They are sweet, retired couple (he is Egyptian. she is German) who have been together 40 years and spent most of their lives working in the Middle East- Kuwait, Dubai, and Jordan. We spent the evening chatting about the French system, traveling, and living an expat life. It was an international evening where they served Armenian cured meats, Italian stuffed peppers, homemade German bread, and a French Sancerre.
In addition to being neighborly, I think they invited us for drinks because they understand our situation very well. They can relate to being a foreigner in a city and trying to re-create a sense of home by making new friends, establishing a routine, and finding sources for both new and familiar things. They retired to France around 2002, and since then they have forged strong relations with local producers and have discovered areas of the city (both Paris and Garches) that locals could only know about. They have graciously offered to take us around and be our source to these treasured locations. Until Saturday, I did not realize that Paris had an Indian and Arab quarter. It is here, where they stock up on their exotic, but well priced, cooking spices. They also told us about an authentic Indian restaurant in the next town over. The best part of the evening was the fact that I was able to go to the dinner (upstairs) wearing my fuzzy slippers. That and after four bottles of wine between the four of us over the course of seven hours, it was an easy walk home.
The last few dinners has shown us how international our little town is. This is our fourth dinner so far, and three of the four were organized by a non-French couple. I'm trying to decide why we're meeting so many expats. It's probably because we are one ourselves, Garches has a large number of expats, and our limited French make it hard to meet more French people.
The other big news this weekend is that it hasn't stopped snowing since Friday. Snow has come as quite a surprise to me because the French said that it hardly snows here. And when it does, it melts in a few hours. I'm a firm believer that everything is better with snow (but only if you don't have to travel). So this weather has brought me back to my childhood days when snow meant grabbing your sled and finding the closest hill. I felt a little bad for the French kids, because very few had sled. This is just as well, since there aren't any hills that don't bottom out onto a road.
We took the dogs out and about town to enjoy the wintry weather. Here are some more snowy Garches photos.
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| Snow beard |
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| Despite seeing one snowplow today, most roads remain uncleared. |
To end the weekend, we had fish tacos for Sunday dinner (Thomas was craving fish tacos). Since the French don't really have a taste for Mexican food, aside from tortilla shells, we had to make everything - beer batter fried fish, (sort of) re-fried beans, salsa, and spicy, creamy taco sauce. Two hours later, we finally ate. Yum! but way too much work for Mexican food. Recipe from allrecipes.com.
