Whew! Quelle semaine folle! No matter where you move, I think it is challenging to start a new life from scratch...realizing you need everything from a kitchen knife to pillows to housing insurance, groceries, corkscrew, wireless internet...life is complicated! And especially when one is trying to function in a new language...it is the simple, stupid situations, like the pure fact that I cannot adequately apologize in french after tracking dirt onto a poor clerk’s recently mopped floor in a gas station makes me feel like a heel , even before she reamed me out, using insults that I should have recorded and stored in my arsenal, to foist upon those french men who think it amusing to harass young girls to the point of verbal combat. A run on sentence, I know. It was that kind of week.
Having spent my last entry raving about my hot pink pastry, perhaps we will move onto a classic...cheese and wine. Today, the rest of the exchange students and I visited a fromagerie nestled into a little village, in the Montagnes Bruges. This particular factory is know for a particular kind of cheese which they make from a particular recette, handed down by generations and generations. Even the cows used are only from a specific lineage. (I think they might be inbred and perhaps have ended up with inferior brain power which compensates for the superior milk quality, because they were waltzing all over the road as we drove through the mountains to the fromagerie. Some negatives to keeping it all in the family. ) Somehow (through a process which I didn’t truly listen to, as I was slightly distracted by the promise of samples) the milk gets left out, heated up, ferments, and then gets squashed into these little containers with stickers on them. Sounds quite like what happened to my compost in Toronto on a hot day. Anyways, after one week, it grows a special mold which in English, is called “Cat fur”. Which it actually looks and feels like. Yummy. (For any of you who wondered if that lovely little rind on the outside of cheese is actually just an edible wax, think again.) The fur gets “caressed” (also didn’t translate very well into English) and then the cheese goes back into dormancy again. Until the next petting-session. More caressing, which squashes the outer layer of the mold, then back into sleep mode, to grow more fuzz. Ad nauseum for 6 months. The product of this lovely little technique is known as “Tome des Bauges”. The moral of the story? Les francais LOVE being particular. And I think they may frequently confuse inanimate food stuffs with loved ones–no kidding: yesterday I saw a man making love to his cappuccino. But that’s another story.
Having spent my last entry raving about my hot pink pastry, perhaps we will move onto a classic...cheese and wine. Today, the rest of the exchange students and I visited a fromagerie nestled into a little village, in the Montagnes Bruges. This particular factory is know for a particular kind of cheese which they make from a particular recette, handed down by generations and generations. Even the cows used are only from a specific lineage. (I think they might be inbred and perhaps have ended up with inferior brain power which compensates for the superior milk quality, because they were waltzing all over the road as we drove through the mountains to the fromagerie. Some negatives to keeping it all in the family. ) Somehow (through a process which I didn’t truly listen to, as I was slightly distracted by the promise of samples) the milk gets left out, heated up, ferments, and then gets squashed into these little containers with stickers on them. Sounds quite like what happened to my compost in Toronto on a hot day. Anyways, after one week, it grows a special mold which in English, is called “Cat fur”. Which it actually looks and feels like. Yummy. (For any of you who wondered if that lovely little rind on the outside of cheese is actually just an edible wax, think again.) The fur gets “caressed” (also didn’t translate very well into English) and then the cheese goes back into dormancy again. Until the next petting-session. More caressing, which squashes the outer layer of the mold, then back into sleep mode, to grow more fuzz. Ad nauseum for 6 months. The product of this lovely little technique is known as “Tome des Bauges”. The moral of the story? Les francais LOVE being particular. And I think they may frequently confuse inanimate food stuffs with loved ones–no kidding: yesterday I saw a man making love to his cappuccino. But that’s another story.
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