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Published: August 17th 2005
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Catherine et moi
On est sur le quai a Tournon, deriere est le Bar Moderne ou j'ai passe pas mal de temps quand j'etais au lycee. My friend Catherine managed to fly over from London for a quick visit while I was staying at Michèle’s. She was the English Teacher’s Assistant at my school Lycée Gabriel Faure during the 1999/2000 school year and she still agrees with the other teachers that my class was the worst they’ve ever had. Luckily she doesn’t hold it against me and, like a good teacher, realizes we weren’t really evil, just rambunctious.
We spent a lovely day with my parents driving around Tournon and visiting wineries. Dad was on a wine mission and so we made our first stop at Chapoutier in Tain l’Hermitage, because Chapoutier really is one of the best. These are the vineyards I could see from my Spanish classroom’s windows at Gabriel Faure. What really impressed me was that the more recent vintages are increasingly organic. Every year Chapoutier comes out with more organic wines. I had never seen a major winery do that before and I hope it means more wineries will follow suit. There are tons of wineries, or tasting rooms, called “caves” but I convinced my parents that we couldn’t stop at all of them and we might as well start with the best
Les parents
We had to take a short lunch stop in Tournon, between all the wine tastings. just in case we end up spending all day there. We didn’t quite spend all day at Chapoutier, but it was close.
I hadn’t seen Catherine on my last trip home to Ardèche, so this was the first time I’d seen her since she was my teacher. A lot has changed for both of us, but her accomplishments are most impressive. She finished her law degree in only four years and still had time to partake in a British volunteer organization that sounds a bit like Peace Corps. She did volunteer work in Nepal where she met and fell in love with a fellow volunteer who is Nepali. They are now married and living in London and had just returned from visiting his family in Nepal when I arrived in France. I am very grateful that she made it over to France to see me though I’m sure she was still exhausted after the Nepal trip, and she promised to consider a trip to Morocco in the next two years.
I spent quite a bit of time during this trip inviting all my French friends to come and visit me during my Peace Corps stint. I figure it will be easier for them to visit me than for my friends from Boise. Also, after five years of living in the States without a single French visitor I hope I will have better chances of getting the French to visit me while I’m living on their side of the Atlantic. Either way, I’m afraid the Peace Corps goal of bettering understandings between Americans and people of other countries will backfire. I’m might be bettering the relationship between the French and the Moroccans.
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