We're only two and a half weeks into our 7 week holiday, but we've been zipping around so fast we've covered quite a bit, so I'll start from where the last blog ended.
We spent two extremely cold (about 2 degrees) but fun filled days at Paris Disneyland where we met up with Rhona's uncle Steven, Pauline, and 3 year old cousin Amy. We had a blast and packed a lot into 2 days. Rhona and I had a lot of fun in France without a mobile phone and no coin operated phones in sight; at Disneyland we ended up going to the lost children building where they let us ring Steven's mobile for free! (we went there twice); and then at Charles de Gaulle airport we attempted to use the credit card phone (bad move, but it was all we could find) to ring my brother, we tried twice with both calls failing, we later found two AUD$25 charges on our bank statement for the failed calls!
We finally found a coin operated phone and managed to ring my brother who met us in Nice at 11:30pm after our flight was delayed an hour. The first thing I noticed about France was the crazy driving, for starters they drive on the right but wrong side of the road, white lines are just a guide (everyone veers all over multiple lanes), and indicating is just a courtesy. We spent a couple of days at my brothers apartment catching up, taking Fleur (my niece) to crèche, and relaxing; before heading off on a 10.5 hour drive to Angers in the north.
We arrived in Angers to colder weather (about 5 and below) than Nice (where it was about 12-15 degrees). Angers is a beautiful little town, we spent most of our time either shopping or with family and friends of Delphine's (Tim's sister in-law). It was great to see the different ways people celebrate Christmas. Before we started the marathon of eating at Christmas we all shared our Christmas present with each other.
The kids went first, Fleur and her two cousins, Jules and Louis all went off with their papa (Delphine's dad Joel) in search of papa Noel (father Christmas to us). This is when all the parents and us ran like crazy to get all the gifts and place them next to the children's slippers under the tree. The kids came back into the room after John François (Delphine's brother) knocked on the door and yelled ho ho ho au revoir! It was really good to see all the kids getting so excited and ripping open all of their presents.
After the kids had finished opening all of their presents the adults headed to the dinner table and on each persons setting they have all their own gifts. This happened for both Christmas Eve and Christmas day lunch when Chantelle's family came around for lunch.
For dinner we had about 6 courses, from memory:
Aperitifs – ports, sprits and liquors with a salmon spread on bread and a caviar type spread as well on bread. With chips and nibbles also.
Course 1 Seafood platters – king prawns, snails, live oysters, and live cockles (they closed when touched, so you had to be quick getting your knife inside).
Course 2 Foie Gras (I looked up the dictionary and that is how you spell it!) and toast – this is liver from a goose, I think, that has been force fed special palets until it bloats up and is then killed; a delicacy.
Course 3 Castrated Rooster – much the same as chicken just bigger boned, served with salad and balsamic dressing (homemade).
Course 4 Cheeses and Bread
Course 5 Dessert – A very tasty icecream/caramel?/orange? log thing
Course 6 Tea and Coffee with chocolates. And a really really full belly.
Mind you, this different culinary experience was only Christmas dinner, other interesting things we've had include:
Brains
Blood sausage (yes, it's just coagulated blood in intestines with a few other bits and pieces)
Milk sausage (the guys had blood sausage, the girls had milk sausage)
Prawns (wait ….. with hundreds of eggs attached, apparently a normal thing when they're fresh) Sea urchins (alive before being choppe d in half) - See in the photo below
Angers has become a blur of eating, drinking, shopping (great outdoor shopping and Vin Chaud (Warm Wine)), and meeting new people; an amazing experience! J
Before heading south again we went to Futuroscope (a theme park all about future technologies) for a day, which as you can guess, has been a highlight for me. It took a fair bit of convincing to get Delphine and Rhona on-board, but they enjoyed the fresh air (it was so cold the feature pools around the park were frozen). Anyway it was really cool (excuse the pun), we went to heaps of different IMAX future cinemas such as a planetarium style one, an animated 3D one, another 3D one about the International Space Station which was in a big orb building, and a few other interesting ones. We also watched people riding the dancing robot arms, which are 7 meter high massive robot arms with a seat for two as the end effector (the hand), and they danced to different styles of music; spinning this way and that, up and down like a nightmarish roller coaster. Andrew and I were keen to have a go except for the 1 hour queue for a 1 minute ride!
The day after Futuroscope we were off again in the car heading south to Marseille. We stopped off for the night at the Castle of Carcassonne which is huge fortified village where people still live (I have a funny photo showing a traffic light inside the castle!). We all had the dish of the region for dinner called the Cassoulet of Castelnaudary, which is a baked beans style soupy thing with sausages and duck and things inside of it, it tasted good but I can't imagine all of that fat being good for the body.
That night we all (Rhona, Delphine, Andrew, Fleur, and I) squeezed into a single hotel room, and as you can imagine the air in the room by the morning wasn't the best.The next morning we had another quick look around the castle and then headed off on the final leg to Marseille.
Marseille is on the south coast of France and has a massive port where we spent our final day. We took a tourist truck/train around the sights to try and squeeze as much as possible into the little time we had. It became more like a roller coaster than a gentle sightseeing tour, going up and down and around steep streets (with the driver cracking jokes about the last carriage still being attached), but we had fun and saw some things we wouldn't have otherwise.
For dinner we went to a nice little seafood restaurant were we had the prawns with eggs, and sea urchins I mentioned above. Back at our hotel Rhona, Andrew and I had a bon voyage drink and had some fun trying to get internet access to check our 6am flight to London (we had to get up at 4am!)
We will add all the other pics and details of our trip very soon.
Tim, Clare and Me
The Big Ben London
The Eye of London- Tim, Rhona and Clare