Marché des Capucins, Creole food and that time I ran into a parked motorcycle...

Oyster tasting

Last weekend we visited the Marché des Capucins, the immense covered market that sells everything fresh from all kinds of raw and cooked meats, fresh and dried fruits, vegetables, nuts, oils, etc...and of course tons of different kinds of breads and pastries in every size and shape imaginable. And for a nice change they also had more ethnic food stands where you could buy Italian, Spanish, and Moroccan prepared food or ingredients! We've all found that after continually eating the traditional french staples of bread, ham, cheese, and 'nature' foods for so long (meaning not very many spices or strong flavors) we NEED some spicy food! Luce, one of our 'guardian angels' for the semester and a few of the middkids tried some oysters, while the others did a cheese tasting. Afterwards we did yet ANOTHER walking tour of Bordeaux for about 3-4 extremely long (and painfully annoying) hours.


On Monday we had a traiditional HUGE dinner with the neighbors that live in the house behind us – a mom, her daugher Rémi who’s 27 and doing her residency (I think), and her coloc Alban, who’s around the same age as Rémi and actually spent a few years in the states studying in Wisconsin at a small university, talk about having a small world! Dinner was amazing, Isabelle and Rémi’s mom spent about 3 hours in the kitchen cooking créole food - finally some spicy food! We had some great chicken and creole sausage in these amazing sauces, spiced rice and beans, and an amazing lemon meringue pie for dessert. Almost everyone had multiple glasses of wine, and the meal itself lasted from about 8pm until midnight! 

Tons of cheese, of course

This week a bunch of the middlebury kids got together for a pot luck since one of the girls on the program's french roommates were away for the night. We had kind of a mix of french and italian food - but topped it all off with the most enormous mountain of bread I've ever seen! The guy who brought it said he was going to get a regular baguette, but that was the only thing they had left - and it was about 10 times the size of a normal baguette here. Between about 10 of us we finished less than half of it!

Cannelés and Macarons - Bordeaux specialties

I finally registered to use VCUB this week, the extremely convenient city bikes program - there are about 100 stations all over the city, and you can just pick up a bike at whatever station you want and return it to whatever station you want for a really good price per month! But, me being a complete klutz I managed to run my bike into a parked motorcycle and almost fall off my bike within the first 30 seconds of me even being on it, almost run into about 5 old people, and almost get hit by a couple cars. Woops! Later that night we had an erasmus soirée in the center city for all the new exchange students to meet a bunch of french students who were coming back from their semesters/years abroad with exchange programs - and Karina, Amanda and I took charge of the dance floor for a few songs and taught a bunch of french girls the cotton eyed joe and then all danced the macarena together. Gotta love those oldies.