Meeting anyone to whom I am related is always an experience. I have a saying my friends have heard many times that goes something like this. "They say that normal is relative, but none of my relatives are normal."
For example, my family across the Atlantic is fantastically, 100% French.
And never is the wonderful handful of traits that make someone French more apparant than when you visit them in their home. My French family, the children of my grandfather´s brother, are wonderful hosts. Their house--nestled on the side of the Sallanches valley--is gorgeous, and has views that make people with lodges in Aspen smolder with jealousy.
Victor Hugo wrote "The Sallanches Valley is a theater" and the statement is a perfect sentiment that captures the ways in which the weather interacts with the mountain vistas, creating new visions and views each moment that it is observed.
Sallanches
My family is equally intriguing. The head of the household works for Renault in Annecy, and they have traveled as much if not more than my parents, with recent trips including China, and the next trip in the queue--work related--to Mexico. Their son lived and worked for a time on the island of Guadeloupe in the Caribbean. They run the quintessential French household. Simple breakfasts, extravagant lunches, and a fantastic array of wines constantly arriving from the Cellar.
In addition, over a year ago, when I taught some friends of mine (including my traveling companion) a definition of 'just a taste' it was based on hard liquor--just a sip is all you need, this is very different from a proper definition of 'just a taste' for a bottle of wine, where just a taste means at least 1/2 a glass.
These definitions were at odds nightly, when my family would introduce a new bottle of wine and 80* (say it out loud) would say "oh, sure. Just a taste!" and find a half a glass of wine in front of her to take in. She put up a good fight, certainly, but it was entertaining to watch her become more and more inebriated throughout the night as each new wine was introduced and she failed in a battle to have a single sip.
For both of us, the phrase of the weekend was "Un Petit Peu" -- A little bit! It became our constant cry as each new food and drink was brought to the table. Our hosts would offer us a new item and laughingly declare, "oh yes, of course, just a little bit!" and then, it often seemed, give us double!
But oh, what fantastic food it was!
The first day we were there we arrived after lunch, and so we sat and talked and drank Heineken (80 had orange juice) and looked over photograph books for most of the afternoon. This also presented 80 with her first chance to see photos of my parents, since I hadn´t sent her any while I was back home. It was funny to have to suddenly explain to my family that my traveling companion had never laid eyes on my folks. Awkward!
Their son, who lives in an apartment in the bottom level of their house and works at one of the ski resorts in the valley, arrived from work around 5PM, and we sat and drank aperitifs (scotch for me, various and sundry for the other four) and talked about our trip so far and how things were going.
Then we had dinner. It was a very traditional French meal born, like many modern Irish meals, out of necessity. The areas around us, impoverished after the world wars (they were the first areas to fall under German control in both cases), had managed to find simple, low cost meals that could be turned into feasts, and we had one of these that evening. It was boiled potatoes and smoked cheese. They have a cheese smoker, like a series of miniature pans for fondue and an on-the-table cooker. You put your ingredients in a little pan and slide it in one of the 8 accessible slots in a large heated iron (it looks like an imposing sort of waffle iron) and a few minutes later you slide out hot smoked cheese, which you then pour on your potatoes and consume, usually along with sounds of delight. It makes a wonderful meal.
And of course, as a traditional French meal, it was preceded by cold cut Italian and French hams, and followed by a bread and cheese course, and a fruit course.
4 course meals that last 2 hours were not something that 80 and I had been doing a great deal of so far on the trip, and the transition was imposing, but we certainly did our best to live up to the challenge.
After dinner was finished, we moved back to the sitting room and finished off the wine, then moved to champagne.
By the time we retired for the night, we were both certain only of the location of the floor. Thank heavens there was only one flight of stairs to our rooms, I don't think I could have survived two.
*My companion´s name is Adrienne. She shortens this name to Ad. I pronounce it Aye-Dee, or Eighty. So her new nickname, 80 was born. In person I now often call her quatre-vingts, the French word for 80, literally translated, it means "four twenties". It is pronounced Katruh-Vahn.
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