thank goodness it's not oysters & chips. I love Scotland.

Hi, Hello

Merry Christmas Eve, Christmas, Chanukah, Boxing Day, Birthday, New Years, St Someone Day…

Over here, I guess “secular” is pretty loosely defined. It seems pretty Christmas-y to me. The French are into not repressing anyone which is fine but I’ve yet to see any reference to anything else.

Mireille just treated me to a French Traditional Christmas meal. I hope I didn’t come across as rude when I asked if the second course was already dead. The first wasn’t. Inquiring minds wanted to know.
So we started with oysters. Freshly pried open with some tool, design circa no later than the early Middle Ages. And henceforth was marred my perfect record of eating everything she put in front of me. I soldiered through 2 but…Oy. I’m a texture girl and these, jsdfhadsjhfldskjhvdjfgfhdfd. "No you take the rest, I insist. "
Next was escargot. Already deceased. Check. Can pretend they’re clams. Check. Drowned in butter and garlic. I can pop a few down. At least I didn’t have to suck it right out of the shell like the oysters. I don’t even like shots of things that are normal to shoot. Chasing with bread and butter. First, and hopefully, last time I will utter that phrase.
When she was done laughing with/at me, we exchanged presents. She gave me a little stuffed animal, because she saw that I hadn’t brought one, and some traditional French Christmas chocolates which are positively delightful. I gave her a potted orchid, so it would last, and then an enormous stem of some enormous flowers which are gorgeous and whose name I don’t know. She is a huge flower person. Her living room is well on its way to forest classification.


Meanwhile in a more innocent, pre-oyster era…
In order to get some homey-ness in my life prior to the festivities, I jetsetted off to sunny, delightful Scotland in December. Kirsty’s (Scottish friend/roommate/enforcer of sanity in this madness of 9A Chemin des Petites Roches) direct quote was “Wow, this is even bleaker than I remembered” referring to the Glasgow skyline.
We, like a large fraction of the civilized world, decided to flee France the last Saturday before Thanksgiving. Despite the shrieking, cranky children in the eternal security line who were obviously asexually reproducing (there were not that many of them 20 minutes ago) it wasn’t so bad. Security remains an eternal mystery to me; “put liquids in sealable plastic” what? “sorry, sir, that white powder on my bag is laundry detergent” who?
We arrived and mentally passed out for the rest of the day which was amazing. It was a house. And we could sprawl on the couches and watch TV (in English!) and make tea without bound! It was a little weird reverse culture shock. There were a lot of awkwardly started sentences in French and there was a little “mais” and “donc” where there should have been a little “but” and “so.” It was just so amazing to be in a place where we could sit around the table and talk and say nearly intelligent things in nearly proper sentence structure. And then in town, ah the calm and the glory of being able to understand and respond without the “sorry, what?”s and the considerably less witty than desired response. Ok. So maybe I’m glorifying it a little because some of those accents were from the mud hovel right off the highland. I would have given plenty of people my large, shiny, and worthless 2 pence pieces to take the 40 marbles out of their mouth.
We can’t all be American.

The next day was a wander about in Glasgow day, which was fun for me and stressful for Kirsty because she was still pursuing Christmas gifts (one family can receive only so much mustard). I followed and observed and after careful study, yes, there really are more redheads in Scotland. It’s like the headquarters. Even adults. Maybe this means I’ll have red hair when I grow up, too. Shucks, that’d be awesome. Later that night, she took me on a walking tour of Glasgow and we ended up at Glasgow Uni which is amazingly beautiful and all stone and columned and stainglassed and every other requisite for old school British things. It was dark and gorgeous and we were the only ones there just walking around have a look-see and, get this, a bag piper was dressed in the full garb and just walking around playing. You can’t even plan shiz like that. And then we were walking around and all “oh, hey were does this archway lead to” and we went out and there was this amazing panorama of Glasgow and enormous lights that lit up the entire face of the Uni on that side.

The next day was the Edinburgh day. The sun was practically shining so the view from Edinburgh castle was impressive. We started to descend down the Royal Mile, the mile in between Edinburgh Castle and Hollywood Palace (which I struggle at taking seriously), one of the Queens many obscene mansion houses, I guess. Then we kept descending to have a walk through the Christmas market and down to the Scotland National Gallery. But more importantly, after that we ate a scone. Then we were [still] completely wiped so we jumped on the train home. And that night we went out for some drinks. Who thought that was a good idea? We just needed some serious non-Dijon pub action in our life. Where a drink doesn’t cost 7 euros and the two social groups available are the Italian student rager set or the 60 year old French man throwing down a pint set.

The next day was another morning of a hearty bowl of porridge and off to the carnival. Where I felt old, went on my first upside down ride ever, persevered through a few more, became ill, and handed my remaining tickets to a small child who was not yet green with unhappiness. We then returned to the homestead, slightly off-colored, ate dinner and then played scrabble where I inched out narrow victory with the suspicion-ridden word of “abet” which I promptly tacked an “S” on the end of to get the double word score. Yesssss. Love that conjugating. The green light was also given to both English and American spellings. Good game, that.

The next morning, we got up far too early/it remained dark until 8:30am. Horrible. And I got the car to the bus to the train to the plane to the metro to the train to the bus to arrive back in my cozy little room in Dijon, France. It’s way weird traveling between two countries, neither one to which you belong. Although it was amusing on the plane where I was sitting amongst a group of younger Muslim Scottish guys who were talking about how excited they were to go to EuroDisney. Glad to see they take advantage of their JudeoChristian-centric holidays.

Well this post has occurred over about 3 days. More has happened. There have been pancakes eaten as Christmas dinner all the while improving American-Candian relations.
My mother is now en route.
My sister sends positive reports about dad's reaction to the Dijon baseball hat.
Miss the family dinners. Oysters do not replace the annual surf and turf. Sorry, France.

Merry Christmas xoxo