Another Wonderful Sunday Afternoon

This past Sunday I spent most of my day with Chantal and François. I arrived at the home around 10AM so we could begin preparing our lunch. Chantal had shown a lot of interest in learning how to make egg rolls and spring rolls, so we spent part of our day making them.

The day before we went to Paris Store (Asian Supermarket) to get some of the necessary ingredients. We started with the egg rolls. We made pork egg rolls filled with ginger, garlic, bokchoy, and carrots. They were quite good! The spring rolls were filled with vermicelli, cilantro, carrots, cucumbers, lettuce, and bean sprouts. In my opinion, they were not as good as the egg rolls, but still yummy.

For lunch we ate our homemade creations. We started with the spring rolls and then had the egg rolls. We ate the egg rolls differently than in the States. We wrapped each egg roll with a mint leaf and some lettuce; it was like a slightly different take on the chicken lettuce wrap concept and very good. Afterwards, I had some homemade yogurt. Chantal and François make their own yogurt about every other day! They showed me how it was done and it is surprisingly very simple (if you have the machine). All you need is powdered milk, regular milk, and a yogurt from your previous batch…you mix all of that together and then put it into a warming machine for 8-hours. After yogurt, we had homemade compote of apples, prunes, and rum; it was like applesauce on steroids! All in all, lunch was very delicious!

We concluded lunch with some tea before heading out. François took Chantal and I around Tours and showed us the old Roman wall and told us about the founding of Tours. It was very interesting and cool to see how the Roman wall weaves through Tours. François explained the characteristics of a Roman wall (thin layers of red bricks sandwiching uniformly-shaped grayish stones…all mortared together with a red-ish brick-like mortar). When we returned back to their home, François showed me a map of Tours and where the wall is in relation to everything else. He also explained how the two former Roman towns of Tours combined to create modern-day Tours.

I left Chantal and François’ around 4:30PM and headed to The Pale. I met up with some Anglophones to watch some of the Scotland v. England rugby match. I stayed for about a half and hour before Emma and I head to the movies to see “127 Hours”. The movie was well done and definitely made me feel as if I was there. All I could say after leaving the movie was, “I do not think I could EVER cut off my own arm!”

Well, that is all for now. I am off to Barcelona this weekend to visit mi Hermana!

-ALEX