New Year in France

So I’m back from France. It was so great. We spent the week chatting, eating, sightseeing, shopping, playing Brain Training on my DS (what a cliché) and watching quite a few episodes of Jonathan Creek.

It was fabulous to catch up with my family and see how they are getting on. They have such a nice lifestyle in France that I leave and am full of envy and plans of how I will change my life to be more relaxed like them. Then I remember that I am a teacher and that my life doesn’t work like that. I have weeks of intense working and then weeks of intense relaxing!

We ate some amazing food too. We tried snails (again – yum!), frogs legs (not my cup of tea at all), frois gras (controversial but interesting to taste), chocolates and galette (bakewell tart pie without the icing). It was all delicious and now I’m in that stereotypical position of wanting to go on a diet in January. Instead I’ve decided to be sensible and just take up exercising again; something which had become a somewhat foreign concept.

The sightseeing we did was breath-taking. As we were near the Alps we went up them and took in the view. It was lung-freezingly cold at some points, but the sky was blue, there was little rain and lots of snow up there! It’s funny how the more I visit the mountains the more I like seeing them. As a child we used to visit and I was not overly interesting. I liked seeing the cows but other than that I thought it was quite dull. Now I relish going up there and seeing the massive expanses of rock.

Shopping of course is a must with my relatives. We have various paces when we shop: dashing for groceries, medium pace for when the shops are likely to shut and relaxed paced for seeing all the great things in the tourist shops etc. To be fair I was relatively restrained. I bought a necklace and some tins of food and that was about it.

Brain Training on the DS has proven to be quite a distraction on holiday. I took it to play while we were travelling as I thought there might be delays and I only got the DS on Boxing Day. Everyone had a go and it was quite funny seeing how everyone did on the different challenges. Since I’ve gone back to school I’ve had to resist the urge to leap in my car and go home to play on it. Surely that’s not healthy? I feel like one of the kids I teach who loves his computer games. Perhaps I am regressing.

Jonathan Creek DVDs were quite a hit on holiday. We’d taken them because I received them as a Christmas present and thought we could entertain ourselves with them for an hour or two if there was a lull one afternoon. Instead we got everyone huddled around the tv late after dinner to enjoy an episode. The concepts are really very clever on that show and even when I’ve seen them before I like to see them again because then you look for the clues as they go along and figure everything out. So over the course of less than 2 weeks we’ve watched all 4 series plus the 2 Christmas specials. I will remember Christmas/New year 2007 as the year with Jonathan Creek!

So there you have it – New Year in a nutshell.