s. Talk about testosterone fest. But really, they were a great group of guys, very nice and quick to make fun of themselves so there was no shame in all the falls we took. They quickly began the trend of teaching me a new French expression every day ( some guy on my train on the way there had jokingly said I had the vocabulary of a French grandmother and since then I was on a mission to up my cool status with more up-to-date expressions). We even did half a day in English since allegedly all ski instructors are required to speak English too and most of the other guys used it for work...it was a good laugh.

Our ski instructor was such a veteran, literally the oldest there, something of a legend (on the slopes as well as at the bar). You know, the one who has been there since the place opened in the 80s, the kind of guy who skis in sunglasses and nothing else even when its dumping snow, who is always retelling a story of the « old days » when they would stop off for a 4-hour Savoiard lunch and finish so sloshed it was a feat to get back down the mountain. He had a penchant for off-trails which I learned right off the bat as I found myself at the top a a 40° slope (I'm talking reach back and touch the moutain behind you on the way down) surrounded by boulders on both sides for our warm up. Our conversations usually went like this:
« OK to today we'll start off nice and easy, just take a blue trail down to warm up....then maybe some off trail a little later this afternoon. »
100 meters later: « Ok well maybe we'll do some off trail this morning since the snows so good; »
100 meters later: « Oh, well, come on, how about some off trail? »
50 meters later we dip off into the woods.

But really it was wonderful as it was stuff I would never have done myself and I feel I progressed a ton in a week of lessons. Three days in we were dumped with 60cm of snow and skiing of trail took on a whole new meaning as I found myself in powder over my knees! At that point the most strenuous part of the skiing was pulling myself up out of the snow after each fall which sometimes required supplemental assistance.

Now I'm back in Toulouse and I must say leaving the mountains and going back to work was rough. Everyone came into the staff room with alarm clock horror stories (snoozing 3 times, missing it completely, and waking up in a confused stupor or under the assumption there was a national emergency to name a few). Here are some photos from the skiing...

A bientôt!