French friends and fungi

This weekend was one of new experiences.

First on the agenda was an evening out at Nathalie and Thierry’s house. They had invited us round for a meal, along with Christophe and Gwénaelle, and we were really looking forward to it. This was to be a big test of our language skills, it being the first real evening with only french people and us. Unfortunatley I was full of cold, and not totally on the ball anyway, so we really had to get our brains into gear.

But we needn’t have worried as the evening went really well. The food was wonderful – Nathalie had clearly been extremely busy baking and preparing – and everyone had fun. The language barrier was well and truly broken down for most of the evening, and we all thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. A very successful night, thank you Nathalie & Thierry!

It was around 2am when we got home from our evening out so on Sunday we were all pretty tired. However, we had lined up a potential day out mushroom-hunting with Sylvie & Kevin and it looked like conditions were right for our expedition. So, at 11am Sylvie gave us the nod and we roused ourselves from our bleary-eyed trances, packed up a picnic and headed off to the forest at Benon [map].

We had never met Kevin [link] or Sylvie [link] before. You may recognise their names, as they are regular commentors here and together run the “FuelMyBlog” community site for bloggers [link]. I had “met” them through this channel and spoken on Twitter [link], but this was the first meeting in “real-life”!  Well, we got on like a house on fire. They are a great family, so friendly and good fun to be with. The kids soon got over the initial embarrassment of meeting new people and were off tramping through the woods and playing games like they had been friends for years. MSN ids have been swapped and I’m sure they will be keeping in touch.

As for the mushrooms, although we found lots about 4, most were unfortunately deadly. Luckily we didn’t have to rely on Kevin’s memory to tell us this, as he couldn’t quite remember what Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall [link] had said… was it bitter tasting ones are good, or are they the ones that kil you…?  Thanks Kevin, very reassuring!  Fortunately the well-prepared Sylvie had a book which confirmed the sad truth that none of the ones we found were eatable.   We had brought along a couple of carrier bags, expecting, in our naievity that we would just be scooping them up and stuffing our bags full. Oh how wrong we were! Clearly the french experts had already been up at the crack of dawn and snaffled all the good ones while we were still snoring.

Ah well, c’est la vie. The thrill, as they say, is in the chase, not the capture, and we all certainly enjoyed a good wander through the forest, fruitless though it may have been. 

We ended the day with a picnic in the woods while the children played and had a good chin-wag about our respective lives in France. A most enjoyable day for everyone. Here’s hoping for many more…