Frogslegs and snails: Je suis une vraie gourmande (Brousse Willis!)

Well it’s been one heaven of a Christmas! I’ll start with the photos:

We took the boat across the Loire River to visit a friend of Anna. It’s just like taking the bus or the tram –all we had to do was show our travel cards and get on! In the background of the sixth photo (on the way back) you can see little red and green dots, which are actually rings of light which represent the chains of slavery, as a monument to the freeing of the African slaves (because Nantes, being on the Loire River, used to be the slave capital of France), which is pretty cool.

Brousse Willis! In French, you pronounce their last name and mine the same as you say Bruce Willis, so me and Anna are team Brousse Willis. For Christmas I made her a jewellery box by cutting a square out of the pages of an old book, and bought chocolates at the Christmas Market with the letters BROUSSE WILLIS on them and put them in the box!

The fourth photo is Anna, Priscilla and Quentin, all friends from Anna’s youth group. This photo is actually quite important because we were outside for a while and although it’s not very cold here, I caught a cold that day, so I fitted in perfectly with most of the rest of the family, who were sick as well (the joys of a Winter Christmas!)

The sixth photo is Roland, the Grandad who stays at the house for Christmas. It’s hilarious how he smokes his cigars inside the house (very French). I don’t really understand anything he says though!

The next photo is Odile, the mother who is super- (although the French would say hyper-!) lovely and a great seamstress. Her work, which I go to Friday afternoons, involves sewing too (I included a picture in a previous post). Women who can't otherwise find work sew things to sell. One Friday they were making diary covers with cool fabric and buttons and I chose one I liked -Odile surprised me and gave it to me for Christmas! She has been super-busy leading up to Christmas, preparing the meals for all of us, including the two older daughters Marion and Claire and their husbands, who just add to the fun, and sewing us all Christmas presents. They all wear very interesting, colourful clothes (perfect, right?) and all the females wear each other’s clothes and jewelery pretty much as we please. Odile made me a cool poncho with snowflakes on it to remind me of my Winter Christmas.
Everyone in this family laughs lots (I think it's very French!) but Odile laughs the most. There are lots more words for the different types of laughter in French than there are in English -I think that in itself says something! Fou rire means to laugh without being able to stop, and Odile does this lots!
We watched a video from someone's birthday (it was in Summer -very different - which makes me want to visit again in Summer!) where they had had a concours (competition) for the meal where everyone had prepared a different apperetif (appetizer, normally in delicate little glasses like shot glasses with miniature spoons) and Benoit had made one in normal size glasses, with cold porridge and munched cucumber, and it had been disgusting! Watching them all laughing was hilarious, and set everyone off again! I'm definitely still the stupid exchange student (!) so I'm not sure if it's just with me, but the same jokes tend to get brought up again and again!

We've eaten lots of long and elaborate meals (seven hours on Christmas Eve long enough for you?!) but there's still not the same feeling of not wanting to eat for another year that you get in NZ -at least not for me, anyway!! (The magic of French food..) On Christmas Eve we skyped my family at home when they were eating the Christmas meal (midnight for us and midday in NZ) and we hadn't even got onto the dessert yet! It was fab -we each did a course and dessert was gorgeously presented homemade choux pastries with a caramel and chocolate fountain, and vanilla bean ice cream.
Marion and David, who arrived last, also brought a massive crate of pates, confits, nuts and the ultimate dish of Christmas for the French, which we had with onion jam (but you can also have it with fig jam) and gingerbread: Foie Gras. They also brought a ginormous loaf of bread for eating with the other things.
We decorate the table for Christmas, and play games and do sketches in between the courses. As you can probably tell, the Brousses are very dramatic, and it's quite a sight when all of them, plus their exuberant other halves, are all together under one roof! Here Anna and me are making roses out of serviettes.

This is a picture during our Christmas meal (which started at 4pm, like most of our lunches, by the way!) which is mostly for my family to see a bit more of the house. The children had made a poem for Odile, and they stood in a line with their backs to us and turned around one by one and read a line (not at all out of the ordinary in this house, little performances like this!)

For the Christmas meal we had a chapon (like a giant rooster) which was great, until Nicholas took the head (which had been left on, with beak, feathers, eyes and all) and started waving it around, then picking it apart to find the soft bits of meat!

Just another moment of dancing..

And music.. (I gave them a CD of NZ music and it is radical listening to all my favourite NZ artists while eating and playing games together in French!) And there's still the odd moment when I have been blogging, or skyping someone in English, and then I randomly will ask someone a question in English!

This is Shalom (it means Peace in Hebrew). I'm not actually sure if she is their only cat, because there are always the neighbour's cats that seem to live in the kitchen aswell! She eats almost as much as us and we often find her on the bench eating the leftovers, and sometimes even the dinner!