IMin' and Monbazillac

Fun Stuff:

When you are living in a land with a seven hour time difference from your home, you really appreciate instant messaging. I appreciated it already, but maybe I took it a bit for granted. I am sorry IM. I will never do that again. If you have IM, and you want to chat, here are my account names:

Yahoo: decbat2002

ICQ: deckard2000

Gtalk: decbat@gmail.com

Wine Stuff:

Jeannine, the lovely lady I am staying with during my French classes, pulled out a big gun last night. We were discussing how difficult it is to be a sommelier, what with all the requirements to know wine by taste smell and color. She postulated that she could tell the difference between wines from the different French wine regions, but maybe not from within a region. I said maybe that is not quite accurate, because each region has some atypical wine.

To show me the great difference between the Loire and Monbazillac she brought out a 1988 Monbazillac from which we drank. I won’t go into the discussion that ensued, suffice it to say, that wine ROCKED!

To employ a technical wine term, that wine was freakin’ yummilicious. And the color was like a slightly dried out honey.

I will argue with Jeannine more often, if that is a typical result.

happy drinking,
-PMo

Fun Stuff:

The train I am sitting in is quite ugly. All the other trains around it are as ugly or uglier. I am in Paris Gare de Austerlitz waiting for my ugly train to take me back to Amboise where I will complete my second week of immersion French lessons. Today is a bank holiday, so the school was closed. I decided to go back to Grenoble for the long weekend to see my sweety. With respect to Paris; I am just passing through.

From Grenoble, I arrived in the Paris Gare de Lyon with a bunch of pretty TGV trains. TGV is the name of the fast train. I think all those trains made fun of all of these ugly ones, and made them go to their own ugly train station. Poor ugly trains.

Anyway I had a nice weekend with my sweety, my pugs, and my friends. There was a party on Saturday where we ate a bunch of great Spanish food and drank a bunch of great Spanish wine. Some friends just returned from a long trip in Spain and decided to share the joy.

We all went to see a boring movie on Sunday, and today Claudia and I had a relaxing breakfast before my departure.

The French class I am in is great. The school boards the students with local families, and you have class 25 hours/week. I am only going to be in school for 8 days total, but I have already learned a lot. I can massacre the French language through a number of simple situations. I expect, by next week, the number of French words I know how to obliterate will double. And “What about my grammar?” you ask. Forget about it! I am the king of French grammar destruction.

Since you stay with a family during the whole experience, the amount you learn increases dramatically. A lot of the other students speak English, but it probably only amounts to two hours per day that I am not speaking French. So the other thirteen or fourteen hours are spent speaking French (If I am speaking that is).

Wine Stuff:

Maybe I will get Claudia to write a little something about her recent wine experience. She, and a bunch of other expats, went to a local wine shop for a wine and chocolate tasting. She said it was a lot of fun.

I have not been drinking a lot of wine during my stay in Amboise. I sometimes have a glass or two at dinner. I drink what I am served, and it is usually pretty decent stuff.

happy drinking,
-PMo