One of the cool things I did the weekend after our vacation was climb to the top of the cathedral. We went on the first Sunday of the month so entry was free. And I think our count of how many steps there are was around... 300 or so? I can't even remember. But it was quite a workout climbing all the way up. The view was absolutely incredible though. You could see practically everywhere in all directions. Stunning.
The next week I spent doing what they call a "formation". I basically spent a week going to a different high school. It was a school called the CFA (Centre de Formation d'Apprentis). Teenagers go there to learn how to do their jobs. They choose around the age of 15 or 14 that they don't want to continue with normal school but start working. They're essentially apprentices (hence the word apprentice in the school's name). The jobs they do are things like baking and wood-work. The way it worked for the first group of kids I talked to was that they went to this school one week out of three. They spent one day working in the actual workplace with a professional teacher who showed them how to make a certain thing or use a certain skill. Then the other days they had normal classes like history and German. The older students I was with though went to school for the skills class once or twice a week but they didn't have to go to classes.
Here was what I did for the week: boulangerie, boucherie, and patisserie. Translations: baking--like bread-baking, butchery, and pastry-making. And here is the day by day:
Monday I did pastry-making (patisserie). But before the class even started Ana (a girl from Ecuador) and I had our own little adventure. I had been planning on spending the first two nights of the week with her since she's lives in the city center so it made transportation easier. With my large backpack and purse, I had wanted to drop off my bag at Ana's house, but we were running late so we just decided to meet up at the train station. We found the right bus stop and hopped on a bus that was marked CFA. We got to the stop and walked into the building... but of course we were at the wrong CFA. They eventually pointed us in the right direction, we got on a different bus and found the building. After, of course, asking for directions right next door to the building because we weren't sure where it was... But we arrived, about an hour late, and settled into our different classes.
My class was really nice. Everyone there was really really welcoming. It was nice for once to have a group of people come up to me and actually ask questions about where I'm from and seem interested... Because otherwise that's hard to come by.
That day we were making pain d'episces. It's pretty much like gingerbread but with a little bit of licorice-y, fennel-flavor in it. It's a little bit different and I prefer our more artificial-tasting gingerbread (weird, right?) but it was good anyways. And unfortunately that day they weren't making houses out of the gingerbread, just hearts. Since I didn't have the right clothes, I couldn't participate at first, but after a while they finally brought my a lab coat sort of thing to throw on over my clothes so I could help out. I couldn't do very much--all I did was coat the rolled-out hearts in milk before they went into the oven... But most of the time I was busy answering questions and talking with the other kids in my class.
Towards the end of the class, they started decorating so I decided "what the heck" I might as well join in! So I picked up a makeshift icing contraption, glued a marzipan bear onto a heart, and started decorating. I didn't do a fantastic job but it was still fun. And I learned at the end of class that students could choose to buy the things that they made. So I bought the gingerbread that I had decorated. It was at a cheaper price than you'd normally find so that was nice.
The second day I was in boucherie--butchery. This time I was with older students. Around 20 years or older. That meant they were doing far too complicated and dangerous things for clumsy old me. They were taking the bones out of a duck and another chicken-like being that was too small to be a chicken. It was so dangerous that they had to wear chainmail gloves and aprons so they wouldn't stab themselves... Needless to say I was glad I didn't have to participate. I sort of just stood around while they did work. It was nice though--they were really nice people too.
Not to mention the teacher was really hilarious. He was a very no-bull kind of teacher so that was fun to have when he wasn't MY teacher. He also showed me some of the things they were doing around the kitchen so I didn't spend the whole entire time standing around awkwardly.
Now for what we did that day... Well the others worked on removing the bones from various animals. Then they made what's called "farce" (maybe it's the same in English but I have absolutely no idea considering my knowledge on butchery isn't very extensive) which is basically the same as stuffing, but made with meat and onions and parsley all minced together. They put the farce onto the de-boned meat and wrapped it up and turned it over to make it look all nice and pretty. In the end it basically looked like a duck or chicken with farce inside. They tied them up with the string to keep the farce from getting out and stuck them in the oven. The oven, as I later learned, was a new oven that cleans itself. When I saw it after having been used it was brown and rusty-looking. After two hours of self-cleaning it was shiny and chrome-looking.
When the duck-things came out of the oven they were golden and brown. We cut off the string and cut it into slices to eat. Despite having seen all the insides of the meat and the raw farce and everything, they had been in the oven long enought that I was able to forget what it was like. And it tasted really good. Surprisingly good. It definitley had the taste of something my parents would like. I didn't take any pictures (I didn't want raw meat on my camera) but I found some online to show what it looked like. Here's before going in the oven:
And then here's sliced up: 
Then we made more farce, with a different kind of meat I think, and then put them in slabs of chicken and wrapped it all up in pig intestines. But I'm not positive about the pig intestines. They were white and looked like intestines but then you could spread them out and they kind of resembled spider webs. I'm not sure if I completely understood the translation, though. It seems like they were either pig intestines or stomach muscles... Stomach lining maybe? At any rate, we also made some "crépinettes" which were the farce wrapped in the pig stuff. Once they were all done cooking we got to taste the "crépinettes" with a sauce that we had made from the bones of the duck and chicken-things. It was really really delicious.
But the best thing--which I think may be easy enough that I could try to replicate it back home--was another sauce we made. We took some of the sauce made from the bones and put it in a pan. Then the teacher cut out the "meat" of an orange--no pulp and threw it in with the sauce. He threw in a chopped up thing that kind of looked like a mixture between a small onion and a big garlic chunk (this would be the only problem with replicating it back home). He then threw in a bit of vinegar. It sounds like the weirdest thing possible but it was surprisingly delicious! The teacher also said that we could do the same thing with any other kind of fruit we wanted.
For the last hour of the class we had finished cooking and cleaning and everything so we went into the classroom next door and we did a very awkward roleplaying game. The teacher had the students try and explain an Alsatian specialty to me, a tourist. This was hard because the teacher kept quizzing me on whether I had understood or not... Half the time I had but simply couldn't rephrase it for him. The worst part, though, was when the students tried to ask me questions on "what I was looking for". Because even in English I don't know the differences between cuts of meat. Luckily that was over quickly.
The third day I had boulangerie (baking). This was probably my favorite day because I actually got to participate. A lot. It was a little annoying because my class was all guys which meant I had to go to a different classroom's locker room to change into my apron and keep my stuff. It was nice at the same time though because being the only girl in a class of 15-year-old boys made it very easy to find help. I rarely had to carry my own pan.
That day we made brioche. It's kind of like bread but more of a pastry and sweet bread. And this time the teacher let me do everything everyone was doing. He let me use the table next to his and his equipement to do it all. It was great! I did an even better job than some of the kids in the class! I also brought home the recipe for how to make it so that's something I really really want to try when I get back.
How it worked was at the beginning we made the dough (which was actually the more difficult part for me since it involved reading the instructions in French, using French measurements, and finding the ingredients). Then after that we used the dough to make various things. We made the classic twists. One was a simple braid. The other was a four-strand braid. Then we had a two-strand twisty-thing. My best was the simple braid. But that part was fairly easy since--being a girl--braid's aren't that hard, and the teacher showed us how to make them. Then we used the rest of the dough to make tiny people (St. Nicolas), flat cookie-things that we later covered in a butter-brown sugar mixture, and cupcake-like things with a bubble-thing on the top. It's hard to describe and I don't have pictures of everything since I didn't get to take it all home (and some of it I ate on the way home) but here are some internet pictures so you can get an idea of what they look like.
They looked more or less like this. Except ours were entirely plain, like the very first picture. There were no chocolate chips or almonds. They were pretty good though.It was also really sweet because at the end of the class I took my best twisty brioche, a little person (I had four), and a cupcake-thing (I had three) and was planning on paying for them so I could bring them home, but my teacher told me I didn't have to worry about paying.
Now just to remind you all, I hadn't been home since Monday morning. I hadn't talked to my host family during this time. I didn't think whatsoever to talk to them--I suppose I was too wrapped up in trying not to fall asleep in the middle of class... But at any rate, throughout the duration of the 5-minute car ride from the village's train station to home my host mom yelled at me for this. And every other problem we had had. I can barely even remember what was really the problem. I got home, ran upstairs after shakily saying hello to the guests they had over. Upstairs my host dad yelled at me some more. And I finally started trying to defend myself. Which didn't work. And I'm not really going to go into detail because most of those problems have now been taken care of. We're kind of the better off for it. But I still don't like to think about it. Some of the things they said to me were entirely out of line and still kind of hurt.
The next day was a holiday. My host family took me with some friends to see a nearby castle. And in an attempt to appear like the perfect exchange students I tried my very very hardest to be nice and social and talk a lot (since that was what they told me I wasn't doing). But to be quite honest, trying to understand what someone else is saying in another language while you're hiking through a path covered in dead leaves is practically impossible. And is made even more difficult when that person is a mumbling teenager. Very very difficult. And then I'm supposed to respond. But that's just part of being an exchange student I suppose--trying to exceed the impossible expectations others set up for you.
As you can see that was a rather low point for me. But the castle was beautiful.
The next day I went back to the CFA. That was nice because I got to talk to other exchange students about all my problems. Getting it all out was definitely nice.
And then for what I did that day. I was meant to do something with wood-work but the teacher wasn't there so I joined Ana (the girl from Ecuador) in her boucherie class. It was the same teacher again so it was nice. He knew me and he was a very interactive kind of teacher so he let us participate.
That day they were decorating plates. Basically what they did was they poured a thin layer of gelatin mixed with milk into a nice silver plate and then decorated it with the peels of various vegetables cut up into tiny shapes. It's really hard to describe but it was actually pretty fun. It was sort of tedious work but I didn't mind.
At the end, once we had made the platters look all pretty with the designs, we covered it in a clear gelatin layer to make it all stick. And of course, because the class was entirely guys except for Ana and me, we had to have a competition to see whose platter was the best. Ana and I had been in different groups of two--she and her partner got first place and my partner and I got second. That was admittedly a good feeling, especially since we'd never done anything like that before. At the very end, while the boys cleaned, we went to a classroom next door and flipped through a French cookbook. Were it a normal clean-up we would have helped, but when they clean at this school they break out a giant hose and literally hose it down. That would have been ok but with shoes that slip... it doesn't quite work.
Now I have got plenty more to talk about. This is just the week of November 8 to 12. But I'll save that for another day because I feel I've put off a blog update for long enough. Luckily I've started keeping better track of what I've been doing in my agenda--that way I'm sure not to forget.
I miss and love everyone back home! And since I may not manage to throw together another update before then, I'll just throw in a Merry Christmas now. And a Happy New Year!
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