Wine Weekend

As in all of France, the Southwest home to an excellent wine region.  This weekend, the four Americans decided to check out what our region has to offer.  Saturday morning, we borrowed a car and headed north to the Madiran region to visit, taste, and buy.  We couldn't have asked for better weather--it was clear and sunny, and we got all dressed up in our cute sundresses.  On the way, we stopped in the village of Madiran to have lunch at a cute little family restaurant.  I think we were the only customers, everyone else there was part of the family.  We ate very very well and, in the French style, spent about 2 hours à table.

I also took pictures of my food, for mom:

Appetizer plate

Confit de canard--the best dish the southwest has to offer

After our decadent lunch, we kept driving, ending up in the village of Viella, which is surrounded by wineries.  The first was the Chateu de Viella.

Our future home?

We tasted most of their wines and picked up a few bottles, and the nice lady in the tasting room offered us a free bottle to take home as well!  We weren't ready to be done so we visited a second, smaller winery, owned by an older couple and their adult son.  We got to taste all their wines and see the sheds where they age the wine in giant metal tanks before bottling it, and walked around the vineyard a bit.  Here are some photos of the property:

(not related to wine) On Sunday, Nancy and Samuel, the two Venezuelan assistants, decided to cook us a huge Venezuelan lunch.  There were the two of them, the four Americans, and some of our friends from the engineering school--Venezuelans and Colombians.  The lunch was awesome, obviously.

Can't rotate the photo--Nancy explaining the food to us

For my dad--a different and WAY better way of making fried plantains

It was actually my last full weekend in Tarbes, and although I'm obviously really sad to leave, I feel like we're doing the most we can together these last few days so I'm not disappointed at all.  I've made some amazing friends here and as always, the best and worst part of travelling or living in other places is that you meet people from all over the world who you may not see again and even if you do, it's only every few years.  We're all still in denial at this point, and won't let each other talk about it until the day we leave.  Everytime anyone starts saying "I'm really going to miss you guys!" they get yelled at and we change the subject...

As for my classes, I'm having a mostly positive last few sessions with them.  I'm getting some hilariously mixed reactions when I tell them it's their last class with me--most of them are sad but I have the occasional dud groups who don't care at all or make a really lame effort to pretend to be sad.  I saw one of my favorite classes this morning and we talked about American high school--I gave them a little quiz about it then showed them some of my pictures of important high school events like prom and graduation.  They loved seeing the photos and finding out what things are different from their high school.  Most of them said they would prefer to go to high school in American solely because we finish school at 3pm every day (they sometimes have class until 6 in the evening).  As is everyone in France, they are shocked that we don't get a 2 hour lunch break but said they would gladly sacrifice that to finish earlier.  I have my other favorite group this afternoon and since they didn't have class last week I asked the teacher if I could have the whole class instead of half.  Yesterday Molly, Hadley, and I spent the evening making cookies upon cookies upon cookies, and mine were for this class, so they will be tasting that great American delicacy, the chocolate chip cookie.