Dans lequel je me rapelle que les francais sont des mangeurs competitifs OR In which I am reminded that the French are champion Eaters

My first weekend has passed with beatiful weather and lots of things to see. On Saturday, Lupita, the Spanish language assistant, and I tried to go to the outdoor market, but were too late. We wandered around the towns shopping district and found a fabulous local museum housed in a convent ( le couvent des Ursulines) that was built in 1690. The bottom floor featured archaological exhibits from the local area-- greco-roman funerary steles, neolithic stone tools, the skulls of some cave bears and teeth from mammoths. The top floor is dedicated to some wonderful paintings done by local artists from the 1700-1800s. My favorites portrayed very realistic scenes of peasants and local folk going about their daily lives in the fields and on their doorsteps. This group of painters paid special attention to the eyes and they were all incredibly luminous and lifelike.
After the musee, we found l,eglise Saint Georges, the local catholic church, rebuilt rather late, in the early 1800s (practically new, here). The church had the usual niches for all the saints, but I was struck by how many people had put up plaques to say thank you to their saint when their prayers were answered. Saint Therese seems to be the special saint for this area and a lot of people put plaques up around 1940-1943, something like ¨¨Remercier a Saint Therese 1942 G.D.¨¨ . I found that very sweet.
Saturday evening, Lupita and I made some seriously tasty sandwiches from half a baguette, with mayonnaise so delicious and fattening that only the french could have created it, a wonderful local cheese, and some slices of cold pork.
Sunday, however, we were completely outdone. One of the Spanish teachers invited us to her house to eat and then to visit a local man who made his own wine. I thought we would probably eat at 2 or 3, so I made myself a big breakfast of eggs and toast, juice and tea, now that I have overcome my fear of our little propane stove and the matches (okay, am overcoming my fear--its a work in progress). So I was very surprised to see that the table was already set when we arrived at 11.30am. We sat down almost immediately with the whole family, and another couple of teacher-friends, so there were 8 of us in all and we had:
First course:
a series of cold meats, ham, pate, bologna, and some others that I couldnt identify, each paired with appropriate accompaniments to offset the flavours, like capers, tiny yellow tomatoes, a peach slice, a mini seaweed salad, etc with a light white wine.
(at first I thought, oh, nice and light, a perfect little midday meal...)




Second course:
Patates au gratin with the uber-tasty addition of mascarpone cheese and boeuf bourguignon (like Julia Child!) that had been cooking since early early that morning, served in extremely generous (almost painful) portions and accompanied with red wine.
(I realized my mistake, and remembered my wonderful meals with Danielle, my host mom, two years ago, when I felt I needed a small crane to get up from the table...a premonition of things to come!)

Third course:
Salade vert with a light vinnaigrette and some local cheese, frommage du brebis (ewes milk).

Fourth course:
A marvelous flourless chocolate cake;
Fifth course:
and an apple tarte, followed by coffee or tea. Naturally; I didnt realize there was apple tarte to come, so by the time this was brought out, I was more horrified than pleased; it really would not do not to try at least some of everything, and its really rather insulting here not to eat the majority of what you are given...and so I was reminded of how the french spend a great deal of time in their lives practicing the sport of Endurance Eating... and I am but a novice....
How are the french able to leave their houses, much less fit into car, bus, airplane seats you ask? I think the secret lies in the idea of eating very little for breakfast, then a huge meal for lunch, followed by a small meal or snack for dinner, with no snacking in between. It doesnt hurt that all of the ingredients are marvelously fresh, with no processed foods used.

After this extraordinary repast, we all stuffed ourselves into a series of very small cars; (best moment of the day for me was when one of the men said to other, with a certain amount of pride, *we should take my car, its much bigger, I have a VW Golf sport!*). And we proceeded to take some very lovely but windy roads into the country for about two hours. Now, many of you know that I suffer from rather debilitating carsickness--suffice it to say that this was, for me, a mortal battle, trying to hang onto all that food.

Finally, we stopped at the tiny, picturesque village of Champlitte, where the old chateau has been converted into a huge museum of daily life. This beautiful building was filled with room after room of displays--the dentist, the mill, the chapel, the kitchen, the store, etc, all set up with antiques from the local area to resemble life from the 1600s-1800s. The amount of time and detail that went into this was truly incredible. The musem curators had managed to collect everything from old dental tools to giant bed cabinets! My favorites were a real life gypsy caravan and a giant puppet theater that rivals the one the Von Trap family had in the movie The Sound Of  Music.
Eventually, we made our way up the town to the wine guys house, which was, of course several hundred years old, and featured a truly beatiful old stone cave underneath for keeping the wine. We tasted his chardonay, rose and pinot noir, with the grapes all grown by him just outside of the village, organically cultivated and produced. We also got to climb up ladders and peak into the vats used for fermenting the grapes during their verious stages of production. Sadly, I really couldnt understand him well enough to comprehend the winemaking process, but he looked just like the farmer in Babe, so I was content imagining him bursting into song to heal a sick pig.
After all of this excitement, we piled back into the car and I pretended to be really interested in the countryside, hanging my head out the window, so as not to puke all over the backseat :)