Anyways, I'll pick up the story at Rosh Hashanah, aka the Jewish New year. Rosh Hashanah was last Monday evening, and I joined the Chosen People of Aix for services and dinner. It was a lot better than expected. The only temple I could find was fortuitously a block away from my house, but also Orthodox. However, it was closer to my Reform comforts that I would have expected. The service lasted forty-five minutes, not a lot of chanting more just reading from the Rabbi, and then we were done. Men and women were separated, which was a little annoying beecause upstairs with the women were all the little kids who, while adorably cute, were also walking up and down the stairs and whispering and sort of disrupting the prayer session but since they were up high the men weren't bothered, and I suppose that's all that mattered. (that was a joke). Not sure if my style of humor/sarcasm is very good for the blog-world, I think it's more of a spoken humor. Right, so the mayor of the town came to the service which was a big deal, as a hospitable.gracious gesture. Also three imams from the local mosque came and someone from the church. There was a little bit of an affair with the imams, they were asked three times to put on kepot and each time they did not. At dinner the family had some words to say about that. So after the service I ate with this family who had invited me because the mom worked in the office as secretary, and when I came in looking for information on services she took my contact info and said I could eat with her family if I wanted. I can see that this story can go on for a while so I'll try to speed it up, but basically her family consisted of her, her "companion," her two kids from a previous marriage, girls ages 17 and 22, then her brother/the uncle with his wife and 20 year old son, an american widow with two seven year old girl twins, another french woman who was a guest that night, and some other random family members dropped by during the evening. It was a fun meal: first we prayed over apples and honey, then spinach, leeks, jujubes, sesame seeds (with the idea that you will have as many good things happen to you this year as you have sesame seeds in your hand), pomegranate seeds, and some other things, then we had entree course of carrots with cumin, shredded carrot salad, a dish with green peppers and tomatoes, an egg dish, homemade round challah which was amazing, and wine. The plat principale was a choice of some meat and spinach, and then chicken glazed with honey and a chicken with mustard, and rice with eggplants. Dessert: chocolate mini cupcakes, butter cookies, macaroon type almond cookies, these ice cream filled chocolates, these crunchy things that looked like cigars with honey inside, fruit salad, and there were probably other choices that I am forgetting. It was really fun and the two girls were nice, the 17 year old is studying at Sciences Po here and loves English so we connected pretty fast, so all in all I made new friends and had a great meal and celebrated the new year. They were having dinner again the next night but I had said I wasn't coming. Since it was so good, I ended up coming Tuesday night with two friends Danny and Sam, and it was equally good. There were more cousins there and the two little girls took a liking to me so they made me sit with them on one end of the table while all the kids our age were at the other end, so I sort of missed most of their conversation but I instead did magic tricks and talked about Hannah Montana so I can't complain. We ate the same stuff the second night. So that was very very fun, and then after the second dinner there was a birthday party at my apartment for my french roomie's friend Luana, which was even more fun since the only three Americans there were myself, Danny, and Sam, so we spoke in French and partied and then went out to our fave boite IPN.
Fast forward to Thursday evening, last cooking class (yes i've been learning how to cook a la provencale, wouldn't you know). All cooking classes have been fun even though we don't actually do a whole lot of cooking, we peel carrots or chop tomatoes or break up bars of chocolate and let Madame Daniel handle the rest, then we eat our delicious creations. So this last night was Deviled Eggs, then a vegetable buffet with fish, then Creme Brulee and baba au rhum cakes. Two desserts for the last night, very good. And of course lots of rosé, and good rosé at that. So cooking class over, we went straight to the ballet, Pavillon Noir. Modern danse. Interesting. I prefer traditional ballet but the last act was good, it was three girls three guys together and then these other three girls and guys come in different costumes with a bizarre dance style and the music got more electric/machine like but one guy and girl from the respective groups break off to dance with each other (all symbolism of course) and they are shunned from their "family" groups at the end. Sad, but replete with good dancing. After that we got crepes at Patacrepe, the restaurant we ate at the first night, crepes heaped with ice cream and nutella and bananas and such. I sort of slid from that group to the group across the way that was getting drinks at a bar, then we got Pizza Capri, yes it was a night of feasting, and then we broke up and reassembled to go to O'Shannons, this very lively bar, later. So much for my evenings in Aix.
Oh yeah, I also have an internship at La Provence, the local/regional newspaper. Every week I write an article, a bio let's call it on a student here, their impressions of Aix, what their story is, etc. The first week the article was about me, and last week I wrote the article about a Canadian guy. I'll attach the articles to this blog as they come out. They're in French but it's cool just to see the finished product.
No comments:
Post a Comment