Good French Cheese = Raclette

Day Fourty-Four

Yesterday I was invited to have dinner with a young married couple from church (Kate is my weekly running buddy).  We had raclette, which is a pretty heavy meal typically eaten in the winter.  The name comes from the type of cheese that is heated and eaten on potatoes, meat, and vegetables.  Very cool, VERY delicious!  I think I had 3 baked potatoes and...countless raclettes haha.  Included is a picture to make more sense of it.  It's not like anything I've had before, and I heard you can't find this cheese in the states.  I really hope that's not true! It was a really fun time of fellowship and another girl (Rachel) was eating there as well.  She's really sweet and is here to teach English for a year.  We then made apple crisps, while I prepared my Andes Mint cookie dough for the next day.  Then played a card game-Phase 10-which is really fun and could probably take hours with a large group.  Then headed back to chat with my good friend Christina.   We haven't oovoo'd in a very long time so that was much needed!

Today did the usual but I went out to have lunch at a sandwich place--their "sandwich" is a mini-baguette with meat, cheese, and vegetables in it.  With a strawberry tart and water.  I LOVE FRUIT TARTS!  lol.  But since it was rush hour during lunchtime, I asked an elderly woman if I could sit at the same table as her and she said it was fine.  Then, I decided to start a conversation and we talked for 30 minutes!  She was so sweet and was like "Oh, you're just talking to a French grandma!" and we talked about my impressions of the French (everyone's nice but I've noticed they're more reserved than Americans) to which she agreed and said that she would attribute that to our different education systems.  In the US, students are encouraged to voice their opinions in discussion and have a two-way conversation with the teacher.  However, I learned that in France it's not the same.  It's a lot more rigid and more lecture-based where it's predominately the teacher speaking to the students, not discussion-based.  That made a lot of sense.  She also talked about how when she visited the US and got lost in NYC, someone immediately was willing to help point her in the right direction.  I didn't have the heart to tell her that she was really lucky because that's not the typical scenario in NYC, lol.  She also explained how the sandwich I was eating is the French version of fast food (literally food prepared quickly, without the unhealthy connotation we associate with the term fast food).  And that McDonald's is acting as a colonizing force in France with its unhealthy food.  I agreed and said that I am not going to eat McD's here because I can have that at home and I want to eat as much French cuisine as I can, to which she was very pleased.  But yeah, it makes sense.  It's impeding on the eating habits of the younger generation around the world.  I'm dissapointed when I see McD's in a foreign country--is that bad? 

Then had class and afterwards, I was literally running around trying to do everything in a short time-span. I walked to Amelia's to borrow her little carry-on suitcase for my upcoming weekend in Paris, ordered my train tickets online, printed my tickets at the SNCF boutique (the train line has little boutiques around the city where you can print out your tickets/talk to an employee), dropped off my suitcase, then made my way to Bible study. We had some amazing lasagna/regular pasta dish that was seriously...unbelievable! I need the recipe. I baked the cookie dough I had frozen over night since the oven at Katie's apartment destroys cookies--French ovens are very different from those in the US. The cookies were a HIT! Love ittttt :) They're my favorite and it was nice to bake! Now I'm about to head to bed after having a nice video chat with my parents! I can't WAIT for them to visit. Now I have to just plan out our entire perfect week in France together--no pressure--to show them all that I can of this lovely country!

FOUND AN ASIAN STORE!!! 

I could've saved my parents a lot of money if I had known this store was here...

Raclette! The cheese cooks and when it gets bubbly you know it is ready.  Then, it just slides right off the littlep an onto your nicely made plate (if you're a pro)

Well that's sideways..but you get the point

This one too.

This picture will stay big to emphaisze how AMAZING it was to bake!