a pleasant visit on Saturday

The phone rang Saturday around 10:00 am. It was from a French couple we met when we were invited to the country-music festival in Crappone at the end of July. We had exchanged phone numbers and email addresses with the intention of getting together again in the future. I was embarrassed to call them because my French had not gotten any better since the last time we were together and they were kind enough to speak English to us when we first met them. I was also unsure about their plans during August when the entire population of france seems to be somewhere other than france.

So the call was to invite us over to their house…. for lunch… that day! I couldn’t say no – I didn’t really want to say no, but we had just started our day after a late night out the night before and we had many errands to run. So I said ok…. we would be there at 12:30. Now… I wasn’t sure if 12:30 meant French time or American time… Americans, for the most part, love promptness in comparison to the French where time is more fluid. But it didn’t matter because we didn’t even walk out the door until 12:10 and Paul took a wrong turn on the way there….. I think we arrived about an hour late.

Their house is in the suburbs and is very nice with beautiful gardens and a pool. They told us to bring our swimsuits but in the rush to get out of the apartment we decided that finding them would take more time than we had. And when we got there they said it was ok – they thought it was too hot to swim (it wasn’t really not - not Houston hot). We sat around and talked about the hurricane (and took out the maps of Louisiana) and had a lot of interesting discussions about New Orleans and the city and its location and the people.

Their house furnished they way I would have expected a French house to look. I have been surprised at how most stores sell only very modern furnishings so I was under the impression that traditional French style was found only in magazines!

We had a very nice simple lunch with the traditional cheese after the meal and before a fruit salad dessert with coffee – the kind you can stand a spoon in. Our host loves all kinds of music, particularly American music, and he played for us one of his Cajun albums! The lyrics were, of course, in French and he laughed at how hard they were to understand. We had a great time visiting with them. Just before we left, he took us to see his wine cellar. I tried to do a mental count of bottles. He had all these compartments for (I guess) different categories of wine. There must have been 2-300 bottles down there! He gave us a couple of bottles to compare because one bottle came directly from the vineyard where it was bottled and the other bottle was one he bottled himself after purchasing only the wine from the vineyard. Geez… you think we will be able to tell? I’ll report later. We said goodbye with a promise to have them over soon for Tex-Mex.