I can't believe it's not... turkey....?!

Hey Everyone!

I know I haven’t written in a while, so just going to post a quick one now. Nothing much has really been going on here. I’m getting better at ice-skating though =)! France is gorgeous, even though today’s the 1st of January, it’s so sunny outside! With saying that it’s the 1st, Happy New Year!!! I didn’t really think to post something up for Christmas… mainly because… well it was Christmas and I had my mind on other things :-P.

This Christmas was very quiet. Usually we’d have a lot of people over but with living in France and all… well everyone is still in Ireland. It was quite strange actually, not the fact that it was quiet more that French stores don’t supply many things… or at least not where we were looking anyway.

For instance, you can’t get “Lyle’s Golden Syrup”… an extremely important ingredient for FUDGE! So my sister can only make it when someone from her work goes over to England and brings her some back :-P. Another necessity is “Bovril” that you also can’t get in France. I was so annoyed, it’s like marmite, but in my opinion much nicer :-P! Anyway, the Christmas things that we were having trouble getting a hold of were “Crackers” (not the one’s that you put cheese on, the ones that make a … BANG, when you pull on them :-P... wow I wouldn’t be such a great describing person if you guys were aliens and hadn’t ever heard of anything :-P).

Another difficulty to get was “candy canes”, we couldn’t find them anywhere! On Christmas Eve, I think it was, my parents came home and had found some =). So that was great, but they’re not really like the green, red and white, mint flavoured candy canes that you can get. These are more multi-coloured and fruity flavoured :-P. They still look awesome though :-P!

Oh and also most of the ingredients to bake a proper Christmas cake, my mom makes a few every year. It’s the only thing that I’ll eat that has raisins in it… I’m just not much of a raisins fan. Anyway, this year we didn’t have that, but my gran’s supposed to be bringing the things with her when she comes from Ireland =)! Woo! Oh, I also eat mince pies, but what do you know! None of those here either! It’s alright though, ice-cream kept me going for pudding :-P!

Yes another thing that happened at Christmas, and was a consequence of living in France was that we didn’t get Turkey! Well we thought we did, until Boxing Day… You see, we went to the butcher, and we asked the guy for “dinde” (turkey in French). He sent us down to a section but it was just pieces of it, not the whole bird.

Anyway, we came back up and I asked “Avez-vous le ouiseau pour Noel” (literally, have you got the Christmas bird?”. The woman butcher pointed in front of her to a large bird but it had “chapon” stuck to the front of it, my mom and I chose this one, brought it home and then on Christmas it was cooked. It was absolutely lovely, the next day though we found out that, yes dinde is turkey and chapon is actually rooster… Hmmm, who knew?

Anyway I’m going to leave it at that, sorry it’s been a while and this is sort of short! Hope to hear from you all soon!

- Bianca