Folk Dancing and Peanut Butter

Friday night, we went to this crazy French folk dance thing at the student center Eve.  The band played French/Irish sounding beautiful and fun music and there were tons of people doing all these traditional dances.  Lots of girls were wearing beautiful long skirts that twirled around to the violin/flute/guitar/harmonica/accordion music. Pretty much every single song had a different specific dance, so we were a little lost most of the time, but still had a blast. 

The four of us girls were definitely the only foreigners there, but luckily we weren’t the only ones who didn’t know the dances.  There were lots of nice people who showed us a few of the moves for the swinging partner dances and it was easy to catch on the big circle dances.  It felt really good to do something without a zillion other Americans and really observe a part of traditional French culture.  Everyone was extremely kind and full of energy. 

  

Saturday, we ventured out to the shopping mall for the end of “les soldes” (sales).  The French government only allows stores to hold sales twice a year, in July and January.  So we had to take advantage of that now, because everything will be full price for the rest of our stay here in Grenoble!  We found lots of good deals and then had our first experience in Carrefour, the big grocery store chain.  That was insanely busy and we had a hard time finding what we needed.  We basically bought our tiny jars of Skippy peanut butter from the “foreign foods” aisle and got through the lines as quick as possible.

That evening, my 16 year old host brother Thomas had a dinner party of raclettes (basically a fondue party).  People could melt several different kinds of cheese in the raclette to drip it over potatoes, mushrooms, chicken, beef, peppers, and tomatoes.  The food was great and it was really funny meeting all his friends and answering their questions about America.  Oh and I ate some kind of chip thing that had the consistency of a cheeto, but tasted like peanut butter.  That was rather interesting.  We all shared a moment of making fun of the American who cannot pronounce the word cacahuète (peanut) haha.