Pyrenees: Camping, french style!

When we arrived back at the vineyard, we started to set-up the tents before it got dark. That was another fun team-building excercise as we tried to put the damn things together while explaining things in a mixture of French and English (clearly for my benefit). But, with 14 people, we were able to get 6 tents up pretty quickly, and after that, the work was pretty much done.

We spent the next few hours relaxing, building the fire, eating, and playing games. Fun times!

My favorite part about the whole evening was when someone busted out the snacks. Only in France does camping mean that you have bread, 10 cheeses, wine, olives, and cashews on the table before dinner. Camping, I repeat, we were camping! But food is never lost on the French, and absolute care must be taken to prepare only the finest quality cuisine even if you are living in a tent in the woods.

With wine and beer flowing, and after some delicious snacks, we started to work on building the fire. All of those years in the girl scouts totally payed off as I helped my teammates construct a brilliant campfire. Soon it was going strong and we got ready to cook the rice and tomatoes that would accompany the high-end sausages for our dinner.

The evening was a lot of fun, and after a few beers, a lot of my teammates started speaking some English! I love that alcohol makes everyone bilingual. So, I was finally starting to get to know some of the girls, and they were finally starting to see me as someone other than just the random foreign person that never knows what is going on. Of course, there were lots of jokes about me being American, and especially how pale I was, but it was all in good fun and I was really enjoying myself.

Once the sun set and it was really dark, the sky was amazing. There were no clouds and the sky was exceptionally clear, so you could see thousands and thousands of stars. I couldn't even count the number of falling stars I saw as we all laid on our backs and took time to enjoy the beauty around us. We pointed out constellations and planets that we recognized, but it was harder than usual to spot things with so many stars shining brightly!

Finally, we ate dinner at what was probably 10:30 or 11:00pm. Although I had overseen the cooking of the sausages, I passed on that part of the dinner. "But you can eat this," my coach said, trying to put a sheep based sausage on my plate. "No thanks, I'm really not into eating sheep either." But even sticking with the rice, tomatoes, and bread, it was good. Oh yes, and of course the swiss chocolate we had for dessert! And the plums and grapes I had stolen from the orchard earlier. Delicious!

When we finished eating, we built the fire back up and sat around in a circle, camp style. We played some "get to know you" type games where we went around the circle talking about ourselves, or our teammates. It was a challenge for me since my vocaularly is limited, but then they had me explain things in English while they tried to translate them as a group. Very amusing. Then we played the game where you write a name on a post-it and put it on the forehead of the person sitting next to you. Then, you ask questions to the group to try to figure out who you are.

I put Mandela on my neighbor's head which seemed to be extremely challenging for some of the girls. I cringed when my neighbor asked if this person was American and a few people said "yes." So, maybe the French education system isn't THAT much better than the American one!

I had Edith Piaf on my forehead, which I guessed pretty quickly, much to the amazement of my teammates. They were very impressed that a stupid American would know who she is. Major shout out to my mom for having "La Vie en Rose" on repeat in our house!

So, after games, and laughter and general shenanigans, I finally went to bed. It turned out to be VERY cold during the night, and I was shivering even in a tank top, two t-shirts, two long sleeved shirts, a sweatshirt and my sleeping bag. But, I slept decently and Laurent gave us a nice "vacation" by letting us sleep-in until 9:30.