le week-end à la plage!

one night at dinner my family very nonchalantly asks me if i have plans for the 25th/26th, for they are going to their beach house and invite me to tag along. i stare, openmouthed, and revel in the thought of going to the beach! the beach!!! oh mon dieu!! while sacha laughs at me and tries to throw green beans in my mouth, much to the dismay of nathalie. the beach! do i have plans?! what plans?! no plans! if i had to go to paris that weekend to fight for my visa at the consulate because my passport stamp is all wrong (more on that later) and the choice was beach and french jail or paris, i would choose beach. obviously. and relive glorious beachy memories while i eat bread in a french jail two days later. but no matter. i brought with me a picture book of the seacoast as a gift to my family, and showed them the cinnamon rainbows surf cam and we google mapped the house to show them that i live at the beach, that i love the beach. they know this. so when i wholeheartedly accept in overexcited grammatically terrible french, everyone laughs. the night before, i pack my things (once again realizing the simultaneously impressive and depressing fact that i can fit my entire life in a backpack for multiple days if needed) and sleep very little, the culprit of my insomnia my ridiculous excitement but also just maybe the chocolate i ate before bed. (side note: there is a french hypermarché called auchon which is so very dangerous. it has three floors and is a food store, home improvement center, department store, clothing store, record shop and bookstore, kind of like a super target but sadly without the starbucks cupcakes. they sell giant bars of chocolate for 48 centimes. oh mon dieu.) 

saturday morning i wake up and everyone in the house is packing packing packing and running and busy and "do you have your toothbrush?" and "did you pack the cooler yet?" and "why is there only one sock in the suitcase?" and it is hilarious because it is exactly the same at my house in the states and probably every other house in the world. except in france, food reigns supreme, which is why amongst the four members of the family, there is only one giant communal red suitcase but three coolers and a terrifyingly jangly bag of bottles of wine. we pile into the renault and we're off! we stop at a suburb to do "just a quick little bit of shopping, we won't be two minutes i swear" (nathalie's famous last words) because sacha needs winter shoes and jeanne needs a coat. we make quite a sight, traipsing around the department stores, nathalie at the front of the line and jean-louis in the back to catch stragglers (usually sacha when he sees a train set, but sometimes me when i see something wonderfully french or bizarrely familiar like american brands). the quick little bit of shopping is clearly an understatement, as finding a winter coat for jeanne is akin to running a marathon in terms of stamina, while buying shoes for sacha becomes a spy training procedure, as he runs off with two different shoes every three seconds and the rest of us are dispatched to find him and reign him back into the shoe department. jean-louis earnestly picks out colorful coats with bold patterns that strongly remind me of the highlighter section in staples (side note: at this very point in time, jean-louis is wearing a shirt with giant rainbow polka dots that everyone in the family hates but he loves and washes himself to hide it from nathalie to keep it from the garbage bin, so his choice of coats is not surprising in the least.) while jeanne pulls faces and i use all my non-sacha-chasing energy not to laugh at how very similar this is to every other family in the universe.

finally we leave the store, coat in one hand, shoes in another, and also a train set that sacha promised he would set the table for two full weeks to get, and i am starving, because i didn't eat breakfast amongst the shuffling. thankfully, everyone else is too, and we stop at a restaurant on our way to the beach which is entirely wood-paneled, even the inside, like a log cabin. i learn that this is because the region we're in is called "les landes" and the primary trade there during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was woodworking, for it was entirely forested but also marshy, so the men had to use stilts to carve long slivers of wood from the trees but also not fall into the marsh. we get the menus and the special of the day is this three course behemoth with six different options for each course that i promptly turned away for fear of spontaneous combustion later. nathalie senses my hesitation and suggests a regional specialty: confit de canard, or duck confit. when i ask what confit means, i get four different, simultaneous explanations, all with questionable hand gestures so by the end everyone is looking quite pleased with him/herself for properly explaining french haute cuisine to a clueless american, while i know even less than i did previously. i order it anyway, and it arrives with entrance music in my head that is a cross between schubert and the theme from jaws, because it is a giant stuffed bird, thanksgiving turkey's little sister, with the glaring difference that on thanksgiving, a confident male head of household with reasonable holiday experience and an electric knife cuts it for me, while i am armed against the confit with only a dull knife and a glass of wine. now. let me preface this by saying that since my arrival in france, i have wisely adopted a practice of drinking water/folding my napkin/busying myself at the beginning of meals while subtely (or not) watching everyone else to see how to properly eat things. unfortunately for me, in my time of indecision over the menu, i completely miss that neither nathalie nor jean-louis ordered confit de canard, and i am very much fighting this battle alone. nathalie laughs as i gamely (ha! how's that for a food pun?! julia child is rolling around in her grave right now) poke my knife in the general direction of the duck, and just as she took nine-year-old sacha's plate a minute before to cut his sausage into bite-sized bits, she takes my plate and violently stabs the duck, slicing it down the middle, and hands it back, as if to say now that it's in two pieces, the divide and conquer strategy, i can eat it. it is, however, more of a multiply and terrorize tactic for the duck, as i now have two pieces of regional specialty with no instruction manual for either. jean-louis helps out and puts the little bowls of salad and mushroom sauce and potatoes off my plate for a clean workspace in which to attack. first, you have to remove the fat of the duck (who knew ducks were fat? maybe ducks are like icebergs, and look little on the surface of the water but ninety percent of them is underneath) which comes off clean on the first half, leading me to believe that five minutes in, i have conquered all small game dinner entrées and can now take over the world/put confit-eating on my resumé. this gratifying sense of confidence is torn away as i try EXACTLY the same thing on the second half and am left with little balls of duck fat soldered all over the tasty parts that i can eat. (i am adding duckfat removal to the list of things that don't work at all the second time even if you do it precisely the same as the first time and it was a raging success; see hitting golf balls at the driving range or drawing ears in art class portraits.) after much consternation on my part and blatant amusement on my family's part (this will turn into a fun ha-ha-americans-doing-french-things story later tonight at dinner), i finish the duck which was very very tasty and most definitely worth the effort and humiliation. the meal is finished with little cups of chocolate mousse which i eat, not because i'm hungry because i just ate an entire flying thing but because it is something that i actually know how to eat, and we pile back into the car for another hour to the beach.

i am now in a severe food coma and am fighting valiantly to look alive while i watch tim burton's alice in wonderland (alice et le pays de merveilles) with jeanne, and the only reason i have a vague idea of what's going on is because it is in english with french subtitles. we arrive at the beach house and i am absolutely in awe at the size of it, easily equivalent to one of the beach mansions along route 1a, while everyone else spent all of august here and is not sitting in the backseat gaping like an idiot. the bedrooms are furnished with floral wallpaper that belongs in the 70s, even the bathroom, but for some reason entirely opposed to every interior design rule ever invented, it works. there are ten people in the house, as another family came with us, and everyone gets their own bedroom! i find my towel and bathing suit and diligently follow jeanne and sacha through the little surfing town of contis to the beach to discover the MOST MAGNIFICENT SIGHT THAT I'VE SEEN TWENTY MILLION TIMES BEFORE: the atlantic ocean! it is beautiful. it is almost, almost, almost like sitting on the wall at north beach, eating burritos and staring out at the isles of shoals. the waves are huge and menacing, pouding into the sand and making wonderfully familiar rumbling noises as stones tumble in and out at the mercy of the tides. it is absolutely glorious. i don't want to leave, and i keep staring at it, almost falling into the giant hole that the kids have been digging all afternoon in the sand. it is 830, almost 9pm, and it is time to start thinking about dinner. there are many appetizers (pretzels, pistachios and tomatoes seem to be the standard in france) but the main course is goat! what!? goat!? when everyone talked about dinner, they said "chèvre," which is most definitely goat but is used more commonly to mean goat cheese, which i think is delicious, especially with honey and bread (don't knock it till you've tried it, especially at this panini place on rue sainte-catherine...) so i thought we were having cheese. not goat. but anyway, the meat was wonderful, and thankfully for my bruised ego, much easier to eat than confit de canard. the next morning i am introduced to the wonderful world of sugary french breakfast cereals, a universe i have been introduced to with sacha but fully explore with the other four kids in the house. there is a cereal that looks terrifyingly similar to vanille's cat food that i dared not touch in the apartment, but is actually chocolate and caramel bits and very delicious, now that i know it's edible for human beings. powered by sugar and newly-won breakfast knowledge, i bask in the glory of the beach, not knowing when i'll see the atlantic again before my return to the states. after a full day of napping, swimming, reading, napping and napping, we return home, nathalie and jean-louis grilling sacha on his math times tables in the car while jeanne holds up fingers to show him the answer in the backseat, expertly hidden from the rearview mirror. the beach weekend now comes to a close save one tiny detail: the next morning i am up before the sun for an 830am lecture class at the university, a dark and clumsy (how is it i always manage to trip on the corner of the bed, then on the leg of the desk chair, with only the handle to the bathroom door saving my nose from imminent collision with the floor EVERY morning?) endeavour made twenty times better, thanks to the cuffs of my jeans and hood of my sweater, by the grains of sand on my pillow and in between my toes.