Domaine de la Forge

Alright it's been three and a half weeks since I've been living here and I figure it's probably about time to clue you all in as to what I've been doing, where I've been living, and who I've been living with! So welcome to your online tour of the Domaine de la Forge! 

This lovely french country "estate" has been home to members of the Guinhut family for the past 5 generations. Andre, the current owner and my host Dad, and Henri his son live here now, and manage 150 hectares of wheat corn and grape seed, and another 60 hectares of vines. (FYI- 1 hectare=2.5 acres... you do the math). 

This is the main house, so basically where we eat and watch movies (Into the Wild and The Straight Story... those are the only 2 Andre owns and he is completely obsessed, it's adorable). 

This is the view of the rest of the main part. The big building on the left is the wine room. It's pretty self explanatory: there are crates full of their wine bottles. The first day I was here, Andre was giving me a tour and he took me into this room and said (in french) "Here's all of our wine... help yourself!". I knew after that moment that I was going to like it here just fine :). The smaller building on the right is the upstairs to my little room, aka the office.

And here is my little apartment! How cute is this??

There's me in the vines...

Sunset at La Forge

That's my little tractor. I spent a good portion of my time here mowing with this little guy in the vines. A serious case of allergies and sneezing, and a great farmer's tan later, I consider myself a tractor riding pro :).

In the wine building there is a series of stained glass windows that are nestled into the walls. This is just one, the others are a dog, grapes, a beach, and a goat. 

 

The wines of Domaine de la Forge. (And showing off my photography skills. I was taking pictures for the website I'm making for them, and needed a cool way to showcase all of their wines together. This was a big crate of rocks. I'm pretty happy with the result!)

Grezille, which is the town Domaine de la Forge is associated with, happens to be about a half an hour away from Cholet, a town where the Tour de France is happening. So my friend Laura and I decided it would be stupid not to take advantage of such an opportunity and headed over to Cholet for a day to watch the time trials take place. It was pretty crazy. I think the entire town must have been at the track that day. There was a whole stretch of street closed off for the riders. They would come up individually onto the platform thing in the picture below, and the announcer would read off all their stats and a bell would ding and off they went! Then the next rider would ride up and the whole process would start again. I saw a lot of cool bikes, a lot of crazy fans, and a lot of cute men in spandex shorts. It was a good day.

Another weekend, Laura and I decided to drive to the coast for a day at the beach. (You know, because I learned how to drive stick and all and I was lucky enough to have a car for my use. Euro-trip!) So we drove to La Boule, and found this adorable little beach on the outskirts of town. It was really a lucky find; it was situated in kind of a cove, so it wasn't too windy, but just perfect. We had our little picnic and drank some beer and tanned and swam and climbed the big rocks, then grabbed some McDonald's (I know, I know, I caved, but I had to try it one time, right?) and then headed home. 

Happy Bastille Day! Even though I missed the 4th of July, I got to have my own little celebration of sorts 10 days later when the French celebrated their ow independence. Nothing like an impressive display of fireworks over the river!

Ooooh the exciting things I've done... the list just keeps going. This past week was a blur of fun stuff. First Laura and I went kayaking on one of the little rivers that feeds into the Loire.  Our instructor was so cute, and tried so hard to speak english to us.

This is my little car. It's name is Pierre. Pierre and I have had many great adventures over the past 4 weeks. From stalling in the middle of a highway (ooops!) to cruisin' by the beach, to getting a speeding ticket (even bigger oooops!!). 

Also this past week, Andre took me to Samur to see the wine caves. Samur is about 20 minutes away from Grezille, and is apparently very well known for it's wine, and especially it's method of storing and aging the wine in these caves. So we got a tour of the caves, where some ridiculous amount of bottles are aging, mostly all champagne, and here they are stacked at least to my head, just waiting for me to bump into and send tumbling into a crashing frothing mess onto the floor. No worries, I didn't break any though! Then after the tour we headed back to the main room to taste some wines. YUM. Just, yum.

Then we went to see the castle in Samur. Like I said before, there is a castle, and/or cathedral in every town I've been to, and Samur was just added to the list!

That's all for the pictures... what else can I tell you? Ok, normal day on the farm: Wake up around 7, eat breakfast, then head out to the vines to mow until lunch time, come back, have lunch, take a "petite siest" (as Andre says) then head back out to mow again until 6 or 7. That was the first week. After we finished all the mowing, the second week the three of us (Andre, Henri and I) drove out to this little patch of land a few towns away to plant some baby vines. Holy cow I have never been so sore in my life. Basically all day I did squats alternating planting the vines, carrying massive bags of fertilizer and jugs of water, and pushing the dirt into the holes with my feet (which, by the way, is a great ab excercise!). For lunch, since the place was pretty far away from home, we would go to this restaurant near by. I was, without fail, the only woman dining in there all 5 times we went. And yes they stared at me when I walked in (caked in mud with my hair frizzing like no other), only to discover that I am american. It was pretty funny. I'm pretty sure that week of planting is the dirtiest I have ever been in my life. I loved it.

Then the past couple of weeks have been a mix of random chores (like harvesting all the potatoes, green beans, peas, and onions in the garden) and making a website for Domaine de la Forge. Yes, that has been interesting, considering I've never done it before, and I have to use their computer because they have the right software/so they can actually edit and keep the site with them, and oh yeah, it's in french. But I've been plugging along and kind of have something put together and it was fun trying to figure out what all the words meant.

So that's life on the vineyard. Don't worry I will be bringing home lots of wine for everyone to try. Tomorrow my Mom is coming here, spending the night and then we head to Paris and then to London and finally home! I'm very excited!!!!

A Week Abroad in France, Part 2

Ok, time for the second installment to my exciting euro-trek. After spending the night at a hostel in Chartres, (where we had a couple beers while watching the light show that was projected onto the front of the cathedral, very cool.), we left wednesday morning to head to Versailles! We had pretty much all afternoon in Versailles, and an hour or so to wander before our guided tour began. So we took our lunches and ate in the gardens of Versailles, and afterwards wandered around the fountains, mazes, statues, lakes and gardens of Versailles. I knew the place was big by reputation, but man was it huge. We only saw a fraction of it, and that was without going through the palace (palace, not castle- I learned there's definitely a difference, and Versailles is DEFINITELY a Palace). So finally we made our way back to the main entrance to head into the palace. WOW. That's really all I can say about it. It was like every room you walked into had more gold covered ceilings and paintings and was more lavishly decorated than the one before it. I wonder though, what did they do with all of those rooms? I can't even estimate the number of bedrooms there were because there were so many. However it wasn't so much the artwork on the walls or the furniture that interested me, but the ceilings. Every ceiling was covered with a mural and golden carvings. I swear I walked through the whole thing gaping at the ceilings with my mouth hanging open (haha could I be more of an american tourist?). Here's some of the pictures I took:

Annnnnd last but certainly not least there was Paris! We got to paris around dinner time on wednesday night, and it seemed that everyone had the same idea: get dinner and get some cold beer. So we ate and drank our beer and enjoyed our late/very extended dinner on the streets in Paris near the hostel. The next morning we started off our official city visit with a boat tour on the Seine river. It was.... well it was a boat tour on the Seine. I took lots of pictures of really cool old buildings and listened to someone say the same thing in 6 different languages (french, english, spanish, italian, german, chinese) so I learned some new words!

 

The whole gang!

Then after the boat tour we had the rest of the day thursday and all day friday to do whatever we wanted. Now, after having 3 weekends pretty much planned out for us, it was surprisingly difficult to decide what to do, since everyone wanted to go separate ways. So that's exactly what we did. My friends Natasha, Jake, Candice and I went wandering in search of some gardens, which we found at the Grand Palais de Paris. We wandered around there, stopped for a cup of coffee (yum!) and then decided to go to the Musee D'Orsay!! Oooooh I was in heaven there. For any of you who don't know, I am quite the impressionism fan, and when it comes to my favorites (van gogh, renoir, monet, cezzanne, etc) I am pretty much obsessed. But, I have never seen a real copy of any of their works... until the Musee D'Orsay! We wandered a little bit through the museum before we found the impressionist gallery. Holy Cow. I got goose bumps it was so cool. All my guys were well represented, including an ENTIRE room for Van Gogh (who is my favorite among favorites) and I was just like a kid in a candy store. Voila:

So after spending wayyyy too much time at Orsay, we came back to the hostel for my friend Lisa's goodbye dinner. We found a cute little pizzeria and dined like Parisians (or maybe italians, but either way, very european). Afterwards we thought it was very necessary to see the Eiffel Tower at night, so that was our next and final stop for the night. Being the poor college students that we are, we took the most economical solution: the stairs...allll 600+ of them. But man was it worth it. If you look at the pictures I don't think I have to explain why:

The girls in front of the tower

View from the almost top

C'est moi!

The next and last full day in Paris Natasha and I decided that it was a must to visit the Louvre, and we did just that.... all day.... and still didn't manage to see the whole thing. I think we got there at 10 and left at 3 and had only seen a fraction of everything. At that point everything was beginning to look the same and we were walking in circles (yes we were too stubborn to look at a map of the place). But we saw the Mona Lisa (La Joconde) and the Venus de Milo and wandered around the rest of the crazy sculptures and paintings for a while until we got hungry. So we had a yummy and very expensive lunch at the Louvre (they have apple sauce in pouches that you drink, SO good) and jumped on the metro to head back to the hostel. Then it was nap time, because at this point my feet were hating me for walking all over Paris in my new (and not so comfortable) sandals. So it was nap, aperitifs, dinner, and packing and hanging out at the hostel for the last night. It was pretty sad to say goodbye to everyone. Even thought we'd all only known each other for four weeks, we'd all gotten pretty close and it was definitely sad to say goodbye. But don't worry too much, talks of a reunion adventure in Mexico are already in the making! 

That's all for my euro-adventure. Saturday morning, Laura, Britney (the 2 other people from Wisconsin) and Annie (our supervisor) headed to the train station to go back to Angers. In Angers we met with our farm host families and headed to our new homes in the country! 

A week abroad in France, part 1

Finally, the long awaited post about my week long journey through France (happy mom?). Here we go....

After a lovely weekend at the beach, I had a day of no classes to shop around Angers (found some sweet sandals--SO european), do some laundry, get packed, and make my host parents a good ol' fashioned american meal. I made pancakes. They put cheese on them.... haha go figure right?! (It was actually very good though!). Then on tuesday everyone met in front of ESA (the school) to say goodbye to their host parents and Angers and jump on a bus for a week traveling across France. So after loading too many bags and lots of sad goodbyes we pulled away from the school with all our host parents waving goodbye to us (it was so cute). First stop: Botanical Gardens. 

Because we left so late we only had about an hour or so at the gardens to both tour and eat lunch. The place was huge and (big surprise here) it had a castle. --->(Side note: I'm beginning to see that pretty much every town here has either a castle or old cathedral, and sometimes both. I think I could get used to this :). So we ate our lunches on a hill by the chateau overlooking the river and afterwards wandered around the gardens (which I'm pretty sure had every possible type of flower, plant, tree, shrub, bush, etc. that you could possibly imagine.) Unfortunately dumb me forgot to charge my camera battery and couldn't take any pictures. The unique thing about the gardens though, was that it was split up into mini exhibits, each one having a theme. For example one was all recycled stuff, the next was a water exhibit, the next plastic, mirrors, wood, metal, etc. 

Next we left for Chartres to see the Cathedral there. Again, no camera, but here's a pic I stole from one of my friends:

And the stained glass:

Ooooooh, ahhhhhhhh.

Chartres was very cool, not so much because we had a horrible tour guide, whom we luckily could very easily tune out, but more because there was a choir singing while we were touring. The way the music echoed around the chapel was chilling. Between the ornate carvings in the walls of the chapel, to the immense stained glass windows, to the echoing arched ceilings, and the dimmed lighting along with the singing, I found myself completely transfixed. This place was truly amazing. 

Une petite vacance a la plage!

This past weekend there was nothing on the schedule (shocking I know) and we were really encouraged to travel. So, myself, my two friends Courtney and Natasha, one of the professors, Ruth (who is amazing), and Natasha’s host mom Dominique, went to the beach! We were lucky enough to be able to stay at Dominique’s friend, Mon(ique)’s house, which was absolutely ADORABLE. It’s this old house/combination of flats that’s been in Mon’s family for like 200 years. It definitely shows its age, but the place could not be cuter. We ate every meal in the garden, slept with the windows wide open and the ocean air coming in, and it was COMPLETELY silent. This town had to be the cutest French town I’ve ever seen. It was about a 5-minute walk from the beach, and we took advantage of this to the fullest. We arrived Saturday around noon, had lunch (more fresh bread, local cheese, wine and produce, etc- yes you should be jealous;) then headed to the beach. The weather could not have been more perfect- Dominique told us that the sun follows her wherever she goes! The great thing about being here is that the sun doesn’t start to set until like 9:30, and isn’t completely down until 10:30 or 11, so we were at the beach until about 6:30 and could have stayed a while longer. At that point thought we were all very hungry, sunburned and sandy, so it was back to the house for showers and a yummy dinner with Mon (I got to practice my French a lot!). Sunday morning we got up and went to the open market (basically a farmer’s market but with clothes and jewelry and other random stuff) where we munched on cherries and perused the various stands. After a while the beach was calling us again and the weather was the same if not better than it was Saturday, so we beached it again for another few hours before heading back to the house to clean up, and then head back to Angers. It was the perfect weekend with the perfect people at the perfect house on the perfect beach in the perfect town with the perfect weather! (Not to rub it in…) The only bad part- I forgot my camera. L Lucky for me everyone else has one so I’m going to steal the pictures from them just as soon as I can!

Chocolate Factory!

So remember how I said my group was to learn gastronomy, tourism, viticulture, and that kind of stuff? Well, what better way than to go to a french chocolate factory, a vineyard, and a bakery! So this past week we were lucky enough to go to all these places, and get a behind the scenes view of everything. 

First we visited the chocolate factory where our lovely guide/chocolate maker extraordinaire  Christophe was nice enough to show us the ins and outs of the chocolate making process. Honestly, I know we learned some history about Christopher Columbus and some Tyrants, but the sight and smell of all the chocolate was just too distracting to really absorb any of the information we were being given. Lucky for me the info part of the tour was the shortest. Christophe showed us how the chocolate is tempered and how they make all of their molds and decorative calligraphy and even a chocolate rose! We finished up the tour with a look at the chocolate making machines, some (ok lots) of free samples and a visit to the front store to buy some (ok again a lot) of the chocolates we saw being made! Marie and Romu were especially happy to hear about this field trip because they were able to sample the treats with me!

That same week we got to visit yet another vineyard. This time it was much more educational we were finally able to see everything we've been learning in the classroom the past few weeks. First we saw the vines, then the pressers, fermentation tanks, barrels, and finally the finished product. We tasted the wines, which according to French rating (they have this really complicated rating system that involves big french words like appellation that I just can't quite grasp) are very highly rated, but I have to be honest weren't my favorite. However the guide/owner was SO nice and put up with all our silly questions and wine tasting faces (we don't quite have the swish and spit part down so gracefully, if there is a graceful way to do it) and all-in-all it was a great day at the vineyard!

Now that's a LOT of wine!

Lastly that week we went to a boulangerie (bakery) to see how the oh so wonderful french baguettes and madeleines are made. The (cute) head baker, who's been going to culinary school for 7 years now, walked us through the steps of making their best sellers. We got to watch the process, which was a little dull because all it really involves is kneading dough for the bread and whipping up egg whites for the cookies. But then we got to sample the treats, fresh from the oven! It doesn't get much better than that!