Home again home again

After what felt like a whirlwind week and a half, I'm back home.

Christmas with oysters, foie gras, and les 13 desserts de provence was with B's family in the Gard. Then I took the train to Strasbourg, where I stayed three days with family friends. Lots of Wii playing, hanging out, petting the dog, and chatting. Our families have known each other for forever, so they feel like family. I see them more often than a lot of my family, actually. I had yummy tarte flambée my last night there, and generally enjoyed seeing everyone and visiting Strasbourg (even if I didn't get to go to l'Orangerie, my favoritist park).

Then I took the train to Montrejean, which is halfway between Toulouse and Tarbes (a long long way from Strasbourg). My original ticket ended in Nimes and I bought the rest of the trip later, which meant that I had two tickets for the same train. I was hoping to get away with just staying in my first seat, but at Nimes someone else had my seat reserved, so I had to drag my stuff three cars down to my second reserved seat. The Lyon-Toulouse train was a TGV and you're always supposed to have a reservation, but there were several people in the baggage areas between each car. I thought if you had a reservation, you had a seat? Are they people who bought their ticket late and there's no seat unreserved for their entire trip and instead of giving them seat F for the first half and seat B for the second half of their trip, they just get to stand?

I arrived in Montrejeau two hours early because I was able to jump on the TER in Toulouse. It helps to have those kind of travel experiences every once in a while to counter-act all the negative ones.

And New Years.

This year B and I went to a friend's "chalet" not far from the Spanish border in Haute Garonne (hence the Montrejeau arrival). There were 9 of us for New Year's eve, but Sunday night when I arrived I made 7. Monday we were supposed to go skiing all day, but no one wanted to get up at 7:30, so we decided to just do a half day. We got out all our gear, made sandwiches, stuffed the cars, rented skis and boots and one pair too many of poles (which we didn't realize until we were at the ski station and were forced to leave them in front of the ticket booths and hope we'd find them later; we did).

The snow was alright, although a little too icy for me sometimes. We had a high-altitude picnic, and everything was going pretty well. I was getting tired and feeling frustrated with my skiing skills, so B and I left the others to ski down the mountain and wait for them in the car. We borrowed the keys to one of the cars so we could get our shoes and started heading down.

Except that halfway down we were presented with a choice of two sides of the mountain and we chose the wrong one. Which we didn't realize until we got to the bottom and said "Hey, this isn't what it looked like where we started..." We hopped on the shuttle hoping it would take us to the other ski station, but our hopes were dashed at the end of the loop when we got off and I found out at an info center that it was 10 km back to the other station. B and I sat down and waited for someone to answer their cell phone and eventually were picked up by the other car and driven back so we could give the other key and all go home.

But when we arrived, our host's girlfriend exploded in anger about how it was all B's fault and she'd been waiting half and hour and why couldn't we just go back up the mountain and ski down the other side ( a) because the whole reason we skiied down was because I wanted to stop and b) because the ski lifts had stopped by the time we realized that was what we had to do). I didn't hear her say this, but she then criticized B for 'imposing' people on the party that no one else knew and continued her general rant. B had indeed invited three people to join the party when our host told him he was welcome to do that. And though the friends weren't usually part of the group of our host, everyone had met at least once at B's birthday or a concert or some other event.

Suffice it to say that B was rather upset with the girlfriend's tirade and talked about driving home. She can be very nice, but often times she's really difficult with a group. As one of the guys commented, everyone can disagree with her, but they still do what she wants just to avoid her complaining.

Luckily tempers cooled by the time we got back and we prepared the tartiflette, set out the drinks and little apéro snacks, and took turns showering and putting on our fancy clothes. B forgot his nice pair of pants, so he borrowed from one of the other guys. One of the other guys forgot a nice shirt, so he borrowed from our host. Everyone had hot water (which avoided many arguments, in my opinion) and we settled around the table with the last couple who arrived around 7pm.

Lots of yummy food, three rounds of Loup-Garou (fun role-playing game) some sing-alongs with our friend while he played the guitar, and B's flan that he tried to make into an upside-down cake (word to the wise: it doesn't work).

We toasted midnight and then everyone started texting their friends, which was kind of funny. B and I went to bed around 2am, but the others stayed up and partied till about 4:30am. Our host invented "glou-glou" which involved sitting in a chair with an apron and drinking alcohol poured into a funnel. Our guitar player glou-glou-ed a whole bunch of champagne and was one of four or five who finished a whole bottle of Get-27 before the night was done. At 4am the partyers came into our room and beat of pots and pan and made noise with the taboo zapper while filming, but we weren't too surprised since they had talked about doing that to other friends during the evening and I hadn't been sleeping due to their SingStar performances.

At any rate, we're back now, with lots of laundry to do, an apartment to find in Toulouse, and a huge stack of boxes to re-form and fill.