Every group of people needs an event organizer to come up with new fun things for the group to do. For the group of people from around the world who we know in Villefranche, that person is JP. He is french and was born and raised in this region, but he has spent a lot of time in the United States, including a stint as a chef in New York which is where he met his wife, an American. Yesterday he organized an excursion to a park on top of the hill on which Villefranche is build. Everybody was to bring their own lunch to the park where we would play pétanque and have a big pique-nique. JP was not content to have just any ordinary pique-nique, so he brought several great things. Here he is with Jane and the wide variety of things he brought to drink - coffee, hot water, hot milk, cold milk, and hot chocolate mix.
I do not have a picture to show, but JP also brought water and soap so that we could all wash our hands after playing pétanque before we ate. He thought of everything.
We started out with several pétanque matches. Here is JP measuring which ball is closer (the object of the game). It is hard to see, but he has a cord made specifically to do these measurements. Exact measurements are often needed but normally the distances would be much smaller than in this photo. In defense of our skill level this picture was taken just after one of the players had rolled a really hard ball into the group to break it up, and he did.
We were quite a large and diverse group. Here is the women's international team - one each from France, Canada and the United States.
Some of the spectators and players began to eat even before the matches were done, particularly the men.
JP surprised everybody by bringing not one but two galettes des Rois for desert. This is no ordinary cake obviously since it is the cake of kings. The French now have it to celebrate the feast of Epiphany. If you think an incredible mille-feuille pastry with and an equally incredible almond paste, you might get the idea. As part of the celebration, a small trinket is placed in the cake. You can learn more about the cake and the traditions here. JP got up at 6:00 to make the galettes. What a treat they were!!
In the most religious galettes the trinket is a baby Jesus but in more secular ones it can be almost anything. The person who while eating the galette finds the trinket becomes the king. In this case, only one trinket was found. Which demonstrates one of the two dangers of this tradition. The first is that the trinket is small enough to be swallowed and hence not found at all or found much later. The second is that you might find the trinket by breaking a tooth on it. I was the lucky finder of the trinket (without breaking a tooth) and became the king. See what a great crown I got!
While the men did not get their picture taken as a group, the women did.
A great time was had by all, and we thank JP for organizing and providing the special treats.
Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal
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