Happy Armistice everyone! Apparently, WWI ended today, of so many years ago. In France, our holiday is called Armistice. The US is Veterans Day. Anyway, no school today; I get to stay home and do homework while texting Maggie.
Anyway, last night was very exciting! And yes, I did meet a world famous chocolatier. His name is Phillipe. [...]
So first thing’s first, they arrive and I go out and sit with everyone, since they’ve just sat down in the living room and what not. So I’m sitting there listening to the conversation and drinking grape juice (seriously) and eating mini sausage slices, and the chocolate man's wife turns to me and says: “So you had that test of King Arthur today?”
Conversation sparked, magically I find that they are turning to me more and more and asking stuff. We talk about King Arthur, school, and the Loire Valley trip. It’s amazing! After not too long (maybe three glasses of grape juice?) we’re ready for dinner so we relocate to the table.
In the last week I’ve done this weird dinner party thing twice. It's called raclettes. For dinner, there’s this giant kind of oven thing in the middle of the table. Everyone has a little metal tray where they put cheese and ham and thin sliced meat into, and put it in the oven thing to heat up. The cheese gets all melty and the meat gets kind of smoky. It’s pretty good. We had that for dinner today anyway.
At dinner, we talk about politics (“Are you happy that Obama won?” “Yes, of course!”), the American election (“Is the election always on Novemeber 4th or does the day change?” “Oh, well, the day changes since it’s always on the first Tuesday of November, not specifically on November 4th.”), wine (“You should try to the wine is you want, it’s very French.” “OK, I will try it.” – tastes wine – “That is very interesting!”), and national holidays (“So, Armistice tomorrow, nice to have no school.” “Yeah, there are a lot of holidays in France.” “Really?”), and then all about the differences between French and US schools. It was a really great conversation and one of the best I have had so far with my host family and with non-host family guests (who are usually much harder to talk to) so I felt really happy.
Oh and I left out the part about meeting a world famous chocolatier. After dinner, we had an amazing chocolate cake and mini chocolates. My host dad says, “Oh, he made these.” *points to dinner guest* And I’m like: “Really?” But yeah, it’s gets better. My host dad: “Yeah, he is a very well known chocolate maker. He has a chocolate laboratory and everything. He has stores in Europe, Japan and the US.” It was amazing. And the chocolates were so good too. Really. So I know a world famous chocolatier! I thought that was really cool.
Last night was my most fun dinner party ever. It’s fun to feel like you can actually communicate coherently with French people. Especially today it was great because it was people outside of my host family and usually it's really hard to talk coherently with people who aren't used to putting up with your bad French. (Which I really appreciate by the way...our host families go through a lot trying to understand us, haha.) Anyway, it made me feel like I had made a lot of language process. Such a great feeling.
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