Thanksgiving à la française

Sunrise: 8:30
Vocab: avoir le mal du pays - to be homesick

Well, and I will be honest. I've been hard pressed to work up the gumption to write this blog post. Officially three weeks away, my imminent return home has fostered a lot of reflection and not a little lethargy. The Mal du Pays struck pretty hard after Thanksgiving and I needed to spend a lot of Friday locked in my room going on facebook and pretending to be in America. Don't get me wrong, I had an amazing birthday and the food at Thanksgiving was delicious (both to be discussed!), but the distance between me and my friends and family just seemed that much greater when I realized how separate our experiences of this week had been; for me, Thanksgiving was more or less just another day with a fancy dinner at the end, and for them, my birthday was just a 24-hour window in which they had an excuse to write on my facebook wall. Well, maybe that's a bit much, but you see what I mean -- inverse experiences.

I'm eager to get home for Christmas, but my looming departure has also induced a certain amount of clinging; I still have so much left to see and do, it seems, and French friends who I may not see again for a long time once I leave. No question about it, I will return, but it won't be the same. This desire to see and do has not combined well with my approaching finals -- not a lot of work, but more work than I have been doing, to be honest. Mixing two such volatile ingredients in a vessel primed with homesickness has led to lethargy and a generally sedentary lifestyle these past few days. I'm overwhelmed. And thus the W descends again. This is a study abroad blog, after all, and I ought to document every aspect of this experience -- which includes the occasional period of emotional turmoil. During my solitary Friday, I watched L'auberge espagnole, a really fantastic French film with Audrey Tautou (in a role much smaller than and different from Amélie) that follows a young French university student on his year abroad in Spain with ERASMUS. He cries all the time.

But, on to happier things. My birthday was incredible; I was on such a high then that I guess my current crash was somewhat inevitable (again, tragedy?). Turning 21, for some unexplained reason, induced a day of delirious happiness. In between my two classes at the fac, as I was sitting in the open study space in the lobby Censive (the humanities building, basically), I could hardly control my impulse to laugh. Fortunately, that night I found an outlet for all of my suppressed mirth: Nantes Comedy Club. Naturally, it was Angèle's suggestion, and so after my inaugural G&T, we headed over to the show. Well, to make a long story short, it didn't take long for the MC to discover that I was an American student celebrating her 21st birthday, and naturally he started to tease me -- and I bantered back! I don't know what came over me, but I was actually funny, and that discovery was probably the best birthday gift I could have received. Other comedians that night seemed to pick up on my willingness to play with them and to speak in English and French, but the moral of the story is: I have a French sense of humor!

Two days later, it was Thursday, time for Thanksgiving à la française. IES had booked a restaurant out in the middle of nowhere -- on the outskirts of town, if you will -- because they had to find somewhere large enough to accommodate a group as formidable as ours: IES students, French host families, and visiting American parents. Marie couldn't make it because of another obligation, so I was really all alone in the midst of so many families and pseudo-families. Luckily, I found a place at the table with my friend Lauren and her host siblings: Comb, Elois, and Fauste (approximated spellings). Comb and Elois, the two older brothers, are 17 and 15 respectively, leaving their 13-year-old sister Fauste rather at a disadvantage when it comes to teasing. She holds her own though, and the three of them put on quite a show over dinner. I spent the most time speaking with Comb because he is absolutely obsessed with America; no sooner had I mentioned my New York upbringing when he began to grill me with Gossip Girl related questions ("is it really like that?").

I can't say I minded, though. French kids are funny. Most of the ones I've met have been incredibly poised and gracious, good conversationalists, and sharp dressers, but there are always little details here and there that give away how young they are -- the way they fidget when the conversation gets boring, or bite their nails, or laugh too loud. I was lucky to spend my Thanksgiving with such a lively group of siblings. But even these America-fixated, Abercrombie-American-Eagle-Hollister-wearing French adolescents had never experienced Thanksgiving before. I think the menu puzzled them a bit...it confused me, too, honestly, because all of the right ingredients were there, but it just didn't feel like home. The dishes were too polished. Here is what we ate...

The evening started with...how to describe it...I suppose it was something like bruschetta (only monster sized) with roasted peppers and vinaigrette dressing. (Sorry the photo quality is not wonderful; I blame the ambient lighting and my aversion to flash photography.):



After the appetizer came the true test, though -- the turkey. I have to say, I was impressed with my dinde à la française. The perfectly cooked meat was tender and juicy, dribbled over with a cranberry (wine?) sauce that artfully combined savory and sweet. Also on the plate were cooked chestnuts (a recurring theme here that I'm beginning to enjoy) and mushrooms...perhaps an attempt at stuffing. What I really missed though, was mashed potatoes. I guess purée de pommes de terre just doesn't fly in the land of wine and cheese, and each plate came with two measly, scrawny boiled potatos. Alas (oh, but note the red wine):



We rounded out our night of French portions with an insufficient amount of dessert; then again, when the primary confection is pumpkin flan, perhaps it's better to have only a sliver. I've never been a huge pumpkin pie fan, but this Thanksgiving, I finally came to appreciate the art of the pumpkin pie (although, as Garrison Keillor so accurately states, "The best pumpkin pie you eat isn't much different from the worst"). Our pumpkin flan wouldn't have been that bad if it hadn't been for one very out of place spice; we suspect it may have been curry, and I, personally, suspect that they based their pumpkin flan recipe on a recipe for pumpkin soup (a much more common dish in France):



Well and there you have it. In spite of my semi-sarcastic commentary, it really was a lovely meal -- if for no other reason than the company!

Addendum: And how could I forget to mention another amazing birthday present?! I was sitting next to Lauren's host dad at dinner, so naturally we chatted a little bit about my studies and experiences in Nantes. And, do you know what he told me? "You speak French very well. You have no accent." YES!

To Market, To Market...too soon?

Sunrise: 8:22
Vocab: boudin - blood sausage

Farm attire.

At long last! The entry about my experiences as a murderer of small animals. Well, to be fair, they were large animals, and it wasn't me who killed them, and nothing was wasted. Seeing as I wrote 10 pages in my notebook when it was all fresh in my mind, I've decided to excerpt a few snippets for your reading pleasure. For purposes of discretion I will not: (1) post all of my notes, (2) include any names, or (3) post photos of the piggies. (Yes, I justified the text of this entry; trust me, it looks much better this way.)

Sunday, October 15, 2009

We had stumbled into an immense family gathering. Over the course of the weekend, I kissed easily over 40 people between hellos & goodbyes; you acknowledge everyone present when you arrive and when you leave. I am omniscient because I had no responsibilities and could bounce from inside to outside as the different family members proudly displayed and explained their roles.

We killed 4 pigs. I'm not a squeamish person, but I thought I might lose my proverbial lunch. The pig is terrified, seeing he must confront his own mortality. She struggles and screams -- not squeals, screams. Every fiber of her existence tenses and converges into one simple message: I am alive and I do not want to die. And that's what pretty much all of us want, isn't it? Her death is inevitable, though, planned by the human arbiters of life and death...the only gods in the pig world. I understand more than ever why the base of tragedy -- the most ancient and fundamental tragedies -- is inevitability. I felt myself in a completely alien world, watching a woman easily in her mid-60s eagerly place a bucket under the cascade of blood, while the men held the pig still in the throes of its death tremors.

After killing the pigs, the next step was griller... in other words, to light them on fire to clean the skin and slightly cook the insides before cutting them open. It was raining. Hard. And the bonfires felt oddly funerary as the pigs transitioned to meat (as Angèle said). The human role in all this requires a strong stomach and a hearty constitution: You have to face your role as a killer, but you also have to have respect for the whole process underway. The man who butchered the pigs had been doing so since he was eight. One fluid motion after another, he opened the animals, separating head from body, organs from flesh, and later, separating the different cuts of meat.

While the work was clearly divided according to sex, all the work for men and women alike takes a toll on the hands. The men worked outside in the rain, scrubbing down the charred carcasses, and setting up spigots to run cold water through the organs of the animals. The women worked inside to separate the intestines, finessing them out of their tangles, tugging and tearing at the connective tissue. Cold water, warm blood, hot insides. Even with hands no doubt numbed by the spigot water, though, the men still came inside periodically to roll themselves the perfect (filterless) cigarettes in zero seconds flat.

If the French are efficient in nothing else, they work quickly when preparing food. Within minutes the assembly line was whirring away. Ladies tearing at innards, an older mustachioed gentleman grinding away at the sausage machine, and the other men outside in the rain cleaning shit out of intestines that only minutes before had been inside, steaming with the heat of a recently-killed corpse.

After several hours of hard labor, we sat for lunch, which lasted easily two hours. With the efficiency of the day, we had converted the meat prep. room into a kitchen. Warmed by the fire, we passed around huge loaves of crusty country bread before partking of salads that people had made the night before. For the main course, we had sausage (not from our pigs) & pasta. I wasn't brave enough to try any of the recently killed cuts that we had cooked for lunch, but I did try a bite of the blood sausage. Never again. The taste was fine, but the texture reminded me too much of the substance recently flushed out of those same intestines. We wrapped up with strong country camembert, roasted chestnuts, & clementines.

That night, we had dinner with another part of the family. Again, there were at least 20 (une vingtaine) of us. This meal lasted around four hours. We took our time, starting with aperitifs & cold appetizers that we passed around on platters, then the warm appetizers -- a small plate of mini tarts for everyone. The main course, which came out in pre-arranged plates, consisted of three types of sausage, a cut of ham, half a baked potato, and a sauerkraut-like cabbage mélange. We three girls split a plate amongst ourselves and it was just the right amount of food for each. After the cheese course came dessert and digestifs. Angèle's uncle challenged us girls to try Calvados (affectionately: "calva"), a locally made apple brandy that you drink from a spoon, poured over a sugar cube. The other two didn't much care for it, but I appreciated the burning sweetness of the combination, which amused the family to no end.

I know Angèle and Anaïs said it depends on the family, but the French seem to thrive on family collectivity... certainly in the countryside.

The Month in Review: A Dinner Party

Sunrise: 8:15am
Vocabulary:
canapé - sofa
la classe - classy

It's Monday night and I'm sitting at my computer, when Marie tells me that we've been invited to dinner and that we're going to Ikea. Puzzled as I was, I tossed on my scarf and coat and followed her out. In the lobby, we met her niece and nephew, who had arrived by bike, and headed down to the garage to pile into the car. As we drove to Ikea, two significant and practically simultaneous revelations struck: (1) we would not be eating at Ikea and (2) I needed neither my coat nor my scarf.

It has been just over a month since my arrival in Nantes and the greatly diminished language barrier remains a barrier nevertheless -- although I might attribute the above more to syntax than to my limited knowledge of French. As I tell everyone, it seems, I have my "good French days" and my "bad French days." I've sensed a gradual increase in the number of good days, but sometimes the right words just don't come out. While I've been struggling against my meager vocabulary, though, I've found that I can fake it pretty well -- all it takes is a room full of French people. The more saturated I am in French French, the easier it is for me to speak with an authentic-sounding accent, and I've just about perfected the three words I use most often: "merci," "pardon," and "bonjour." But, I exaggerate (or underexaggerate), I've received a fair number of compliments on my accent from many of the French students I've recently encountered -- although according to Marie and her nephew Arnault, the best compliment of all would be, "You have no accent!" I'm trying.

While the language has, of course, been my main focus and obstacle over the past month, there are other, smaller things, that I'm also still trying to get a handle on. The weather, for example. I wish I could say, definitively, whether or not it is autumn here. Each day commences with decidedly autumnal temperatures, which linger well into the late morning and early afternoon, but ultimately climb to 70 or 75 (in Fahrenheit, of course). Thus, a coat is a highly practical article of clothing when I leave for class, but has become outmoded by the time I'm done with lunch. (I guess that's French fashion for you!) It's humid here, too. The air right now is a sponge and I am not looking forward to the day it gets wrung out. Every time we have a gray or rainy day, Marie jovially remarks that "c'est un vrai temps nantais!" While my body and psyche are both still adjusting to Nantes' peculiar meteorology, I must admit that a crisp, cloudy day in Nantes makes me about as happy as a brisk, sunny day in the states (that is, very happy). Perhaps there's hope for me after all.

We arrived at Ikea around 8:30pm. Everything here closes early. Most buses quit running at around 8:00pm (even on weekends). But Ikea, Ikea stays open until 9pm. We had arrived on a mission: to pick up a sofa for Marie's niece, Alice. While she went off in quest of the desired piece of furniture, Marie, Arnault, and I took a more leisurely turn around the store, pausing to pick up some lightbulbs. On the way out, Marie stopped by the small food section of the store to pick up several boxes of the cookies to which we had lately become addicted. She came back with six boxes of cookies (two of each kind) and a chocolate bar for each of the kids. If I were to come up with a term for this phenomenon it would be "little treats," and it remains unclear whether "little treats" are customary, or just a peculiarity of this French family. In any case, my life seems to be just full of little treats, just little moments of indulgence. While Americans seem to have this decadent, luxurious image of French life, I've found that the secret to the lifestyle here lies in finding the right moment for a little treat.

After a brief drive back into the city, I helped Alice carry her new sofa up three flights of stairs -- or, I should say, a box of pieces that would soon become a sofa. She's a student at the local architecture school and, as is customary here, she lives on her own in a small apartment because there is no such thing as "on-campus housing." On the way out, I helped her carry a gargantuan pile of trash and cardboard boxes out to the dumpsters. The next stop on our driving tour was Marie's house, again, to pick up the bikes and head over to Arnault's house for dinner. We brought some bread and a small dish of eggplant and ham to contribute to the rest of the meal: couscous and steamed vegetables. I was surprised Marie didn't make her usual joke about "eating like they do in Spain," since we started our meal well after 8:00pm.

After the main meal, we moved on to cheese and wine. Alice rinsed out my glass for me, without a second thought, and brought in a hunk of Camembert, which we ate directly out of the wrapper. While it is most elegant to eat cheese plain, with fork and knife, we ate our Camembert on small pieces of bread while sipping a red wine from Bordeaux. Arnault keeps a wine map on a wall by the dinner table (which is in a room that triples as dining room, living room, and bedroom) and showed me the exact region of our wine. He pointed out that if I took a bite of cheese and then sipped the wine, the taste would change completely. And it did! Before my enological revelations, though, they asked me to smell the cheese. "Most French people enjoy the scent of this cheese," said Alice as she held it up to my nose, "except for me." They all seemed floored when I told them I liked the smell, and then cut off a sizable piece for my bread. "But she likes Roquefort," Marie said almost proudly. "She's not like most Americans."

I find it both comforting and off-putting (if that's possible) that the French treat family members' homes practically as their own, both in the liberties they take and the responsibilities they assume. Whenever Marie has relatives over for dinner, she makes sure I get the best place at the table, she offers me every course first, and only asks her family members for help in the kitchen. I think I'm something of a novelty, though, more than just a guest. People constantly ask me if we "have" certain things in the states. The first time we ate eggplant, Marie hadn't expected me to know what it was. Whenever I mention how much I love the bread here, people ask, "But don't you have bread in America?" People also ask me questions about the economy, politics, education, the environment. Even if I'm not an expert, a simple yes or no can often elicit at least one ooh or semi-interested ah.

We closed the evening with tiny cups of decaf coffee and spéculoos cookies (which also come in spreadable form!). After two cookies (which taste like Teddy Grahams, but look much classier), I drank the rest of my coffee black -- again, to oohs and ahs. I had never drunk black coffee before, but I think it may become a habit. As much as I continue to find myself lost in the cultural differences here, I already feel myself changing, adopting new ways of going about my life -- adapting maybe, but also changing for good.

Last Saturday, my friend Emily and I met up with my maraine Angèle and her friend Anaïs for a voyage to Trentemoult, a small island just a ten minute ferry ride from Nantes (and pulled straight from my imagination). I invite you to spend the day in our shoes this way. (For reasons that remain unclear, this album is password protected. Get in by typing: iheartchucks.)

NB: After rereading this, I have surmised that as my French improves, my grasp of English becomes increasingly tenuous. There are just so many misplaced modifiers. Please forgive me.