Olive Festival and Chinese Buffet

Today was cool.
For some reason, even though I'm exhausted, I wake up at 7am and can't fall asleep again.  Jet lag doesn't make sense.  My hosts slept a couple hours later than me, so I went outside and had tea in their outdoor living room and read a book.  When they awoke, they joined me, and Edith asked if I would make the American version of brownies to bring to lunch at her parents' house.  After rifling through her pantry, I found ingredients that somewhat resembled what one would use to make brownies in the states.  The cocoa powder had banana flavor, but you do what you can with what you have.  I gave up trying to convert the recipe into grams and improvised, and Edith gave me a bowl of almonds to crunch up and throw in the batter.  She picked them from her parents' yard:

Obviously, few almonds wound up in the brownies, because it was a pain in the ass to crack each one and dig the nut out of the center, but it was cool.  They taste sweeter than the ones that come pre-shelled at the grocery store.  On our way to her parents' house, which is gorgeous, by the way,

Edith drove up onto the sidewalk and ran into the bakery for thirty seconds to buy a couple of baguettes, and then we were back on our way.

Edith has a convertible, so I got to have the experience of driving 80 miles per hour through the winding roads of southern France with the wind in my hair.  Lunch was lovely, and the pan of brownies was treated as a strangely alien object at lunch, but everyone took seconds, so they must have thought they were pretty okay.

After that, Edith took me to an Olive Festival in a neighboring town.  It was a lot like Chocolatefest in Long Grove.  There were tons of artisans set up all over the town with products they'd made from the first olive harvest-- oils, soaps, lotions, etc.  I bought a few soaps.

Then we came home and I had a narcoleptic nap on the couch until Nico asked if I wanted to go get Chinese food and tossed the cat on my lap.  We drove to Avignon and enjoyed a Chinese buffet-- pretty standard, and exactly the same as American Chinese food.  It was a fairly awesome, relaxing day in general.  My French comprehension is inexplicably 20x better than it was on day one.  That first night, I stared into space for most of dinner, because I was hard-pressed to catch even one word out of every 300, but today, I actually had a vague idea of what they were talking about 30% of the time.  Not exactly an impressive achievement, but I was proud nonetheless.

Now it's time to sleep.  Bon soir!