Yvoy-le-Marron, Dead Animals, and Bad Manners

Grab a comfy seat, a refreshing drink, and perhaps something to snack on. This will be a long entry! For this was quite an eventful weekend.

Friday morning, Geraldine (Mom), informed me that we would be leaving at 7pm for the campangne. When the kids got home from school at 5pm, I realized that I had to pack them for the trip. For about an hour, I chased them around the house, trying to get them to pack. They hit each other, screamed at each other for the littlest things, cried, ransacked my room for the peanut butter (skillfully hidden), and then finally conceded to pack (while doing all of these same things).

That said, I am sorry to admit that these are not the best of kids. They hit each other frequently (resulting in the other hitting back, screaming, and/ or crying) and have even hit me. When the oldest, Antoine, hit me (which he thought was funny), I was infuriated. However, there was nothing that I could say to him in French. It made me so angry that he could be so disrespectful.

I thought that perhaps is was just these kids not being raised right (by nannies or their parents), but this weekend I changed my mind. Geraldine’s sister, Fanny, has a 2-year-old son named Mateur. After she would not open the door to an off-limits room, he screamed and slapped her (hard) on the arm. Sitting across from her on the table, I gasped. I expected her to look him in the eye, yell something about his misbehavior, and punish him.

She frowned, and spanked him back. He did not flinch, nor shed a tear. She went on with her conversation. I was floored. Do I expect too much out of children, or is this a bit out of the ordinary?

Anyways, la campagne. We left around 10pm (due to the cliché French punctuality). Not once did the kids complain about being hungry for dinner on the 2-hour drive. They watched Les Indestructibles (The Incredibles to you and me) on DVD, with English subtitles pour moi. We drove through mostly green, foresty areas. It was very beautiful. During the drive, Geraldine informed me that her father (whose house we were going to) had a passion for hunting; So much a passion that he had imported lions from Africa into his woods, where he hunted and killed them. He also liked to stuff his prizes, which he displayed in a room in the house.

Okay, I thought. A little odd, but everyone has a hobby. Then, Arnaud (Dad) sneezed a huge sneeze, looked at the hand that had covered his nose, and proceeded to lick his fingers. This reminded me that there are worse things than dead, stuffed animals.

When we arrived at the house, I was shocked. I was expecting a medium sized house, a little pool (the kids informed me there was one), and a little lot where the kids could play in the woods. Not even close.

We pulled into the driveway of a sprawling hunting lodge mansion in the town of Yvoy-le-Marron, located in the center of France, in the Loire-et-Cher region. Talk about passion. This was your traditional hunting lodge, version 100.0. The main part had 2 wings. There was a giant kitchen, a huge living area, equipped with a very well stocked bar and espresso machine, pool table (without pockets. The French play a different version), and multiple couches. There was a T.V. room, with the biggest flat screen T.V. I have ever seen. There were at least 10 other rooms I didn’t even get to go in. There was an outdoor walk-in freezer and refrigerator. There was a garage with 2 Jeeps, a Land Rover, and 2 sports cars. The second house, presumably the guesthouse, was the size of my house in Libertyville. Probably 6 bedrooms, 3 baths, and a kitchen and living area as well. An Olympic sized pool finished off the resort they called home.

Actually, they only called it home for the weekend, and for short amounts of time in the summer. Their home for the week is in Paris.

We ate a fancy midnight dinner of halibut, salad with vinaigrette dressing, and bread, halfway through which Arnaud ate dessert before everyone else and left the room. We headed off to unpack and to get ready for bed at around 1am. We passed Arnaud, fast asleep on the living room couch, shoe-d feet perched on the expensive wooden coffee table. I slept in a room, not on the couch, with a teddy bear comforter, next to a creepy headless mannequin dressed in a traditional black dress that would surely give me nightmares.

The parents, and to my surprise, the grandparents, left the next morning for their marriage dans Bordeaux. Another woman, Danielle, had arrived and would be watching after the kids with me. Danielle, a friendly French woman in her early 60s, was so wonderful. She helped me with everything, and shared my viewpoint in all aspects. The kids watched T.V. and played Wii with their cousins (the parents having dropped them off for our enjoyment, so that they could have alone time) for the majority of the day. Matuer, 2, and Enzo (a named reminiscent of Sesame Street), 5, played well with the others. Philippine, in a rare calm and friendly state, played Cluedo (Clue), Bataille (War), and Skip-Bo with Danielle and I. It was nice.

Danielle and I cooked together as well. That night, she informed me that she would be making crepes. I told her that I have never made or had real crepes before, and she immediately took me under her wing. We prepared the dough-like mixture, and then heated up the pans. Danielle took the stove top on the right, and I the left. I poured a ladle into the round skillet, tipped and swirled it around to cover the whole surface, and then scraped the edges from the pan. Danielle did the same. Then, she shook the crepe so it loosened from the pan, and FLIP! Perfect flip! I squealed in delight, like a 4 year old. We laughed as I turned to do the same… and FLIP! Perfect flip on the first try! I set the pan on the stove, and began to dance and hoot triumphantly around the kitchen. We were both nearly on the floor with surprise and laughter. It is a moment I will remember forever.

After completing the crepes, we made the actual dinner crepes with ham and cheese and, for some, egg. The rest were for dessert. The kids gobbled them up, putting jam, Nutella (a chocolate butter, with the same texture as peanut butter), or just plain sugar on them. Each kid ate an average of 7. They called me the Crepe Champion.

The kids were eager to show me the room with the stuffed animals. I had seen enough stuffed animals already; the walls displayed multitudes of stuffed birds hanging upside down from iron nails, giant deer and moose heads protruding from the walls, and tableside rabbits, mid hop. As Danielle unlocked the door to le chamber des animeaux, I stood for a moment in shock.

It was not only one room, but four interconnected rooms. They were filled to the brim with real stuffed animals, posed in a re-creation of their natural habitat. There were deer, male and female. There were multiple bears, snarling with their mouths hanging open. There were five lions, perched on a rock. Giraffes, cheetahs, a rhinoceros, fox, and more that I cannot remember. Heads emerged from the walls, monkeys hung from the rafters, and others prowled the ground. It was the most frightening room I had ever been in. One of the kids hid behind a bear and breathed heavily, causing me to scream in fright and run from the room. I cannot even describe to you how bizarre I felt inside, with this stuffed, life-like, yet dead zoo all around me.

In addition to the animals, there was a huge, and, again, fully stocked bar bordering a wall packed with hunting plaques and rewards. With the kids running around and slapping each other, and the animals staring down at me with sharp teeth and dead eyes, I about popped open a bottle of rum and chugged.

Due to my tremendous self-constraint I managed, sans rum, to herd the children out of the room (no pun intended), all the while avoiding eye contact with my animal friends, Putting together my new friendship with Danielle, the discovery of my God-given talent for crepe flipping, and this, I would say that Saturday was a successful day.

Sunday the parents arrived around noon. They all looked tired, and Geraldine told me that they had been up till 3am dancing (and drinking) and got up at 8 to have lunch with us. Lunch was salad and a full chicken that had been sitting on the counter all morning, fresh from the freezer. I was handed a leg, and followed suit by cutting the meat off the bone. It is so much harder than it sounds. Meanwhile, Arnaud finished first, and began to pick salad leaves out of the communal bowl with his fingers.

Apparently Geraldine’s sister, Fanny, was coming over soon with a cake for Philippine’s belated birthday, and we would leave right after. Three hours later, she arrived and we all ate a delicious yogurt mousse-strawberry topped cake. Seriously, the French are obsessed with yogurt. I wonder what the osteoporosis rates are.

Anyway, after that, the grandfather took the kids for a ride in one of the cars. The mom told me we were leaving in 5 minutes. I put the luggage in the car, and waited around awkwardly (for, although the grandparents and sister were kind to me, they did not speak to me the entire time. I sense an underlying sense of class here; they are rich, and I am a servant, not an equal. They treat me with humane kindness, but not a smile further).

Around 5:30, we left the house. I let Philippine listen to my iPod with me. Taylor swift, Billy Joel, and Coldplay made the drive pass quickly. We got home, and I watched a movie in my room, “Baby Mama” was more entertaining than the reviews gave it credit for.

This morning, the tiny alarm clock Arnaud (Dad) lent me did not go off. I was ready for that, however: my internal clock possesses an every present distrust of electronic ones. Perhaps this is why the time adjustment has been rather difficult.