My French teacher, Delphine

My French teacher here in France is an older lady called Delphine (older being somewhere between 60 and 75 years old - I just can't tell!). She's a darling. We met at the local community French lessons offered by kindly retired people for the small sum of 10 euros a year. I didn't go there much after the first six months because I couldn't follow what they were trying to (kindly) teach me...and to boot we were in a pre-fabricated type building, not a centuries-old, aching with past memories and dripping with gorgeous history kind of stone building. Not at all. Anyone who went to school in New Zealand from about the 1980s onwards will know what I mean by pre-fab type buildings, only this one was bad and seriously ugly. My problem was that I absolutely could not be in beautiful France and have French lessons in an ugly building. The feng shui was just all wrong for me.

Anyway, Delphine and her husband Jean-Pierre had a granddaughter who had worked on an alpaca farm in Christchurch, New Zealand (but of course!), and Delphine was very keen for us to meet. One Saturday we met them at a local restaurant for a delicious French lunch and we got to know them all - Delphine and Jean-Pierre, their daughter and her children. After that, dear Delphine generously invited me to her house for French lessons, and I keenly took her up on that suggestion. I have now been going to her house once a week for the last two years, and we send each other postcards whenever we are away on our holidays. Delphine used to teach English so she slips between the two languages gracefully.  She laughs a lot too - often at me - but I don't mind because it stops me from being embarrassed at my mistakes as I join in with her for a good laugh. I'm not even sure that I blush anymore!

She and I are looking through the manuscript for my (recently-published-now-available-for-sale-on-amazon-websites-for-example) book called 'Waking Up In France', and slow line by slow line we are translating it into French. This has to be the best type of French lesson I have ever had! Seeing words I have written in English gradually transformed into a real French sentence with the correct words in the correct order is a joy to behold, and kind of makes the French make more sense to me. And so I come home and type it all into my computer so that my brain will register it all the better. I even use the 'insert symbol' option to make all those clever e-accent acute, e-accent grave, a-accent grave, etc... Quite a job! 

But what made me laugh was that Delphine and I were working through the manuscript - the first page of the prologue in fact, and she was laughing hard. That wasn't unusual, but then she said something that made me hoot. She said, "Sara, this is really, very good. You should write a book!" 

Holidays, a couple worth mentioning

A ‘gite’ is a holiday home that is available to be rented. You have sole occupancy of the home and access to all the usual amenities. You can find them through all sorts of websites here in France. Our first experience of a gite had been through the local town council in Angoustrine, in the Pyrenees mountains, not far from the Spanish border. Our French friends, Jerome and Marijo and their three children, invited us to join them for a weeks’ holiday and hiking in the mountains in the endearingly and deliciously warm springtime of southern France. We leapt at the chance. We stayed in a very basic collection of adjoined cottages, and ours was the smallest - with the most people to bed down. One of the children took turns having sleep-overs with our friends. We had a wonderful week as we explored the region by foot.

After our second French summer holiday back to winter in New Zealand - waving goodbye to summer-frocked friends in France - we were seriously sunshine-deprived. We wanted Vitamin D, and fast. This time we wanted a gite to enjoy a little bit of the French summertime before it disappeared into the marvellously long but slightly cooler autumn. So, we went to Pays Bearn, not far from the Mediterranean coast (where the French accent is stickier than thickened porridge).

Monsieur Lafargue met us, as pre-arranged by text and through the friendly reservation people at www.gites-de-france.com, at precisely 4.00 pm at Maison Lafargue just outside of the village of Morlanne, with a bisous and a warm smile. This ‘maison familiale’ (old family home where he grew up) included a lovely outdoor covered swimming pool, fruiting fruit trees and grapevines and an enormous locked barn and outhouses.  It was hard to tell exactly what the house was like from the photos on the website but we had few choices, given our late booking and non-negotiable requirement of a swimming pool to cope with the over 30 degree Celsius heat each day. It ‘ticked the boxes’, so we parted with a few hundred euros. When we saw the place on our arrival, we were definitely happy with our choice, in fact it was better than the photos.

However, here's some problems with staying in a former 'maison familiale': an overwhelming desire to look through the locked doors and rifle through the cupboards; a longing to hear the stories, see the family gatherings, taste the cooking, experience life in France (not really so long ago) when there was no inside plumbing, water was from the well outside, and light was the glow of candles or kerosene lamps, etc etc. When it was time to leave it was incredibly hard to say farewell to the armoirs full of ancient everyday china and beautiful porcelain, just part of the stock of the house that was wanted by no one else and therefore deemed suitable for the gite.

We explored the area, and had a wine tasting (our first) at a cave at Chateau de Cabidos. It was fabulous, and our French flowed far more freely after a few samples of their favourite flavours. We saw multiple legs of ham hanging salted and strange at the working Musee de Jambon in Bayonne, and we galloped around the grounds of the old castle at Morlanne. (I’ll post some photos soon).

And then we went to lunch at the Café des Sports in Arzacq. The restaurant was typically French, so imagine outside seating under a shady exterior of drooping grape and wisteria vines, happy people cheerfully downing delicious local wines, the aroma of fine in-house cooking hurling out through the open doors to greet us, and the happy shouts and merry clinking of glasses as the local tradesmen sat down to their obligatory two hour sustenance stop.

Our eight year old daughter Olivia waited patiently for her entree – an extremely hearty soup of the region and a particular award-winning speciality of this restaurant. It arrived in a large, functional, stainless-steel bowl so that we could serve ourselves. Olivia brought the spoon carefully to her mouth, gently blowing the steam away. She tasted, she swallowed, she exclaimed, “Wow. This is delicious! I never knew the French could cook so well.”

It was in fact a ham soup, called garbure, just like my New Zealand mother makes, only swimming with all winter vegetables and borlotti beans (this is at the height of summer but they serve it every day because it is their speciality). A pertinent tip from someone who knows is that if you want to try the garbure then don’t also choose the 17 euros lunch option, as we did, which had four more courses to follow  (well, we were on holiday!). Our three children were very happy with their steak and fries, followed by the unmissable bowl of icecream for the kids.

I'll post some photos in the next couple of days. Since then we've been to Luchon for some skiing and exploring. Different location, different climate but the same gorgeous France.