Holiday Update!

So the holidays have come and almost gone (I go back to school Monday, boohoo...) but not without their fair share of exciting holiday activity. Noël (that's Christmas for all you who don't speak French) marked my first journey outside of the south-west pocket of France. I spent eight hours in the car as me, my host family headed to Normandie. I thought it was cold in Orthez, but I was horribly mistaken. The farther north you go the colder it gets in France.

So anyway, Noël, French style, is a lot like New Year's Eve. Everyone stays up past midnight to great Christmas. And they eat oysters. Lots of raw oysters. Christmas tradition: seafood. But mainly oysters.

After Normandie, I bebopped over to Bretagne to visit the other side of the family. I got to check out Nantes, and saw a very large mechanical elephant. There are some things in life I'll never understand.

Over four days, each meal was like a holiday feast. I guess it's just the French way of storing up fat for the cold French winter.

So then I returned to Orthez, and two days later took the train up to Paris to visit the daughter of my host mother for a few days (and of course, to see Paris!). I traveled with the niece of my host mother, who is super sweet, and in the last three days, we've visited the Luxembourg, Versailles, and of course done some Paris shopping. This evening I decided to go check out Notre Dame, and unfortunately got completely lost in the Latin Quartier of Paris. When I finally did get to Notre Dame, however, it was just in time for mass, which was nifty. And, above all, very beautiful. Unfortunately, after the mass, I decided to head back to the apartment and got lost again. But now I'm pretty sure I've seen most of Paris, and I've also burned off all my holiday fat.

Tomorrow I'm going to go check out the Eiffel Tower and hopefully hit up an art museum or two. Who knows?

I'll have all sorts of pictures coming soon, though, thanks to the camera my dad sent me for Christmas.

Joyeux Noël et Bonne Année à tous!

Exploding Churros!

So last night was my final night in my first host home. I'll be moving in with a new family today, and to end things with a bang (which turned out to be unintentionally literal) my host sister and I decided to make churros. This is the second time we've cooked together, the first time being our adventures into the world of fudge, and that didn't go so well, so you'd think we would have taken a hint.

But anyway, at the beginning it wasn't too hard. Sometimes we were a little confused by the directions of the recipe, especially since it was all in Spanish, but we managed to make the dough, and fry a few churros before disaster struck. We were just finishing off our second and final batch, and Mathilde and I were leaning over the pot of boiling oil to examine a rather bizarre looking churro when BAM! there was a very loud noise, we were covered in hot oil, and Mathilde's mother came running into the kitchen to scold us.

Besides having rather painful burns on our face and necks, we were relatively unhurt. But my host mom wasn't too happy. She scolded us while mopping the floor, and then went to bed. Mathilde and I ended up staying up until midnight cleaning oil of walls and cupboards and pots and pans, and we found a churro that had flown from the kitchen all the way into the hallway. Overall, despite the fact that I now have a funny white burn under my lip, it was a lot of fun.

And we're planning to get back together in a few weeks to make Christmas cakes. This time, the recipe's in German. Oh, and fudge. Christmas fudge.