Friday = groceries

Aaah, Friday.

TGIF.

I like Fridays. Why ? Because it's my day off. :)

And because I get to do the thing I love most : go grocery shopping !

I loooove super markets. I can spend hours in them, just browsing, touching and deciding. I enjoy comparing prices to always have the cheapest and/or healthiest product. Since I've started the diet, I need to be careful of the sugar and fat intake.

So yes, I'm one of those people that can spend 30 mins infront of the dairy products-section, picking up a product, checking out its the nutrition values, comparing it to another one while at the same time checking the price, putting it down, picking something else up, putting that down, picking up the first product again, checking the n.v., putting everything down, visibly pouting until I pick up the first product and place it in my caddy.

I can assure you that Olivier hates going to super markets and even more when I come along :D

Since next week is Christmas and we are going to spend it at his parents' place, with no time to grocery shop before hand, I had to buy lots of everything. I also decided to buy something more or less fancy meat to prepare for myself for D-day. I can't take another comment about what I am eating and if it is any good. So instead of preparing chicken, that would certainly be seen as something too plain for Christmas, I'm gonna eat some kangaroo! :D

Maybe I should shape the meat into kangaroos and see if it would make it more festive.

If it'd make the children cry, it'd be a plus.

About his parents.. I like them, they make me feel at ease. I'm not at all shy around them and I'm maybe a bit too direct when I speak to them..

Olivier's dad's a director of a sugar factory, so he brings in the big bucks. Mom is a house-wife that stopped her secretary studies when she got pregnant. She hasn't worked since.

She gave birth to 3 boys, all tall, lean and nicely build, the youngest (being the hottest of the 3) Olivier.

She is someone who's spent her adult life at home, cleaning, preparing food, taking care of the children, doing laundry, the groceries etc. Respect for that, not something I could do.

She's not mean, she's what Olivier calls "incroyablement maladroit". She speaks without thinking and doesn't understand that the car infront of her that clearly has "Citroën Picasso" written on it, is in fact a Citroën Picasso. She needs to confirm that with her husband who can only sigh and ask what else could it be? "Well I don't know".

Oh and last year she asked me to prepare traditional finnish Christmas dishes aaand a ton of homemade, DECORATED gingerbread for the Christmas feast. I of course told her before hand what I would make, to see if she was ok with the idea. She was.

As a wanna-be-lovely-daughter-in-law I prepared all that, spent hours making and decorating all the gingerbread shapes and put my heart and soul into creating peruna-, porkkana- and lanttulaatikko.

The result : "We're not big fans of carrot in the family. It's really weird how you prepare it. It has a weird taste. I don't think I'll need a second serving."

Aaand : "Oh I don't really like gingerbread and yours don't taste the same as the ginger-BREAD I'm used to. I really just wanted to decorate the tree with them."

..............................

Smile. Just smile. Don't look at the knife. Eyes off the knife. Now breathe. Don't forget to smile! And say thanks.

At least Olivier's brother's Russian girlfriend (now wife) was nice and complimented my dishes. I like Gala. I'm glad she's part of the family and I'd really like to get to know her better. She's friendly to boot.

When I first met Olivier's parents, they didn't quite know what to say to me, so they asked me a bunch of questions, but really, the questions that they asked... :

"Do you have cheese in Finland ?"

"What kind of furniture do you have in Finland?"

"English is your mother-tongue?"

"Why come to France for work? Don't you have work in Finland?"

"Don't you have beautician schools in Finland?"

"What kind of food do you have in Finland?"

"Do you build your houses underground? (like in Canada?!)"

etc..

The latest greatest question/comment his mom threw at me was (knowing that she knows I spent 3 years studying in French in FRANCE getting my beautician diplomas) "So that beauty salon you work at, there're only Finnish girls working with you, am I right?" I could only stare before I understood that she was asking a serious question. "Well, no, given that we are in France and my workplace is in Paris.." "Oh, I really thought you worked with Finns" "...." Cue Olivier snickering in the back-round.

Sometimes I don't know if I should laugh or cry...

Another good reason for the huge grocery shopping is that a Finnish friend of mine will be arriving on the 27th to spend New Year in this lovely country (we'll be spending it in Bretagne with friends of Olivier). And since I don't know what he eats for breakfast, since I want him to feel at home and frankly just because I care for him, I want to try my best.

And I also feel guilty because I asked him to bring me stuff from Finland..... bad me, BAD.