Bonjour, mes amis ! Comment ça va ? (Hello, my friends! How are you doing?)
I am now back in Oberlin after an incredible trip to the world heritage city of Bordeaux, France, where I was lucky enough to receive excellent education in the French language, a loving welcome from my host family, delectable eats, including the best pastries I’d ever tasted, just a bit of (fully legal, as the drinking age is eighteen) wine tasting, and so much more! I’m not sure I could ever write enough (just as with my trip to Guadalajara) to properly convey how incredible and life-changing my time in France was, but I’ll at least try to capture the essence of it and hit the main points in my next few posts.
I’d like to start by talking about my host family (as I did with my Guadalajara trip too). This time around, I ended up with a family comprised of five members, my host mother and father and their three children. At sixteen, nineteen, and twenty years old, none of the kids were too far in age from me, and they all spoke English quite well. Of course, this was important because, very differently than when I went to Guadalajara, I traveled to France with only the language experience of a month of Duolingo. Not too helpful when my host mom (who spoke less English than her children) was picking me up at the airport and wanted to ask if I had my things.
“Je m'appelle Evan, enchanté !” (My name is Evan, nice to meet you!) is about the extent of what I could say in return.
My host mom drove me through many a roundabout to reach our house from the airport, and once we arrived showed me to my room and around the kitchen and living and dining room areas. As in Guadalajara, I got my own bathroom to use (something I figure must be a requirement for international hosts of some kind) and was welcomed to eat that very night at their table. I found quite a few differences in eating with my host family from meals I’d had elsewhere, which I’d later enumerate to my own family at home in explanation of European culture.
For one thing (this being the same in Mexico too) dinner in France was eaten quite late by US standards, the usual being eight o’clock and the actual time sometimes pushing nine! Sacrebleu ! (Literally “Holy blue!,” more or less equivalent to an English “Oh my goodness!”) You may remember from my posts about my Mexico trip that the meal timing was different there too, but I might argue that their meal structure perhaps made more sense. They had their largest meal in the middle of the day around two and then a light dinner between eight and ten. In France, lunch remained a more medium-sized meal, as in the States, and dinner was the largest course but was eaten seemingly just before one was to go to bed.
Often, we would start meals with my host family by having soup of some kind. There was tomato, for instance, or a pumpkin soup into which we mixed cream that I found quite delicious! Following this, the soup bowls would be cleaned up and the main course would come out. We ate all manner of delicious foods for that course, ranging from andouillette (a French sausage made of pork intestines, herbs, and spices, which is actually quite good!) to good old American burgers. Pasta with cream to spread on was a frequent staple, and perhaps my favorite meal was when we had crêpes, first with savory meats inside and next with sweet spreads. Nutella was what I first picked, and when offered a third crêpe, I had my host mom’s suggestion of squeezed lemon and powdered sugar, surprisingly the most delicious pick of the bunch!
On the whole, the portions we ate for dinner were small by US standards, but this was what allowed us to have so many courses because, after the main entrée, I would always be offered both fruit and coffee pudding for dessert, sometimes followed by a single chocolate too!
From the point of finishing our food, all the family would spring into action cleaning up the table with efficiency I’d seldom elsewhere seen. At first they didn’t want me, the guest, to help, but by the end of my stay I would join my host family in cleaning up from our meal and moving to the kitchen for a bedtime drink. I don’t mean of wine, no, they weren’t that wild. I do mean of coffee, though, which they somehow drank just before smoking a cigarette on the porch and heading to bed (really, I wasn’t sure how they slept!). While I did have coffee with my hosts on the first night, I subsequently swapped it out for herbal tea I’d drink at that time in the evening, and (as I’ve never smoked) always passed on the cigarettes.
The truly communal process of my host family’s European dinner time was something I came to appreciate the routine of each night, and from which I’ll take bits back with me to the US (especially the fruit for dessert and night time herbal tea-drinking parts, I don’t intend on having coffee before I sleep).
On my mornings in the house, I was provided pre-frozen Belgian waffles (cooked and stored over the weekends) which I could microwave half of and spread with peanut butter, nutella, or syrup, to give me energy for the day. I’d often see my host mom or dad on my way out the door and say goodbye (au revoir !). I’d take my bag with all I needed with me and head off, throughout the past January month, to a morning of learning at my French language school.
To be continued…
